Appleyard Knocks Another One Out of the Park
Substitute "Bush" for "Blair", and it's exactly the same on this side of the Atlantic. Excerpt:
"Take the teachers. People blame Blair for loading our children with tests. But they miss the point. It is not the children that are being tested, it is the teachers. Teachers had, from the sixties onwards, effectively deprofessionalised themselves by destroying any realistic possibility of assessment and compromising our ability to transmit culture from one generation to the next. This made them unreformable other than by the coercive and legalistic device of tests."
posted by Oroborous at 9:02 AM
2 Comments:
While I am sure there are problems with NCLB, it is pure folly (which is not a disqualifier for academics) to consume mass quantities of taxpayer dollars towards the end of producing a product, while expecting to avoid measurement as to how well that product is being produced.
The Real World (that is, the part of it subject to actuall feedback mechanisms) has long since learned the folly of that particular bit of nonsense.
NCLB is simply 'Unsafe at Any Speed', tailored to the vulnerabilities of the public education industry. It turns out that it is fairly simple to do a hostile political takeover of an industry: all you have to do is set a goal for it in the public's mind that you know it can never reach. Public schools are no more capable of teaching skills to unmotivated kids than General Motors was capable of building a cheap, safe sportscar back in 1963.
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