Thursday, May 29, 2014

If You Read Only One Thing This Month or Next...

Read Maciej Cegłowski's talk, The Internet with a Human Face:

Of course, for ad sellers, the crappiness of targeted ads is a feature! It means there's vast room for improvement. So many stories to tell the investors.

This ghost of a business model propels us to ever greater extremes of surveillance. If the algorithms don't work, that's a sign we need more data. If the algorithms do work, then imagine how much better they'll work with more data. There's only one outcome allowed: collect more data.

Maybe if we start calling cities a "disruptive innovation?"

Jon Geeting:

When the city was shrinking in population, city politicians were consumed with how to bribe companies to locate their headquarters here, or how to make suburban people like us and come and visit the city, using subsidized Big Culture institutions, hotels, and underpriced, oversupplied parking. But now, even though the city has been growing, the politics haven't really changed.

We're still subsidizing hotels, oversupplying parking, and spending far too much time worrying about whether suburban people will come spend their money here, rather than focusing on providing the fundamental amenities our citizens want - good schools, safe neighborhoods, clean streets, low-cost transportation choices, and nice public spaces. Why do we keep wasting money on corporate tax breaks and short-sighted get rich quick schemes instead of focusing on the fundamentals?

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

What is the Relationship Between Humanities and Literacy?

Valerie Strauss:

The Boston public schools district found itself in the position of having to issue a public statement denying that it was eliminating its history and social studies department after someone posted on the Web that it was and the news went viral in the education world. Historians assumed it was true and rightly flipped out.

What happened?

According to Eileen de los Reyes, deputy superintendent of academics, the school district is, for the first time in many years, reorganizing its academic departments to make them more inter-disciplinary and to help implement the Common Core State Standards. As part of the reorganization, job positions are being rewritten across the various departments and dozens of people are being asked to reapply for their jobs. People in the history department did get notices but they weren’t the only ones. Part of the online buzz was that history and social studies were being absorbed into a new uber-humanities department. In fact, the departments of history, English-Language Arts and world languages are coming under a new humanities umbrella for purposes of better coordination, she said. Likewise, a new science umbrella will include science, technology and engineering, while a new “specialized learning” umbrella will include special education and English Language Learners.

Ah yes, nothing helps a district with apparent problems with absorbing a stream of externally imposed reforms, inter-departmental rivalry, and communication than a between-superintendents reorganization hastily drawn up in response to a self-interested consultant report.

More specifically though, hacking together an interdisciplinary scheme in response to the Common Core ELA/Literacy standards is bound to go badly, because the CC does not manage to articulate a vision for English and/or Language Arts as a complete discipline.

There's definitely muddled language around this new "uber-humanities" umbrella. Is it "humanities" or "humanities and literacy," as suggested by the title of the new job description? It seems as though the "arts" will not be part of the "humanities" in this scheme, but its own cluster.

This is like creating a new cluster for math, science and technology called "STEM and Numeracy," while keeping computer science and robotics in its own separate domain.

School reform that is intellectually incoherent is just not going to work.

Monday, May 26, 2014

Off-Year, Low Turnout Elections: What Could Go Wrong?

David Atkins:

The only possible way that a party of social tolerance survives for long in this sort of economic environment is if it goes hard after the plutocrats truly responsible for the economic malaise. The social liberal/economic conservative mold of Bloomberg is a recipe for political disaster.

It is notable that the only places where the far right was brought to heel were places where a strong leftist economic argument was made. The big, big loser was cautious, austerity centrism.

When the social left throws the economic left under the bus in a time of rising inequality, they sow the seeds of their own destruction. The forces of intolerance and fascism are only a couple of hard-knocks elections away at any given time.

...it's the old The Situation Is More Nuanced Than You Liberal Naifs Believe It Is trick

tristero:

As Maxwell Smart might say, it's the old The Situation Is More Nuanced Than You Liberal Naifs Believe It Is trick.

Actually it's not. Without the moolah flowing from the Kochs or the loon whisperers at Fox News, there'd still be too much funding and exposure of rightwing extremists but there would be a lot less of it. And yes, I would be satisfied that things were flowing in a good direction if the Kochs and Fox were "beaten back."

One good thing about having Diane Ravitch on your side is that passes on her immunity to that trick.

It Doesn't Get Better When You Mix In Overconfident Educational Technocrats

Quinn Norton:

Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse.

It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.

Computers, and computing, are broken.

Friday, May 23, 2014

Meg Whitman is Doing Her Part to Solve the Shortage of STEM Workers... ARE YOU?

Rick Merritt:

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard will lay off another 16,000 workers on top of 34,000 layoffs it already announced. The move could save up to an additional billion dollars a year by 2016 on top of the maximum $4 billion savings previously anticipated.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

At This Point, the Process Should Have Been Halted and Completely Re-thought

Cathy Kessel:

Summary

Education policy is complicated, and cross-national comparisons of education policy are even more complicated. This post is not meant to be a comprehensive account of either, but to make the following points:

  • In their official documents, not all countries communicate the kind of detailed expectations for student performance that U.S. readers are accustomed to seeing in standards documents.
  • Details of curriculum and expectations for student performance may occur in teacher’s guides, textbooks, and teacher’s manuals; and in findings of empirical research.

The two posts that follow comment on two comparisons of the CCSS with standards and course of study documents from other countries, adding relevant details from textbooks, teacher’s manuals, and other sources.

Another way of putting this is simply, high performing countries don't use standards, at least as we define them post-NCLB.

Tired of Non-Profits

While, no, the Common Core won't turn your children gay, the Florida tests will be written by a non-profit that supports LGBT Youth. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is a kind of weird juxtaposition. I'd rather see them drop test development than the LGBT work.

The broader question here though is, why is our massive testing industry "non-profit?"

The reason this somewhat farcical accusation about the Common Core's gay agenda came up in the first place is that AIR is a business and a social service charity jammed together. The College Board is of course a non-profit. ACT is non-profit. Measured Progress (i.e., the NECAP people) is non-profit. They're a "small" player at this point, pulling in over $100 million a year (in 2012).

These are businesses. They should be run as businesses and taxed as businesses. Pretending they're some kind of public spirited charities is pointless.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Start the Countdown

OK, we've got tickets to fly back to Boston on August 12. Seems like it is barrelling toward us, but if someone told me they were going to Scotland for 12 weeks, that'd sound like a pretty nice summer trip.

Sorry for the general lack of Scotland blogging. A lot of it is just that I work three feet from where I sleep, so I generally don't feel like doing much recreational computer time here too. I figure once I start feeling more prematurely nostalgic about our time here, I'll write a few more posts about what I'll miss.

Confusing Elite Consensus and Consensus

Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, January 9, 2009, WaPo op-ed:

Second, perhaps the single greatest lever for raising expectations and achievement for all children in America would be the creation of national learning standards and assessments. With KIPP schools operating in 19 states, we have seen how the maze of state standards and tests keeps great teachers from sharing ideas, inhibits innovation, and prevents meaningful comparison of student, teacher and school performance. Rather than there being 50 different standards, Obama could unify the country around a common vision for the kind of teaching and learning we need to prepare our children for the future.

Randi Weingarten, February 16, 2009, WaPo op-ed:

Education is a local issue, but there is a body of knowledge about what children should know and be able to do that should guide decisions about curriculum and testing. I propose that a broad-based group -- made up of educators, elected officials, community leaders, and experts in pedagogy and particular content -- come together to take the best academic standards and make them available as a national model. Teachers then would need the professional development, and the teaching and learning conditions, to make the standards more than mere words.

I'm not so naive as to think that it would be easy to reach consensus on national standards, but I believe that most people would agree that there is academic content that all students in America's public schools should be taught, and be taught to high standards. And I would expect near-consensus on the fact that, today, we are failing in that important mission. A national agreement about certain aspects of what every well-educated child in every American public school should learn won't be easy to arrive at, but that is no reason to give up before we even try.

What could possibly go wrong? Everyone, from the center-right to the center is totally on board for whatever, blah-blah, oh snap don't call them "national standards" next time!

Meanwhile, I cautioned:

Yes, good luck selling Alabama, Utah, Texas, Kansas, Alaska, etc. on the idea that they should take the advice of the head of the teachers' union and model their curriculum on Massachusetts and Minnesota. That's going to go over really well. The reality of our current political situation is that we have a socially conservative, obstructionist Southern regional party and everyone else. I don't see how we're going to get to national standards in that climate. The problem is, however, a good distraction though for people who might otherwise find more effective ways to screw up public education.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

My Government Spent $350 Million Dollars and All I Got Was This Mis-Coded Crap

OK, let's move on to the second question in the 9th grade PARCC ELA/Literacy practice test:

Part A: In paragraph 1, how does Oppenheimer structure the opening of his speech to advance his argument?

  • A. He praises the accomplishments of the members of the audience in order to deflect their potential dismissal of the subject of his speech.
  • B. He positions himself as a colleague of the members of the audience in order to increase a feeling of fellowship and community.
  • C. He criticizes some unpopular authority figures in order to gain the sympathy of the members of the audience.
  • D. He sets forth his credentials as an expert on the subject of his speech in order to gain the respect of the members of the audience.

Here's the paragraph in question.

I am grateful to the Executive Committee for this chance to talk to you. I should like to talk tonight -- if some of you have long memories perhaps you will regard it as justified -- as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in. I do not have anything very radical to say, or anything that will strike most of you with a great flash of enlightenment. I don't have anything to say that will be of an immense encouragement. In some ways I would have liked to talk to you at an earlier date -- but I couldn't talk to you as a Director. I could not talk, and will not tonight talk, too much about the practical political problems which are involved. There is one good reason for that -- I don't know very much about practical politics. And there is another reason, which has to some extent restrained me in the past. As you know, some of us have been asked to be technical advisors to the Secretary of War, and through him to the President. In the course of this we have naturally discussed things that were on our minds and have been made, often very willingly, the recipient of confidences; it is not possible to speak in detail about what Mr. A thinks and Mr. B doesn't think, or what is going to happen next week, without violating these confidences. I don't think that's important. I think there are issues which are quite simple and quite deep, and which involve us as a group of scientists -- involve us more, perhaps than any other group in the world. I think that it can only help to look a little at what our situation is -- at what has happened to us -- and that this must give us some honesty, some insight, which will be a source of strength in what may be the not-too-easy days ahead. I would like to take it as deep and serious as I know how, and then perhaps come to more immediate questions in the course of the discussion later. I want anyone who feels like it to ask me a question and if I can't answer it, as will often be the case, I will just have to say so.

The answer is clearly B. For the follow up in Part B, you just have to pick "...which involve us as a group of scientists..." from four brief supporting excerpts. I don't love the questions, but whatever.

I do have a problem with Part A's supposed alignment with the Common Core standards. This is meant to be aligned with RH.5, specifically (I guess):

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.5 Analyze how a text uses structure to emphasize key points or advance an explanation or analysis.

I'm not buying that. Oppenheimer's text is neither "using structure" or "emphasizing key points," nor "advancing an explanation or analysis" at that point.

The closest relevant standard would be:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.6 Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose.

You'd have to re-phrase the question slightly, but then it would align perfectly well to standard 6.

This is the point in the writing process when I leave my computer and rant bug-eyed in front of my patiently bemused spouse. "Does anybody actually read this stuff? Anyone? How does this even happen?"

If you believe at all in "data driven instruction" based on standards, you have to be mortified by this kind of thing. If PARCC is essentially mis-coding questions, it's going to screw up any attempt to do anything innovative or subtle with these test results.

I'm also disturbed by PARCC's mixing of "informational text" standards and "history and social studies texts" standards in this sequence. Question 1 is "informational" and two and three are "history." The entire premise of disciplinary literacy is that a reader must change the way he or she reads based on the academic context in which he or she is working in at the time. You read a text differently in history class than English class. This was considered such an important aspect of the standards that they essentially discarded their original goals of "fewer, clearer" standards in favor of an explosion of overlapping, redundant disciplinary literacy standards.

If PARCC really believes in disciplinary literacy standards, they should give some cue to the reader whether they should be approaching the text from and English or History/Social Studies context (or science, etc.), or at least they should approach each text consistently. Flip flopping back and forth just makes a mockery of the entire concept.

The Most Ridiculous Words Ever Posted on Common Core Watch

Checker Finn:

For no current-affairs commentator do I have greater respect than Peggy Noonan, whose sagacity, common sense, plain-spokenness, and “big picture” view of things are as welcome—and rare—as the clarity and persuasiveness of her prose.

The Cornerstone of the Cornerstone of School Reform

Here's Part A first question of the 9th grade PARCC ELA/Literacy practice test:

In paragraph 1 of Robert Oppenheimer's speech, what does the phrase recipient of confidences mean?

  • A. The speaker has won numerous awards.
  • B. The speaker feels sure of his own abilities.
  • C. People have told the speaker their secrets.
  • D. People have given the speaker their support.

Here is the paragraph, with the sentence containing the phrase in bold.

I am grateful to the Executive Committee for this chance to talk to you. I should like to talk tonight -- if some of you have long memories perhaps you will regard it as justified -- as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in. I do not have anything very radical to say, or anything that will strike most of you with a great flash of enlightenment. I don't have anything to say that will be of an immense encouragement. In some ways I would have liked to talk to you at an earlier date -- but I couldn't talk to you as a Director. I could not talk, and will not tonight talk, too much about the practical political problems which are involved. There is one good reason for that -- I don't know very much about practical politics. And there is another reason, which has to some extent restrained me in the past. As you know, some of us have been asked to be technical advisors to the Secretary of War, and through him to the President. In the course of this we have naturally discussed things that were on our minds and have been made, often very willingly, the recipient of confidences; it is not possible to speak in detail about what Mr. A thinks and Mr. B doesn't think, or what is going to happen next week, without violating these confidences. I don't think that's important. I think there are issues which are quite simple and quite deep, and which involve us as a group of scientists -- involve us more, perhaps than any other group in the world. I think that it can only help to look a little at what our situation is -- at what has happened to us -- and that this must give us some honesty, some insight, which will be a source of strength in what may be the not-too-easy days ahead. I would like to take it as deep and serious as I know how, and then perhaps come to more immediate questions in the course of the discussion later. I want anyone who feels like it to ask me a question and if I can't answer it, as will often be the case, I will just have to say so.

That's a tidy 393 word paragraph.

Regarding the answer to the first question, it is clearly C. It is a good representative of the new approach to vocabulary: fewer obscure SAT words, more obscure alternate definitions of more common words, used in combination. That's probably a win, but let's face it: a small one. A more extreme example someone reported from the recent PARCC pilot tests required kids to figure out the meaning of "impression" in the naval context. That's not much better than having to guess the antonym of "syzygy." In the end, you just get a vocab list with fewer words and more definitions. But, whatever, it is fine.

Part B:

Besides the sentence that contains the phrase mentioned in Part A, select the other sentence in paragraph 1 that helps the reader understand the meaning of recipient of confidences.

For starters, what earthly reason could there be to exclude the rest of the sentence as the source of context clues? There are 23 words preceding the phrase in that sentence, a thirty word independent clause completes the sentence. That sentence has the best context for understanding the phrase.

To cut to the chase, the correct answer according to the key is "I want anyone who feels like it to ask me a question and if I can't answer it, as will often be the case, I will just have to say so." I had quickly eliminated this one because it is obvious that there are lots of reasons Oppenheimer might not be able to answer a question an atomic physicist might ask in 1945. He points out earlier in the paragraph that he doesn't know enough about "practical politics" to answer questions about that. Other questions that would be relevant that he can't answer might include, "Are we going to hell for this?" "Can we really create a League of Nations that works?" or "Exactly how deep should I dig my bomb shelter?"

But beyond that, what is the message here pedagogically? What is it saying about reading? That if you encounter a puzzling phrase you should keep reading and perhaps 146 words later you'll come to a sentence that will help you understand its meaning? I guess that explains the emphasis on re-reading, cause you're going to be doing a lot of it if you try to read that way.

For the record, I thought "As you know, some of us have been asked to be technical advisors to the Secretary of War, and through him to the President." was probably the best answer, although not a very good one. Also, the answer key cryptically has the phrase "discussion later" highlighted in blue next to the answer, with no indication of what it might refer to. Did they note internally that the question was flawed but put it in the practice test anyhow? Or is there a explanation somewhere in the vaults that explains why theirs is the right answer?

These questions are representative of the cornerstone of the PARCC ELA/Liteacy test, which is the cornerstone of the entire test-driven reform agenda in a big chunk of the country. In this section of the test, you read a prompt and then answer three two part questions, the first is always a vocab question of this type, covering standard 4 ostensibly. The other two questions address standards 2, 3, or 5, but you always get a vocab question in this form, whether you're reading Beatrix Potter in 3rd grade or Oppenheimer in 9th.

Similarly, half of the multiple choice questions are of the "identify the evidence for your previous answer" form.

So basically, whether or not your school will be burned down is dependent on figuring out how to get these kinds of questions answered "correctly." At the end of the day, that's your "reform."

Welcome to the future.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Oppenheimer for 9th Graders

I've started to try to grok the PARCC tests, or at least the practice tests. I'm afraid they are as much of a sixteen dimensional clusterfuck as the Common Core Standards themselves.

I started by looking at the 9th grade Performance Based Assessment (PBA) in ELA/Literacy, because most of my experience is with high school, and one pays a lot of attention to the freshman year in general (or you should!), so I felt like I had relatively good intuition about this one.

OK, so the first sentence you read is a real forehead slapper from the start:

Today you will research the development and one-time use of the atomic bomb.

I trust you see the problem there. I think that should be sufficient to throw the whole damn thing out, if they can't proof-read the first sentence of the practice test.

Anyhow, moving on, the first text in the PBA is Robert Oppenheimer's farewell speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, or at least the first 40% or so (up to "It is clear to me that wars have changed."). I ran the first 1000 words through the scoring doo-hickey on the Lexile website, and it came up with 1270, which would be the top of "college and career ready" according to the official Common Core commentary. Beyond that, you're basically dropping kids directly into an ongoing conversation between atomic scientists in 1945. Oppenheimer's purpose in the speech is to take advantage of his leaving the directorship of the Manhattan Project to speak a little more freely about his opinions, so a lot of it is in the form "Concerning issue X, some people have been saying Y, others Z, I think it is important to consider K..." and then on to the next thing.

There isn't a lot of technical detail, which I suppose might make it seem somewhat accessible, but there just isn't much detail at all. Oppenheimer can't start throwing out details and anecdotes because it's the Manhattan Project. He can't say "I remember well the morning in April 1944 when General Whatever invited Niels Bohr and I over for lunch..." or any of the sort of anecdotes which would usually give a little life and context to a farewell speech.

Nor does he particularly want to linger on exactly why this discussion is even taking place. He doesn't point out, for example, that "The work of the people in this room lead directly to the death of at least 150,000 people."

Also, the first part is mostly throat clearing and setup, and the excerpt ends before it gets to the more interesting parts of the talk.

Even if you assume you want some Oppenheimer in the test, it is just a lousy choice of a text, and the idea that this can be considered a text at the 9th grade level defies common sense. Atomic scientists do not discuss among themselves profound moral and political issues of great personal weight at a 9th grade level. Any definition of textual complexity that claims they do does not pass the laugh test.

One big question though is whether this text is intentionally way above 9th grade complexity because these tests have to measure growth of advanced students. At least that would explain its presence, although then one has to ask about the impact of starting a test with a section way above the grade level expectation. I did a little Googling on the impact of question sequencing, and on the whole it is somewhat inconclusive, but there's pretty good reason to think the common sense expectation that this would be disproportionately hard on a range of disadvantaged students, including those with high test anxiety.

And I haven't even started on the questions yet. That'll have to wait for later posts.

On the whole though, this is what I was afraid of when I first read about the Common Core's emphasis on textual complexity: choosing texts because they are difficult to understand, perhaps ones that are difficult in some specific way.

Ug.

Economists are also Better Teachers, Principals, Superintendents and Parents

Thomas Frank:

One of the best things about Piketty’s masterwork is his systematic demolition of his own discipline. Academic economics, especially in the United States, has for decades been gripped by a kind of professional pretentiousness that is close to pathological. From time to time its great minds have grown so impressed by their own didactic awesomeness that they celebrate economics as “the imperial science”— “imperial” not merely because economics is the logic of globalization but because its math-driven might is supposedly capable of defeating and colonizing every other branch of the social sciences. Economists, the myth goes, make better historians, better sociologists, better anthropologists than people who are actually trained in those disciplines. One believable but possibly apocryphal tale I heard as a graduate student in the ’90s was that economists at a prestigious Midwestern university had actually taken to wearing white lab coats—because they supposedly were the real scientific deal, unlike their colleagues in all those soft disciplines.

Piketty blasts it all to hell. His fellow economists may have mastered the art of spinning abstract mathematical fantasies, he acknowledges, but they have forgotten that measuring the real world comes first. In the book’s Introduction this man who is now the most famous economist in the world accuses his professional colleagues of a “childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation”; he laughs at “their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.” In a shocking reversal, he calls on the imperial legions of economic pseudo-science to lay down their arms, to “avail ourselves of the methods of historians, sociologists, and political scientists”; the six-hundred-page book that follows, Piketty declares, is to be “as much a work of history as of economics.”

Admittedly, I stalled out about 25% of the way into Capital in the 21st Century, but it is an extraordinary "informational text."

The Supply of Good Jobs Does Not Automatically Expand to Match the Number of Educated Citizens

Matt Bruenig nails it:

Education boosters bizarrely think that providing everyone a high-quality education will somehow magically result in them all having good-paying jobs. But, as Finland shows, this turns out not to be true. Apparently, it’s not possible for everyone to simultaneously hold jobs as well-paid upper-class professionals because at least some people have to actually do real work. A modern economy requires a whole army of lesser-skilled jobs that just don’t pay that well and the necessity of those jobs doesn’t go away simply because people are well-educated.

The reason Finland’s ultimate distribution of income is so equal is not because its great education system has made everyone receive high paychecks (an impossible task), but because Finland has put in place distributive policies that make sure its national income is shared broadly. In 2010, Finland’s tax level was 42.5 percent of its GDP, which was nearly double the tax level of the U.S. By strategically spreading that tax money around through a host of cash transfer and benefit programs, Finland’s high market poverty rate of 32.2 percent fell to just 7.3 percent. Its child poverty rate, which Finland focuses extra attention on, fell down to 3.9 percent. Overall economic inequality took a similar dive.

This is so obvious that it is hard to figure out how so many apparently smart people can't grasp it. The only explanation that I can come up with is that for a lot of prominent commentators, wonks and politicians, low paying jobs and the people who hold them are simply an abstraction.

There are a Couple Ways to Interpret this Quote

Chris Cerf:

My specialty is system reform—micro-politics, selfishness, corruption, old customs unmoored from any clear objectives.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

One Thing to Look Forward to in Providence

They expanded the skatepark.

Now we only need about five more that size, but at least I don't have to feel like returning to the original home of the X Games from a city of 36,000 in central Scotland is going to entail a major downgrade in skate infrastructure.

Thursday, May 08, 2014

It is Almost Like Teachers had a Hand in Writing This

I particularly like this one, from the CTU:

WHEREAS, the Common Core State Standards emphasize pedagogical techniques, such as close reading, out of proportion to the actual value of these methods – and as a result distort instruction and remove instructional materials from their social context;

Saturday, May 03, 2014

The Speedup

Me, in comments:

One problem with stories like this is that the teaching load is not directly questioned. Twenty years ago it was axiomatic in US school reform that 80 students was the maximum load a teacher should have (see the Coalition of Essential Schools Common Principles). Three different preps for a developing teacher is nearly impossible. High performing countries do not drive their teachers this way.

Teaching IS uniquely demanding, but we are also simply overworking our teachers.

Thursday, May 01, 2014

I'm Sure Philanthropy will Save Us in the End

Sara Reardon:

Ultimately, the report's most surprising finding may be the lack of global data on antimicrobial resistance. “Despite the fact we've known the potential of this going cataclysmic for ten years, as a global unit we haven't managed to get our act together,” says Walsh. Just 22 of the 129 WHO member states that contributed to the report had data on the nine antibiotic–bacteria pairs of greatest concern.

Although the report calls for the establishment of a global monitoring network, it is unlikely that any extra money is forthcoming. “It’s a huge problem and I'm not sure the resources are available,” says Keith Klugman, an epidemiologist at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. (emphasis added)