Lloyd's Anything Blog

Originally posted on Diane Ravitch's blog: John Ogozokak, a high school teacher in upstate New York, ponders here which is the more meaningful task: to clean a septic tank or to grade a standardized test: About a half dozen years ago the septic tank lurking beside our old farmhouse went kerflooey. I dug out the top of the rusty thing…

Originally posted on Diane Ravitch's blog: Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University offers common-sense ideas about closing the achievement gap. She says that testing is less important than teaching. No surprise there. She reviews an OECD study about teachers. What it shows is that teachers in the U.S. work longer hours under more difficult conditions than teachers in many other nations.…

Originally posted on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé: In a recent online discussion, it was argued by one voice that the public schools have failed, because they don’t teach independent thinking. However, I disagreed. Evidence that the public schools work well—just not the way the one percent wants—comes from several surveys where the opinions of the top one percent…

Originally posted on Diane Ravitch's blog: On June 7, Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post wrote a blockbuster article about how Bill Gates pulled off the Common Core coup, which the headline calls “the swift Common Core revolution.” In a short period of time, less time than it takes a state to write standards in one subject, the U.S. suddenly…