sex_n_pancakes asked a while ago about thoughts on NCLB. Education Week (which is going to a subscription model at the end of the month), had an article about how civil rights groups are split on it (joe@schmoe.com/joe works as a login - thanks to Bug Me Not). The part I like about NCLB is the amount of data they're collecting - yeah, it leads to lots of testing, but it holds schools accountable. The part that doesn't work for me is that NCLB is a punitive system - if you don't score high enough, you're penalized. I'm not sure why it isn't a reward/incentive based system, based upon improvement. The funding issue mentioned at the end of the article is also quite real, with lots of pressure being put on schools to meet new standards, with no change in funding . . . which is rather silly . . . As a counterpoint, National Review had this article titled "Some Children Should be Left Behind." The article title is pretty sensationalistic, as the teacher who uses the quip was using it pre-NCLB. It's a feel good fluff piece about what education can be (and if you read between the lines, how important out-of-school time is, as they talk about after-school and field trips . . . )
Somewhere along the way, I saw this quotation:
If you asked Aristotle, John Dewey, and Martin Luther King Jr. to describe the aims of education, would they offer any version of the education goals that drive U.S. public schools today? Would any world-class visionary identify proficiency in basic skills as the primary aim for every student? Would he or she declare adequate yearly progress a school's central reason for being?"
-Marge Scherer (author/editor), "Valuing Children"
Switching gears . . . apparently in Cali, Korean men, gays and transsexuals, and U.S. Marines have an above average propensity to smoke. There's no reason proposed for why Korean men smoke more, though they attribute the higher rates about the LGBT and military populations to stress. Makes me wonder . . . On a related note, it's a bit crazy how much children model their parents behavior . . . freaking 2 to 6 year olds, thinking that for a night out they need cigarettes and/or alcohol . . .
I wonder if I could ever be this flippant to a recruiter . . . choice quote: "I’d thank you for your offer of employment at Microsoft, except that it indicates that either you or your research team (or both) couldn’t get a clue if it were pounded into you with baseball bats."
