Standardized testing is an instrument of convenience for politicians. Its use for educators is as an indication of aggregate effectiveness. Its results are useless to the individual test taker. In the United States, standardized testing is a cruel disease perpetrated by policy makers and educators alike that separates learning from testing. The nation needs a new generation of testing instruments. Testing is crucial to achievement in the classroom. Tests must be frequent, designed by teachers, and involve immediate responses to the test taker sufficiently rapid as to make testing useful to learning. We need to understand the mistakes we make as we make them in order to learn from them. Current standardized testing in the United States does not meet that crucial criterion.
The current system of education fails most decisively in its inability to sustain the natural curiosity of children. This is most evident in the failure of the American system to teach science.
The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.
What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.
Really nice interactive map showing the political transition of Europe over time. We could build similar products in Google Earth.
“The book has much worth, not least for its eloquent and powerful critique of today’s educational malaise.” –Ink Pellet
DataAppeal is a new data visualization company that is doing some neat stuff. They allow you to upload XLS files, which are then converted into 3D models and/or animations. The resulting models are quite well-done, as seen here:
Poverty and inequality, Marsh argues, are dire problems for all of us — even those who’ve never known financial hardship and probably never will. But education cannot make them go away: it is simply not possible for all Americans to earn college degrees, and “[i]nsisting that they really should is neither a wise nor a particularly humane solution.” And if all Americans did graduate from college, then college would no longer be any guarantee of a good job and a decent living (or rather, it would be even less of one than it is now).
Some really nice primary source tools from the National Archives.
Just how tiny were those kids?