Hilary, I know nothing of teaching, but this paying students for getting good grades sounds kinda stupid to me. I've only read a little about Arne, mostly gushing praise, which always makes me suspicious.

I read the linked article and the only part that gave me hope was the very end.

Testing testing testing.... 1...2...3... Testing.....

Testing in school bears the same resemblance to learning as the soundcheck to the concert.

Bah.

That first paragraph is enough to make me despair. Gotta hope there's more to it than that crap. Keep hope alive!

Paying for good grades!
Cynical, revolting and in the end it will always back fire.
Exactly right Hilary. Because it's not an internal approach.
Makes me sick.
Thanks for the post Hilary.

I agree with your no-nonsense assessment (pardon the pun) of the test-oriented vs the education oriented. I don't think, however, that being an educator is necessarily the best quliaification for positively impacting educational outcomes.

I agree with you that putting CEO's and Governor's in charge of education has been a bad thing though there have been some birhgt spots along a rather dark path the past 10-15 years, but what is it that we need to do, to do the right thing? My own opinion is that we first and foremost need to take an approach toward education not dissimilar in structure to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We need a solid foundation of basic skills and then build upon that in a logical and seamless progression toward the highest critical thinking and other advanced intellectual skills. But how do we do that in a nation so fractured by our system of local control and local self-determination? It is a daunting task particularly since politicians universally pay homage to local control which has some advantage, but is also one of the biggest if not the biggest hurdle to transforming American education for the better.

Clearly, the other advanced nations have better overall outcomes and if I am not mistaken all of them have national curricula and national standards as opposed to our diffuse and fractured system that produces not only uneven outcomes directly correlated to the economic circumstances of local districts, but poorer outcomes overall. As a large nation, we have relied on a strategy that produces large numbers of very highly skilled students most of which come from the more affluent and priveleged communities around the nation. Our average or typical outcomes, however, are very poor indeed. That is why so much remediation is required in college and once students leave school and enter the workforce. Our current system, like the laissez faire approach to the economy produces wild highs and lows, but the highs only produce a limited number of "winners". Because of our large population we have been able to produce an adequate number of "winnders" to keep us competitive in most respects but we have done so at the expense of the vast majority of our students and citizens.

Ever wonder why it is so easy to convince Americans to vote against their own economic interests? I think poor education is a major factor in that phenomenon. If what we want is to produce the most capable and adaptable citizens in this nation who are "lifelong learners" able to compete in a global economy and to understand and defend both the qualiry education of future generations and democracy itself, there must be (among many other things) a radical shift in how our entire system is structured.

We need a unified national model but we also need to make sure that the model is not dominated by business interests alone and the mindset that sees education as valuable only as a means to greater profits for private enterprise. That would be disasterous. Obama and the rest of our political power structure remain locked into a mindset that puts business leadership at the helm of society in all respects and exalts business values in all respects. Our elites overall do not understand that when they destroyed the economy, that cataclysm was the 9/11 event in terms of their claim to rightful leadership of all segments of society. To borrow a phrase oft used after 9/11 "everything has changed". We cannot and we shold not return to the post economic collapse status quo or else we will just be allowing them to repeat the very same mistakes they made to wreck the economy and society in the present.

I believe in outcome driven education but not measured solely by employment and employability standards. We must have an education system that yields outcomes that produce intellectually and ethically skilled citizens as well as automatons with economically useful skills to be used and disccarded by the barons of industry and commerce. Those people can no longer be allowed to distort the values and purposes of education any longer. Robert Kennedy was right when he said "A well-informed, well-educated young America is our country's best hope for the future." That statement is as true today as it was during his lifetime.

We must invest more in education, we must pay our teachers better to attract better talent for careers in teaching (as opposed only to educational administration and coaching)and we must also finally start talking about the fact that education in isolation cannot overcome the violently negative impacts of poverty, family instability, and parental absence spawned at it's core by the overly demanding, shortsighted capitalist workplace culture we have in America.

If poverty is not addressed on it's own, and recognized as a factor that undermines the effectiveness of our educational system, how can we expect any schools to overcome it's negative effects in more than a small percentage of cases? Think of your own circumstances and how difficult it is to do a good job of raising children in a safe, stable, predictable environment where they are given the best opportunity you can provide to concentrate on their own healthy personal development and education. It is not easy at all.

Now, think for a minute about how traumatic and negative extended unemployment or divorce is on children in relatively affluent families. I'm sure most of you know of instances where a divorce or the hardship of unemployment's negative impacts caused such trauma in the life of the children involved that one or more of them spun out of control and took off on a self-destructive and self-defeating pattern of behavior that virtually ruined their life or derailed what otherwise could and should have been a happy, productive track for that individual or family.

Now, take the most traumatic circumstances of those sorts of events and make those the best days in the life experience of children who are born into families stricken with chronic, lifelong poverty. Think of how your own children would do if you had little or no money over and above subsistence with no hope of changing that. Think of how your children would do if you were continually in a state of long term clinical depression and thus were unable to focus on the needs of your children because of your own bottomless pit of needs the depression weighs you down with. Imagine the impact on your children's lives if you lacked basic employment skills because of your failure to even finish high school and you are chronically self-anesthitized with alcohol and other substances. Think of how your children would do if all they ate was a high fat, high sugar, high starch diet and you rarely read to them because you had no books at home. Think about the negative impact upon them if you lacked the basic parenting skills necessary to keep your children on a normal, predictable schedule and that they were (like you) crhonically sleep deprived and thus drowsy and sluggish for most school days. Think of how your children would do if you lived in substandard, overcrowded housing where the lights regularly went off for lack of payment or the heat didn't always come on for the same reason in the midst of winter. Think of the tension between you and your spouse over the lack of resources, the bickering and fighting the children would be exposed to, the contstant and depressing drone of television programming serving as both a life soundrack and primary caregiver with no countervailing culturtal or familial influences.

Outside of global warming which threatens human existence itself in the long run, poverty and family instability are the biggest problems our nation faces: bar none. Yes, individuals can overcome the kinds of negative effects poverty and family instability produce and there will always be some of this. But these conditions are epidemic in our country and we must do all we can to minimize them or we will continue to see a people at the end of their rope trying to cope with high anxiety situations on such a constant basis they will remina overwhelmed. This is not healthy at all.

If we do not act to restabilize the American family, but especially the families of the poor, nothing we do will ever make the education system much better than it currently is because we will have done nothing to lift the appalling weight of poverty from the backs of it's victims. Even the most talented educators can only save so many of these young people and that means far too many will be lost to the grinding and tragic violence of poverty. Our focus must shift from pouring resources toward and nurturing the best and most priveleged students at the expense of the average. This is not to say forget about the top students, but we must have a much better balance in the structure of our educational system because the current structure allows staggering numbers of students to be left far, far behind. We must shift our focus from short term employer's needs that sacrifice child development in the home on the altar of profit at all costs to creating an environment in American families that allows children and thus, education, to succeed. Chaos, economic stress, alcohol and substance abuse, horrendously unhealthy dietary habits, unreasonable work hours for adults all must be addressed in tandem with investing more and adopting more effective means of producing better educational outcomes in America.

Thanks for bringing this important issue up. With the varous crises and catastrophes dominating the headlines we often forget the educational emergency that confronts us as a nation.

Standardized testing began as a means of keeping those drudge Jewish students out of Harvard. But like many other things, once it exists it is apparently impossible to make it un-exist.

It's like the microphone, which is always used, instead of speech. The result is a louder classroom or assembly hall.

It's like advertising, which exemplifies some sort of Gresham's Law when it crowds out unadorned spaces.

It's like class size. Once the administrators push it up to 30, there is no incentive to bring it down (except from those greedy, selfish teachers' union).

We forget that people are called to teach, as they are to nurse, as they are to write, play music, and dance. If we had to persuade people to teach it would actually cost a lot. But people will spend years in college to start at $30,000, with the hope of possibly achieving almost six figures with a lifetime of experience, and a doctorate.