Nothing says Christmas like...

Hey, I just made a total elf of myself. Check me out by clicking here.

Is Education Too Important to be Left in the Hands of Educators?

The executive summary for Tough Choices for Tough Times was released sometime this week. The "report" by political think-tank National Center on Education and the Economy blasts us with the standard Cassandra-like warning of the inadequacies  of our current educational system. (For a couple of very interesting alternate views, read Dennis Fermoyle's Here We Go Again: Another Nation At Risk asking why our economy hasn't tanked since A Nation At Risk was published 23 years ago, and Paul Tough's November 26, 2006 New York Times article "What It Takes to Make a Student" that smacks down the effectiveness of NCLB and reveals the hard facts of what closing the achievement gap will actually entail.)

After the usual litany of warnings of the impact of globalization and automation on the American workforce, the report recommends ten steps be taken to fix our "educational system." These are:

1. Assume we will do the job right the first time. (Initiate Board Exams that all students must pass. Since testing has worked SO well as a part of NCLB.)
2. Make much more efficient use of the available resources. (Follow our plan and we will save taxpayers $60 billion a year.)
3. Recruit from the top third of the high school graduates going on to college for the next generation of school teachers. (We dumb folks currently in the classroom are why we are in the current mess. By starting new teachers at $45,000 a year, we'd get the smart folks in education instead of in investment banking.)
4. Develop standards, assessments, and curriculum that reflect today's needs and tomorrow's requirements. (Start testing creativity and innovation. Go beyond assessing the basic skills. This one I like. But I  doubt filling in the ovals with a number 2 pencil is going to do the trick to doing this.)
5. Create high performance schools and districts everywhere - how the system should be governed, financed, organized and managed. (Every school a charter, oops, make that contract school. Vouchers. Choice. Yada, yada, yada... Competition will solve all education's problems.)
6. Provide high-quality, universal early childhood education.  ("For decades, researchers have almost universally concluded that high-quality early childhood education is one of the best investments..." For decades? For decades? What does this say about what politicians think about research? Only the results that don't cost money are valid?)
7. Give strong support to the students who need it most. (Equitable school funding by shifting school financing from local property taxes to state revenues. Redistribution/equalization of current school funding. Do "wealthy" districts have a surplus of funds now? Why does spending more on the kids who really do need additional help always mean spending less on other kids?)
8. Enable every member of the adult workforce to get the new literacy skills.  (Turn those unemployed old-economy factory workers into college grads ... who can't get jobs.)
9. Create personal competitiveness accounts - a GI Bill for our times. (The government making it easier for you to pay for your own training through payroll deduction. Awful kind of them.)
10. Create regional competitiveness authorities to make America competitive. (Another layer of bureaucracy between the Feds and the states. Sounds good to me.)

Do I sound cynical? No!  This document is not about improving education but about shifting the power for making educational decisions. Don't get your hopes up looking for real answers to real problems.

Oh, and still not a single mention of the growing need for BS Literacy. 

Shopping for the grandsons

Occasionally I get the odd warning from my daughter about what is appropriate and what is not when it comes to gifts for the grandsons. (No weapons, no musical instruments, no toys for ages 12 and up.) It's surprising that she's not yet sent me this article - Pray for Coal: the 10 most dangerous toys of all times. I remember playing with at least two of these items as a kid - the lawn darts and the Creepy Crawler maker. 

The items that didn't make the list really surprised me. There is no listing for BB-guns or bows and arrows. Nothing about the metal slingshots with which we used to fire ball caps at very high velocities. Our primary targets for any toy that was projectile in nature were other children - siblings, buddies, cousins, neighbor kids - anyone handy who could not beat us up or out run us. Of course, we used corn knives, pitchforks, scythes, and other tools as a toys (when I was a little boy growing up on the prairie). What's a pirate without a farm implement after all? Does this explain why some of my friends still go by their childhood names of Gimp, Lefty and Cyclops?

The studies of today's "net genners" tell us that these kids are a very protected group. Thinking back on my own concerns and actions while raising my Gen X daughter (born in 1973) and Net Gen son (born in 1986), the differences are startling and I don't like to think the result of loving one child more than the other. Brady got a bike helmet; Carrie didn't. Brady had a car seat; I don't remember even buckling Carrie up. We put safety plugs in electrical sockets when Brady was a toddler. I think we just tried to keep forks away from Carrie. We locked Brady out of the storage area under the sink where we kept the Drano but thought it was cute when Carrie would hide there. Brady and his peers went to schools with security cameras, metal detectors, and police officers patrolling the halls. I believe Carrie got a whistle.

I don't know that my grandsons' cohort has a generational name yet. I am sensing that these kids may well be even more protected that the Net Gens. I only hope we can protect them without making them fearful - especially when it comes to virtual environments. It will be a balancing act.