I Speak of Dreams

Educational Policy in the US: Punish Children's Diffenrences

From the Reading & Other Learning Differences Blog:

American Educational Policy: Punish Children’s Differences? | Reading & Other Learning Disabilities. Recently, Marion Brady offered thought-provoking insights on educational policy that deserve serious consideration, something that many Democrat and Republican politicians are loathe to do.

* Think there’s something wrong with a same-standards-and-tests-for-everybody approach to educating? Think a math whiz shouldn’t be held back just because he can’t write a good five-paragraph essay? Think a gifted writer shouldn’t be refused a diploma because she can’t solve a quadratic equation? …. If you think there’s something fundamentally, dangerously wrong with an educational reform effort that’s actually designed to standardize, designed to ignore human variation, designed to penalize individual differences, designed to produce a generation of clones …. [complain to] to your senators and representatives before they sell their vote to the publishing and testing corporations intent on getting an ever-bigger slice of that half-trillion dollars a year America spends on educating. (Brady, 2011)

But wait: Brady is wrong. Retention works. That’s why we do it over and over and over. If a kid fails, the only way to help him is to retain him in grade until he gets it right. Right? That’s what decades of research show.

Wrong.

(read the rest of the post for the research)

Why You Should Make a Plan « peer-reviewed by my neurons

Why You Should Make a Plan « peer-reviewed by my neurons.

Obviously the efficient allocation of cognitive resources can help almost anybody in their everyday lives, but I think this kind of finding has a lot of specific unacknowledged potential for education. Any given student is essentially tasked with distinct learning goals in at least five or six different subjects, and concern for all those goals can create a heavy cognitive burden. A simple solution is for teachers and schools to do a better job letting students know exactly how a class will progress and what skills they are expected to have at any point in time. This could be done with improved syllabi or efficient use of the skill/course management software that is rapidly improving and finding its way into classrooms. At the very least, students will be more likely to feel as though there is a “plan” for their learning, and that will help keep struggles in one subject from creating distractions that exacerbate struggles in another subject.