In a time when smart people of good faith occupy both sides of many heated and complex education debates, it makes sense occasionally to pause, take a deep breath, and denounce things like the incoherent mishmash of policy juvenalia, useless sentiment, and blatant lies found in this article, published by GOOD Magazine, in which we are told that NCLB “requires all of the nation’s schoolchildren to be above the mean on standardized tests,” Bill Gates and Eli Broad are spearheading the corporate conspiracy to privatize K-12 education, and standardized tests come with instructions about what to do if students throw up on them. It’s sort of a perfect distillation of woolly-minded HuffPost-type conventional education wisdom, and in that sense is oddly valuable, because you can read it and know everything that a not-inconsequential percentage of people know (or rather, don’t know) about education.
BAD Magazine
Update: The author of the article, Gary Stager, objects to the above as defamatory and insists that ”my article was carefully fact-checked by Good Magazine.” Yet somehow the legendary Good Magazine fact-checking department failed to notice that NCLB is not “mathematically impossible,” as Stager asserts, because it does not actually “require all of the nation’s schoolchildren to be above the mean on standardized tests.” That Stager, a self-proclaimed “internationally recognized educator and consultant” would display such basic ignorance of the law he’s criticizing tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the quality of thinking and editing involved. Stager also says “It’s not ‘useless sentiment’ to care about children.” Well, yes it is, if you think simply saying “I care about children” represents an argument of some kind.
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03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.