Summer’s over, and kids all across the world are getting ready to go back to school. For those who live in parts of Iraq and Syria, however, class might look a little different this year.
The reason: ISIS. The jihadi group, also known as the Islamic State, released a new curriculum on Tuesday for primary schools in the areas it controls—and it sounds like a bit of a bummer. For grades one through six this year, there will be no more art class, no music, no philosophy, no psychology, no social studies, no history, no geography and no literature. Those subjects will be replaced with ISIS-approved subjects such as ideology, medicine, engineering, chemistry, physics, administration, agriculture and Islam.
Summer’s over, and kids all across the world are getting ready to go back to school. For those who live in parts of Iraq and Syria, however, class might look a little different this year.
The reason: ISIS. The jihadi group, also known as the Islamic State, released a new curriculum on Tuesday for primary schools in the areas it controls—and it sounds like a bit of a bummer. For grades one through six this year, there will be no more art class, no music, no philosophy, no psychology, no social studies, no history, no geography and no literature. Those subjects will be replaced with ISIS-approved subjects such as ideology, medicine, engineering, chemistry, physics, administration, agriculture and Islam.
Good article. One of my lucky breaks was being sent to a Montessori school by my hippy parents. There was a lot of open learning and we were left to find our own course most of the time. We also had two camping outings a year where we organized small groups to cook/clean/take care of each other with minimal adult supervision. I think those formative experiences have had a lot to do with my successes (and how I've handled my failures). I think most schools, especially the ones set up to get kids to pass standardized tests are doing a huge disservice to our society. It's a squandered opportunity when we let our youth become disinterested, unfulfilled and unenthusiastic about life.
my other half is a montessori teacher (early childhood) in the state school system (inner city no less) which had fantastic results
following/tracking her students revealed a very noticeable difference/performance
the program was recognized with honors and awards
so the state did the obvious
they cancelled the program
now she's dealing with other programs (high scope or something like that)
admittedly she still uses as much montessori as humanly possible in the new curriculum
Peter Gray has studied how learning happens without any academic requirements at a democratic school. The Boston College research professor also wrote about the long history and benefits of age-mixed, self-directed education in his book Free to Learn. Over the years, as he encountered more and more families who had adopted this approach at home (these so-called “unschoolers” are estimated to represent about 10 percent of the more than two million homeschooled children), he began to wonder about its outcomes in that setting. Finding no academic studies that adequately answered his question, he decided to conduct his own.
In 2011, he and colleague Gina Riley surveyed 232 parents who unschool their children, which they defined as not following any curriculum, instead letting the children take charge of their own education. The respondents were overwhelmingly positive about their unschooling experience, saying it improved their children’s general well-being as well as their learning, and also enhanced family harmony. Their challenges primarily stemmed from feeling a need to defend their practices to family and friends, and overcoming their own deeply ingrained ways of thinking about education. (The results are discussed at length here.)
This led Gray to wonder how unschooled children themselves felt about the experience, and what impact it may have had on their ability to pursue higher education and find gainful and satisfying employment. So last year, he asked readers of his blog to disseminate a survey to their networks, and received 75 responses from adults ranging in age from 18 to 49; almost all of them had had at least three years of unschooling experience. They were split almost evenly among three groups: those who had never attended school; those who had only attended school for some portion of kindergarten through sixth grades; and those with either type of early experience who had also attended school for some portion of seventh through 10th grades, but not afterward. (The results are explained in detail in Gray’s recent four-part blog series, which begins here.)
Good article. One of my lucky breaks was being sent to a Montessori school by my hippy parents. There was a lot of open learning and we were left to find our own course most of the time. We also had two camping outings a year where we organized small groups to cook/clean/take care of each other with minimal adult supervision. I think those formative experiences have had a lot to do with my successes (and how I've handled my failures). I think most schools, especially the ones set up to get kids to pass standardized tests are doing a huge disservice to our society. It's a squandered opportunity when we let our youth become disinterested, unfulfilled and unenthusiastic about life.
Peter Gray has studied how learning happens without any academic requirements at a democratic school. The Boston College research professor also wrote about the long history and benefits of age-mixed, self-directed education in his book Free to Learn. Over the years, as he encountered more and more families who had adopted this approach at home (these so-called “unschoolers” are estimated to represent about 10 percent of the more than two million homeschooled children), he began to wonder about its outcomes in that setting. Finding no academic studies that adequately answered his question, he decided to conduct his own.
In 2011, he and colleague Gina Riley surveyed 232 parents who unschool their children, which they defined as not following any curriculum, instead letting the children take charge of their own education. The respondents were overwhelmingly positive about their unschooling experience, saying it improved their children’s general well-being as well as their learning, and also enhanced family harmony. Their challenges primarily stemmed from feeling a need to defend their practices to family and friends, and overcoming their own deeply ingrained ways of thinking about education. (The results are discussed at length here.)
This led Gray to wonder how unschooled children themselves felt about the experience, and what impact it may have had on their ability to pursue higher education and find gainful and satisfying employment. So last year, he asked readers of his blog to disseminate a survey to their networks, and received 75 responses from adults ranging in age from 18 to 49; almost all of them had had at least three years of unschooling experience. They were split almost evenly among three groups: those who had never attended school; those who had only attended school for some portion of kindergarten through sixth grades; and those with either type of early experience who had also attended school for some portion of seventh through 10th grades, but not afterward. (The results are explained in detail in Gray’s recent four-part blog series, which begins here.)
That's the theory, anyway. Now for a dose of reality regarding whether K-12 education can be improved via privatization/market "magic": Sweden's School Choice Disaster
Those idiot parents, screwing up their kids' education again! Obviously they should have no role in where or how their children are educated.
Articles on education are always an exercise in confirmation bias. Slate has a long-standing antipathy toward any effort at reducing government control of education, so any problem in education must be due to just that. But let's read a little closer.
They don't differentiate results in the Pisa test by voucher versus pure public schools; I'm sure Slate would have waved that as a red flag/smoking gun if the results matched their bias, but that may be a lack of information rather than obfuscation. There is this tho: "In fact, a sizable portion of the much-vaunted outperformance of voucher school students could be chalked up to nothing more than easy grading."
That "outperformance" (did they google translate their article from Swedish?) doesn't all go away when you correct for grade inflation; voucher schools still outperform pure public. They linked to the article they sourced this from but sadly I can't read Swedish so I can't dig any deeper on this yet. The latest data I could find on this was from 2009; it compares Pisa scores between voucher and public schools. From 2000 to 2009 the results looked like this:
Source here. It would be interesting to see how the two compare now, but we aren't going to learn that from Slate. At least up to 2009 it would seem the fiskolor (voucher schools) were doing something right and the public sector was failing.
The Slate article does point to a real incentive for mischief here (grading your own students standardized tests), one that needs to be guarded against and it seems would be pretty simple to correct for. Point taken; Swedish public schools also grade their own students' standardized tests. But they haven't shown vouchers to be the source of Swedish education problems—in fact they imply exactly the opposite, and the data I can find indicate that as well.
That's the theory, anyway. Now for a dose of reality regarding whether K-12 education can be improved via privatization/market "magic": Sweden's School Choice Disaster
Now that a celebrity has tweeted about Common Core, news media and ordinary people are starting to look at the issue.
This response by Diane Ravitch to a Newsweek column criticizing Common core critics for voicing their concerns has a nice summary of what's wrong with the decade-plus old push for high stakes testing and other misguided reform efforts our kids have been subject to. Ravitch Response to Alexander Nazaryan Piece in Newsweek This graf contains a nice summation of the idiocy behind the propaganda of A Nation at Risk that helped spark the current reform effort:
Are our kids left behind by China, South Korea and Germany? Not really. Maybe not at all. It is true that we get mediocre scores on international tests, but we have been getting mediocre scores on international tests since the first such test was offered in 1964. We were never a world leader on the international tests. Most years, our scores were at the median or even in the bottom quartile. Yet in the intervening fifty years, we have far surpassed all those nations–economically, technologically, and on every other dimension– whose students got higher test scores. Basically, the test scores don’t predict anything about the future of the economy. Should we worry that Estonia might surpass us? The fact is that our international scores reflect the very high proportion of kids who live in poverty, whose scores are lowest. We are No. 1 among the rich nations of the world in child poverty; nearly one-quarter of our children live in poverty. Our kids who live in affluent communities do very well indeed on the international tests. If we reduced the proportion of children living in poverty, our international test scores would go up. But in the end, as I said, the international scores don’t predict anything other than an emphasis on test-taking in the schools or the general socio-economic well-being of the society. We would be far better off investing more money in providing direct services to children–small classes for struggling students, experienced teachers, social workers, counselors, psychologists, and a full curriculum–rather than investing in more test preparation.
She distills above what educational researchers and journalists like Gerald Bracey and Richard Rothstein have been saying for the past decade or so.
One of the symptoms of the fundamentally flawed process utilized in setting common core standards described by Diane Ravitch (see my post below): High stakes tests that are even more flawed and inappropriate than usual.
Regarding Common Core standards, I must confess that I haven't read them in detail.
One thing that makes me suspicious right off the bat is that they have the backing of Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee, two people whose motives and track record in attempting to improve education in Chicago and Washington, DC are, shall we say, questionable?
Another thing is the rather bizarre and secretive way in which the standards were created.
Schools are community institutions. They should serve the needs of the community, and be answerable to the community. Determining how they do their job should be based, to a significant extent, on what the community believes "being well-educated" means. In otherwords, stakeholders in the community (parents, employers, and people in general) should have access to the process of setting educational standards. This is why a lot of experienced educators are very suspicious of nationally mandated standards.
Harold Howe II, a former US Education Commissioner under LBJ, once opined that any national educational standards established in the US should be "as vague as possible". There's a lot of wisdom in that statement, IMO.
