Standardized Tests Have Gone Too Far

Some valid points and concerns about our troubled Public Education system (**courtesy of our buddy, Cosmo).  My wife and I currently homeschool our two sons, …and posts like this make us grateful that we do.

cosmoscon

Much has changed in the our education system since I attended high school in the mid 80’s and one of the biggest is the number of standardized tests students are required to take.

From NPR:

“High school students in the U.S. take lots of standardized tests. There are state tests, new Common Core-aligned field tests, and an alphabet soup of others like the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) and NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) exams, the SAT, ACT, AP and IB.”

Before I get to my point of this post, don’t misunderstand me. Our educators need to be held accountable and we need to improve how we educate our children (parents are included in this too….) and if you want to improve something then you have to have a metric that you can use to measure your success or failure.

Lord Kelvin put it best:

“If you…

View original post 657 more words

OLD: “#BanBossy” — NEW: “Ban EVERY Word We Don’t Like”

In comparison, “Ban Bossy” looks positively restrained.

It was only a couple days ago that I wrote the following about the #BanBossy crowd:

“…we have the smarty-pantsers on the Left trying to remove another word from the English language, as they are wont to do. But words aren’t inherently cruel and a free society has no business banning ANY words. If you ban one word, people will simply substitute some OTHER word to convey that same meaning. Guaranteed.

Worth noting is it seems to be the allegedly free-speech-loving Progressives who are always enamored with the removal or banning of words. Our institutes of higher learning seem especially smitten with this idea…”

And in light of this newest example, my observation can only be termed disturbingly prescient:

Education and Character: Learning to See Clearly, part 2

In part 1 of this series, I quoted C.S. Lewis’ essay, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” which illustrated the different between looking AT something and looking ALONG it to its source. There is flexibility and discernment required here. In some sense, it is the difference between objective and subjective seeing, or the difference between analysis and philosophy.

To understand anything–any subject in the natural world–fully,  we ask not only “What is it?” but “What can I infer from it?” and “Where did it come from?” and “What is its purpose?”

#CommonCore is not the problem; the IDEA of Common Core is the problem…

More than any other aspect of the new Common Core curriculum right now, what I fear most is its top-down control, its federal centralization of power.

Much as we are seeing with Obamacare, and in direct contradistinction to the Free Market, centralized power is not nimble: it’s clumsy and slow, and is particularly susceptible to corruption. Which means that no matter how pure its ideals or what standards are set initially, eventually a monolithic federal agency is going to be riddled with all of the graft and spectacular inefficiency of any OTHER government bureaucracy.

Friends SHOULD let Friends Drive Drunk, …according to school

Seriously, what other interpretation IS there?

(via boston.cbslocal) – “…Two weeks ago, Erin received a call from a friend at a party who was too drunk to drive. Erin drove to Boxford after work to pick up her friend. Moments after she arrived, the cops arrived too and busted several kids for underage possession of alcohol.

A North Andover High School honor student, Erin was cleared by police, who agreed she had not been drinking and was not in possession of alcohol. But Andover High told Erin she was in violation of the district’s zero tolerance policy against alcohol and drug use. In the middle of her senior year, Erin was demoted from captain of the volleyball team and told she would be suspended from playing for five games…” 

Erin’s friend did something dumb, hardly an unusual occurrence during the teenage years. Yet she ALSO made the best of a bad situation by calling for a ride, rather than electing to play Driver Roulette on her own. Erin then simply did what most of us would have done: she jumped in her car and went to help her friend.

Two more examples of how Orwell’s ‘1984’ is becoming a reality in 2013:

One of the basic precepts of Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-four‘ is that individuals should not think for themselves, and that everyone is subservient to the State. It’s accomplished by reprogramming how people think, a reversal of logic and that which was known. Only through accepting these illogical reversals is someone “allowed” to exist:

“WAR IS PEACE;
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY;
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”

These three basic slogans of the Party were everywhere. Even questioning them was tantamount to a Thoughtcrime, and was punishable as such.

But was ‘Nineteen Eighty-four‘ just a book, merely a dystopian fantasy to be discussed in an English Lit class? Because more and more, I’m getting the distinct impression that someone decided it’d make a pretty good “How-To” instruction manual. 

Example #1:

How long can we effectively Govern ourselves, if we can’t effectively Educate our children?

“Real knowledge, like everything else of the highest value, is not to be obtained easily. It must be worked for, studied for, thought for, and, more than all, it must be prayed for.”

— Thomas Arnold

—

My two sons began their new homeschooling year in earnest today, and my wife and I have big dreams for them… by today’s standards, at least.

You see, we want them to have SOME clue as to how many Supreme Court justices there are, and to be able to list all three branches of government in the U.S.A., or to know why the Declaration Of Independence was written.

I know: crazy, right?

But if we manage to do just that, the two of them will be geniuses, comparatively speaking.

Toxic Knowledge: How to control an unwieldy weapon

This is NOT Lucy…not that she wouldn’t try this, however…

Daily, even hourly, I hear my granddaughter exclaim, “I can do it! Let ME do it!” At which point I can anticipate hearing a howl or shriek of frustration at least 50% of the time, because in her zeal to do whatever it is she knows how to do, she has acted rashly and dropped, spilled or broken something, or she’s fallen down and hurt herself.

In Lucy’s case it is empirically true that “a little learning is a dang’rous thing.” But in her case it’s because knowledge is imperfect, and accompanied by impulsivity and lack of finesse. How is learning dangerous for adults?