The WSJ published an article entitled "A Sputnik Moment for U.S. Education" and a couple of days later, a friend showed me the way her child is being taught "division" via a popular "reform" math program. I seriously doubt that China wastes valuable class time on this sort of DRIVEL!
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Improve STEM with more red tape??
Yep, that's the plan!
My bill, H.R. 6248, addresses these problems by providing the education and skills necessary for students to compete in today's global economy and to understand increasingly complex issues. Additionally, it improves STEM education coordination and coherence among federal and state governments in order to advance STEM education across the nation.
How? First, this legislation creates an Office of STEM at the U.S. Department of Education at the assistant-secretary level, responsible for coordinating STEM education initiatives among all federal agencies. Second, this bill institutes a voluntary Consortium on STEM education, comprised by no less than five states representing at least five of the nation's nine geographical regions. Its mission: to develop common content standards for K-12 STEM education, engineered at the state and local levels. Third, the bill creates the National STEM Education Research Repository, which would be a clearinghouse for educators to research the latest innovations in STEM. This will break the silos that keep creative programs from being replicated and will make these resources available through simple internet searches rather than having to sift through convoluted websites.Common Core = WEAK Math Standards
BEWARE OF "COHERENCE AMOUNG FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENTS"
Budget Crisis = Historic Opportunity????
To this day, federal dollars represent less than 10 percent of public education funding. State governments provide the bulk of the funding, so they are mostly immune to federal efforts to reform education policy.The current crisis in state budgets has created a historic opportunity to change this paradigm. State governments, mired in long-term fiscal trouble, are willing to accept the requirements the federal government has imposed in order to receive desperately needed aid.Paradigmatic change is already happening. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has altered the political landscape through competitive grant programs like Race To The Top, that provide state and local governments with funding if the recipient agreed to some form of educational reforms. More than 30 states have changed laws around the issue of teacher evaluation. The impending reauthorization of ESEA has taken the process a step further: 37 states have agreed to the Common Core standards for curricula to ensure they will qualify for future federal funding. The groundwork has been laid for an increased federal role in education. We need to build on these accomplishments to ensure that federal dollars can continue to be leveraged to produce local successes after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding runs out.
WHEN HAS AN INCREASED FEDERAL ROLE
IN ANYTHING
RESULTED IN IMPROVEMENT??
Scrapping Education Dept. Could Be Tough Task
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Trade practice threat to US manufacturing - from EPI
Comments on the USTR investigation of
China’s subsidies to green industries
Robert E. Scott
November 17, 2010
The United Steelworkers recently filed a petition with the U.S. Trade Representative, accusing China of illegally stimulating and protecting its producers of green technology exports, ranging from wind and solar energy products to advanced batteries and energy-efficient vehicles. After the USTR opened an investigation, EPI International Economist Robert Scott submitted the attached comments outlining how Chinese trade practices "pose a direct threat to the recovery of U.S. manufacturing."
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
What does the future hold for public education?
An Interview with Laurie H. Rogers: Betrayed
Q. What does the future hold for public education?
A. That depends on the people. If parents and teachers can resist the negative messages that divide them, and instead work together to take back the classroom, many good things can happen. The country is desperate, the children are desperate, the taxpayer is desperate, and businesses are desperate. People must rise up and insist on the education system they want. It’s a pretty good thing to do for the children and the country.
I look forward to reading her book "Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America and What You Can Do About It," which will be published in December by Rowman & Littlefield Education.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
It's ALL Education! (REE)
It took slightly less than a decade for the U.S. trade balance in high-technology manufactured goods to shift from a positive $40 billion in 1990 to a negative $50 billion in 2001.
Now consider this:
The US imports 100% of it's rare earth elements, even though we have the world's third largest deposit. These imports come mostly from China, who has banned exporting them in recent weeks, putting our economy in an even more vulnerable position.
Check out: The USGS Report The Principal Rare Earth Elements Deposits of the United States—A Summary of Domestic Deposits and a Global Perspective
"At the present time, the United States obtains its REE raw materials from foreign sources, almost exclusively from China. Import dependence upon a single country raises serious issues of supply security."
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Rare earth metals and alloys that contain them are used in many devices that people use every day such as: computer memory, DVD's, rechargeable batteries, cell phones, car catalytic converters, magnets, fluorescent lighting and much more.
During the past twenty years there has been an explosion in demand for many items that require rare earth metals. Twenty years ago there were very few cell phones in use but the number has risen to over 5 billion in use today. The usage of computers and DVDs has grown almost as fast as cell phones.Saturday, November 20, 2010
Untitled
Reform Math, American Thinker, November 20
Few things could be more useless than a system of math instruction concocted by developmental psychologists, and serious questions must be raised about the real effects (and intent) of Everyday Math. Human beings have been performing simple math since hunter-gatherers realized they had digits and things that needed to be counted. Only a starry-eyed progressive fool would attempt improvement upon methods of simple addition and subtraction, which were used by Franklin, Edison, and Einstein.
And an epiphany found in the comments:
The rot that is destroying our public schools can only be fixed by communities unwilling to suffer the pathologies found there.
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