The week’s best ed blog posts from the weekly Common Knowledge email newsletter–a weekly roundup of news in curriculum, teaching, ed policy and more. You can sign up for the newsletter here.
Why Business Leaders Should Not Be in the Driver’s Seat
Bridging Differences
Schools are not trying to build a better mousetrap, writes Diane Ravitch. They are trying to educate our citizenry. “Schools are not businesses, and we will continue to flounder so long as we put politicians and business leaders in the driver’s seat on education policy,” she says.
Platoons! What Are They Good For?
Teacher in a Strange Land
Nancy Flanagan looks at the latest fad, instructional “platoons” in elementary school and concludes that it’s jargon more than anything else that’s driving it. “In the end, it’s just another example of our national faith in tools and levers–rather than people–to solve problems,” she concludes.
A “Race to the Top” Flip-Flop
Flypaper
A move to use results from state assessments in addition to NAEP to qualify for Race to the Top funds means states will be able “to claim that they have narrowed achievement gaps when all they’ve done is make their tests so easy to pass that virtually all kids-black and white, rich and poor-do so, magically erasing any group differences,” complains Mike Petrilli.
Innovation Follies
Learning First Alliance
The problem with all innovation hype is that it downplays the difficulty of the work and “sets us all up for a fall when the reforms we puff up through our PR firms fail to deliver in the end,” writes Claus Von Zastrow. “We do need to be innovative. We do need to break with ineffective practices. But success requires a lot of different strategies,” he says.
Unintended Negative Consequences
Common Core
A new GAO report on Student Achievement concludes that standards-based accountability “influence[s] instructional practices in both positive and negative ways” and counts curriculum narrowing among the “unintended negative consequences.”
Don’t Know Much About History
Eduflack
A survey from the American Revolution Center shows that 83 percent of adults failed a basic test on the American Revolution, even though 89 percent of those surveyed believed they could pass such an exam with no trouble.
