This is a slightly different twist on yesterday’s blog post.
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I Dunno, (cc) photo by Marinda Fowler
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Yesterday, I was listening to Steve Hargadon’s chat with education writer Audry Watters, a weekly podcast conversation on what Watters’ has been writing about, recent news stories related to education and the various conferences they have recently attended and worked. I’ll put a plug here for Steve’s upcoming Hack Your Education tour (the blog entry) to cities across the U.S. I’m hoping to make it to Philly or Washington.
Their (nearly) weekly podcast conversation is an excellent way for me to keep up with happenings and from an angle that I often learn something new from. Hargadon and Watters’ takes on things suit my 60s “question authority” sentimentality and the passion I have for the toolbox that computers have become for me.
They both mentioned something yesterday (or during Friday’s recording) that I immediately identified with –– but have since turned around in my head. Recently interviewing Education Week’s founder and former editor, Ron Wolk, Steve asked if any of the major political candidates were speaking substantively about education. After a moment, Wolk replied, “No!” –– and Steve and Audrey agreed that the script on education was pretty much the same across the parties: accountability, global competition and achievement (as measured by high-stakes testing).
But I got to thinking, “Should we expect to hear substantively conversations about education from political candidates.” They’re not educators. They do not hold education degrees, earned from schools of education. They do not hold postbaccalaureate degrees of education specialty like half of the teachers in the United States (49.5% in 2007-2008). ((U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2012). The condition of education 2012: Characteristics of full-time teachers. Retrieved from website: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_tsp.pdf))
It’s a huge part of our problem today, that education in America has been captured and held political hostage by AMATEURS, whose message on the subject has more to do with the rhetoric that will earn them votes than deep and risk-taking conversations about the nation’s problems. What’s worse is that part of their message seeks to demonize the very professionals whose leadership we so desperately need. We have lost confidence in ourselves as educators and sometimes even bought into the global education reform movement’s (GERM) spittle –– with exceptions (Chicago).
It would make me happy to hear a candidate say,
It’s clear that the institution of education in this country is not working for our children and their future. Even where performance is high, are we merely doing a better job of teaching children to take tests.
I don’t know what the answer is. It is not my expertise. Formal education, in this time, is perhaps one of the most complex endeavors that a sophisticated society engages in, and it will take foreword thinking professionals to reinvent the institution.
I promise, if elected president (to Congress, the Senate, etc.) to assemble and consult the best and most progressive minds from the profession, to promote, legislate, and pass the best of their ideas, no matter how untraditional, and do all that I personally can do to make every school a point of pride for every community –– not because of the test scores, but because of the quality and creativity of the work produced and shared by its learners and graduates.
Posted with Blogsy
I’ve been working hard, over the past few months, working on Citation Machine. I hope that the changes haven’t been too obvious. The most striking changes have involved the operation of the help (<- help) buttons to the right of most form elements. You must now clicking them and when clicked, the fold-down messages should run much more smoothly. I’ve taking the mouse-over functions out, because I’m sure that the jumpiness caused pop-up messages reacting to mere mouse-overs was irritating. It irritated me.
