| Read a Post for Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment: Amiable Allies or Phony Friends? | | | | Reply to this Post | | | Switching seats on the Titanic | | Posted By: Patrick Greene on August 4, 2005 | | | In an educational environment in which whatever happens in Colleges of Education or Departments of Education is statistically irrelevant, and has been for many many decades, changing the way that specialists work, or begin working, with each other seems about as useful as rearranging deck chairs on a dead oceanliner.
We are talking about a higher education system that has had almost zero impact on improving the education of public school children since the 1893 Council of Ten decisions. Education research only serves to provide references for other educational researchers to use to get promotion and tenure in institutions that will produce teachers with new and better ideas about education. These new teachers will then go into schools in which they will be told to not to use this knowledge, but to go back to the lecture/hand-out, spray and pray, methods of inculcating irrelevancey, of the long and horrible past.
High stakes testing systems are designed, not to assess anything meaningful, but to provide largesse to political contributors. As an example, I offer McGraw-Hill corp., publisher of the FCAT, Florida's high stakes test. McGraw-Hill has been a large contributor to all the Bush campaigns, and is now busily ruining Florida's public education system. In the meantime, Florida's children are forced to reside in the below ground levels of Bloom's taxonomy where the sun doesn't shine, where mind numbing activites prevail, and where boredom reigns supreme. Any child with any umph in his/her character rebels, and gets sent to alternative learning schools, or drops out and becomes a criminal.
Before worrying about the inner-relatedness of DOE or Higher Ed Professors, we should probably address the need to completely revamp the entire K-12 curriculum/instruction/assessment system. Perhaps then we could produce graduates who don't think it's OK to invade another country without reason. Perhaps we could even produce graduates who accept scientific reality, like the theory of evolution.
Patrick Greene, PhD
Florida Gulf Coast University
College of Education
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