Thursday, September 15, 2011

School Tech Connect: Debt and The Great Disconnect

School Tech Connect: Debt and The Great Disconnect:

Debt and The Great Disconnect

I wonder how this is playing out in communities where the new metric isn't a test score but rather the ability to sculpt a school's graduating class so that 100% of the graduates are accepted at colleges, in spite of whether or not there is any evidence they are prepared for the rigors of higher education.

This whole "college and career ready" thing--- I just don't get it. There are all kinds of colleges, and there are all kinds of careers. How can one set of standards be appropriate for all of these things? I guess it's the perfect bookend for a policy that assumes that everyone will do equally well in school no matter what their home situation-- if their teachers are perennially new.

It's all part of the irony-as-policy movement that Arne Duncan seems so unaware of. The great disconnect between policy and rhetoric that seems to undergird the administration. Did you see the George Schmidt piece on Duncan's visit to the shop class at Shurz? Where he wondered aloud why things like vocational ed are disappearing? Apparently he's unaware of the massive, unsupervised bribing he's been doing for states to adopt