Author
Mark Bauerlein
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Blog Posts/Multimedia
The New and Old of Digital Learning
What stands out in a rendition of recent digital breakthroughs in learning is that it relies on some of the most routine progressivist assumptions about learning.
Arts Education Goes Activist
While serving at the National Endowment for the Arts, I spent many months working on arts education policy. While one had to admire the dedication and spirit of people scrambling to deliver the arts to young Americans, I soon concluded that their efforts to persuade funders and politicians to support arts education misplaced the emphasis.
An Apple Campus
There is an interesting development at Beverly High School in Beverly, Massachusetts, north of Boston. Parents have been informed that every student must use an Apple MacBook in his and her work.
The Mimetic Classroom
In the current issue of Education Next appears a summary by Robert Pondiscio of the philosophy and practice of Edutopia. Edutopia presents its pedagogy as cutting-edge and innovative, and its motto suggests a hard focus on evidence and feedback and outcomes. Within the article, though, appears a statement by the former executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Milton Chen, that sounds more like an a priori principle than an idea derived from experience: School life should resemble real life.
Social Justice Teaching from the Students’ Side
A few years ago I interviewed a professor of education about the training of arts teachers. She was enthusiastic about what her school was accomplishing, citing in particular its focus on social issues in the classroom. I asked her about what she does in the classroom, and she volunteered an interesting trend. The students resist her instruction, she admitted, but over the course of the semester they come around and recognize how important these lessons in social justice really are. For her, the pattern was a sign of how much the students learned, how much their awareness had broadened from Day One to the end of the semester.
Audio Excerpt: The Dumbest Generation
An audio excerpt from “The Dumbest Generation” by Mark Bauerlein
Core Standards and College-Readiness
The latest version of the “Core Standards Initiative for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies & Science” bears the phrase, “Through wide and deep reading of literature and literary nonfiction of steadily increasing sophistication, students gain a reservoir of literary and cultural knowledge, references, and images.” This is precisely the kind of acknowledgment of cultural literacy that education conservatives and curricular traditionalists of various kinds have been advocating for more than two decades. Still, I think, another step needs to take place in the next round of revisions.
Career Readiness: Don’t Expect Too Much from Colleges
Employers shouldn’t expect colleges to instill the writing skills employees need. The duty falls on high schools whether they like it or not and whether it is fair or not.
Atlanta Grades
A story last week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that fully 191 schools in the state of Georgia, 10 percent of the total number of elementary and middle schools, are up for investigation for altering test answer sheets. The next day’s story put the count at one in five Georgia public schools.
Food for Thought?
As administrators struggle to engage wayward teenagers and make learning meaningful after hours, one can imagine a school turning an unused plot of grass on the grounds into a working garden. Some students could cultivate crops while others head to football and band practice. Getting a few credits for the work wouldn’t interfere with calculus and U.S. history, either, and it might improve attitudes toward school in general. That isn’t what happened at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, CA, though.
The NCTE on College Readiness
After the Common Core project released its first draft of standards for English Language Arts last summer, the National Council of Teachers of English had a “review team” issue a report on the document to be submitted to the project as it worked its way through subsequent versions. Apart from the immediate aim of steering the core standards in certain directions, the document also offers a vision of English education that strangely downplays the fundamental principle of the project, namely, college and career readiness.
The Minnesota Re-Education of Educators
Readers may have heard about recent developments of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative at the University of Minnesota. It’s a project to revise the training of teachers, and it has infuriated conservative, libertarian, and First Amendment groups. Among the elements of the process is the Task Force for Race, Culture, Class, and Gender, which issued its recommendations in September. The Outcomes of the document read like a parody of academic identity politics, but they stand loud and clear in black and white.
We’ve Had National Standards for 15 Years
With the Council of Chief State School Officers sponsoring the creation of national standards in math and English language arts, many people are raising customary objections to the very idea of national standards. If people don’t think they can happen and please most everyone in the field, though, they’re wrong. Many readers of Education Next might be surprised to learn that we’ve had national standards in one field for 15 years.
The Providence Effect in Action
Fifty minutes into The Providence Effect, a documentary profile of Providence-St. Mel School in Chicago, an extraordinary episode unfolds. Over the years, Providence-St. Mel and its admirable founder have received up and down attention, it has a 100 percent college acceptance rate, and its ACT scores have risen steadily. But this tiny snapshot of accountability in a math classroom says it all.
“The Cartel” in New Jersey
New Jersey is #1 in spending per public school student. Where does the money go, and why so much? The answers may be found in some of the bizarre and dismaying facts and stories recounted in a new education documentary entitled “The Cartel”.
They’re #1–and They Teach To the TEST??!!
BASIS is a charter school that has struggled through neighborhood protests and funding cuts, plus the usual resistances that charter schools face, but its success speaks for itself. It’s now the subject of a documentary produced by Robert Compton.
Three Voices for English Knowledge: Hirsch, Willingham, and the AFT
Hirsch, Willingham, and the AFT are powerful voices arguing against one of the sorriest trends in English Language Arts over the years, namely, the attempt to convert it into a skills discipline that emphasizes cross-disciplinary capacities (critical thinking, “media literacy,” reading comprehension strategies, etc.) and downplays English knowledge.
A Controversy That Wasn’t
Consider this scenario. A 16-year-old boy transfers to a high school in Georgia from out of state and shows up the second day wearing a hot pink wig and high heels.
The Costs and Benefits of Remediation
Readers of Education Next may have seen a report entitled Diploma to Nowhere from Strong American Schools last year that counted up the number of high school graduates who end up in remedial courses at the next level. The figures are dismaying.
If Students Are Career-Oriented, It Doesn’t Show Up in Majors
With all the talk about workplace-readiness in education reform, one would think that students who enter college would look carefully at the coursework that leads to high-paying jobs.
More and More, School Just Isn’t ‘Meaningful’
Most educators probably aren’t surprised that more than two-thirds of high school seniors don’t recognize the value of what they have to learn.
The Real Reason Why English Educators Don’t Like Classic Reading Lists
The idea of selecting certain works for study, creating a canon of novels and poems and plays, fashioning a lineage, however multi-racial and filled with women writers it is, strikes all-too-many curriculum designers as a bad, bad idea.
The College Cruise
The New York Times this week hosted a forum on summer homework, and while I voted “Yea!” many contributors and commenters thought summer homework a terrible intrusion on June, July, and August.
The Fall of Multi-Tasking
Not so long ago people were trumpeting multi-tasking as a new way of learning and behaving, one that was rewiring our brains.
Don’t Think Too Highly of Yourself
A few years ago, in the 2006 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning? researchers found a correlation that went against 40 years of prevailing wisdom in education circles.
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