March 9th Ed Week

"The High Stakes of Standards Based Accountability" article brought out some interesting points. The writer assumed that since students were having trouble on tests, going all the way back to 1983 when Nation at Risk was published, then it made no sense to raise the standards and tests because students are just continuing to fail at greater rates. Instead we should scrap the high stakes testing and go with something he calls "personalized education" Some suggestions he made were good like getting to know your students and universal preschool education, then he ventured into areas that are a little abstract like: "Each student would play a significant role in designing the curriculum, which would be anchored in the real world, not in the abstractions of most classrooms." Also, he offers that there should be no such thing as a "core curriculum. "classroom instruction would be minimal, teachers would become advisers who would guide students in educating themselves. They would tutor students and help them manage their time and energy"etc. All this would begin in middle school.
All I can say is your would have a hard time making this work with the top twenty percent of students, let alone with the struggling and underachieving students. And what kind of money would be required to provide this type of personalized instruction? This concept is pretty far out and impractical as far as I can tell.

"An Educator's Role in a Pop-Culture World" I certainly agree with his premise that pop-culture is an utterly corrupting influence on our society and children especially. It is unfortunate that greed fuels almost every aspect of our society. There is no level we will not stoop to for a buck. The problem is that we cannot stop the flow of garbage that the medial sends our way--anymore than we can sweep back the tide with a broom. As the author suggest with his "stone cutter" story all we can do is try to make an impact recognizing that we may only reach a few but that is better than reaching none. I like the way George Orwell put it in 1984: "How far away the future is no one can say--all we can do is try to expand the frontier of sanity one person at a time.