Slate blogger goes full retard on education

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

I'm not sure I follow the author's blogger's argument here. The thing about private and even charter schools in competition with traditional public schools is that they offer alternatives, giving parents the choice of where to send their children to be educated. Choice is always a good thing, and even 100% enrollment in old-school public schools would not guarantee anything beyond higher funding, not actual results. The end result of the public system is simply not something that is desirable for all parents and students, so choice is always needed. There are really no good reasons that these efforts to increase the quality of any school should be limited to public schools. The author fails to recognize the moral deficiency in funding public schools through theft (involuntary taxation) when private institutions (should) only rely on voluntary contributions to educate those students that choose those institutions. Every enterprise, public or private, should be allowed to succeed or fail based on its customers. Public schools shield themselves from market effects instead of living up to the same standards as private institutions.

I'm thinking that the author probably hasn't stopped drinking since high school and was thoroughly wasted when she wrote this long-winded rant. She really offers no good reason not to send your kids to private school, other than because she says so. Me, I tend to do what I want because I know better what is good for me than some stranger in another state or country. The author is a great example of why public schools are such dismal failures, and why we have to have alternatives, even if only some of us can afford them. And, yeah, anyone can get a library card and learn without ever stepping foot in a classroom. Some of the greats are autodidactics, and proud of being self-taught leaders in their fields. Benedikt is trying to be seen as relevant in a dead-end career by lashing out in the most vulgar and ignorant manner.

Read the whole article, really. Make it a drinking game. Apparently Benedikt believes tagging a rant as a manifesto will redeem her intellectual inadequacies.

Don't discount the pre-game underage drinking with the kids from the trailer park. 

Private school vs. public school: Only bad people send their kids to private school. - Slate Magazine

College Board Enters Expanding Common-Test Market

The College Board will redesign four of its testing programs to align to the Common Core State Standards, following an announcement last year that the SAT would be redesigned for the same purpose. Ed Week reports that the additional tests include ReadiStep (8^th and 9^th graders); the PSAT (10^th and 11^th graders); and Accuplacer, which colleges use to determine course placement for incoming students. The College Board is currently talking with policymakers and educators around the country.

Education Week: College Board Enters Expanding Common-Test Market

Should Higher Education Be Subsidized?

Professor Friedman leads a roundtable discussion with students. Liberty Pen

Teaching Children to Learn using the Classical Method

“What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers–they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.” - from The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1947

Teaching the Trivium to Children - Trivium Education.com

Texas Education Assessment Testing Confusion

 

This week, the Texas Education Agency will release a tsunami of reports rating Texas public schools under a new accountability system. 

Designed to credit schools that increased academic achievement even if they didn't deliver glowing test scores, the new system grades schools and districts across four indexes: student achievement, student progress, closing performance gaps and postsecondary readiness. 

It also might credit those schools in which poor scores rise higher at a greater rate than others, but unfortunately, like the old system, schools will still be penalized if students fall below the grading curve of 5%.

The accountability system is the state's way of measuring how well schools are doing in educating kids. The old one could sink a school based solely on the standardized test scores of its lowest-performing students. Educators pleaded for more flexibility, and the TEA didn't rate schools at all last year while it overhauled the system. 

But some who have looked closely at Index No. 2, the new method of calculating student progress, say it might be as much a curse as a blessing when the reports come out Thursday. 

Despite being necessary to have 3-4 years or testing data to vet the new system, it is being implemented immediately.

“It doesn't look right, feel right or smell right,” said Mike Lara, director of research and technology services for North East Independent School District, the second largest in San Antonio.

More: Schools, districts await grades - San Antonio Express-News