Developmental Psychology of Schoolchildren

The field of developmental psychology seems to be about the development of school children, not the development of children in general, according to Peter Gray. Here is a post he wrote in response to his trying to find out what the "definitive" book set on the field of developmental psychology has to say about the subjects of play, curiosity and exploration.

The Consequences of Standardization

Marion Brady, a long time curriculum critic, gives a good overview of the situation that has lead most of our schools to the place of kowtowing to standardized tests in this article from Education Week. Here's his conclusion:

Here’s a prediction: If implemented as it’s being advocated by spokespersons, the national standards-reform effort will fail. Period. It won’t fail because subject-matter specialists can’t agree on standards. And it won’t fail because of teacher incompetence, weak administrators, “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” union resistance to change, parental indifference, inadequate funding, lack of rigor, failure to employ market forces, too few charter schools, too little technology, or any other currently popular explanation of poor performance.

It will fail for the same reason the No Child Left Behind Act failed—because it will be driven by data derived from simplistic tests keyed to simplistic standards keyed to a simplistic, dysfunctional, obsolete, 19th-century curriculum.

Raising Important Questions About Testing

Here is a post by Diane Ravitch that raises crucially important questions about the effects of high stakes testing regimes:

This raises the question: With scores so often rigged and fraudulent, how can we use them to pay bonuses or to close schools? New York City's last round of phony test scores (noticed as phony even by the august New York Times) triggered a payout of $33 million in bonuses to teachers; the union is laughing all the way to the bank! So millions are awarded in fraudulent bonuses at the same time that school budgets are cut to the bone. Is this the way that big business operates? If so, it is no wonder that we had a financial meltdown.

I fear that American education has now entered into a twilight zone, where nothing is what it appears to be, where numbers are meaningless, where public relations and spin take the place of honest reporting, where fraud is called progress.