NAS Blog

Watch out for it — already a fixture in leading schools of art education –before it becomes the norm in K-12 classes throughout the land, thus vastly politicizing the arts by making anti-capitalist, race/gender/class-obsessed (ne0-Marxist) “art activists” of our young.

So warns art critic Michelle Marder Kamhi, with the worthy view in mind of galvanizing parents against  proposed provisions in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, whose Congressional reauthorization is pending. These provisions would, in line with Paulo Freire’s dictum that all education is political, mandate social-justice art.

“Art”? Such as the pro-illegal immigration creation “Brinco,” or “jump” in Spanish, which would teach students to construct sneakers (jammed with compass, map, etc.) for people  attempting illegaly to cross our borders.

Americans to the barricades, in the defense of true art education!

George, thanks for sharing the Pope Center piece on student evaluations. I thought this paragraph was especially poignant:

Today’s student-survey approach may tell us how students viewed the course, but the data tell us nothing about actual learning. It is not that questionnaire designers disdain knowledge; they just cannot measure it, and thus they exclude a key element of teaching. Ironically, universities can now hire or retain teachers who impart nothing of value but have superb ratings.

Incidentally, NAS published an article by Peter Cohee on student evaluations last week. Cohee concluded:

A decade spent writing evaluations of public school teachers has brought me to this disillusion: evaluations as they are don’t make teachers better, don’t get rid of bad teachers, aren’t needed by good teachers, and don’t improve schools or student learning. They tend to induce cynicism and to engender ill will between the teacher and the evaluator. They are an almost complete waste of the enormous time, energy, and money spent on them.

He argued that several factors render evaluations useless:

1. Pre-written forms are created by those who don’t teach and allow for mediocre teaching (“I’ve also seen altogether mediocre teaching that meets every formal requirement.”)
2. No meaningful consequences or rewards follow evaluation
3. Evaluation is not tied to what and how well students have learned

Cohee offers some concrete suggestions for making evaluation meaningful and effective.

Anyone who’s followed Ashley Thorne’s posts describing the recently discontinued La Raza/Chicano “studies” program in the Tucson public school sytem may well have experienced a sense of the surreal: how on earth did this balkanized, ideological bomb-throwing find its way into any classroom anywhere? Could anyone actually have been serious about a “curriculum” that could only engender ethnic chauvanism and antagonism toward non-hispanics, especially whites? Unfortunately, yes, since the Tucson program is simply an extension/imitation of what’s been going on in academic precincts for quite some time now. Here you can easily find any number of undergraduate courses and “studies” programs devoted to fostering group identity, group chauvnism, group grievance, group entitlement, etc., etc. But as these two pieces (here and here) in the Chronicle of Higher Education illustrate, ethnic studies has apparently been catching some flak, even from within the academy, and the authors respectively write to mount a defense. Of course, they believe, lots of criticism predictably emanates from the incorrigible racism which perdures at all levels of American society, and which was recently made manifest in Arizona’s new statute which effectively terminated the Tucson curriculum. But one of the authors interestingly argues that ethnic studies programs at the college level have been weakened by academic “liberals,” who have used them as a means of celebrating “diversity’ rather than generating political activism and group advocacy (as in “empowerment”). That, he concludes, is where ethnic studies needs to refocus, as the La Raza program was apparently doing so well. As the comments thread indicates, a number of academic observers with first-hand experience of similar programs also think that’s exactly what’s wrong with them.

One of the most depressing articles I’ve ever read in my entire life describes the problem American students face when pondering a career in science. For years, the conventional wisdom was that our education system was failing to properly educate our children in STEM subjects (science, tech, engineering, and math). However, this article in Miller-McCune directly challenges this assumption.

The authors contend that the real problem facing American students is a lack of careers in science. The case they make is compelling: Although the number of graduates receiving Ph.D.’s has increased, the number of job opportunities has not kept pace. This trend is particularly noticeable in academia, where young Ph.D.’s spend years as post-docs, with only a small chance of ever landing a permanent position as a professor. Indeed, the average age of a scientist who earns his first independent NIH grant– a huge milestone in the medical science field– has risen from a researcher’s late 20s/early 30s to the ripe old age of 42.

One of the biggest causes indicated in this article is the flood of foreigners who are willing to take post-doc positions. It doesn’t take an economist to realize that a massive increase in labor supply will both eat up opportunities and drive down salaries. Post-doc positions, which were once viewed as prestigious, are now treated as temporary, cheap labor. With such a dismal prospect for career advancement and compensation, it’s no wonder that American students would rather get an MBA or MD… or to forgo higher education altogether.

Children today are getting a strong message from their schools, extra-curricular activities, and popular culture: “You need to help your parents live greener.” Reinforcing this message are campaigns such as GreenMyParents, which trains kids to “grade their parents” on their energy and water use and demand pay for their services.

In “Indoctrinate Our Kids and Green My Parents,” I argued that such teaching subverts parents’ authority, breaks down the family, and undermines one of the great purposes of education – to hand down civilization’s legacy to the next generation.

University Talk radio interviewed me on this here. My segment is from 13:47 to 29:27.

It seems that some teachers and administrators, when offered incentives (within systems such as No Child Left Behind) for boosting students’ test scores, act unethically to inflate them.

The Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern recounts how two brave education officials are confronting assertions of “spectacular student progress” by forcing an outside audit of the tests.

Their efforts, he writes, should serve as a model for making all states “come clean” and (in education secretary Arne Duncan’s words) “‘stop lying to children.’”

A teen went public about her failing high school — a sick, sick place in Brooklyn where students have sex and smoke dope in the stairwells, where pregnancies and smoking pot are the stuff of every day, and where administrators and security guards are lazy and incompetent.

For her efforts, according to the New York Post, the student, Alisha Strawder, was barred from the school and told that it cannot guarantee her safety.

One student told the Post: “Everyone wants to fight her, to jump her. If they find her, they’re going to beat her up.”

Is it possible to reverse such institutionalized depravity? This young girl, unlike most of the educational establishment, has had the courage to try.

Andy Wolf, always an astute observer of New York’s educational scene, advises the state’s officials not to submit an application in the next round of “Race to the Top” competition for federal cash.

Showering public schools with more money has not improved their performance, and, as Wolf notes, the federal funds would amount to a mere one-third of 1% per year of the total state expenditures for the schools.

More important, the “Race” process has proven to be so intrusive that to accept the cash would give the feds too much control over local school affairs.

Candace de Russy recently noted that Massachusetts received no Race to the Top funds, despite the state’s celebrated high academic standards. Peter Wood continues that thread in “Ratatat, Sissy, Bay State Boom: Obama Whacks K-12 Standards.”

NAS president Peter Wood has published a review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. The book outlines Ravitch’s change of heart regarding education reform. Here is an excerpt from Dr. Wood’s review:

Ignorance is easy. Left to themselves, most children do not become literate. They don’t learn math. They don’t drink in large amounts of history. Basic ideas about how the world works remain beyond their reach. And ignorant children grow up to be ignorant adults—provided they survive the sometimes perilous passage.

To combat this natural frailty, every group of people from time immemorial has organized some way to get the little ones—squirming, distracted, cranky, bored, breathless, or all at once—to pay attention. “This is rock worth chipping, and here’s how to chip it.” “Eat the root, not the leaves.” Civilization eventually acquired a lot of knowledge that seemed worth preserving. To get the children ready for this intellectual inheritance, civilization invented schools. They are an artificial contrivance intended to do a more or less difficult thing: organize the brains of young primates to perform unnatural acts such as reading and long division.

That’s my view as an anthropologist. Schooling is, inevitably, difficult—and more difficult for some children than for others. The difficulty is a mystery only if you begin with the assumption that children are just so bursting with curiosity that, absent some external check on their eagerness, they will take to the alphabet as readily as infants take to climbing and crawling. But we are climbers and crawlers by nature and alphabet spelunkers only by outside intervention. When we learn to read, we are at one end of a long cultural rope that extends back though history beyond Shakespeare’s Stratford Grammar School, past Aristotle troubling young Alexander, to whatever lessons were taught in the cuneiform academy for Sumer’s scribes. Literacy has always been an achievement—and often a precarious one.

I mention this by way of coming alongside a book of groaning frustration by one of America’s best-known advocates of school reform.

Read the review in its entirety at NAS.org or The American Conservative.