Archive for January, 2013

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January 7, 2013

Why Schools Used To Be Better

by Marion Brady | Published January 4, 2013 by Answer Sheet Blog

You enter a checkout lane at Walmart, Target, or other big-box store and put your purchases on the counter. They’re scanned by a device that reads bar codes and translates them into data fed at the speed of light through fiber optics cables to corporate headquarters and distribution centers.

The data produced by the bar code readers keep track of inventory, determine appropriate staffing levels, provide feedback about advertising effectiveness, and much else that guides decision making.

Those in Washington now shaping education policy are certain that what data tracking does for business it can do for education.

But there’s a problem. Kids don’t come with bar codes, and teachers don’t have scanners. Nancy Creech, the Michigan kindergarten teacher who recently told her story here on The Answer Sheet, summarized a consequence of data-collecting mandates. Authorities in her state, unwilling to trust her professional judgment, require her to give more than 27,000 grades or marks to her 4- and 5-year-olds. That number, evenly distributed over the school year, would require her to take a data-related action every two minutes of every school day!

This, of course, is ridiculous — almost as ridiculous as assuming that machine-scored standardized tests produce important data about the mental ability and future potential of those who take them.

As others have pointed out, computer programmers have an appropriate acronym for irrelevant data: “GIGO”—“Garbage In, Garbage Out.” If data fed into a computer is nonsense, the data coming out will be nonsense.

The non-educators now in charge of education have the teaching profession awash in GIGO.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/03/why-schools-used-to-be-better/

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January 6, 2013

Laurel’s lies: The real way to put Ontario students and children first

By Michael Laxer | Published January 4, 2013 by Rabble.ca

Laurel Broten is lying.

But, then, so are all of Ontario’s other politicians.

The narrative of Broten, imposing contracts on Ontario’s teachers, is quite clear. Ontario cannot afford pay increases, fair wages and reasonable sick day banking  policies because of an alleged “financial crisis” in the province. Ontario simply has no money.

She laid out the Liberal government line. And the media have largely bought it. The Ottawa Citizen states:

After months of labour strife, Broten says she chose to impose contracts on thousands of people working in the province’s public school system, based on similar terms reached with Ontario’s Catholic teachers last July, in order to save the cash-strapped province $2 billion and protect gains in education and teaching jobs.

“In the interest of students, families and all Ontarians, I have been left with no other reasonable option,” the minister told reporters in Toronto.

Ontario families deserve “certainty and clarity, and that is why we put in place collective agreements,” Broten said.

The key point is the claim that she, and the government, “have been left with no other reasonable option”. That is simply false.

There is a reasonable option that would put students first and that would also ensure that educators were properly compensated. It is an option that would allow for the reversal of the welfare cuts, in real terms,  of the last budget that were supported by the NDP. It is an option that would eliminate any deficit at all.

It is raising taxes.

Read more: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/michael-laxer/2013/01/laurels-lies-real-way-put-students-and-children-first

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January 5, 2013

The Big Heist in the Great White North

Canada’s Housing Bubble and the New Economic Order

by MIKE WHITNEY | Published January 02, 2013 by counterpunch.org

Canada’s housing bubble has burst and prices have started to fall. Sales have dipped for 8 straight months as buyer interest has begun to wane. Housing sales in November dropped 12 percent from the same month last year, while previously-hot markets of Vancouver and Toronto saw declines of 28.6% and 16% respectively. Despite the media’s repeated predictions of a “soft landing”, Canada’s real estate market is headed for a bloodbath that will end in a wave of foreclosures, higher unemployment, slower growth, bigger budget deficits, and an aggressive campaign to implement harsh austerity measures aimed at dismantling the social safety net. This is the real objective of bubblemaking, to abolish the publicly funded programs that provide vital assistance for the poor, the elderly, the sick and the unemployed. Ballooning deficits provide the rationale for an assault on the institutions that protect individuals from the ravages of free market capitalism.

As was true in the US, Canada’s massive bubble was created by government and central bank policies intended to shift more of the nation’s wealth to large financial institutions via reckless credit enhancement. Low interest rates, lax lending standards, bogus appraisals, and giveaway gov insurance programs have all fueled a real estate boom which has more than doubled housing prices since 2002. At the same time, “household debt in Canada has risen by 135 percent, while disposable income and nominal GDP have risen by 54 per cent. Household debt growth over the past decade has risen nearly three times as fast as income growth, a trend that is clearly unsustainable. The average Canadian now has a record-high debt load equal to 154 per cent of their disposable income.” (“Is household debt threatening Canada’s economy”, The Globe and Mail) Actually, things are worse than the article suggests. Currently, the household debt-to-income ratio is 165 percent, up from 137 percent in 2007. That means that regulators, big finance, and the BOC have all been working together to inflate the gigantic bubble that’s is now beginning to unwind.

Read more: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/02/the-big-heist-in-the-great-white-north/

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January 3, 2013

The First Rule of Good Teaching

by ROBERT JENSEN | Published January 02, 2013 by Counterpunch.org

“Good teaching is living your life honestly in front of students.”

I don’t recall exactly when Jim Koplin first told me that, but I know that he had to say it several times before I began to understand what he meant. Koplin was that kind of teacher—always honing in on simple, but profound, truths; fond of nudging through aphorisms that required time to understand their full depth; always aware of the connection between epistemology and ethics; and patient with slow learners.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Some background: Jim Koplin was, by way of a formal introduction, Dr. James H. Koplin, granted a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1962 with a specialization in language acquisition, tenured at Vanderbilt University and later a founding faculty member of Hampshire College, retired early in 1980 to a rich life of community building and political organizing. I never took a class from him, though in some sense the 24 years I knew him constituted one long independent study. That finally ended on December 15, 2012, not upon satisfactory completion of the course but when Jim died at the age of 79. (http://jimkoplin.com/obituary/)  He left behind a rich and diverse collection of friends, all of whom have a special connection with him. But I hang onto the conceit that I am his intellectual heir, the one who most directly continued his work in the classroom.

So, with that conceit firmly in place and his death fresh in my mind, it seems proper and fitting that I offer lessons learned from Koplin to the world outside his circle of students and friends.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in my 20 years of teaching at the University of Texas at Austin reflecting on Jim’s core insight, that good teaching is living your life honestly in front of students. The first, and most obvious, implication is a rejection of the illusory neutrality that some professors claim. From the framing of a course, to the choice of topics for inclusion on the syllabus, to the selection of readings, to the particular way we talk about ideas—teaching in the social sciences and humanities is political, through and through. Political, in this sense, does not mean partisan advocacy of a particular politician, party, or program, but rather recognizing the need to assess where real power lies, analyze how that power operates in any given society, and acknowledge the effect of that power on what counts as knowledge.

Read more: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/02/the-first-rule-of-good-teaching/

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