OECD

Guess who just realized that just because it doesn't say wikispaces+blog entries due on d2l, it doesn't mean there's not an entry due! No wonder I felt like I wasn't doing enough blogs. Well, now I'm behind by two entries, unfortunately.


edweek is being really helpful at providing me with good articles, though!


like this one.


It really goes back to the discussion we had in class and our discussions about NCLB. Especially how America seems to believe that slow progress is no progress.  How it's a tragedy if America isn't number one. Settle down, people. We're not last. We're average. In order to be average, there must be people doing worse.


I like the point  they make about the fact that our leaders are trying to tell us they know what the problem is with education, that they know how to fix the problem. Of course, if this were the case, why would we have a problem in the first place? If they knew the perfect method of reforming schools, wouldn't that prevent any issues? Exactly.


I liked this paragraph: "Consider the two top contenders on PISA: Shanghai and Finland. These two places—one a very large city of nearly 21 million, the other a small nation of less than six million—represent two very different approaches to education. The one thing they have in common is that neither of the world leaders in education is doing what American reformers propose."


They also pointed out that American children are "accustomed not to intense discipline, but to a culture of free expression and individualism."  I think this is a good point. Because PISA doesn't measure a child's creativity and free thinking.  Yet those are incredibly highly valued traits in the US.  So I think that maybe instead of being terrified of our low math scores, maybe we should look at the fact that we're breeding a generation of brilliant minds.  Maybe they're not all going to be engineers, but there'll probably be a good crop of interior designers, chefs, software developers, who knows. 


Another great point this article made (apparently I just really liked this article!) was that in Shanghai, instead of failing and closing schools that were having issues, the city partnered it with a high performing school.  The "successful" (as we'd call them here) teachers and faculty help the failures, and apparently they all get up to a 100% passing rate. That's just nuts. I think we should adopt that sort of policy.  Help schools instead of shut them down.


In Finland, there are no tests. So then naturally people wonder how they hold teachers accountable.  Apparently, in Finnish, there is no word for "accountability". How.. progressive.  Which is ironic, given they piggy-backed off of our progressiveness. 


So I thought that post was pretty interesting.  I really enjoyed basically all the points Diane brought up. Now, let's see if she has an entry on globalization...