The way sex porn works is to convincingly create simulations that have all the mechanical nuances of the real act with the soul missing. That is how porn workers can finish their shift and then go pick up the kids and take their wives to dinner.
Same principles apply with edu-porn. It, too, is market inspired and involves convincing simulations, just like the ones offered in the Freakanomics documentary that got shoved my way yesterday in an email. And edu-porn, too, is looking for the most bang for the buck (never mind the pun, which, by the way, originated with the defense industry).
According to Steven Levitt, describing the plot line for the edu-porn segment of their new documentary, the "goal was to figure out can we cheaply and quickly move the needle at a school--can we get kids to achieve more as quickly as possible and spend very little money."
This, my friend, is edu-porn reform in a nutshell, so to speak.
Have a look at this clip, but I warn you it is XXX rated for sleazy exploitation of poor children, simulated alcohol consumption by minors, gambling promotion, and further destruction of the environmental conscience of minors (winners of the lottery get to ride in a stretch Hummer). Yeah, that's right, baby.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Why Time Magazine Deserves the Same Fate As Newsweek
Recently the scandalously vapid and opinionated "news" magazine, Newsweek, sold for one dollar to the highest bidder, Sidney Harmon. Not long before it went broke, it published one final salvo of public school bashing in an issue that was universally panned as one-sided, unfair, and inaccurate.
Now it looks as though Time is following the same pattern, choosing to pick up where Newsweek's failure left off by choosing to print as news the perspectives of the ed industry and the vulture philanthropists. The latest example is last week's issue on education, which provided Morning Joe and his wifey-styled sidekick, Meek Mika, all the research they needed to reinforce the neoliberal party line to the hundreds who watch them every day.
My favorite example of Time's editorial position gone wild is in this question from its survey of public views on teachers and ed issues:
Now it looks as though Time is following the same pattern, choosing to pick up where Newsweek's failure left off by choosing to print as news the perspectives of the ed industry and the vulture philanthropists. The latest example is last week's issue on education, which provided Morning Joe and his wifey-styled sidekick, Meek Mika, all the research they needed to reinforce the neoliberal party line to the hundreds who watch them every day.
My favorite example of Time's editorial position gone wild is in this question from its survey of public views on teachers and ed issues:
New SATs Show Education Suicide Is Working
The new SATs are out with some predictable outcomes for a decade dedicated to narrowing the curriculum and teaching to tests and draining any care and joy from the classrooms, yet the "bold reformers" like charterite Jeanne Allen are calling for more of the same bullshit: "we must redouble our efforts to reform an education system that continues to spend more only to receive less in return."
A bit of different take from Fairtest yesterday (my bolds):
Below is one of the charts from a beautiful analysis done by the NYTimes with last year' SAT scores. It looks at the relationship of family income and scores, and what do you know--the positive correlation "for each test average/income range chart is about 0.95." That's as close to a direct one to one as you are likely to find anywhere. Remember: the SAT is objective and represents the essence of American meritocracy.
Source: College Board
A bit of different take from Fairtest yesterday (my bolds):
SAT college admissions scores released today show that “Test-and-punish school ‘reform’ policies are leaving more children further behind, even when measured by other standardized exams,” according to Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director of FairTest, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing. Schaeffer noted, “The data contradict the claim that more high-takes testing improves educational quality and equity.”
A chart prepared by FairTest shows overall SAT averages declined since the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) federal testing mandates went into effect. At the same time, gaps between Whites and Asians, on the one hand, and historically disadvantaged minority groups, particularly African-Americans and Hispanics, grew larger. ACT scores, made public last month, demonstrated comparable patterns. Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) also indicate that educational progress has slowed in the NCLB era. Under NCLB, every public school student must be tested annually in grades three through eight and at least once in high school in both reading and math.
“Proponents of NCLB and similar state-level testing programs promised that overall achievement would improve while score gaps would narrow,” Schaeffer continued. “Precisely the opposite has taken place. Policymakers need to embrace very different policies if they are committed to real education reform.”
Schaeffer added, “Fortunately, more and more colleges have recognized the folly of fixating on the narrow, often biased, information provided by standardized tests and moved toward test-optional admissions.” According to a free web database maintained by FairTest (http:www.fairtest.org/university/optional), more than 840 accredited, bachelor-degree granting institutions will make admissions decisions about all or many applicants without regard to SAT or ACT scores.
2010 COLLEGE BOUND SENIORS AVERAGE SAT SCORES
with score changes from 2006*| READING | MATH | WRITING | TOTAL | |
| ALL TEST-TAKERS | 501 (- 2) | 516 (- 2) | 492 (- 5) | 1509 (- 9) |
| GENDER | ||||
| Female | 498(-4) | 500(-2) | 498(-4) | 1498(-10) |
| Male | 503(-2) | 534(-2) | 486(-5) | 1523(-9) |
| ETHNICITY | ||||
| Asian, Asian Amer. or Pac. Islander | 519 (+9) | 591 (+13) | 526 (+14) | 1623 (+36) |
| White | 528 (+1) | 536 ( 0) | 516 ( - 3) | 1580 (- 2) |
| African American or Black | 429 (- 5) | 428 (- 1) | 420 (- 8) | 1277 (- 14) |
| Amer. Indian or Alaskan Native | 485 (- 2) | 492 (- 2) | 467 (- 7) | 1444 (- 11) |
| Mexican or Mexican American | 454 ( 0) | 467 ( + 2) | 448 (- 4) | 1369 (- 2) |
| Puerto Rican | 454 (- 5) | 452 (- 4) | 443 (- 5) | 1349 (- 14) |
| Other Hispanic or Latino | 454 (- 4) | 462 (- 1) | 447 ( - 3) | 1363 (- 8) |
* The “No Child Left Behind” requirement to test every child annually in grades three through eight and at least once in high school went into effect in the 2005-2006 academic year. High school graduates in the class of 2006 were the first to take the SAT “Writing” Test.
calculated by FairTest from: College Board, College-Bound Seniors 2010: Total Group Profile Report and College-Bound Seniors 2006: Total Group Profile Report
Below is one of the charts from a beautiful analysis done by the NYTimes with last year' SAT scores. It looks at the relationship of family income and scores, and what do you know--the positive correlation "for each test average/income range chart is about 0.95." That's as close to a direct one to one as you are likely to find anywhere. Remember: the SAT is objective and represents the essence of American meritocracy.
Here are all three test sections next to each other (zoomed in on the vertical axis, so you can see the variation among income groups a little more clearly):
Source: College Board A few observations:
- There’s a very strong positive correlation between income and test scores. (For the math geeks out there, the R2 for each test average/income range chart is about 0.95.)
- On every test section, moving up an income category was associated with an average score boost of over 12 points.
- Moving from the second-highest income group and the highest income group seemed to show the biggest score boost. However, keep in mind the top income category is uncapped, so it includes a much broader spectrum of families by wealth.
Monday, September 13, 2010
David Sirota on the Great Education Myth
Syndicated but copied here from the Seattle Times:
The Neoliberal Bait and Switch--The Great Education Myth
Without reforming the trade, tax and regulatory policies that reward high-tech outsourcing and incentivize careers in finance, writes columnist David Sirota, our schools can never be an engine of value-generating information-age jobs.
Syndicated columnist
In simplistic, Lexus-and-Olive-Tree terms, the neoliberal economic argument goes like this: Tariff-free trade policies are great because they increase commerce, and we can mitigate those policies' negative effects on the blue-collar job market by upgrading our education system to cultivate more science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) specialists for the white-collar sector.
Known as the bipartisan Washington Consensus, this deceptive theory projects the illusion of logic. After all, if the domestic economy's future is in STEM-driven innovation, then it stands to reason that trade policies shedding "low-tech" work and education policies promoting high-tech skills could guarantee success.
Of course, 30 years into the neoliberal experiment, the Great Recession is exposing the flaws of the Washington Consensus. But rather than admit any mistakes, neoliberals now defend themselves with yet more bait-and-switch sophistry — this time in the form of the Great Education Myth.
No doubt, you've heard this fairy tale from prominent politicians and business leaders who incessantly insist that our economic troubles do not emanate from neoliberals' corporate-coddling trade, tax and deregulatory policies, but instead from an education system that is supposedly no longer graduating enough STEM experts. Indeed, this was the message of this week's New York Times story about corporate leaders saying America isn't producing "enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms."
As usual, it sounds vaguely logical. Except, the lore relies on the assumptions that 1) American schools aren't generating enough STEM supply to meet employer demand, 2) the education system — not neoliberalism — is driving this alleged STEM drought and 3) if America came up with more of such specialists, they would find jobs.
To know these suppositions are preposterous is to consider a recent study by Rutgers and Georgetown University that found colleges "in the United States actually graduate many more STEM students than are hired each year."
That debunks the supply-and-demand canard. But can we still blame the jobs crisis on schools failing to deliver more STEM graduates?
Nope.
As researchers discovered, many students are pursuing finance instead of STEM careers because Wall Street jobs "are higher paying" and offer "employment stability" and "less susceptib(ility) to offshoring."
This is the truth that the Great Education Myth aims to obscure. It's not that schools are ill-equipped to train STEM specialists. It's that the additional students who might boost our STEM work force are choosing to avoid STEM majors because they see an economy that is more hospitable to careers in Wall Street casinos rather than in high-tech innovation — a financialized economy based less on creating tangible assets than on encouraging worthless speculation.
This doesn't mean that our education system is perfect. But it does mean that without reforming the trade, tax and regulatory policies that reward high-tech outsourcing and incentivize careers in finance, our schools can never be an engine of value-generating information-age jobs.
Why, then, do neoliberals nonetheless press the Great Education Myth? Because it deliberately distracts from a situation that enriches neoliberals and the powerful interests they rely on.
Tariff-free trade pacts inflate the profits of transnational businesses by helping them troll the globe for cheap exploitable labor. Loopholes exempting foreign earnings from taxes encourage companies to move jobs overseas. And both deregulation and bailouts disproportionately balloon financial-industry revenues.
The neoliberal corporate class makes big money off this status quo and neoliberal lawmakers get their cut via campaign contributions. The last thing either wants is an honest debate about neoliberalism's downsides. And so they play to our lust for silver-bullet solutions, endlessly telling us that everything is the schools' fault.
As mythology goes, it's certainly compelling. If only the facts didn't get in the way.
David Sirota is the author of "Hostile Takeover" and "The Uprising." He blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com
Elections? Get Real and Do Something
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are not direct threats to anything or anyone, but threats they do represent, by making fascism the liberal, acceptable alternative to insanity.
As Hedges and Nader argue, people with real hope are not begging Obama to do something but, rather, they are acting and planning actions that undermine the oppressive system, from education to the market to energy to the work place. The elections? The same quality of entertainment as professional wrestling.
Forty years ago a handful of oversexed, privileged white boys and girls like Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dorn were bombing banks and government offices as attention-getting acts they called revolutionary. Today they host teas for corporate-owned politicians.
Present and future efforts to undermine the military industrial educational complex, methinks, will not be so visible, violent, or personality driven as in the silly days of the Weather Underground. But they will be much more effective in bleeding out and gutting the corporations that think they can turn us all into slaves.
A clip (my bolds):
As Hedges and Nader argue, people with real hope are not begging Obama to do something but, rather, they are acting and planning actions that undermine the oppressive system, from education to the market to energy to the work place. The elections? The same quality of entertainment as professional wrestling.
Forty years ago a handful of oversexed, privileged white boys and girls like Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dorn were bombing banks and government offices as attention-getting acts they called revolutionary. Today they host teas for corporate-owned politicians.
Present and future efforts to undermine the military industrial educational complex, methinks, will not be so visible, violent, or personality driven as in the silly days of the Weather Underground. But they will be much more effective in bleeding out and gutting the corporations that think they can turn us all into slaves.
A clip (my bolds):
Investing emotional and intellectual energy in electoral politics is a waste of time. Resistance means a radical break with the formal structures of American society. We must cut as many ties with consumer society and corporations as possible. We must build a new political and economic consciousness centered on the tangible issues of sustainable agriculture, self-sufficiency and radical environmental reform. The democratic system, and the liberal institutions that once made piecemeal reform possible, is dead. It exists only in name. It is no longer a viable mechanism for change. And the longer we play our scripted and absurd role in this charade the worse it will get. Do not pity Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. They will get what they deserve. They sold the citizens out for cash and power. They lied. They manipulated and deceived the public, from the bailouts to the abandonment of universal health care, to serve corporate interests. They refused to halt the wanton corporate destruction of the ecosystem on which all life depends. They betrayed the most basic ideals of democracy. And they, as much as the Republicans, are the problem.“It is like being in a pit,” Ralph Nader told me when we spoke on Saturday. “If you are four feet in the pit you have a chance to grab the top and hoist yourself up. If you are 30 feet in the pit you have to start on a different scale.”
All resistance will take place outside the arena of electoral politics. The more we expand community credit unions, community health clinics and food cooperatives and build alternative energy systems, the more empowered we will become.
“To the extent that these organizations expand and get into communities where they do not exist, we will weaken the multinational goliath, from the banks to the agribusinesses to the HMO giants and hospital chains,” Nader said.
The failure of liberals to defend the interests of working men and women as our manufacturing sector was dismantled, labor unions were destroyed and social services were slashed has proved to be a disastrous and fatal misjudgment. Liberals, who betrayed the working class, have no credibility. . . .
Blame students or blame poverty? Response to T Friedman (corrected)
Blame students or blame poverty?
Sent to The New York Times, Sept 13, 2010
Thomas Friedman ("We’re No. 1(1)!,"9/11) asserts that American education has declined, our test scores are low, and that we must therefore demand more of our students.
This is all wrong. American students from well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high-poverty schools score below the international average. Our scores look low because the US has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (25%, compared to Denmark's 3%). American education has been successful; the problem is poverty.
The solution is not to blame students for being lazy (our elders said this about us). The solution is to protect children from the damaging effects of poverty: better nutrition (Susan Ohanian suggests the motto "No Child Left Unfed"), excellent health care for all children, and universal access to reading material.
Stephen Krashen
Friedman article at:
http://tinyurl.com/3ajk77c
Sent to The New York Times, Sept 13, 2010
Thomas Friedman ("We’re No. 1(1)!,"9/11) asserts that American education has declined, our test scores are low, and that we must therefore demand more of our students.
This is all wrong. American students from well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high-poverty schools score below the international average. Our scores look low because the US has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (25%, compared to Denmark's 3%). American education has been successful; the problem is poverty.
The solution is not to blame students for being lazy (our elders said this about us). The solution is to protect children from the damaging effects of poverty: better nutrition (Susan Ohanian suggests the motto "No Child Left Unfed"), excellent health care for all children, and universal access to reading material.
Stephen Krashen
Friedman article at:
http://tinyurl.com/3ajk77c
Blame students or blame poverty? Response to Thomas Friedman
Blame students or blame poverty?
Sent to Time Magazine, Sept 13, 2010
Thomas Friedman ("We’re No. 1(1)!,"9/11) asserts that American education has declined, our test scores are low, and that we must therefore demand more of our students.
This is all wrong. American students from well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high-poverty schools score below the international average. Our scores look low because the US has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (25%, compared to Denmark's 3%). American education has been successful; the problem is poverty.
The solution is not to blame students for being lazy (our elders said this about us). The solution is to protect children from the damaging effects of poverty: better nutrition (Susan Ohanian suggests the motto "No Child Left Unfed"), excellent health care for all children, and universal access to reading material.
Stephen Krashen
Friedman article at:
http://tinyurl.com/3ajk77c
Sent to Time Magazine, Sept 13, 2010
Thomas Friedman ("We’re No. 1(1)!,"9/11) asserts that American education has declined, our test scores are low, and that we must therefore demand more of our students.
This is all wrong. American students from well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high-poverty schools score below the international average. Our scores look low because the US has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (25%, compared to Denmark's 3%). American education has been successful; the problem is poverty.
The solution is not to blame students for being lazy (our elders said this about us). The solution is to protect children from the damaging effects of poverty: better nutrition (Susan Ohanian suggests the motto "No Child Left Unfed"), excellent health care for all children, and universal access to reading material.
Stephen Krashen
Friedman article at:
http://tinyurl.com/3ajk77c
Sunday, September 12, 2010
The Koch Brothers' Brand of "Anarcho-Tolalitarianism"
A must read from The Nation:
The rest here.Eric Alterman | September 9, 2010Jane Mayer's New Yorker profile of Charles and David Koch reveals a decades-long investment of many hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve a single goal. The billionaire oilmen sought to "bring about social change" to advance what Charles Koch calls their "radical philosophy." To make this happen, they've adopted a "vertically and horizontally integrated" strategy "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action."
How radical? When, in 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket—a race he also funded—his platform called for the abolition of Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, all personal and corporate income taxes and much else. A worried William F. Buckley Jr. called it "Anarcho-Totalitarianism."
What the Kochs were doing, as Mayer astutely notes, is implementing the strategy originally laid out by Lewis Powell's now infamous 1971 memo to the director of the US Chamber of Commerce, by which the political culture of the United States would be transformed on behalf of individuals and corporations of great wealth. The primary obstacle Powell identified was not the remnants of the late-'60s antiwar and civil rights movements, which were both in the process of disintegration. Rather, they sought to undermine the "respectable elements of society" and replace them with people like themselves. . . .
The Fake Science Behind Single-Sex Schools for the Poor
The natural repulsion of children to the repressive reality of today's urban penal pedagogy systems is often registered first by boys, who are less likely than girls to have been socialized to sit quietly, listen, remain passive, and to parrot back what the teacher says. And since this kind of resistant reaction by boys to school as chain gang could not be read by the perpetrators as an indication that there may be something essentially abusive with teaching children to act like robots, another explanation for the resistance and bad test scores of boys had to be found.
The explanation that was hit upon and is now being exploited as a niche corporate charter market based on another age-old form of oppression against girls and women and a form of miseducation for boys on how differently they learn from girls. And so the "boy crisis" is born, complete with gender segregation rationales based on pseudo-science and the basest of chauvinistic folkways.
A "boy crisis" empire has grown up, in fact, led by Dr. Leonard Sax (rhymes with quacks) who has ground out four books out on the subject since 2005. Dr. Sax is not only keen to design learning environments where boys can be active, loud, and strong while still learning like parrots, but he is equally keen to re-write Title IX to reflect the quackery that he cites as the science of gender differences.
And in this era of white men wanting their country back--way back--it should come as no surprise that this new form of segregation on top of the other segregation has found fertile ground in the first state to secede from the Union to protect slavery, South Carolina. From the piece last month in WaPo by Karen Houppert: (my bolds)
Finally, there is today a book review in WaPo of what appears to be an excellent book by Cordelia Fine. An excerpt of the review:
The explanation that was hit upon and is now being exploited as a niche corporate charter market based on another age-old form of oppression against girls and women and a form of miseducation for boys on how differently they learn from girls. And so the "boy crisis" is born, complete with gender segregation rationales based on pseudo-science and the basest of chauvinistic folkways.
A "boy crisis" empire has grown up, in fact, led by Dr. Leonard Sax (rhymes with quacks) who has ground out four books out on the subject since 2005. Dr. Sax is not only keen to design learning environments where boys can be active, loud, and strong while still learning like parrots, but he is equally keen to re-write Title IX to reflect the quackery that he cites as the science of gender differences.
And in this era of white men wanting their country back--way back--it should come as no surprise that this new form of segregation on top of the other segregation has found fertile ground in the first state to secede from the Union to protect slavery, South Carolina. From the piece last month in WaPo by Karen Houppert: (my bolds)
South Carolina leads the way on single-sex education. Thousands of children throughout the state are enrolled in 160 participating public schools, and another 160 schools are weighing the option for the fall.What irony to find educators leading the charge to undo the hard fought understanding that took generations to achieve. Over 200 years after Mary Wollstonecraft had this to say the "gift of gab and glitter":
South Carolina teachers are conducting the workshops for 400 fellow educators from around the country. The participants have their choice of sessions, including "Smart, Sassy, and Stylish: Gender-specific procedures and strategies that can be used in the all girls elementary curriculum," "Mean Girls: Building Community In An All Girls Classroom," "Using the Glorious Gift of Gab and Glitter: How to use what comes naturally to girls to enhance classroom instruction," "Throw it, catch it, make it move: Teaching middle school boys through movement," and "Boys and Literacy."
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.But do not despair--the voice of reason is strong, and this version of stupidity and miseducation does not go unchallenged. Again, from Houppert's article:
. . . .In his 2005 book, "Why Gender Matters," Sax cites a 1999 Virginia Tech study, where researchers found that boys' brains were developmentally years behind girls' when it came to qualities such as fine motor skills. That put the boys at an immediate disadvantage in school, where many are frustrated by trying to read and write before they're ready, Sax says. As a result, he says, many boys often check out mentally and underperform.
"At what age do we find the single-sex format has the greatest capacity to not only boost educational achievement but to change the academic trajectory?" he asks rhetorically. "The earlier, the better."
But Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School, doesn't accept the arguments for single-gender schools. "I'm a neuroscientist, and this claim that boys and girls learn differently because their brains are different is just not supported by real scientific data," she says.
Eliot, the author of "Pink Brain, Blue Brain," says she assumed she'd find a slew of powerful differences between girls' and boys' brains but grew frustrated by the research. "If you put all the research together, you are very underwhelmed by the difference," she says. "Boys do have bigger brains than girls, but they also have bigger bodies -- and hearts and lungs -- so I can't get too excited about that. This whole Mars versus Venus idea that our minds are from different planets is really inaccurate."
Eliot says girls reach puberty two years earlier than boys, but separating what is biologically driven from what is culturally imposed can be tricky, especially considering that the messages girls and boys get start at birth.
In her book, Eliot describes a child development study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in 2000 where mothers put their 11-month-old infants on a platform and adjusted the incline of a ramp to a level they thought their babies could crawl safely down. Mothers of girls consistently put the ramp at a less steep grade than mothers of boys; yet, when scientists tested the babies' actual abilities to take a steep incline, the infants were equal.
This experiment shows that modern parents -- and teachers -- like to think they are gender-neutral, but maybe they're not, Eliot says. Boys may be "risk-takers" because parents encourage it; girls may be more cautious because parents are nervous on their behalf.
By the time children are 2, Eliot notes, they already have a profound understanding of gender and want to belong to their groups. The messages they get in the wider world of grandparents, preschools and books reinforce the rules: Girls wear pink, play house and read books in which Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are praised for their gentle kindness and beauty, occasionally sobbing at cruel injustice; boys wear blue, play with blocks, and read books in which Robin Hood and O'Malley the alley cat are fierce, combative, brave and never cry.
There are some genetic and hormonal differences between boys and girls, Eliot says, explaining that there are compelling examples, such as research showing how boys and girls gravitate toward different toys.
"But our culture exacerbates small differences by putting a wedge in and forcing boys and girls further apart. ... If we teach them together, we stand a far better chance of equaling things out.". . . .
. . . .Two of her [Fine's] favorite targets are John Gray, author of the "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" books, and Louann Brizendine, author of "The Female Brain" and "The Male Brain." Fine's preferred illustration of Gray's "neurononsense" is his discussion of the brain's inferior parietal lobe, or IPL. The left IPL is more developed in men, the right IPL in women, which for Gray illuminates a lot: He says this anatomical difference explains why men become impatient when women talk too long and why women are better able to respond to a baby crying at night. Fine dismisses such conclusions as nothing more than "sexism disguised in neuroscientific finery."
Gray lacks scientific credentials. Brizendine has no such excuse, having been trained in science and medicine at Harvard, Berkeley and Yale. And Fine saves her big guns -- and her deepest contempt -- for her. For the purposes of this critique, Fine fact-checked every single citation in "The Female Brain," examining every study that Brizendine used to document her argument that male and female brains are fundamentally different. Brizendine cited hundreds of academic articles, making the text appear authoritative to the unwary reader. Yet on closer inspection, according to Fine, the articles are either deliberately misrepresented or simply irrelevant.
"Neurosexism" is hardly new. Fine traces its roots to the mid-19th century, when the "evidence" for inequality included everything from snout elongation to "cephalic index" (ratio of head length to head breadth) to brain weight and neuron delicacy. Back then, the motives for this pseudoscience were transparently political: restricting access to higher education and, especially, the right to vote. In a 1915 New York Times commentary on women's suffrage, neurologist Charles Dana, perhaps the most illustrious brain scientist of his time, catalogued several differences between men's and women's brains and nervous systems, including the upper half of the spinal cord. These differences, he claimed, proved that women lack the intellect for politics and governance.. . .
Saturday, September 11, 2010
A call for accuracy: A response to Time Magazine's "A call for action"
A call for accuracy: A response to "A call for action"
Sent to Time Magazine, September 11, 2010
"A call for action" (September 20) is based on two incorrect claims: American students are poor in reading, with 69% of 8th graders "below proficient", and the US "trails most other rich nations" in science and math.
The late Gerald Bracey published compelling data showing that the "proficient" level on our national reading test is set far too high: Bracey reported in 2007 that only 29% of American children scored at the proficient level or higher. According to Bracey's analysis, only 33% of Swedish children would have scored proficient or higher on our tests, and Sweden consistently ranks at or near the top of the world in reading. Setting the proficiency level unreasonably high is an excellent way of making our students look bad.
Our science and math test scores are unspectacular, but the problem is not science and math education. Studies show that American students from well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore all or nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high poverty schools score below the international average. Our scores look low because the US has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (25%, compared to Denmark's 3%). Our educational system has been successful; the problem is poverty.
"A call for action" is a call for tougher schools and longer school days, a painful and hopeless path. Instead, we should be focused on protecting children from the effects of poverty: Proper nutrition (no child left unfed), health care, and access to books. When this happens, all American children will have the advantages that middle class children have and our test scores will be among the best in the world.
Stephen Krashen
Sources
The proficient level
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey/proficient-readers-dear-s_b_54086.html
Test scores in math and science:
Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13.
Impact of poverty
Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential
Bracey, G. 2009. Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality. Educational Research Service
Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22.
Martin, M. 2004. A strange ignorance: The role of lead poisoning in “failing schools.” http://www.azsba.org/lead.htm.
Sent to Time Magazine, September 11, 2010
"A call for action" (September 20) is based on two incorrect claims: American students are poor in reading, with 69% of 8th graders "below proficient", and the US "trails most other rich nations" in science and math.
The late Gerald Bracey published compelling data showing that the "proficient" level on our national reading test is set far too high: Bracey reported in 2007 that only 29% of American children scored at the proficient level or higher. According to Bracey's analysis, only 33% of Swedish children would have scored proficient or higher on our tests, and Sweden consistently ranks at or near the top of the world in reading. Setting the proficiency level unreasonably high is an excellent way of making our students look bad.
Our science and math test scores are unspectacular, but the problem is not science and math education. Studies show that American students from well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore all or nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high poverty schools score below the international average. Our scores look low because the US has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (25%, compared to Denmark's 3%). Our educational system has been successful; the problem is poverty.
"A call for action" is a call for tougher schools and longer school days, a painful and hopeless path. Instead, we should be focused on protecting children from the effects of poverty: Proper nutrition (no child left unfed), health care, and access to books. When this happens, all American children will have the advantages that middle class children have and our test scores will be among the best in the world.
Stephen Krashen
Sources
The proficient level
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey/proficient-readers-dear-s_b_54086.html
Test scores in math and science:
Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13.
Impact of poverty
Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential
Bracey, G. 2009. Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality. Educational Research Service
Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22.
Martin, M. 2004. A strange ignorance: The role of lead poisoning in “failing schools.” http://www.azsba.org/lead.htm.
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