I have nothing to say about Michelle Rhee’s appearance on Charlie Rose last night. But I just had to use the headline.
Michelle’s interview starts at 25:10.
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Democratic front-runner Barack Obama got all Bill Cosby on a predominantly African-American audience in Texas last week, and the crowd ate it up. Thanks to Joanne Jacobs for pointing to this Los Angeles Times article that I’d overlooked.
Spending alone will not cure what ails education, scolded Obama. “It doesn’t matter how much money we put in if parents don’t parent,” he said. “It’s not good enough for you to say to your child, ‘Do good in school,’ and then when that child comes home, you’ve got the TV set on,” Obama lectured. “You’ve got the radio on. You don’t check their homework. There’s not a book in the house. You’ve got the video game playing.”
“So turn off the TV set. Put the video game away. Buy a little desk. Or put that child at the kitchen table. Watch them do their homework. If they don’t know how to do it, give ‘em help. If you don’t know how to do it, call the teacher.”
“By now,” reports the Times, “the crowd of nearly 2,000 was lifted from the red velveteen seats of the theater, hands raised to the gilded ceiling. ‘Make ‘em go to bed at a reasonable time! Keep ‘em off the streets! Give ‘em some breakfast! Come on! Can I get an amen here?’”
“Whooooooooooooooooo, went the crowd. “You know I’m right,” Obama laughed. “And, since I’m on a roll, if your child misbehaves in school, don’t cuss out the teacher! You know I’m right about that! Don’t cuss out the teacher! Do something with your child!”
Tellingly, the first of many comments on Joanne’s blog is from a teacher who posts, “Up to now I’ve been sitting on the fence, but Barack Obama may have just gotten my vote!”
Bet there are more than a handful of teachers thinking the same thing today.
If you watched the CBS Evening News tonight in New York City, you witnessed the debut of a new ad campaign from the United Federation of Teachers. The New York Sun and the Daily News took note of the campaign this morning, with the News characterizing the ad as UFT head Randi Weingarten’s payback for the NYC Department of Ed’s plan to evaluate teachers based on standardized test scores.
There’s no fiery rhetoric in the ad itself, however. It’s all warm fuzzy images of a child tending and drawing a small green plant under teacher’s watchful eye. “A child’s mind is a precious thing that’s growing every day,”says a voiceover. “Standardized school tests can measure her progress in certain subjects… but New York City teachers believe it takes a well-rounded curriculum — including science, civics, language, arts and sports — to help young imaginations thrive.”
No complaints about the message. Indeed, the UFT sought and received an endorsement of its message from Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch for the press release announcing the campaign. I just wish it didn’t remind me so much of the UNorth ad in Michael Clayton.
It’s 1987 all over again! Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason
In an interview with PBS lion Bill Moyers, Jacoby is unsparing in her criticism of America’s schools. “When one out of every five Americans still believes that the sun revolves around the earth [there's a problem]….You shouldn’t have to be an intellectual or a college graduate to know that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth,” she tells Moyers.
Perhaps Jacoby hasn’t heard that content knowledge is mere data, and that critical thinking and problem solving are How We Learn Now. Jacoby points out what ought to be obvious—you can’t divorce content knowledge from understanding and critical thinking. “People getting out of high school should know how many Supreme Court justices there are. Most Americans don’t. Well, now this feeds back into our current political process,” says Jacoby. “If you don’t know that there are nine judges then you don’t know that George W. Bush’s last two judicial appointments, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, have put us one vote away from having a Supreme Court which really believes that religion should have a much more active role in public life, that’s likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. But you have to know there are nine justices before you know that we’re up to a five out of nine sure votes.”
She also sounds a theme that will ring familiar to Core Knowledge adherents. “I think that schools over the last 40 years instead of just adding things, for example—African-American history, women’s history, these are all great additions, and necessary—they really have placed less emphasis on the overall culture– cultural things that everybody should know,” says Jacoby.
A headline in the the New York Times today asks “Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?”
The piece that follows jumps off of Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason, which notes a “generalized hostility to knowledge.” Complaining about how uneducated we are is a hardy perennial, but according to Jacoby “something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that ‘too much learning can be a dangerous thing’) and anti-rationalism (’the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion’) have fused in a particularly insidious way.”
Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she tells the Times, but they also don’t think it matters.
The Times illustrates this phenomenon with a reference to this cringe-inducing YouTube video that shows Kellie Pickler of American Idol fame on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” struggling with the question “Budapest is the capital of what European country?” She gets the correct answer from her 5th grade partner (the Republic is saved!), but not before saying on national TV before millions, “I thought Europe was a country.”
This You Tube video of a toddler who can do what few high school students can do—ID nearly every country on a world map—has been viewed over two million times. Thus, I’m probably the last person to have heard about it. At an age when most kids would be happy merely to be put in front of a video of Madagascar, she can actually find it on a map.
Other than David Tyree’s catch, it’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen all week.
An amusing criticism of the ignorance of Americans, posted by “Web Pundit” on YouTube, who identifies himself as an ex-teacher.
He offers a link to the Core Knowledge website, and promotes the Core Knowledge curriculum.
Please note that this is intended as a humorous, but scathing critique; we are offering it for those readers who will enjoy this sort of video. The views expressed are those of the author, and not of the Core Knowledge Foundation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaN6Rx8X6_I
Meteorologist M.J. McDermott explains the current state of math education in 4th and 5th grades.
She criticizes the approach of two popular Math curricula, “Investigations in Numbers, Data, and Space” also known as “TERC”, and “Everyday Math”.
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