Obama & Education (continued)

A lot of folks are calling Obama/Duncan education policy essentially Bush's 3rd term--David Brooks seems pleased but certainly in a lot of places (like Indiana BTW), Republican leaders are employing these policies to take down Schools of Education, completely unbridle charter schools, and lower standards for teacher education.  I think we need to talk about this.....comments?

Opinion: Obama seems to be delivering on education reform 

By David Brooks Special to the Mercury News Posted: 10/24/2009 08:00:00 PM PDT 

A few weeks ago, "Saturday Night Live" teased President Barack Obama for delivering great speeches but not actually bringing change. There's at least one area where that jibe is unfair: Education. When Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan came to office, they created a $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund. The idea was to use money to leverage change. The administration would put a pile of federal money on the table and award it to a few states that most aggressively embraced reform. Their ideas were good, and their speeches were beautiful. But the challenge was going to be standing up to the teachers' unions and the other groups that have undermined nearly every other reform effort. The real questions were these: Would the administration water down their reform criteria in the face of political pressure? Would the Race to the Top money end up getting doled out like any other federal spending program, and thus end up subsidizing the status quo? Would the administration hold the line and demand real reform in exchange for the money?

Read More: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6683631.html

Comments

[Terry Mason]

Actually, it's like Clinton's fifth term. Federal education policy has always embraced the standards and asssessment approach which cripples any attempts at real reform. Gore's plan was never any differnt than GW's. Maybe the education profession has never mounted a serious challenge to the bureaucratic ideas that dominate Washington politics regarding education. That's why now we are so vulnerable and lack the traction to fend off the assault from the governor and his ally at the head of the Indiana State Department of Education. This will be a long battle but it will take more than good will and lofty rhetoric to win it. Teachers and their friends everywhere have to build a strong case against dismantling public education. Let's find a way to work on that.

[akla]

I am not sure how standards and assessment of the knowledge required to meet those standards gets in the way of real reform. A teacher has a job to teach students to read. If at the end of the time period alloted (one school year, say) the students are not reading, then that teacher has failed. Could there be extraneous circumstances, such as far too many students in a classroom (say over 30), poor quality or lack of textbooks, no discipline code enforcement, or perhaps an abundance of special education students, the answer is yes. But this is not the case in most of the classrooms where students are failing to learn at least enough to improve from one grade to the next. We need to have a measure of student achievement that can be used to assess teachers. The ISTEP+ will suffice, but only for math, english, social studies and science teachers.

Anyway, without a set of standards, we do not know what the student needs to learn. It is up to the teacher to figure out how to get the student to learn the information required to meet the standards. The test measures the standards, so the test measures the success, or failure, of the teacher. Averaged over several years and many students, one can identify whether a teacher is meeting the needs of the students or not. MY two cents.