“Critical Race Theory” and actual education policy, part one
slowboring.com
slowboring.com
Let your political adversaries choose which true, uncontested historical facts are taught in schools, and you too will find yourself in the uncomfortable position of getting mad about what children are learning.
Did you know governor Ratcliffe, depicted in Disney's Pocahontas as greedy and arrogant, trying to start a war so he can steal the Native American's gold, actually met his end trying to trade copper for corn for the starving Jamestown colony (his fellow colonists accused him of being too generous in trading, that they would soon run out of items to trade)?
He and 25 others were invited to a Powhatan gathering, promised they would be given corn for their copper. Instead they were ambushed, and only two escaped. The rest were killed, while Ratcliffe was captured, and:
Women removed the skin from his entire body with mussel shells and tossed the pieces into the flame as he watched. They skinned his face last and finally burned him at the stake. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratcliffe_(governor)#Deat...
That part was omitted from the Disney version. Is it time to teach this in schools, to correct the popular, mistaken impression of early settler-Native American relations?
But I'm more concerned about this part:
> The stigmatization of the kinds of tests that are our main tool for assessing whether or not children are learning
I don't believe standardized testing is as useful a tool as trusting the teachers.
Standardized testing is not being used to tell that student X had a problem with concept Y and needs further training. Especially not if the student only gets an overall summary, and even then only until months later, and perhaps even in the next school year.
Standardized testing is being used to punish schools which don't rank well (often from poor neighborhoods), instead of providing more funding and other resources to those schools.
> I think everyone agrees that you can, in principle, assess someone’s competence in a given subject area with a test
Really? I want to see the test that can, in principle, access someone's competency in software development in a given job role.
Companies would pay a lot of money for one that was more effective than the crappy-assed ones we have now.
> And if you want to compare different people, you need to give them the same test.
Where's the test for the fine arts and music programs?
Why are the tests always stressing those topics which are easy to test?
Why are students nowadays being required to pass those tests in order to graduate? I mean, when I was in school we had assessment tests that had no impact on our grades or graduation status, and they were used for exactly these sorts of assessments.
> All this would be uncontroversial ... except teachers’ unions don’t like the idea of assessing teachers based on their job performance
How did get get from tests that compare different students to tests which assess teachers based on their job performance?
Since "you can, in principle, assess someone’s competence in a given subject area with a test", why not just test those teachers, you know, DIRECTLY?
Perhaps because the author's full of it?