Matt Miller - The Tyranny of Dead Ideas

Went to Townhall Seattle last night as I mentioned previously. I mixed up the dates and the talk I was going to see is actually tonight, but the cute girl at the ticket stand (and she was very cute)convinced me to stay and see a talk by Matt Miller on his book The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.

Mr. Miller is a former advisor to the Clinton and Bush 41 White Houses and a columnist for Fortune Magazine and the Atlantic magazine so I figured hey he might be worth listening too.

He was.

I didn't agree with most of his contentions, although I could understand his reasoning. (He appears to be a liberal, but doesn't not militantly so). One I did agree with is that the American educational system needs an overhaul although we had a disagreement there too. He believes that it needs to be nationalized from the standpoint of standards and funding. I think it needs to be completely re-evaluated, as I have written many times in the past. (here are two of my more coherent posts on the subject) Mr. Miller said he wanted to hear our suggestions for dead ideas so I wrote him this morning and suggesting the same sort of model that I proposed in my Open University post at the elementary and high school levels.

Speaking of the Open University - I just found out yesterday that Britain has an online program run in connection with the BBC called The Open University, and that an Israeli is proposing to open a free online degree granting university. That should be interesting.

Also in education news - LA teachers are boycotting assessment tests in order to preserve their jobs.

The Los Angeles teachers union and the city's school district are battling over a district practice that, a Times' analysis suggests, contributes to higher scores on state tests.

The practice is "periodic assessments," a bureaucratic name for exams administered by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The goal is to give teachers insight into what students need to learn while there remains time in the current school year to adjust instruction.The union Tuesday directed teachers to refuse to give them to students on the grounds that the tests are costly and counterproductive.

source

Here is another dead idea - Only teachers can teach. Fire 'em all revoke the unions collective bargaining status and start over with a fresh crop.

I have mentioned before that one of the most successful educational institutions in the US is the military. One of the reasons that they are is through the use of assessments. In every course of instruction the instructor reads out the Terminal Objectives, what the overall goal for that course of instruction is, and Enabling Objectives, what the goals of that particular block of instruction are. In most a pretest and a post test are given to evaluate how effective the instruction was.

It works, and that is really what a periodic assessment test is. My personal opinion is that teachers don't like them because they know deep inside that overall the educational system is failing to educate and these tests point that out.