PoliticalChic, you are merely mouthing talking points. Do you know what progressive education is along with pragmatism, critical thinking principles, instrumentalism, and Deweyism? The charter schools that succeed on this bedrock: it teaches children how to think.
If you are saying that big government is in the way, then, yes, you are 100% right. I have no use for the U.S. Department of Education or any of the state Education agencies or administrations. But if you think going back to 19th-century education is the right path, then I believe you are not only lost but on the wrong track altogether.
Are you attempting to defend a failed pedagogy? Why?
If you read my previous post, you would see that I have noted that traditional education regularly produces not only better prepared students, those with more knowledge and true self-esteem based on achievement, but students without the obnoxious sense of entitlement noted in the WSJ article that you seem not to have consulted.
Yours, and that of the educational establishment, is the kind of resistence that prevents the proven analyses back to Coleman's '66 report, and those which also indicate that parochial schools, private schools, as well as charters, out-perform the public schools on a regular basis, from being implemented.
Data is availble, yet you continue to support a failed thesis. Odd.
Coleman's analysis of the data is not valid. That is a myth. Student-centered and student-constructed educational pedagogies with parental involvement will always create well prepared students who can problem solve and critically think. Your model cannot.
Why you wish to go with an already-failed model is beyond me, other than that you do not understand educational philosophy. However that may be, I will leave you to it.
Time for 'The Wylie Coyote Mounting Disaster Award'... and you win!
1. The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy.
a. In the new millennium, Massachusetts students have surged upward on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—“the nation’s report card,” as education scholars call it. On the 2005 NAEP tests, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and fourth- and eighth-grade math. It then repeated the feat in 2007. No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year—let alone for two consecutive test cycles. On another reliable test, the Trends in International Math and Science Studies, the state’s fourth-graders last year ranked second globally in science and third in math, while the eighth-graders tied for first in science and placed sixth in math. (States can volunteer, as Massachusetts did, to have their students compared with national averages.) The United States as a whole finished tenth.
E. D. HirschÂ’s Curriculum for Democracy by Sol Stern, City Journal Autumn 2009
2. By the time Hirsch turned his attention to education reform in the mid-1980s, Romanticism’s triumph was complete. Most public schools, for instance, taught reading through the “whole language” method, which encourages children to guess the meaning of words through context clues rather than to master the English phonetic code. In many schools, a teacher could no longer line up children’s desks in rows facing him; indeed, he found himself banished entirely from the front of the classroom, becoming a “guide on the side” instead of a “sage on the stage.” [In] elementary school, students in the early grades had no desks at all but instead sat in circles on a rug, hoping to re-create the “natural” environment that education progressives believed would facilitate learning. In the 1970s and 1980s, progressive education also absorbed the trendy new doctrines of multiculturalism, postmodernism (with its dogma that objective facts don’t exist), and social-justice teaching. IBID.
3. Could the schools do what they once did—create educated citizens inculcated with the ethical foundations of capitalism? That would require rededicating the schools to “making Americans,” as Hirsch proposes in his forthcoming book. Promisingly, a few public and private schools around the country have replaced the child-centered curriculum with one focused on learning about our culture and its institutions. Hirsch’s “Core Knowledge” curriculum, for instance, introduces kindergartners to the Pilgrims, Independence Day, and George Washington; first-graders to Ben Franklin and the concept of law in society; and second-graders to the Constitution as the foundation of our democracy. Other school reformers, according to David Whitman in Sweating the Small Stuff, have raised the achievement of low-income kids by using a “no excuses” model that teaches bourgeois “virtues like diligence, politeness, cleanliness, and thrift.” But these examples amount only to a tiny handful, swimming against the educational mainstream.
Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic? by Steven Malanga, City Journal Summer 2009
4.. In 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the chief professional organization for mathematics educators and education faculty, issued Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. The document presented standards for grades K–12, including algebra. The underlying goals of the standards—never made clear to the general public—were social, not academic. Some of the report’s authors, for example, sought to make mathematics “accessible” to low-achieving students, yet meant by this not, say, recruiting more talented undergraduates into teaching but instead the employment of trendy, though empirically unsupported, pedagogical and organizational methods that essentially dumb down math content. Math educators proclaimed a brand-new objective—conveniently indefinable and immeasurable—called “deep conceptual understanding…. As Alan Schoenfeld, the lead author of the high school standards in the 1989 NCTM report, put it, “the traditional curriculum was a vehicle for . . . the perpetuation of privilege The progressive educators, by contrast, support “integrated” approaches to teaching math—that is, teaching topics from all areas of mathematics every year, regardless of logical sequence and student mastery of each step—and they downplay basic arithmetic skills and practice, encouraging kids to use calculators from kindergarten on. ….”
Who Needs Mathematicians for Math, Anyway? by Sandra Stotsky, City Journal 13 November 2009
