Recommended Reading
Top Billing! Zachary Tumin – Let’s tackle the right education crisis
Zach Tumin, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and co-author of Collaborate or Perish!: Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World is critiquing the Council of Foreign Relation’s recent report on “national security and education” that was very light on connections to national security and very heavy on recommendations for more corporate ed reform of the public school system (Largely because the task force was stacked with an excess of people who would benefit financially from such policies). Tumin writes:
There’s a national security crisis in U.S. education. I’m no history sleuth, but it must have come on fast just after February 2010. That’s when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates sent the last Quadrennial Defense Review up to Capitol Hill, with no mention of U.S. education at all. Two years later, in March 2012, Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice issued a report from the Council on Foreign Relations that declared American education to be so failed as to put U.S. national security at risk.
National security crises can arise suddenly. But education crises? Schooling kids is much as Max Weber once described politics – “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” You can lose a school building or a teacher overnight, but you don’t fall into a national-security-like crisis by mid-morning recess. You don’t get out of it by homeroom the next day, either.
American education today does feel like it’s in crisis. But not the one Rice and Klein would have us believe. Klein and Rice say the problem is: “Johnny still can’t read, ‘rite or ‘rithmetic.” They say tests and standards are the fix. And like George Bush did down at Ground Zero after 9/11, they’ve gone to “The Pile,” megaphone in hand, shouting the alarm. This time, though, it’s not Saddam and WMD. It’s China, Finland, Singapore and our schools.
….If we’re going to war, let’s get the problem right.
There is a crisis in American education worth going after hard. It’s one we can fix, and only a fool wouldn’t want to, whether its draped in the American flag or just sitting there quietly waiting to wreak havoc. Almost 1 million K-12 teachers – 29 percent of U.S. public school teachers – say they plan to quit within the next five years. Two years ago it was 17 percent. For those teachers with six to 20 years on the job – the heart of the batting order – 40 percent now say they plan to wave the white flag.
How do we know? Because Pew and Harris Interactive told us so last month in the 28th annual MetLife “Survey of the American Teacher.” Pew famously puts out the dullest, most obvious, least controversial survey findings imaginable. No one ever accused Pew of “rock piling” it.
But this was a stunner. Pay isn’t the issue. Safety is all right. Teacher-parent engagement is up. With collaboration between teachers and parents strong, teachers feel they have parents’ support and involvement. These are great soft indicators. So what’s the beef? Teachers feel they’re being asked to take a high-speed drill to a “strong slow boring of hard boards” problem just when the long, slow nurture of children has become all the more important to kids’ success. America’s teachers think we’ve got the problem – and the solution – wrong. Here’s what Pew found:
Read the rest here.
HG’s World– Thoughts on a Maritime Nation
The maritime theme that most often runs through this blog, and binds it together, is the same one that for over two hundred years has bound together the United States, and led to our success as a nation and great power. Due to our ability to recognize our failings, and self correct ourselves this path has led to a world more prosperous and secure, than any time since humans have existed. Our nation was founded by people who journeyed to our shores on ships, and then when divorced from Europe, founded a navy to protect our shores and lanes of commerce.
Page 1 of 2 | Next page