If you grumble in the faculty lounge or on Facebook or wherever you grumble, that the “students get worse and worse every year,” then you have to be introspective about what you are doing, what they are doing, and fix the situation.

Through a detailed recounting of purpose and practice, Davidson discusses how and why she argues for the use of blogs and other kinds of writing instead of or in addition to the term paper. The last clause there is important, though. She isn’t anti-term paper, but she is against formulaic writing, assigned and executed mechanistically, that proves frustrating and unhelpful to both the student and the teacher.

I highly recommend reading the whole piece (and the resources she references), but I pulled the quote above because I think it’s the underlying message, even if it’s mentioned almost as an aside: if you and your students are finding the writing they’re doing in your class “frustrating and unhelpful,” then you should take a closer look at what you’re assigning and why.

… the schools the DOE chooses to shut are simply those that dare to teach the students with the city’s highest needs. There’s nothing terribly nuanced about it at all.

It should be obvious, to anyone who takes a second to think about it, that the schools with the greatest needs (which inevitably means the schools with the greatest socio-economic challenges) will be the schools with the poorest performance. So rather than pour resources into those areas and incentivize teachers and other staff to take on those challenges, the approach is to test, punish, and close. Nonsensical, but a great strategy if the ultimate goal is to privatize education and shuffle the less fortunate into ever-more-concentrated holding cells.

Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.

The article makes other important distinctions between the Finnish and American education systems, most of which are ignored by the majority of American education reformers. A few:

• Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play
• All Finnish schools are public (pre-K through University)
• Teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and responsibility (see the above quote)
• Cooperation, not competition, is the driving force
• Equity, not excellence, is the goal

This last point ties into other studies that reveal how large an impact socio-economic factors have in the current American education system.

However, the ultimate conclusions the film draws seem to be disconnected from the very data it provides. (And I won’t even address the whole Michelle Rhee fiasco.)

Many posts and articles have been written in response to the film (like this one), which I won’t rehash and can’t add much to. Instead, I’ll give my summary of the argument as I heard it:

We spend nearly four times as much on prisoners than it costs to send a student to private school, and there’s a strong correlation between school success and socio-economic status, therefore the main problems with education are unions and bad teachers, and charter schools will fix that.

If the second half of that sentence feels disconnected from the first, then you’re feeling what I felt as the credits rolled.

In other words, more than good teachers, more than targeted testing, more than careful calibrations of performance measures and metrics that can standardize and quantify every aspect of learning, it’s the messy business of life — where a child comes from and what he or she goes home to at the end of the day — that really determines success in school.

I left the classroom in 2007, though I stay involved in the world of education through my work with the Northern Virginia Writing Project. Updates here are sporadic.

Suddenly, the entire test-and-punish crowd is explaining to us how test scores dont mean anything and how test scores are tied much more to out-of-school conditions.

Fire D.C. Rhee and her entire staff–or at least cut their pay

Matthew Yglesias » Spending on Sports vs Spending on Teaching.

There’s not much need to say anything here, is there?

Pet dogs failed basic intelligence tests that wolves and wild dogs passed with ease but proved more adept at social interaction, according to the research … Dogs are great at social tasks … wolves are much, much better at general problem solving.

Are we training dogs or raising wolves? Wolf pups need freedom to explore and learn the environment and to practice the skills they’ll need as adults. They also need plenty of play in which they can safely make mistakes.

There’s a balance, of course, like the one that exists between shepherds and coyote teachers, but the current system is shepherding our students into helpless domestic dogs, to mix the metaphors.