As the Obama administration explores new ways to support a national culture of learning – as opposed to our current national culture of testing – it faces a central dilemma: How to satisfy all of our country’s education stakeholders at once.
What I appreciate about Chester Finn is that he always has some good points to make. But Finn makes one good point and several questionable and fallacious ones in his Washington Post Op-Ed, “Slow the Preschool Bandwagon” (May 15, 2009). The good point is that it would help at-risk children and their families to have intensive support from birth to age five. When this was done in North Carolina’s Abecedarian Project, I.Q. scores rose, special education placement rates fell from 48 percent to 25 percent, and grade retention declined from 55 percent to 31 percent.
The Alliance for Childhood’s new report, Crisis in the Kindergarten, offers a careful account of what's actually happening in early childhood classrooms across the country.
The news is frightening.
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."
Thomas Jefferson, 1820
Some people wake up with great ideas. But I'm a night person. Right before I fall asleep I think I've finally found just the right way to say what it is I'm thinking. Often when I wake up I've either forgotten it or it seems banal.
But here are two ideas that keep reoccurring, and it is morning now so I'm going to try to capture them.
Great Idea 1: