As U.S. test scores lag, study shows violence, poverty, teen pregnancy are high  by Emma Brown in the Washington Post

    U.S. student performance on international exams has fallen compared to other industrial nations in recent years, a fact policymakers and others often cite in arguing that U.S. public schools need rapid reform in order to maintain their global competitiveness.

But now two organizations are out with a new study that challenges that narrative by comparing the United States to eight other nations on a raft of socioeconomic measures.

The upshot of the report is that the single-minded focus on test scores has led policymakers to overlook other important trends that affect U.S. public education, including high levels of economic inequality and social stress. Schools can't be expected to solve these larger problems on their own, argue the study's authors, the Horace Mann League and the National Superintendents Roundtable.

 

Horace Mann Was Our Nation's Greatest Public School Advocate  by Bill Cirone  on the Santa Barbara Noozhawk

 is one of our nation's greatest early heroes, and I believe more people should know about him. He was a tireless advocate for public schools and is considered the father of American public education.

He once said, "Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark, all is deluge."

He was born in Massachusetts when our country was young, in 1796. Almost all he learned he picked up on his own at a town library that had been founded by Benjamin Franklin.

To view the film about Horace Mann, click here.

Our Addiction to Testing Is Ripping the Humanity out of Education  by Bronwyn Harris  on the AlterNet website

Teachers, colleges of education on firing line for student test scores. Wrong target. Wrong aim.  by Maureen Downey   

A review of an article by Stephanie Jones

    Picture this: a physician takes a position in a doctor's office within an economically struggling community because she believes that everyone should have access to high quality healthcare and a physician who can provide it. For this decision, she accepts a lower salary and more challenging working conditions.

Years go by and she has created a strong rapport with her patients, working with them to find medications for the lowest price possible and doing a lot of work out of her own pocket. It's work that is both heartbreaking and rewarding: she changes lives, makes them more livable, and probably even extends them.

 

 -- Tevye, Fiddler on the RoofThe final section of the tapestry woven by billionaires and bloviators to control the means of educating our young people has been completed. After a decade-old assault on k-12 schools, which make numbers more important than people, there now comes an incipient policy announced by the U.S. Department of Education to monitor the results of higher ed institutions. Using standardized measures -- including test score results of undergraduate and graduate students -- education colleges and universities will be rated. The education reformers can herald a new triumph. The axis of evil (tenured teachers, parents who rebel against over-testing, and college professors who sit in their ivory towers citing research that indicates the reforms are bogus) has been dismantled.