On Intellectually and Psychologically Sterilizing the Working Poor in the Name of Education and for the Benefit of Walmart
A clip from a post at HuffPo by Joel Shatzky:
. . . .A number of prominent educators, most notably Diane Ravitch, have warned the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, that the testing mania in the guise of accountability is producing bad schooling and low-quality teaching, but these criticisms seem to fall on deaf ears. At least if Duncan would publicly acknowledge "some reservations" about these tests and that their impact on schooling deserves investigation, there might be hope for positive change in the future direction of American Education.
Unfortunately, the people who will be involved in the drafting of the Common Core Standards for grades K-12 of the National Governor's Association and Council of Chief State School Officers will be, for the most part, not educators but business people who, like those from the Educational Testing Service, will be involved in planning even more testing and "Ed Tech" gimmicks as a substitute for sound educational practices. If you wish to make a comment about the future standards of education, please contact this website. The deadline for comment will be April 2nd.
I fear that this "deafness" to reason is not entirely inadvertent; although, I would like to believe that the President has the noblest of intentions, I think that the dirty little secret that most presidents