Dark Matter

ONE
So I just posted the NY Times blog about cheating...in schools and out.  Quoting the author's daughter,  “TRUTH is a second-class citizen in the glittering world of WINNING.”

TWO
Almost at the same time, NPR interviewed Paul Tough (really!) for a story entitled, "Children Succeed with Character, not test scores."

Tough observes, "Right now we've got an education system that really doesn't pay attention to [noncognitive] skills at all. ... I think schools just aren't set up right now to try to develop things like grit, and perseverance and curiosity."

THREE
And since phenomena often occur in 3's, I heard a teaser about an upcoming radio feature that opens with the comment, "Our whole education system is built around the idea that if you are good at taking tests, that you'll be successful in life.  But how do you explain all those people who were good at taking tests, but are not so successful in life?  What is the 'dark matter' that leads to success?"

The dark matter that leads to success?  Personal characteristics like grit, perseverence, curiosity...and integrity.

“They never get asked to create anything,”

American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests. Learn by testing or learn by making? (Thanks to Post Oak parent Lisa Eddleman for sending this article to me.)

Reading of the day

Commentary
by Steve Nelson,
The Huffington Post (from December 8, 2010)

“Tests, standards, accountability, economic competitiveness, managers, vouchers, data, metrics... does anyone actually care about children?Public discourse about education is unbearably impersonal. Nearly all the heated rhetoric suggests that children are nothing but small units of future production, especially in the saddest precincts of South Central, Baltimore, Harlem, Cleveland, Detroit and the other abandoned parcels of our divided nation.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-nelson/lets-bury-the-cats-well_b_792044.html