Some resources

I've been reading The Daily Howler for some time now. Often what is posted has to do with the intersection of media and poltics. However, lately I've been seeing quite a few articles related to education. Today for example this article deals with how the U.S. system ignores its own history in international comparisons of teaching and learning. Briefly, Finland, Japan, and the U.S. are not comparable, because of the differences in languages used, ethnic and cultural group belonging, and the inconvenient fact that, for example:


American schools get good results from middle-class, majority-culture students; on any measure like the TIMSS, the American average is brought down by the very low achievement levels which exist in substantial pockets of the US student population—among second-language kids, Hispanics and blacks. No, Finland never enslaved one-tenth of its population, then spent centuries denying literacy (by force of law) to that oppressed subgroup. Today, we Americans deal with the deadly effects of our ancestors’ benighted conduct.



The current round of standards-based reform and strong accountability places the burden of displacing the effects of that whole part of our history onto the schools, especially teachers and students. Sound like an impossible task?