He talks about the

“the High Skills Hoax”

One may not like the fuzzy talk of “High Skills” or “21st Century Skills” to justify massive changes, but that doesn’t mean that everything is just fine. There are lots of things to dislike about the report, but he doesn’t do much more than complain.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!

They want real change? How about breaking the monopoly? How about giving the customer direct input (control of the money) into the system? Parents are smart enough to see right through all of this BS.

“Create state board exams that students could pass at age 16 to move either on to community college or to a university-level high school curriculum.”

Community college, university, they have equal entrance requirements? Right. They can’t get basic K-12 education right, but they want to allow kids to go to college at 16. This is part of a K-16 education power grab by state boards of education. They want control over it all. Hear them gripe about “tough” state university entrance requirements. They want guaranteed acceptance if kids pass some minimal state board exams at age 16.

A group in our state just proposed a charter high school that is tied in with the state community college. This will allow high school kids to start taking college courses. There is no indication how they will get the kids ready to take these courses. If the kids are so good that they can take college courses in high school, they’re not headed for community college. This is just the sort of weird “charter” that is even close to being acceptable by our state board of education, which has control over the approval of charters. You want to start a Core Knowledge school? Forget it. You don’t have a chance. You can’t have a charter school that attracts the best students. They won’t allow it. It all doesn’t matter, because our state has a moratorium on charter schools until mid 2008.

Boy is this idea a loser. In Oregon, in an effort to turn out “world class students” the educational system came up with a similar idea that they labeled CIM (certificate of initial mastery) and CAM (certificate of advanced mastery), they were suppose to be awarded to students who did specific work that was put into portfolios to show the mastery of … well, we never really did figure out what it was suppose to show. A student could do over 50 essays (or redo and refine one over 50 times) until it shows that they have mastered the … idea, concept, principal, or … something. It was to be voluntary and eventually the high school diploma was to be eliminated and the CIM and CAM replace it. After 15 years, our state is finally going to abandon this stupid idea. It didn’t show anything outside the fact the student had spent tons of time on useless projects. Thankfully the diploma was never done away with, they couldn’t show how the ‘portfolios’ were ANY advantage over the diplomas. They never went beyond being voluntary and they provided no advantage to the student if they did acquire one.

A HUGE waste of dollars and time – so why not move it to a national level, that’s what I always say.

Don’t even get me started on the rest of this report…

There is an executive summary on-line:

http://www.skillscommission.org/pdf/exec_sum/ToughChoices_EXECSUM.pdf

At least a couple blogers have pointed out that it was unlikely that many outside the Beltway will actually read the book, since it is not on-line. There are a number of other topic-related papers that can be downloaded from this site, however.

The work doesn’t seem to be highly received, so far, by many folks reviewing the press releases.

I read the article. The inquiry method sounds like the standard-fare KWL method we were taught in ed school.

Then there is this:

“Unlike the high school diploma program, there are no year-end exams, but fifth-graders complete a culminating “exhibition” that can be a performance, a community service project or another endeavor in which portfolios are turned in periodically. Students also must study a foreign language.”

Yeah that’ll do it. Community service projects will show how well the kiddies learned math, science, etc.

Wasn’t there something in this report about not increasing funding? If you give “A” more funding and it doesn’t come out of “B”s budget then probably “C” ought to hang onto his wallet because that’s a funding increase.”

This could be a breakthrough in algebra. Call it cutting-edge fuzzy algebra.

a + b = 100

a = 60

b = 40

60 + 40 = 100

New proposal

60 + (40 + 20) = 100

Everybody’s favorite false dichotomy. My favorite variant of this is when in the face of Asian countries constantly receiving higher math and science scores than the U.S in tests like TIMSS, people say “Yeah, but they’re not as good at solving problems that require creativity.”

Reminds me of the rumor I used to hear when I was a freshman at college; the one about saltpetre being in the dorm food.