Word: levelism
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None the less, this Obama appointment, a 6-month old Portuguese Water Dog, has at least escaped the tax troubles that have dogged torpedoed previous high-level appointments. That being said, the latest addition to the Obama team has not escaped controversy--those with nothing better to do critics clamor that the choice of a purebred dog exemplifies the shallowness of Obama's claim to bring "change...
...hosted for a small group attending an Aspen Institute education forum. He challenged former Democratic governor Roy Romer of Colorado, who made a case for common standards. Bush agreed with the goal, but he said it was too politically explosive to make it worth pushing at the federal level...
...Beijing or Bangalore. (We can save for later the debate over whether that should be true for more subjective subjects like history.) These standards should define precisely what students are expected to know by the time they complete each grade and should be accompanied by tests to assess their level of proficiency. The process should be quasi-voluntary: states should not be forced to adopt the common standards, but they should be encouraged to do so through federal funding and public pressure. In states that shy away from holding their schools accountable to these standards, parents and business leaders should...
...frightening sight than that of all 535 members of Congress grappling with a congregation of bureaucrats and voting on whether high school graduates should or should not be required, for example, to be able to plot real and complex numbers as points on a plane. Even at the state level, there were times when standards became tangled in political debates, including a protracted "fuzzy math" dispute over whether students should be taught to estimate answers and understand concepts rather than memorize multiplication tables and master long division. When politicians and ideological posturers got out of the way, reasonable educators...
...national system of standards and testing would also permit the gathering of consistent data, down to the classroom level, so that we could finally get more rigorous evidence to answer some basic questions: Do smaller classrooms make a big difference, and in which situations? How beneficial is it to have a longer school day or year? It would also help resolve disputes about different teaching methods, like whether phonics or a whole-language approach to reading works best. In addition, we could more easily spot ineffective teachers, and they could be weeded out or offered training resources that have proved...