This is an excerpt from a discussion
posted at the listserv for the AAPT Committee on
Teacher Preparation (subscription is available at http://aapt.org/Membership/listservs.cfm)
I would like to make a couple of general remarks on
the Gerald Bracey’s
> BELIEVING THE WORST ABOUT SCHOOLS: A LACK OF
LOGIC FROM SPUTNIK TO TOUGH CHOICES
>
> There is a cottage industry in this country that
generates reports devoted
> to keeping Americans anxious about the future and laying the
> responsibility for that future on the schools which are never working as
> they should be.
Let’s say that schools are not responsible for the future
of a country, or have a little influence on it. In this case way
even bother for trying education being better?
Schools are never working as
they should be. This is just a nature of education. A system
of education is very conservative and inertial and always lag behind the
current demands of a society. We just do not need to think of this as of
something bad, we need to keep this fact in mind and do the best we can to
minimize the delta.
> Education historian Lawrence Cremin quipped that
Sputnik only proved that the Nazi
> scientists the Russians
had absconded with after World War II had gotten a little
> ahead of the Nazi scientists we had absconded with after World War II.
It is known that one can
always find facts to support any historical theory.
> This assertion reflected the commissioners’ erroneous assumption that high
> test scores were causally linked to thriving
economies.
We know NOW this is not correct, there is something
important besides the test scores. (poor Japan).
> Beginning in 1991, on the other hand, the
> enjoyed the longest sustained economic expansion in the nation’s history.
>
> economy. Our kids continued to score in the middle of the pack, but
the
> economy boomed and the World Economic Forum ranked us No. 1 in global
> competitiveness among over 100 nations.
Isn’t the boom was related in to new technologies developed
by educated engineers and scientists the amount of which was sufficiently big
at the time?
>(this year the
> largely because of the incompetence in the Bush administration, the
> incompetence and corruption in both the Bush administration and the
> private sector, and the insanity of an open-ended, coffer-draining
> commitment to war coupled with the simultaneous commitment to continue
> cutting taxes).
Isn’t the political and business elite represents the best
(most educated, most active) 10 – 15 % of a society?
> Now comes Tough
Choices. If successful it would accomplish what
some have been
> intending for decades: the private control of publicly funded education.
Politics is always about a control, the question is
which control is better (more efficient).