This, however, is why I’m genuinely confused about the extent to which the current debate tends to construe people like me and my colleagues on the CAP education team as the enemies of K-12 teachers.Matthew Yglesias tends to deploy his genuine confusion whenever he discovers that the population of the world is not so fully composed of hack, Harvard-undergraduate, self-flattering, not-so-polymathic, nebbish meshugenahs as his own succubic circle of young Washington remoras. You mean that a benighted workforce tasked with the impossible job of turning The Children into a razor-edged temporal weapon to be deployed against the future China even as their cities go back to pastureland and all the world's oil dries up, a bunch of workers who want only to preserve some modest semblance of wage security in an increasingly desperate age, do not wish to hop aboard the cocktail-napkin ideations of some hoggish know-nothing who, between subsidized junkets to Helsinki and slack-jawed rediscoveries of the antimajoritarian tendencies of our fucking Rome-derived senate, finds it occasionally necessary to turn out such dazzling strophes as:
-Woody Mattchuck
But schools also matter. Effective schooling is possible and important. Lack of strong evidence about which methods are most effective points to the need for rigorous assessment, organizational flexibility, and choice.Yes, what America really needs are more thunderingly dull declarative sentences and really precise, meaningful terms like important, strong evidence, effective, rigorous assessment, organizational flexibility, and choice. Livelihoods are certainly worth the sacrifice when some ivy-league imbecile bearing management jargon with all the fluency of a phrasebook tour of Europe shows up demanding a table at the bistro. Exkyoozay-mwwah mizzyor, may zhe voodray beeyen voo veeray ay too voh confrayers ohsee. D'akor? Maresee! Supayer! Poor lays onfontz, kee sawnt laveneer!
The only good thing to say about the American system of public education is that it provides lots of people with regular work, reasonable pay, decent benefits, modest protection, and civilized hours.
27 comments:
What a fucking dolt. There is no "lack of strong evidence." Christ, the last nonprofit I worked for trained pre-K through third grade teachers in how to teach reading to low-income kids. Wildly successful at it, too. No lack of evidence, no fucking mystery. He could have found this out with about 5 minutes on teh Google. And he gets paid for this shit?
"Effective schooling is possible and important."
So its both possible AND important, you say? Never would have put that together.
I think the stunning banality of this statement, evidence of a mind that holds the majesty of its own nothingness in such high regard, to be the worst.
Strong men also cry. . . Strong men also cry.
I take issue with this post, only because defiling classic early King Crimson to illustrate a MY post is just wrong, however app-roh-poh it may be, mon-sewer.
AGAINST SCHOOL -
How public education cripples our kids, and why
http://www.rahoorkhuit.net/devi/hs/against_school.html
What a prog. He shows a graph showing "the decent evidence for edu-nihilism" in K-12 schools. And he disagrees with Drum that it means "we" should focus more money on pre-K programs: "If you look at early childhood interventions and if you look at K-12 schools, I think you see the exact same thing."
Could it be there is some heritable biological factor, strongly correlated with "Maternal Education", which explains these findings? Could be! But Matty Woodchuck certainly isn't going there.
Still, one great thing about blogs is their raw quality' their uneditedness. If Matty had any editor, who'd of course also be a dues-paying progressive, she'd have redacted any mention of biology from his post. Yet there it is, in all its revealing glory: "peer group effects and parenting constitute the bulk of the non-biological influences on kids. And human children are biological systems heavily impacted by nutrition, genetics, prenatal conditions, ambient lead, etc." (my emph.) Yeah, Matty Woodchuck knows about IQ.
BTW: IOZ you oughta link the actual piece, for the love of your readers. It is this:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/edunihilism-and-early-childhood/
You do love us, doncha?
King Crimson - Heartbeat live 1982
http://tinyurl.com/4zg7ftr
You forgot: the school system also provides affordable day-care.
I've come to the realization that George Wallace was a prophet.
How else could he have foreseen Yggy when he coined the phrase, pointy-headed intellectual?
Interesting. It's not everyday you hear an eloquent defense of make-work.
I'm sorry, did you say... MESHUGGAH!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkrjE4QRsys
My bad, blog commenting streams got crossed there. Somehow I still sound like less of an idiot that Yglesias.
Could it be there is some heritable biological factor, strongly correlated with "Maternal Education", which explains these findings?
There is! It's called "money."
And damn you for making me read Yglesias again. I'd been in the wagon for almost two weeks. You, sir, are the devil. The devil.
The phrase from this post that deserves to live forever might easily be "young Washington remoras".
May I just point out the fundamental illogic that this Harvard philosophy major is pawning off on us in his "edunihilism" posts?
"the only good thing to say about the American system of public education is...."
So what's wrong with that?
Another Manhattan, barkeep.
--The real Donny
"There is! It's called "money."
And a 5 minute search of Google would indicate the numerous studies that have accounted for class, and yet still found a difference between certain 'biological' groups.
I realize the fact of human biodiversity undercuts the 'equality of results' ideology of the left. Get over it.
I see black people.
I've invented a new game to amuse myself. In any "serious" piece in the media that mentions both "future" and "China", I simply pretend that what they're fearing is the collapse of the entire global clusterfuck of a "system" known as Capitalism.
It's not such a fun game though :(
"I realize the fact of human biodiversity undercuts the 'equality of results' ideology of the left. Get over it."
Say what you want about National Socialism...
Enron, the fact that he posted it anonymously pretty much says it all.
Anyway, I noticed Matty's anti-China scaremongering, too.
"The only good thing to say about the American system of public education is that it provides lots of people with regular work, reasonable pay, decent benefits, modest protection, and civilized hours"
Let's create a negative railroad, consisting of nothing but breaks inn the tracks. It will create lots of work for the people near the stops.
More seriously.
LA Confidential Pantload, got a link/cite for evidence?
TGGP, as I recall, Hart and Risely's 30-million word gap (relating exposure to language with socioeconomic status) is one of the seminal pieces in the argument for pre-K for low-income kids. I think it's available online. There's other research (such as the Chicago Longitudinal Study), but I haven't worked in early literacy for a few years so my memory of who's who isn't so hot.
And, BTW,'effective learning is possible and important?' Why not 'possible learning is effective and important' or 'important learning is possible and effective?' They were 'edu-nihilists,' Dude?
Thanks LA. I'd never heard of them before, but some googling turned up a summary here. But it sounds like it just said there are disparities across SES levels, which MattY seems to fully agree with.
From what I heard in Ian Ayre's "Supercrunchers" the educational method shown by studies to be most effective is "Direct Instruction" (the motivation for Bush's "My Pet Goat" photo-op). I believe this blogger promotes something along those lines.
"Hmm, I keep paying these netflix bills out of habit, but come to think about it, I haven't actually used netflix in years, and I can't imagine I'll start in the forseeable future.
I better call and change to a cheaper package."
Both Ylgesias and Drum agree that by the one standard they actually invoke, schooling does nothing whatsoever, and yet their solution is to spend slightly less money on meaningless things.
Rather then the to my mind more obvious solution of just not throwing any money down the drain at all.
They also both steadfastly refuse to explain why they think compulsory education is necessary. Which I find weird. Do these early intervention programs depend on later schooling to take? do schools perform exceedingly well at some other task that they aren't talking about?
And in either case, isn't it entirely possible that diverting money from K-12 would prevent it from accomplishing whatever important task it's doing?
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