MA School Superintendent: We are at a pivotal juncture in this country with respect to education
This piece from Todd Gazda, the superintendent of Ludlow Public Schools in Massachusetts, is worth sharing here. I wish more superintendents would speak up like this. Here is an excerpt:We are at a pivotal juncture in this country with respect to education. Over the past decade, we have seen a dramatic escalation in the involvement of the Federal Government in education. There seems to be the b
Common Core & Data Collection
A particularly troubling aspect of the Common Core scheme is the emphasis on massive data-collection on students, and the sharing of that data for various purposes essentially unrelated to genuine education. U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said:Hopefully, some day, we can track children from preschool to high school and from high school to college and college to career . . . . We want to see more states build comprehensive systems that track students from pre-K through college and then link school data to workforce data. We want to know know whether Johnny participated in an early learning program and then completed college on time and whether those things have any bearing on his earnings as an adult.
To know all this, of course, we have to know pretty much everything Johnny does, throughout his lifetime.
The underlying philosophy has its roots in early-20th-century Progressivism. The Progressives believed that the modern world had become so much more complex than the world that existed at the time of the American founding, that the old principles of individual freedom and limited government were no longer sufficient. In the modern world, experts would be needed to address increasingly complex challenges. Experts – armed with sweeping data on the citizenry – offer the