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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elroy who wrote (154773)	1/22/2011 7:57:45 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543147

>>A school which claims to deliver a graduating class of students who value being a human being, appreciate diversity, and are able to express themselves (presumably verbally), yet unable to do math well or write English properly, hasn't done a very good job.<< I don't disagree. Kids really do have to learn the basics. Yet test scores alone can't be the only metric for success. Maybe one metric, but not the only one. I think our failure to teach our children how to think is a major impediment to the effective functioning of our Democratic Republic. But teaching reading and math, and teaching thinking, go very, very well together. In the few cases during my school career that I was fortunate enough to encounter teachers who could cover the subject matter while also requiring their students to think critically did better at both.

To: Elroy who wrote (154773)	1/22/2011 8:48:29 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543147

Ah, well, Elroy, if you wish to think of it as an either/or between test scores and learning to think, et al, fine. I don't. If you reread my note, you'll see what bothers me is the reduction of education to test scores. You need both. But, increasingly, in the US, for a variety of reasons, k-12 education gets evaluated vis a vis test scores, funding gets tied to it, salaries get tied to it, and so on. In my part of the US, New Jersey, it gets harder to justify money on the arts, music, etc., because the dollars head to whatever tests easily.