The testing agenda that Duncan is perpetuating is segregative and divisive in yet another sense. In inner-city schools, where principals are working with a sword of threats and punishments above their heads — for fear that they’ll be fired if they cannot "pump the scores" — they inevitably strip down the curriculum to those specific items that are going to be tested, often devoting two-thirds of the year to prepping children for exams….

So culture is starved. Aesthetics are gone. Joy in learning is regarded as a bothersome distraction. "These kids don’t have time for joy, or whim, or charm, or inquiry! Leave whim and happiness to the children of the privileged.

It’s devastating, and as cheating scandals across the nation have helped demonstrate, it’s true. There is incredible pressure in school districts across the nation to prove proficiency on these tests, even though there are so many logistical and theoretical problems with them.

That thought in mind, I happened across the 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress sample questions for 2010 today. I expected to find the kind of questions I hate to give as a teacher—soulless, rudimentary exercises in effort rather than intellect. Instead, I found questions that I want students to be able to answer, questions that required some knowledge about current events and culture.

While they’re not incredibly difficult, they’re appropriate measures of core knowledge.

You can take a look at the sample questions here.

Does my approval of the questions mean that I think Kozol is wrong? No. Test-mania focused on exam preparation (especially the kind of objective, multiple choice measurements used for measuring Annual Yearly Progress for NCLB) absolutely drives critical thought and engagement out of classrooms, especially in low-performing schools under the threat of sanctions. They’re simply not capable of completely assessing a student’s capabilities or knowledge.

Yet good test questions that measure core knowledge do matter. We need to ensure that our students are aware of the fundamentals of Geography, English, History, Science, and even Math. Finding a way to teach and measure these skills—while preserving student critical thought—is the real challenge going forward.

I should offer the disclaimer that I am not a Social Studies teacher, although one colleague does mock me for teaching her curriculum in my Debate and AP Language classes.

Do yourself a favor: read Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation.

As it notes, “The Great Gatsby is Great!”

Joanne Barkan, writing for Dissent, takes on the war against teachers. The opening of the piece offers a sobering assessment: “In a nation as politically and ideologically riven as ours, it’s remarkable to see so broad an agreement on what ails public schools. It’s the teachers.

Rajan Menon argues in the National Interest that Colonel Qaddafi has won the war in Libya: Yet this what the interventionists maintain, never mind that their righteous rendition begs a question: Why, under such favorable circumstances, has the world’s most powerful alliance failed to oust a reviled ruler who presides over what is now a third-rate military machine and faces relentless air attacks, wide-ranging sanctions, and an opposition that is said to reflect the public’s sentiment and now receives external arms, training and money?

David Ralph’s review of Chocolate nations: Living and dying for cocoa in West Africa provides some excellent insight into the ongoing conflict in Côte d’Ivoire and the exploitative practices associated with chocolate production.

Finally, Nissan offers another effective advertisement for its Leaf car.

Ebert points out the contrast between Fitzgerald’s original novel and Ms. Tarner’s “retelling” most effectively when he contrasts the endings of each work.

Fitzgerald:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Tarner:

Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.
Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby’s dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn’t he?

I’ve had the opportunity to teach Gatsby each of the past two years and have come to appreciate it more each time I’ve read it. My students teased me this year because every day I would come to class earnestly proclaiming one sentence or another as “the finest piece of writing you’ll ever come across.”

It’s a beautiful, moving, complex text which can transform a reader. You know, what literature should do. Ebert is right that Gatsby is accessible to high school students and that they deserve the opportunity to read and experience the original text. Boiling down art to a means to transmit plot and low-level vocabulary not only destroys the art, but damages the reader.

No teacher should have such little faith in her students as to teach this text.

I disagree with Ebert, however, when he uses this text as evidence of a collapsed American educational system. He writes:

What depresses me is what this Macmillan Reader edition says about our American educational system. Any high school student who cannot read The Great Gatsby in the original cannot read. That student has been sold a bill of goods. We know that teachers at the college level complain that many of their students cannot read and write competently. If this is an example of a book they are assigned, can they be blamed?

It’s too easy to blame the educational system alone.   As pressure mounts to increase graduation rates without maintaining intellectual and academic growth and as the federal government and business interests demand education focused less on ideas and more on “marketable skills” and “proficiency,” we’ll see more pressure to lower the bar, even as low as this:

“My name is Nick Carraway. I was born in a big city in the Middle West.”

In his essay Dehumanized, Mark Slouka persuasively argues that education our education system has become almost entirely focused on commerce at the expense of ideas:

Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP. It’s about investing in our human capital, and please note what’s modifying what. It’s about ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy. And what of our political perch, you ask, whether legitimate or no? Thank you for your question. Management has decided that the new business plan has no room for frivolity.

Is it any wonder that, in a climate like the one Slouka correctly describes, books like retellings of classic novels are finding their way into classrooms? That a cursory look at the plot suffices?

Teaching literature is difficult in a culture increasingly dominated by short attention span entertainment. It’s even more difficult when those who teach literature are told it has limited value in the marketplace or on standardized test scores.

Ilana Garon, a teacher from New York, argues that we need to move past the myth that education reform needs to be primarily centered on getting rid of bad teachers. She argues that “to assert that this is the #1 problem in education is to plainly ignore the economic and social factors that affect our students during the twenty-three hours a day we’re not with them.”  The Atlantic adds that American teachers are among the hardest working in the world but their students only in the middle of the pack.

The New Inquiry has an interesting dialogue between a professor and someone who has produced over one hundred essays for sale online.

Ted Galen Carpenter offers one the most powerful condemnations of American torture policies I’ve had the opportunity to read. In part, he writes, “Such contempt for moral considerations is both puzzling and alarming coming from citizens—much less leaders—of an enlightened democracy. Even the pervasive use of the Orwellian euphemism “enhanced interrogation” rather than the more honest term “torture” suggests a moral rot within portions of the political and opinion elite.”

David Eagleman examines the increasingly difficult task of determining blame for criminal acts as we learn more about the brain. He writes, ” the choices we make are inseparably yoked to our neural circuitry, and therefore we have no meaningful way to tease the two apart. The more we learn, the more the seemingly simple concept of blameworthiness becomes complicated, and the more the foundations of our legal system are strained.”

Finally, it’s hard to argue with Existential Star Wars.

While attempting to refute Matthews’ argument, Chris Irvine at the Fordham Institute makes the best case for pushing students into Honors and Advanced Placement courses.  He writes:

From my experience teaching at an under-performing high school in a blue-collar area of Metro-Detroit, I am all-too-familiar with mislabeled classes and the problems they create. The class I taught was an A.P. Government course, the same course I took in high school with a group of top-notch students, over 90% of which took and passed the A.P. Exam. The course I taught, however, looked nothing like what I had previously encountered. The chapter exams were all multiple-choice and the questions (and answers) were given to the students literally word-for-word during the review. Any student putting forth even the slightest amount of effort (you’d be surprised how many didn’t) had no problem receiving an “A” in the class. Yet, less than 10% of the class took the A.P. exam and I can count on one hand the number that passed.

I believe Irvine’s argument boils down to the idea that, because he didn’t believe his students were capable of intellectually demanding work, he chose to give them multiple choice tests and busy work. That’s hardly an indictment of placing students in challenging courses; it’s an argument against lowering our expectations because students don’t enter our classes matching the stereotype of “top-notch students.”

Irvine’s specific experience certainly speaks powerfully to a problem in education: the idea that any student should spend her time answering multiple choice questions or regurgitating verbatim answers to objective questions in any class is not only absurd, but an affront to the very idea of education. No matter how low the skill level of the student, we must provide the opportunity for intellectual challenge, exploration, discussion and debate.

I’m not sure that placing every student in an honors course is the right answer, but ending the practice of treating general courses as if they are remedial worksheet factories would be an incredibly good first step towards improving educational outcomes and student interest.  Whether we place students in Honors or regular classes, the most important step we must take is to provide content worthy of their time and attention.

With regard to AP specifically, I’ve long believed that the College Board is correct to ask for open enrollment in Advanced Placement classes. The real power of challenging curriculum is that it can develop the skills of a wide range of students. Schools and teachers should aggressively recruit students who want the challenge of AP and want to improve their skills for college, focusing particularly on traditionally under-represented groups of students.

It’s easy to guarantee success in an Advanced Placement program if success is defined as helping a carefully screened collection of students achieve a 90% passage rate.  Real success, however, can be found in those schools that expand opportunities to take challenging courses to a wide variety of students.

give students agency as readers; where we stop blocking or banning from our classrooms the kinds of reading and writing our students are doing outside of school. We should stop reacting as if all the ways students read and write outside school are wrong and superficial, and instead bring that mash-up of personal ideas and text variety into our teaching.

Allyn asserts that “we have now reached a point at which teaching with neither the whole-class novel nor the basal reader is viable,” connecting the idea quite nebulously to technological advancement and Common Core Standards. Her piece is filled with phrases like giving students “agency” and making them curators of their own interests, but offers a simplistic defense of washing our hands of the responsibility of providing excellent material for our students to learn from.

That students find reading a chore has far less to do with mandatory assignments than what teachers do with those texts.

The most important benefit of a whole class novel is that students will learn far m0re–about the work, themselves, each other, and their world–if they share and discuss a text with classmates and the instructor.  Having a classroom of students reading individual works may certainly initially generate more interest, but a sustained conversation about ideas that a whole-novel discussion can generate will be far more valuable and provide much greater opportunity for personal growth.

Reading an assigned text also provides students the opportunity for students to become acquainted with works they might otherwise never have read. Allyn cites the example of a student reading 16 blogs about boats before reading fictional works on the same subject, but it seems unlikely that students are going to stumble on Ellison or Garcia Marquez without a bit of direction. My own passion for literature (rather than history) was sparked in high school by a teacher who “made us” read Herman Hesse, an author I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have found on my own. As for Allyn’s claim that we can teach especially important books by “reading them aloud” to students, I’d suggest that sounds like the worst reading chore one could possibly invent and reduces the amount of time available for in-depth learning that comes from analysis of a text.

A final reason whole class novels are important is simply that students must be exposed to quality works, works that they will understand and appreciate better as part of a classroom discussion. I’ve heard (and Allyn argues) that it doesn’t what students read, but it certainly does. I don’t mean to channel Harold Bloom here, but quality tells–and quality matters. While students may be “curators of their own interest,” part of our job as instructors is to provide them texts that will both challenge their intellects and expand their worldview. Horton may hear a who, but he doesn’t teach reading.

Allyn is certainly correct to argue that not all texts work as well for each student, but effective instruction can generate interest and enthusiasm. Of course we should encourage our students to explore their own passions and interests, but not at the expense of the whole-class novel.

This is the kind of thing I love, which probably says something unsettling about me. Frank Delaney has embarked on what he describes as a 28-30 year project to podcast his way through Ulysses, to democratize reading the text. Check out re-Joyce here—and best of luck, Mr. Delaney!

James Lundberg argues that despite its popularity and the resultant surge in Civil War interest, we might want to reconsider showing Ken Burns’ Civil War, a work he calls “a deeply misleading and reductive film that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns’ sentimental vision and the romance of Foote’s anecdotes.”

Martin Hogue traces the history of the American camp site arguing that our “[m]odern campsites embody a peculiar contradiction: They are defined and serviced by an increasingly sophisticated range of utilities and conveniences, and yet marketed to perpetuate the cherished American ideal of the backwoods camp.”

I absolutely loved this piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates as a guest columnist in the New York Times, in which he uses the new X-men movie to discuss our tendency to eliminate troubling parts of our nation’s history of racism, calling it “a convenient suspension of disbelief.”

Jiang Xueqin explains China’s brutal college entrance examination (gaokao) system and while he would prefer that it not exist, finds himself defending it in the status quo: “Yes, the images of children memorising and regurgitating away for 18 years may be disheartening. The poor eyesight, bad posture, and crushing of imagination, independence, and initiative will haunt them for the rest of their lives. But we must remember that many of these children and their families find themselves fortunate just to be able to dream of a better life.”

Eric Alterman argues that that the collapse of the newspaper industry and proliferation of think tank experts had led to a dramatic expansion of “ideologically motivated misinformation.” He places the blame on journalists: “journalists, on the other hand, usually treat anything as true if someone in a position of ostensible authority is willing to say it, even anonymously (and if no one is going to sue over it). The accuracy of anyone’s statement, particularly if that person is a public official, is often deemed irrelevant.”

Kim Brooks criticizes the practice of high school English, suggesting that soft discussion about literature and diminished focus on writing has left students unprepared for college, but acknowledges that the math of grading papers makes teaching writing a challenge: “every English teacher teaches five sections of English, and each section has approximately 25 students — a dream load compared to what teachers at, say, a Chicago public face. But that still means a three-page formal essay assignment would translate into 375 pages of student prose to be read, critiqued and evaluated. The very thought makes a cold, dark dread creep across my soul.”

Philosopher Sam Harris forces us to consider simplistic answers about free will and morality, arguing that “free will is a non-starter, both philosophically and scientifically.” Later in the piece, he asks “Consider what would happen if we discovered a cure for human evil. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that every relevant change in the human brain can be made cheaply, painlessly, and safely. The cure for psychopathy can be put directly into the food supply like vitamin D. Evil is now nothing more than a nutritional deficiency.”

The mere existence of trailers for books is astonishing to me, but some of winners and losers of the 2011 Moby Awards offered even more surprise. I didn’t enjoy Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom at all, but his promotional trailer almost redeemed the book.

Peter Schrag argues in The Nation that vouchers are back with a vengeance, the “been the ultimate weapon in our educational debates, always ticking just under the surface, never quite going off. But after last November’s Republican statehouse victories, the right, sometimes abetted by Democrats and liberals, has brought back vouchers and school privatization with a vengeance.