Monday, February 16, 2004
Standards making slow progress
A roundup of articles about the standards:
- Most importantly, the StarTribune is reporting that a set of revisions to the social science standards is forthcoming after reviews from a second set of national readers. The comments are available from the Department of Education's website. Some are positive, some are negative. Read for yourself and see. You would hope that there would be a set of changes, but the House Committee has made it clear that they are taking a bill to the floor, so it's absurd to think that these reviews would lead to wholesale changes.
- There are letters from a math standards writer and a social science standards writer. Money quote from the latter on the opponents of the standards:
According to these negative nabobs of academia, facts don't count, memorization is evil and the heads of students will explode if we dare introduce such "advanced" topics as classical Greece, ancient Egypt or the Declaration of Independence to children in grades K-3. Our students need to think critically, which to opponents means the teacher telling students that oil companies are bad, Castro's Cuba is good and Christopher Columbus was the leader of a planned mass genocide of native peoples because he sneezed on them...
- This morning's paper has more on Commissioner Yecke's confirmation hearings. Norm Draper lists her accomplishments as
* Churned out new knowledge-based academic requirements for language arts, math, social studies and science.
So of course she shouldn't get to keep her job, says the DFL.
* Unveiled color-coded report cards that rank schools in several areas on a scale of one to five stars.
* Gotten the state on track to implement the federal No Child Left Behind law, aimed at holding schools responsible for every student's academic performance, and she has gotten the U.S. Department of Education to make adjustments that prevented many schools from being branded as low-performing.
Robert Bork says "hi."
