The Economist Equates Teacher Unions with the Republican Fringe

Here is the so-absurd-it-makes-you-laugh quote:

Indeed, the extremism of his party is Mr Romney’s greatest handicap. The Democrats have their implacable fringe too: look at the teachers’ unions. 

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Educational Jargon: AAARGH

Thanks to the Guardian's Secret Teacher.  His/her skewering of the language that has infected education is so perfect, I can only link to it in homage.  Please read this; it will even make you laugh.

One teaser quote:

"In a conversation last term with my head of faculty I expressed concern that despite the talk of being world-class, the AfL, the Kagan Structured seating plans, the VAK (Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic) audits and learner voice surveys I thought the teaching and learning didn't compare favourably with schools abroad or even down the road. He replied: "We've de-emphasised our focus away from such comparisons and we have a clear vision for success going forward. With strategically enhanced provision we can ensure all learners, through a partnership with facilitators and parents, are empowered and equipped with the right toolkit to be creative in the 21st century."

Well, that clears that up then."

Marriage Equality

I am not big on the god part, but I am big on the message.

Are We Still Evolving

"The biggest part of our environment is culture."
BBC Horizon, Are we still evolving?
(context = the usual pressures to adapt/evolve for a species are environmental, whereas we create tools etc. to adapt)

Jobs on computers in schools

From the New York Times, 5 November 2011. I guess it does take more than a computer for learning to take place.

Even Mr. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, turned skeptical about technology’s ability to improve education. In a new biography of Mr. Jobs, the book’s author, Walter Isaacson, describes a conversation earlier this year between the ailing Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, in which the two men “agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools — far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law.”

The comments echo similar ones Mr. Jobs made in 1996, between his two stints at Apple. In an interview with Wired magazine, Mr. Jobs said that “what’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology,” even though he had himself “spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet.”

The Blame Game

Add Steven Brill's Class Warfare to the propaganda machine laying ALL the blame for the problems in American education at the feet of teacher unions. [Note that I emphasize the word ALL because the problems in schools are deep enough that every stakeholder has part to play in fixing them.]

Thank you to Richard Rothstein's piece in Slate picking apart Brill's newest addition to the smear campaign against public school teachers.