The Education Wonks
Thanks for the link. I wanted to contribute, but life homeschooling six children is a carnival in itself some days and I missed it.
Thanks
Thanks EdWonk for sharing this moment with the Carnival. For as much as I can't wait to get back to the classroom and my education blogging, I don't want this time with Tate to end.
Wow! Today I had some free chocolate in the Faculty Room (Easter leftovers), free coffee from the lunch ladies and two links from the 'Wonks! I'm off to get some Lottery tickets, now (you'll get half of anything I win).
Your usual excellent job!
Excellent carnival!
Thanks for including my post.
And sorry for the stupid question, but what's a trackback and how do I do it?
It's a good question.
A "trackback" is a method of letting a blogger know that you've linked his or her site. What it does is show your link on the site that has received the trackback.
Trackback is a feature used by Movable Type, (who developed the concept)Word Press, and Haloscan.
Blogger's commmenting system does not at this time offer trackbacks.
I do apologise for bringing negativity to the show rather than the rain of smiles and slapped backs seen above.
This is actually a rather disappointing carnival, surprisingly so (given how much of interest is written weekly about education in the blogosphere).
The generally conservative (in several senses of the word, not merely political) tone of the posts featured is surprising and disappointing - not least because of its marked *anti-intellectualism*. 'Going to the Mat' isn't a policy prescription, it's an irritated gesture of reaction with no insight into modern schooling; the 'Harvard 8' post has nothing whatsoever to do with education, and simply trades on idiotic stereotypes (of the political left) to make jokes that are neither funny nor insightful; the 'privatize it all!' post, written by a high-schooler, is nothing but a retread of pure corporate rhetoric lacking even a shred of analytical heft or seriousness. It's business model actually amounts to nothing more than the Underpants Gnomes' scheme:
1. Privatize the schools.
2. ???
3 Profit!
(The kid actually suggests 'privatizing' and then subsidizing the education of every single school by giving money directly to students. And *this* you call worthy writing on education?)
Meanwhile the 'flat classroom' post is merely a series of bullet points that refer to...nothing. (Worse, it trades on Friedman's asinine, reductive 'flat world' metaphor, but let's glide over that for the moment.) The Wiki is practically empty, and what's in there is a litany of buzzwords and hand-waving. For instance, the first link on the Wiki goes to a page in which a revolutionary teaching methodology is proposed: give the students responsibility for every aspect of a research project without oversight, hoping they can pick up the technical savvy they need on the side in order to make a presentation to the class...and then...VIDEOTAPE IT! This isn't an idea, it's a *mood*:
The presentation would be recorded and digitized, along with all of the ancillary materials, and it will be archived in the school library for later reference and for the creation of derivative works by future students. In addition, any other class in the school can request that the student deliver the presentation for their students. The presenter becomes an expert, and in most cases, that expertise grows.
('The presenter becomes an expert'?? See above re: Underpants Gnomes.)
The 'bribery' post actually touches kind of an interesting topic, but does so only tangentially - what works to build interest? How do we structure students' desires so that self-directed learning is a natural action? Tests are fairly widely understood to be dead spots in the educational process for the most part - why are we surprised that kids find them stupid? The comments don't take up the discussion either. No matter.
Most worrisome is the 'Rhymes with Right' post, which begins from a jaw-dropping, stupid assumption (the many spelling and grammatical errors are in the original):
Imagine this situation. Two black children, a brother and a sister, enrol at a school which is predominatly white. they are subject to racial slurs and other harrassment. They are threatened and assaulted. In one instance, after the girl is threatened, her white nemesis is forced to apologize -- only to return to school three days later with a weapon, threatening to kill the girl.
What do you think would happen?
We know the answer. There would be marches, protests, outaged community members appearing at emergency meetings to demand that action be taken. State and federal officials would intervene. There would certainly be changes inthe school and district administration, designed to change the "festering culture of racism" that had been permitted to arise in the school.
Would that we all got to live in the fantasy world of social justice inhabited by this poster. Amid the points-scoring and dull-witted racism of the post, the simple point is lost that the opening hypothetical is, in fact, a situation that arises every day, that has arisen every day for a long, long time, and that is *not* in fact dealt with as Greg (the poster) would have you believe. (Ask any kid who went through school being called 'faggot' or 'nigger' or 'white trash' or 'spic'. Hell, start at my bucolic rural almost-all-white all-Christian high school.) It might be enjoyable for him to indulge in a fantasy of persecution and systemic hatred toward whites, but we can condemn the actions of this district without resorting to such risible reactionary tripe. The story and the issues it raises definitely have a place in a serious discussion of race and public schools, and in a Carnival such as this; the bilious, disingenuous hackwork of Rhymes With Right does *not*.
There is material of interest in this Carnival - the HUNBlog post on No Child Left Behind is compelling and substantive, for instance, and a number of the personal accounts are moving and necessary - but considerably more critical work is being done through the educational blogosphere than is featured in this post. I suspect that the maintainer's political/cultural predilections play into that, but equally important, the kind of thinking on display in this roundup is symptomatic of a larger tendency to think unseriously about education - as cognitive work, social work, political work. By projecting our politics and fantasies of childhood onto children we do their unique cultural situation(s) a great disservice; by treating the classroom as voodoo, bandying about silly 'flat earth' metaphors and Econ 101 arguments about privatization instead of paying attention to the very serious work that constitutes today's best thinking on learning and teaching, we doom our children to the standard of education we've 'enjoyed' all our lives.
Please, please, please, next week do better! I'm sure you can.
For more substantive dialogue on the ills of NCLB that weren't included in this carnival, perhaps check out:
Routing Racism at Borderland, or
Last Night at Creek Running North.
Hi Wax Banks.
Many Thanks for taking the time to critique this week's Carnival.
You've definitely given us some things to mull over.
As for the political "tilt" of any particular midway, that's entirely dependent upon the submissions that we receive. Sometimes more are from the political left, sometimes more from the political right.
We attempt to present posts submitted by the writers in a non-partisan fashion.
The objective of the Carnival isn't the advancement of any particular political (or educational) agenda, but the Free Exchange of Thoughts and Ideas among contributors, readers, and the publishers of other sites.
Once again, thank you for your thoughts.
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