Sunday links.
Snow falls on Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, home of Occupy Wall Street.
The ACLU sues the City of Chicago. Latino communities are underserved by the police with Rahm as mayor.
Who attends the secret meetings of the cabal that really runs the Republican Party? You guessed it. The Koch brothers and Karl Rove behind closed doors.
Egyptians march in Tahrir Square in support of the democratic movement in the United States. Photo.
What did the Washington Post think was important about Occupy Oakland? Not the shooting of Iraq war vet Scott Olsen by the OPD. The protesters left a kitty. Thank god the OPD was there to rescue it.
The latest from Michgan. A law that would bar a relative of a school employee from serving on a school board. Anti-teacher union? Ya think?
Scott Olsen is not the first victim of police brutality in Oakland. Remember Oscar Grant?
Since I began my crusade against this kind of testing in the late 1960s I’ve been told: (1) Something is better than nothing, and (2) we are developing better measurement tools. Bah, humbug. After 45 years of hearing this—literally—I don’t believe it. We know there are both better ways of administering standardized tests that will do less damage: sampling. We know plenty of other ways that we can look at kids’ work to assess their individual progress. I can name several-hundred public and private schools that have done so for decades. But the particulars of their solutions are not replicable because measures of success rest on “values” that need to be openly negotiated, not mandated. That’s an advantage private schools have that could be made public.
Maybe it’s time to encourage new and old reforms alike, while schools are mandated to invent very different ways to track what the public wants to know about the work of their students. Let this be in the hands of each school’s lay and professional community. Deborah Meier.
