Clips

Good look at what happened in Illinois via Chicago News Cooperative. Sandy Kress challenges the administration on No Child Left Behind.  He does include one tidbit that eluded the national press – the disaggregated data on the school President Obama chose for his recent No Child speech.

The always constructive Michael Winerip notes that some proponents of education reform went to private school.  Unmentioned? Many others didn’t.  You could, of course, go through the same exercise for critics of reform (and for journalists). That’s why the article is a pointless exercise in rhetoric and divisiveness that’s beneath the New York Times.

Update: Amateur Hour – For some actual thoughtfulness on issues of diversity (and lack thereof) check out Heather Harding’s blog post today.

Update II: Just one other thought on this public – private issue (and a more general issue than the Winerip article and the schools it focuses on).  These public/private categories are not monolithic and can be tossed around way too casually.  Just for instance: Someone who grew up in a low-income family, went to Catholic schools through high school may have in fact been exposed in their schooling to much more socioeconomic diversity than someone who grew up in an affluent suburb – and although they attended public schools was actually in a pretty homogeneous environment all the way through because of out of school factors like housing patterns or within school issues like tracking, GT/AP participation etc…Update III: More on this idea here via Fordham.

4 Replies to “Clips”

  1. Sandy Kress is very misleading, again. Generally, test scores gains are a weak indicator of educational progress, but for those who trust them a lot, test scores gains generally slowed after NCLB, and there was already other research finding better learning in low-accountability states pre-NCLB.

    The collateral damage from NCLB has been very disturbing, and in many schools, anything that resembles real education has ceased.

    Meanwhile, schools and states were forced to chase a statistically impossible all-proficient standard that ensured that would lower their standards and be attacked publicly. Try getting all your children to average height by their 14th birthday–or else!

    Meanwhile, since roughly 90% of American students are educated in public schools, and since many see current ed policies as a cleverly-disguised effort to destroy public education (and the public sector more generally), it bears noting that a remarkably disproportionate number of leading educational policymakers/figures were educated in private schools.

  2. Where was Michael Winerep when he was needed to support this bill against the opposition of the teachers unions who defeated it?

    probably wondering why children should be forced to go to school where their belief in God is ignored or denigrated.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.