Bloodless Coup

I'm not sure how the journalists think they can throw stones. When the political workers were dragged out of their cars and shot in the middle of the road the day before yesterday, the AP journalist just stood by and took some very nice still photos. So instead of calling in the calvary to "clean up" (I know she hates that language) the streets by keeping these butchers from killing again, anti-American websites have a few more pictures to use as propaganda in drumming up support for other depraved souls interested in buying a spot in heaven, and paying for it with the suffering of peaceful Muslims. I apologize profusely because I know you think it's inconsistent for me to talk about Sunni on Shia violence as brutal barbarism and then to talk about Americans killing these murdering Sunnis as protective in nature when in fact they are both instances of killing...sorry, but that's the kind of hypocrisy I (and hopefully the peaceful Shiites) can live with.

I think our difference is basically that I have an issue with us killing people who aren't murderers, whereas you seem perfectly ok with that.

And you are anti-photographs? I'll grant you that circulating the news of an attack is essential to the success of terrorism, but ... don't you think people should be able to know what's going on? Should we be sheltered and protected from disturbing realities? It strikes me that if we want an accurate view of the world we live in those pictures should be out there and available.

Armand K,
I have nothing against photographs, but there is a double standard here: when people took pictures of Princess Di instead of going for help, they were rightly reviled as heartless and venal. But when it's just some people trying to support the new Iraqi government, nobody says anything. I'm not sure where you get the idea that I'm okay with killing people who aren't murderers, but if it makes you feel better to say it, I do like the idea of a new "bad boy" image.
Online poker,
That's pretty cynical, maybe you should stay out of the casinos for a while until you find your happy place again.

or, online poker, you might try the bush administration. i hear they have a couple of openings.

Morris -

"I'm not sure where you get the idea that I'm okay with killing people who aren't murderers"

I get the idea b/c you've said that several times in your posts. That if some die so that the many can succeed, that's ok. It's come up a number of times here on the blog - and of course when I was last talking to you in Louisiana your solution to the Iranian proliferation problem was to kill every last Iranian. I suppose that could have just been a disgusting joke. But I suppose it might fit in with your "for the good of the many" philosophy. Just not for the good of the many who happen to be Iranian.

As to Princess Di - do you want paparazzi offering medical attention? I'm guessing no, but ... My impression is that medical personnel got there quite quickly. The problem was getting her out of the mangled wreck. That took a long time.

Armand,
I do believe destroying killers is an option when it comes to protecting people who are the innocent targets of terrorists. And being human beings, we do make mistakes and are imperfect in pursuing this protection. I know you'd rather we let a hundred killers go free (to kill again) than see one innocent in prison, and on this we just disagree. As to Iran, you leave out that our discussion was about when a nuclear weapon is set off in one of our cities, that if we find out it came from Iran we should do whatever it takes to protect our nation from further destruction.
In the Princess Di incident, the paparazzi were furthering their own careers by taking advantage of another human being's misery. Certainly I doubt they had medical training, but it doesn't take a doctor to offer comfort, say a prayer, or at least put down the camera and let her have a little dignity with her last few moments. The photographer in Fallujah was just as callous and venal.
Joshua,
That's pretty funny.

thanks, morris, we try. too bad someone removed the spam and deprived our comments of their proper context for prosperity's sake.

furthering their own careers by taking advantage of another human being's misery

i'm not really in this discussion, but if this aspect of the paparazzi's behavior troubles you, you might consider whose pockets your chosen party is in. sweatshops? reducing entitlements to people with no means to support themselves? denying 40 million americans healthcare to extend a greasy buck a few cents further while chief executives get $50M parachutes when they fail and get fired?

these differ, if at all, only by degree from the shutterbugs' behavior at di's accident scene.

Mo - "that if we find out it came from Iran we should do whatever it takes to protect our nation from further destruction" ... so you stand by your idea that if the Iranian government supports a group that, say, sets off a nuke in LA and kills tens (maybe even a few hundred) of thousands a response comprising of the murder of 70 million people who didn't have anything to do with it would be justified? I hope not.

As to profiting off misery - I concur with Joshua's observation.

Joshua,
The left has had control of Congress for most of the last century, and the presdidency too for much of it, but suddenly a republican president gets elected and he's denying health care to 40 million people? If you remember, it was the left's approach to health care that led to their great Congressional losses in 94. And have you forgotten that what you call compassionless conservatives have increased the department of education by more than 58% since Bush was elected, a larger increase in four years than Clinton accomplished with eight?

Armand,
What would you do if Iran set off a nuke, get the UN involved? Impose sanctions? Unlike the situation in Iraq, we have less reason to believe that the Shiite government of Iran does not represent that country's majority. And if it is their popular will to destroy us, I don't think we should wait until they do something more than nuke hundreds of thousands of us, to respond in an equally extreme manner in order to protect our citizens.

you really are brainwashed, aren't you? who killed healthcare reform in the 90's? why, republicans, that's who. and why? because of the parade of horribles they touted in the media: exploding costs to the government, mounting ineffeciencies, crushing bureacracy, and most of all a lack of choice for individual consumers. i'm sorry, but the only one of those things that didn't come true under the status quo was the exploding costs to the government, unless you count the medicare prescription plan which was basically unavoidable since the health care companies don't give a whit about the old or anyone else who actually needs, you know, health care.

the healthcare crisis has gotten worse under bush, period, end of story. and as for bush's big government fiasco, NCLB, it's wholly underfunded at whatever cost. and in case you haven't talked to an elementary school teacher lately, they spend two-plus of their nine months teaching to the stupid tests required by NCLB, largely so they can punish underperforming schools by depriving them of even more resources. i've yet to meet one who thinks those two months are spent as efficiently as they would otherwise be.

nothing happens in isolation. whatever money has been spent on education under bush has been spent poorly. and to try to absolve republicans of principle responsibility for the whole health care disaster (both present and incipient) would be funny if it weren't so damned depressing. and even if you were right that it's the democrats' fault (a ridiculous assertion given that in only 8 of the last 24 years during which health care has been on the national radar has a democrat been president, and only in 2 of those 8 years has he had a wholly democratic congress), that wouldn't exonerate bush for doing nothing but make it worse during his time at the helm, no matter what else was going on at home or abroad.

40 million uninsured, morris. more than there were 5 years ago. and the health care providers are arguably the most monolithic lobby there is. yeah, it's all about compassion.

Morris:

"We have less reason to believe that the Shiite government of Iran does not represent that country's majority". Why on Earth do you think that? Their government is immensely unpopular.

"I don't think we should wait until they do something more than nuke hundreds of thousands of us, to respond in an equally extreme manner in order to protect our citizens" ... well, if we don't wait, it's not a response now is it? You are in favor of the preemptive murder of hundreds of thousands of people who have nothing to do with their country's foriegn policy?

"if it is their popular will to destroy us" ... I haven't seen any evidence that it is. Bush and company can huff and puff all they like but I haven't yet seen any evidence they aspire to blow-up a US city. It seems more likely that, like us, they want a deterrent that will prevent us from invading them. People can argue about whether or not that's reasonable, but that's likely their goal.

Joshua,
Republicans obviously had national support to keep government from taking over health care, that's why their efforts were rewarded with those gains in 94. I love how people always lament "teaching to the tests." Because it's a big waste of time to teach math, history, english, and other things covered on the tests, right? Apparently the ACLU has it so our teachers can't even teach the Declaration of Independence anymore, so I'm confused as to what's being left out. If the NEA didn't exist, there would be no need for a national accountability test to get lousy teachers fired, and that (and requiring empirical validation) is something good from NCLB.
Armand,
I am aware of protests against the mullahs, but we have no idea how many share that point of view. I absolutely am not in favor of a preemptive nuclear strike (well, not in civilian areas), only to retaliate and keep them from a second or third or fourth weapon being used against us.

i'm not sure what the victory in '94 showed, vis-a-vis healthcare, but i'm pretty sure that just because republicans accomplish something it doesn't mean it reflects mainstream values. call it what you will, social security "reform" is paving the way for SS's abolition, and no one will argue that a majority of americans want that. similarly, more than 60% of americans support elective abortion early in a pregnancy, and more than half disapprove of the death penalty. go tell a republican, as if they care.

if you don't see the difference between "teaching to" a multiple choice, standardized test, and actually teaching a subject to particular students in a particular community in a way that encourages abstract thought and leaves teachers room to tailor lessons to the peculiar needs of their particular class, then i honestly hope you neither plan to teach children nor plan to go into the administration of their schools at the local or national level. any teacher on the ground would be happy to tell you that teaching to the tests causes an impoverishment of the learning experience for children.

my own experiential example (since i can't talk about grade school, where we had only one standardized test annually, and no one's career was so indexed to it that he or she felt the need to abandon creative teaching in favor of rote memorization of arbitrarily selected facts) comes from law school. in school, during my real education, i was taught to think like a lawyer, and my exams reflected this. indeed, many exams included questions derived wholly from spontaneous classroom discussions, because the teacher wrote each semester's test anew, with a mind toward what had gone on that semester. contrast this with my six-week crash course in preparation for the bar exam, a purely results oriented exercise that was incredibly dull, and the substance of which exited my head more or less as soon as the bar was ever, precisely as the bar planners _said_ it would. both contexts -- the classroom exam and the bar exam -- purported to test a subject's knowledge of law. but any employer would much rather have an A law student than a high-scoring bar exam-taker. indeed, i daresay that's why the only question anyone cares about with the bar is "did you pass?" that's all it's good for, as a descriptive tool. i'd rather my children get more than a pass/fail least common denominator exam shoved down their throat each year at the expense of their real learning. of course, i value learning for its own sake, which is plainly of no importance to the bush admin.

and just as i'm more christian than most republicans on issues of "values," so am i more _republican_ on this issue than most republicans: i believe local education ought to be handled at the local level (right up to the point at which it violates the united states constitution, lest you invoke the creationism issue against me). what a novel thought, eh?

Morris: Do you write things like this out of a need for our attention?:

"Apparently the ACLU has it so our teachers can't even teach the Declaration of Independence anymore" - 1) I'm unaware of the ACLU ever arguing any such thing and 2) I didn't realize the ACLU had unlimited power to set school curricula.

"If the NEA didn't exist, there would be no need for a national accountability test to get lousy teachers fired." The NEA is far from the only entity protecting "lousy" teachers.

As to Iran - we have a pretty good idea that 2/3's of the country are opposed to the country's government. "Reformists" won most of the national elections in the 1990's by big margins - bigger than Reagan, Nixon or Clinton margins (so vastly bigger than Bush margins).

Joshua,
So you're suggesting that democratic elections are not a good indicator of a majority of Americans' views, because after a year of updates on Hilary health care, Americans resoundingly made their voice heard at the polls. Maybe there's a "silent majority" who just don't give enough of a damn to actually get out and vote, and we should use psychic's to divine our country's secret will. As an aside, your figures on the death penalty aren't accurate:
http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/issues/Death_Penalty.pdf
Although it's fallen from a high of 75%, it was still at 62% as of 2001 according to the home base for the general social survey.

I agree with you that abstract thought should absolutely be an important topic for law school. However, abstract thought rarely develops before adolescence and "Only 35% of high school graduates in industrialized countries obtain formal operations; many people do not think formally during adulthood."
http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/cogsys/piaget.html
Of course, formal operations is Piaget's code for abstract thought. What you suggest is that for the benefit of a few people we should scrap accountability for the whole lot. I agree that we should spend time encouraging abstract thought to develop, but spending a couple months out of the whole year to make sure other students have their bases covered doesn't seem like too much to ask when it can result in better teachers for all. As you say, even the bar exam isn't a test of excellence, it just makes sure that all lawyers have their bases covered. It doesn't matter how much of a genius a lawyer is if they are unaware of basic aspects of the court. Learning for it's own sake is what we do to attain mastery, not competence. Personally, I don't care who handles education as long as it's handled well, and since I come from a state that doesn't handle it well I welcome the federal government's involvement. It took federal rules to get minorities into public schools nationwide, so why not let them get the bad teachers out of schools?

sure, and for that matter, why not vote democrat? i'll grant the correction on the death penalty because i don't feel like finding a conflicting study. there was a great study recently discussed -- perhaps armand can help me out here -- explaining why deviating from the majority view can nevertheless garner a majority vote. so no, in a two-party system, i don't think the majority vote always equals a majority endorsement of a given candidate's positions. if that were true, and if the country were truly republican in that sense, then we'd see republicans running on their true agendas. needless to say, that's something we never see.

in any event, your hypertechnical definition of abstract thought does nothing to establish the idea that spending 22% of a student's school year teaching rote facts in preparation for a multiple choice test is a good use of school time. if there's no better way to assess teacher competency, then we shouldn't even bother to try. like i said, you can ask a dictionary about what abstract thought means, but i'll continue to ask teachers whether the tests are a waste of their time. the teachers i have to ask are never going to lose their jobs due to those test results, so they have no stake. moreover, those teachers all have given themselves to a life of modest-at-best means, indeed in my brother's case a probable inability ever to afford a home in the town in which he teaches, simply because they want to teach children. and like i said, i've yet to encounter one who thinks NCLB is anything but a destructive program as conceived and as implemented. if you've got a grade-school teacher who feels differently, by all means, bring him on.

Right, Republicans never run on their TRUE agendas, which are I would surmise from Michael Moore enslaving the lower class, banning fun as well as abortion, and maybe outlawing teddy bears? Just like you say that opposing abortion is an exteme Republican stance even though the Democrats new majority leader opposes abortion.

Right, it's a waste of time to teach "rote facts." I assume you mean by little details covered on "the test" like why the first world war started, subject verb agreement, and how to make change...nobody needs stuff like that.

I would agree that many teachers laudably give up better paying jobs to do a meaningful, beneficient public service. If the teachers you know aren't going to lose their jobs because of the results, then they obviously aren't the ones at whom the test is targeted. As I've said before, I live in the South, and while we have a few excellent schools, many children here don't beat the odds, and it's more important they learn how to make change or talk understandably on the phone so they can make some sort of a living. We have many great teachers doing everything they can, and many teachers who can barely pass "the test" themselves. I'm not interested in whether No Child Left Behind makes lives easier for teachers, I'm concerned for their students. This isn't about whether teachers like the test, it's about being responsible to the needs of our children rather than the needs of teachers' unions. And this "hypertechnical" definition of abstract thought can be found in most freshman level psych books. I don't mean to distract from your argument's generous pathos with actual research about learning. Sorry.

all i've been saying, and you've been failing to refute, is that the professional educators i know believe they can teach their students more effectively -- more information of utility to their lives, and yes, the teachers i know do concern themselves primarily with such matters -- with nine months of their own devising than with seven months of their own devising plus two months of federally mandated least common denominator crap. regardless of what your freshman psychology texts say, if you didn't begin to assemble the tools of abstract thought long before your brain developed the ability to utilize them, then your education was impoverished. needless to say, being able to recite archduke franz ferdinand on cue is not one of these tools. regardless of age, how you're taught is at least as important as what your taught. teaching to standardized tests, as i've emphasized in three or four different ways, puts everything on the what and nothing on the how, forcing teachers to teach in repetitive droning ways that are doomed to fail, especially when their classrooms are full of the disadvantaged, where that failure will result in their loss of, rather than gain in, resources to improve their educational capacities during the seven months they're actually permitted to teach in a way that reflects the peculiar exigencies of their sui generis classrooms.

this is not a rational system. and this pervasive federal control is not a republican one.

but if they really want to improve education from a strong federal office, how about they provide enough funding that teachers can be as well compensated as, oh i don't know, senators or even representatives, so that the profession is competitive out of the gate and draws the best and brightest. oh wait, that would require federal funding, which we now know goes only to nation building, tax subsidies and breaks to the rich and powerful, and various offices of propaganda where money is spent to convince the american people that the lack of money spent is money well spent.

just as i'd be more comfortable with senators nation-building if their own children were at stake, NCLB would be a lot more appealing if senators' children weren't by and large attending either private schools or public schools in affluent communities where the families can afford to pick up whatever slack the federal governments' unfunded mandates leaves.

I think Joshua's last paragraph is an important one. I don't blame Bush's or Clinton's for sending their children to good schools. All parents should. But the fact that those in power don't have to deal with the consequences of the failing schools ... I think that has a lot to do with their disinterest in funding them.

Though I will take issue with Joshua's statement that "pervasive federal control" isn't a Republican idea. What'smore Bush-like than that?

precisely!!! that's why the republicans, so called, have been sailing without a compass for four years, and to everyone's detriment. they've coronated the very man who hijacked their party and its historical values.

Joshua,
You talk about the least common denominator like it's an abstract concept, but these are human beings. If I had my freshman psych textbook here I'd quote you the figure, but close to half don't think abstractly even in adulthood, and you can call them intellectually impoverished if it makes you feel better. But these are human beings and while you talk about conservatives not being compassionate, you seem to think it's completely okay that every other person in our society doesn't have the basic skills to balance their checkbooks or complete a job application, to think it's okay if idealistic teachers aren't required to teach them those things. You don't seem to get that how to do math operations is a how not a what, how to conjugate a verb or use the right case for a pronoun is a how not a what (they could be learned as a what, but it would take much longer). And if you knew anything about education, you'd know that repetition may be boring for the teacher, but is one of the best methods for students to learn. It's funny that you suggest more money is what the education system needs, whether you'd take it from nation building or anything else. If you looked at the statistics, you'd know this approach has not worked. For instance, Washington, DC scores lower than most other urban districts in math and near the bottom in reading:
http://nces.ed.gov/quicktables/Detail.asp?Key=1083
http://nces.ed.gov/quicktables/Detail.asp?Key=952
http://nces.ed.gov/quicktables/Detail.asp?Key=951
http://nces.ed.gov/quicktables/Detail.asp?Key=1088
But Washington DC spends more money per pupil than any state.
http://nces.ed.gov/edfin/graphs/topic.asp?INDEX=1
And they have the lowest average SAT scores:
(see table 3 here)
http://www.collegeboard.com/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2004/links.html

again you haven't provided anything to convince me that the particular brand of running-scared rote memorization teachers are forced to impose on their students in preparation for a test is best. repetition, yes, fine, sure. balancing a check book, yes, fine, sure. forcing a smart individual human being to adopt a method of teaching that disregards everything that smart individual human being has learned about herself and other people and more importantly everything she has learned about the two dozen children in front of her so that she can teach the same thing in exactly the same way to farm children in nebraska as some completely different teacher faced with a classroom full of inner city children in washington d.c. is not a policy, it's a cop out, and it reflects a fear, wholly contradictory of basic republican principles of individual initiative and entrepreneurial spirit in all things, of what people might do when left to their own devices. need i observe that our school system, relative to the world, was far better decades ago when the federal government wasn't spending nearly as much time testing as it was educating, and when it wasn't trying to force states to spend their own money in a way the federal government thought best?

as for money not working in the inner city, i'm familiar with those studies, and i agree that they show that the amount of money thrown at inner city schools is insufficient. what they don't show is that money is not the solution; they leave open the possibility that the financial advantage bestowed on some inner city schools may be insufficient to compensate for the many disadvantages under which the children who attend these schools labor. they also leave open the possibilities that the extra money is spent poorly, or that no amount of money is sufficient to compensate for bad teachers, the sort who are left to teach in undesirable, ramshackle schools for $30K/year.

repetition is necessary. but knowing more or less exactly what sort of question will be on the test, and knowing exactly what sort of way that question will be asked, and knowing that poor performance on that tests will jeopardize a suffering school's funding as well as the teacher's own status, encourages teachers to TEACH DIRECTLY TO THE TEST. if you've taken any sort of expensive test prep, whether for the SAT, LSAT, or say a bar exam, you know that that sort of prep is results oriented, and based on a scientific approach to anticipating a test that doesn't change much year to year. granted, public schools may lack the research and resources of Bar/Bri or the princeton review, but the principle holds: the emphasis ends up on anticipating and satisfying, rather than on thinking. you're right, balancing a check book is important. but the difference is between teaching children how to answer a particular checkbook-oriented question or developing a novel way to approach practically math problems generally, which amply prepared children can then use to balance their checkbooks, calculate compounded interest, forecast their tax burdens, and lots of other things. balancing a checkbook is useful; but algebra is universal. the more we test schools, the more checkbook instruction we're going to get, and the harder people like us are going to have to look for competent employees. and that won't be in spite of NCLB's legacy; it'll be, at least in part, because of it.

Joshua,
You describe teaching to the test as:
"forcing a smart individual human being to adopt a method of teaching that disregards everything that smart individual human being has learned about herself and other people and more importantly everything she has learned about the two dozen children in front of her so that she can teach the same thing in exactly the same way to farm children in nebraska as some completely different teacher faced with a classroom full of inner city children in washington d.c."
First of all, your argument assumes that a teacher is smart, certainly some are, but my point is that not all are good teachers so we need "the test." The reason of course is that the Praxis test evaluates knowledge and not performance, and some very smart people (like my high school chemistry teacher) just can't teach. We need the Praxis to evaluate knowledge of subject matter and ethical behavior, but it doesn't determine if they can communicate that knowledge to another person. Second, even if the teachers have learned much, they may not have realized that not all children learn the way they do. If abstract thought is so important to you, I wonder if you think we should test teachers to determine they can think abstractly, and keep any who fail from teaching even if they are teaching math, PE, or shop? Third, we don't have the resources to teach each student at their individual level, we've already talked about this in another post. If more than one child is to learn, at some level we have to teach the same thing in exactly the same way. I don't see how "the test" is a contradiction with conservative belief in individual initiative, because conservatives believe as much in responsiblity as anything, and it is antithetical to conservatives to reward poor performance by a teacher or in a business or in a certain international organization that shall remain nameless.

First of all, I don't know where you're getting your figures comparing the US to the rest of the world, but as far as our nation goes, SAT scores for math in 2004 are just a point off their highs in 2003, including all years back to 1972. Verbal scores are as high as they've been since 1986.
(Click on national report here)
http://www.collegeboard.com/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2004/reports.html
I agree having done the prep for the GRE a few years ago that it does bring anticipation into it, rather than a raw estimation of disparate intelligences held by the students. What I wonder if we can't agree on is that there should be a way to evaluate the performance of teachers and send the ones not best suited for a classrom to another career. Maybe we can agree that that tests should reward creative teachers when their students reach the high end of the spectrum in abstract and creative thought, so those teachers can work with gifted children, and other teachers with personalities suited to it might help the ones on the lower end get all their basic skills through repetition. We forget sometimes that the reason it's so easy for you and me to add and subtract is that our elementary school teachers made us add and subtract thousands of times, then thousands more as higher math and science required it; it's boring, but it works. I don't want you to think that I'm completely happy with our education system just because Bush is in office, because I think as depression, ADHD and anxiety disorders rise every year, we need to focus on teaching emotional skills as well as the cognitive skills; we've stopped showing all those silly 1950's movies and done little to fill the vacuum where social skills are concerned. Maybe it's simply that you come from a more successful school system and you're concerned change will make it worse, and my state has for the most part a lousy system, so I hope this change can make it better.

well, to accept your gesture toward winding this down, a few fairly non-combative points. pennsylvania may have, in the aggregate, better schools than louisiana, and new jersey, where i grew up, certainly does. but in any case that we turned out all right does not plainly turn on repetition, as far as my memory is concerned, and even if it does, the absence of today's pervasive standardized testing, and the lack of job-security issues arising from those tests we were asked to take, apparently didn't stop teachers from being effective in the ways mentioned. and the fact that the SAT scores have improved in the past 15 years, given the many legitimate criticisms of the SAT's predictive and diagnostic utility, doesn't say much to me; what it suggests, however, is that kids are getting better at handling standardized tests. also, are your SAT statistics adjusted for the quantum leap in average scores that occurred in the mid-late 90's, when parents pretty much demanded a new curve due to their children's bruised egos? when i took it, and perhaps you as well, 1400 put you in the 98th percentile; now it only puts you in the 90th. if nobody's adjusting for this grade inflation, the comparison between the 80's and now is meaningless. aside from which, our improvement relative to ourselves in the past 20 years is not what i was talking about; i expressly said our standing relative to other countries. we are losing ground against the developing world, not gaining it. and we didn't test kids so rigorously back when we were whipping the countries that no embarrass us.

finally, if you want to test the teachers on all of the bases you mention, that's fine. test them. test them. testing their children, aside from creating utterly unreliable results (again, a nebraska teachers' students are going to have very different abilities and aptitudes than a d.c. teacher's students, even if the teachers have the exact same ability and level of education, so why should the d.c. teacher be punished for being precisely as good as the nebraska teacher?), is misguided. set high certification bars, fine. create continuing education requirements, fine. but don't punish teachers or schools for the accident of the students in their classroom. that's like using a piano recital to assess teachers, letting some use both hands, others use only one, some play blindfolded, and others with their ears covered, and then pretending to reliably assess one's ability against another's. the reason we won't see this, is because if we set up such requirements for teachers, then we're going to have to pay them more. and nobody wants to do that.

instead of nation building, fear-mongering, and mis-direction, we ought to approach education like we did the moon. an all out effort to draft thousands of the country's most prominent minds to create a meaningful, robust, well-funded proposal that aims at the real target: actually ensuring that children come out of school smarter than they have been. instead, we get NCLB. if you can't see the difference, this conversation is pointless.

Joshua,
I certainly empathize with your frustration at standardized tests. My GRE analytical raw score was higher than my verbal raw score, but my percentiles were reversed, and when I looked at it that didn't make any sense to me since there's supposed to be a fixed mean. My guess as to my frustration at this and your own frustration about your raw SAT scores, is that because the test items change each year (even though of course the types of questions asked usually remain the same), the raw scores measure the effectiveness of the test questions in determining intelligence, and so of course it's almost impossible to accurately measure intelligence (a concept) from year to year or country to country. I hear good things about nonverbal intelligence tests accounting for cultural differences, but of course many people see intelligence as having a verbal component. And then throw in that because of the Flynn effect IQ tests are renormed every 10 years or so, to make them more difficult and reflect the increasing complexity of modern life.

I raised the same question in my psychometrics class that you do here, that if it's unethical to release information about test items, how is that different from the test preparations available? The professor said that of course it is blurry, and if there is a distinction it is that the test preps teach what kind of answer the test is looking for. I agree that everyone should have access to them, or else the tests are not a fair measure. I agree they don't really predict performance very well (I hear college sports is better for that). Some of my friends here may never become counselors because they can't make a 400 on the GRE, even though a counselor really doesn't have to be able to do math anymore with computerized scoring of testing instruments.

But I don't know a better way to make sure a school is teaching well than to test children when they arrive and when they leave. I think part of our frustration here is that the society we live in does not agree on what it means for a school to succeed, or what it means for a child to succeed in school. If a student plays a great bassoon but can't do algebra, is that a success or a failure? And where is the section on "the test" that gives credit for bassoon playing? Where is the section that gives students credit for good social skills and being able to get behind their emotions? Just as there has been a broadening of assessment in the mental health field (it's actually unethical for a therapist to make an assessment based solely on a test's outcome), and now we're using more instruments that test for strengths as well as neuroticism, I hope this trend will be embraced by the schools. But even though I would like to see assessment broadened, if ten of twenty students don't learn how to do algebra in algebra class, I can't say that teacher is doing a good job. We have to hold someone responsible if we're going to make this system better, and it is important to hold both teachers and students accountable to accomplish this.

when federal policy makers make decisions that so pervasively and overwhelmingly determine how teachers are forced to teach, shouldn't we hold tho policy makers accountable? i know that's not a terribly popular view these days, but it makes as much sense to me as the heisenbergian paradox raised by the we-can't-measure-progress-if-we-don't-test-progress-even-where-such-testing-is-an-impediment-to-actual-learning overtone to your argument.

I would agree that federal policy makers are responsible, as are voters who elect them and parents as well. The real quandry here is that we want to evaluate teachers on how they perform teaching and we don't want to tell them (or can't agree upon) what they're supposed to be teaching, as evidenced by your contention that we should focus on teaching abstract thought, something that many in the country would see as unnecessary because they cannot themselves do this.