An Excellent Letter: Hello Dear Policymakers!

The following letter from Austin mom and public school librarian Sara Stevenson highlights the opportunity-narrowing/dream-crushing/dropout-producing insanity of of the one-way-for-all standards and accountability movement.

Monday, March 23, 2009

AUSTIN — My daughter just completed her first semester at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

She took 15 hours, made straight A’s and the dean’s list.

What reads as a success story would have had a very different outcome if my daughter and son had traded places.

My daughter graduated in 2008. My son will graduate in 2011, the first year the mandated “4-by-4” plan goes into effect. It requires four years of math and science to earn a recommended diploma.

If my daughter were in his graduating class, she would have been a high school dropout instead of on the dean’s list.

Read the rest of Sara's letter here.

Policymakers, how is it that you impose destructive policies like high-stakes testing and idiotic "4-by-4" plans, then hypocritically turn around and castigate our public schools for the dropout rates?

It is you, our representatives in government, who are supposed to be held accountable by we the people. How clever and convenient, turning democracy and representative government upside down under the guise of "accountability".

BTW, here is some more commentary from yours truly on the "liberty and higher math for all" issue from a previous post.

Challenging the Assumptions Upon Which Decades of Uninspired "Ed Reform" Are Based

Longtime educator/administrator/author/thinker Marion Brady offers a challenge to the archaic standards and accountability movement that dominates education policymaking. Check out his refreshing and mind opening ideas at his website. And he has just offered online what he sees as a rough draft of an alternative general education curriculum based on systems theory rather than fragmented academic subjects. Check it out, it's free! His vision and ideas are at the very least well worth thinking about. Could it be we've been boxed up in such narrow thinking that we haven't realized powerful alternatives exist?


Just a couple of intriguing statements from Marion:

"Covering the content" – Forget this too. It hasn’t been possible since the
Enlightenment, and the assumption that it should be done (or at least attempted)
is naive and destructive. It’s best to see it for what it is–dynamic, constantly
changing, never equally appropriate for all students, and with the possible
exception of a tiny fraction of it, not worth storing in memory. Choose from it
what helps explain and elaborate the sense-making process. That process is the
main content.

Pacing – The whole idea of a "pacing guide" is ridiculous, a futile attempt
to standardize the unstandardizable. If you’re trying to help learners
understand something really important, there’s no point in moving on to a second
idea until they understand the first, even if that takes days, weeks, months. IS
tries to lay out the whole of the "liberal education" ball of wax, so don’t rush
it. Take as long as it takes.

Just keep an open mind, ponder the possibilities of what education could be, and enjoy a breath of fresh air...

Thank you Marion.