Education Reform: Why Michelle Rhee Is Wrong About Everything
Back when I was a igh school senior in 1995, I fulfilled an elective requirement with a BASIC-programming course. We spent about 45 minutes every day writing rudimentary and basically pointless computer programs. I think I escaped with a C-.
I was bored to tears by the assignments and couldn’t quite master BASIC in the manner expected. So instead of struggling though busy-work assignments, I built, refined and rebuilt a program to calculate weekly take-home pay from my after-school job. Slowly and surely, it incorporated much the coding elements the course was intended to teach and I managed to build an accurate and efficient payroll program. Of course, since I was busy working on it, I didn’t do much of the assigned stuff.Nearly 20 years later, I couldn’t, and I doubt 90% of my former classmates could, tell you the first wit about writing programs in BASIC. However, I did take away from that throwaway senioritis elective an understanding of the logic and flow of computer code. I can perform CSS hacks on a WordPress or Movable Type theme or manipulate HTML code in a blog post. This is an essential skill in the digital journalism world — something that didn’t exist in 1995 — where I now work.
I tell this story because, despite what the report card said, I learned quite a bit in that class. Yet, there existed no metric or system of evaluation to properly quantify that learning.
Actually I tell this story because if self-styled education reformer like Michelle Rhee have their way, we’ll be less likely to develop a way to evaluate unorthodox but effective ways to learn. So they gave me a C-.
Failing Grade For Rhee
I doubt Rhee would understand the point. To people like her, learning is only real when it can be quantified with bubbles filled-in with a No. 2 pencil. From private school to Cornell to Harvard, Rhee’s academic progress is that of someone who never strayed from the directed assignments. It’s hard to
