NRU ... education edition...

one..two...three...rant.

I can't help it ... when I read these articles, I feel they need commentary.

Who knew there were enough religion courses in public school to warrant not one but reports?! Not I, and somehow this is acceptable in TX but Chicano studies in AZ is not... hmmm... demonstrating once again the importance of school board elections?

I have said many times I love the LA Times.  I really do...except for their reporting on education. I wonder if other out there, in other industries, have my love/hate relationship with the reporting over there.  In any case, here is a piece on the school board election.  The interesting part is that here they are nominally following the money (as I admonished via email another *reporter* to do on a different story), yet they still fail to make some pretty basic connections between who is paying and what they are buying.  There should be 1 million + 22 comments on this article.

Oh... this unsigned editorial may explain why the *reporters* only chase education stories so far down the road.  There is so much problematic in this editorial, I hardly know where to start.  Let me just say this, if you are the LA Times and you published the "expose" on teacher effectiveness (with a flawed metric) because you believe there are *good* teachers and data will show it -- and then you say, and here is this thing we think they are doing it for the wrong reasons, but we can't prove it but we have this data that doesn't tell us anything, really, but we'll pretend it does... ugh.

Because we need some daylight amongst the dark clouds, here is a lovely StoryCorps piece ... for all those folks who continue to argue that Latino parents don't care about education, I'd like you to meet Linda Hernandez -- listen to her story.

My complaint about this story is that it reads like a (fundraising) commercial for the school ... and I mean that it gives a lot of laudatory information and plays up how hard it is to get into this school, but it never gives any real details.  What makes this school high performing beyond the few sentences citing an achievement index that wasn't even used to comply with NCLB?  What exactly does an 800 on API mean?  If you can't answer that question, you are not alone ... you just know that it is above the target.  One couldn't even know how far above the target or below the possible points available from the "facts" in this story.  So, just what is being reported here??  I am not saying that I am not happy that these students and their families feel like they are getting a deal, but I don't know what I was supposed to take away... do you?

I have held off from writing about this young man because I just don't know where to start with him... I hope that he is very successful in life, but I wish he would find another entreprenurial adventure.  When I heard him speaking in this interview, I just knew that I had to post it.  This child could use a little schooling -- something, anything that can get him to build a more cogent argument for his view.  I think a little structure and interaction with others in an academic setting might do wonders for his analytic skills.  There is a need for education ... not just because I am a teacher and (hopefully) soon to be university professor...

And almost on cue, I received a link to this piece in my email inbox.  Yes, I have been waiting for someone to figure out how to represent the fallacy of the student debt argument.  It is an easy to read, easy to understand, mostly visual piece ... print it out and/or send it to all the parents you know who are considering counseling their children to "hack their education" like the young man above.  If I had a million dollars to start a project, it would not be one in which I tried to get a bunch of teenagers to quit school. Just sayin'