The Atlantic’s Alexander Russo reports that a growing number of parents are pulling their students from standardized tests:
Teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School voted unanimously earlier this year not to give the district’s required reading and math test. They encountered predictable resistance from district officials and harsh criticism from outside observers. Many students and parents, however, sided with the teachers.
The PTA and student government leaders voted in support of the teachers, and many parents sent in “opt-out” letters to exempt their children from testing that they viewed as an inappropriate measure of teachers’ effectiveness. And so when administrators came to class with lists of kids who needed to take the tests during the spring testing period, many students were exempted and others students simply refused to go with the administrators.
There was “the most incredible sense of solidarity in the building,” recalls Garfield history teacher Jesse Hagopian.
Parents who opt out generally do so out of concern that too much time is being taken with testing (and test preparations), that tests are not reliable or valid measures of what students know, and that tests are being used to rate schools, teachers, and students in ways that aren’t fair.
This past year has shown an “unprecedented surge” of parents, teachers, and students revolting against standardized testing, according to Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, a Ford Foundation-funded nonprofit.
Robert Twigger argues that we need to stop treating those who excel in one area (monomaths) and give more credit to those who are generalists, interested in and interesting about many subjects:
Polymaths such as Da Vinci, Goethe and Benjamin Franklin were such high achievers that we might feel a bit reluctant to use the word ‘polymath’ to describe our own humble attempts to become multi-talented. We can’t all be geniuses. But we do all still indulge in polymathic activity; it’s part of what makes us human.
So, say that we all have at least the potential to become polymaths. Once we have a word, we can see the world more clearly. And that’s when we notice a huge cognitive dissonance at the centre of Western culture: a huge confusion about how new ideas, new discoveries, and new art actually come about.
Colin Woodard author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, argues that the United States, Canada, and part of Mexico are actually best understood as 11 distinct countries. He writes:
The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps—including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history. Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities, a phenomenon analyzed by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing in The Big Sort (2008). Even waves of immigrants did not fundamentally alter these nations, because the children and grandchildren of immigrants assimilated into whichever culture surrounded them.
Before I describe the nations, I should underscore that my observations refer to the dominant culture, not the individual inhabitants, of each region. In every town, city, and state you’ll likely find a full range of political opinions and social preferences. Even in the reddest of red counties and bluest of blue ones, twenty to forty percent of voters cast ballots for the “wrong” team. It isn’t that residents of one or another nation all think the same, but rather that they are all embedded within a cultural framework of deep-seated preferences and attitudes—each of which a person may like or hate, but has to deal with nonetheless. Because of slavery, the African American experience has been different from that of other settlers and immigrants, but it too has varied by nation, as black people confronted the dominant cultural and institutional norms of each.
The New York Times reports that admissions counselors might just be watching:
Of 381 college admissions officers who answered a Kaplan telephone questionnaire this year, 31 percent said they had visited an applicant’s Facebook or other personal social media page to learn more about them — a five-percentage-point increase from last year. More crucially for those trying to get into college, 30 percent of the admissions officers said they had discovered information online that had negatively affected an applicant’s prospects.
“Students’ social media and digital footprint can sometimes play a role in the admissions process,” says Christine Brown, the executive director of K-12 and college prep programs at Kaplan Test Prep. “It’s something that is becoming more ubiquitous and less looked down upon.”
Zerohedge.com has compiled 21 statistics about poverty and wealth in the United States. Among them:
- The lowest earning 23,303,064 Americans combined make 36 percent less than the highest earning 2,915 Americans do.
- 40 percent of all American workers (39.6 percent to be precise) make less than $20,000 a year.
- According to the Pew Research Center, the top 7 percent of all U.S. households own 63 percent of all the wealth in the country.
Read the rest here.
Not everyone was entirely impressed with Waiting for Superman, the documentary we watched today. This video is a response to some of its claims.
