Tag Archive of “short”
The crucial flaw of NCLB, in my opinion, is that is fails to inspire. The law has many other faults, of course, including its lack of funding and regimented focus on testing. However, the root problem is that NCLB is attempting to use an evolutionary methodology for a truly revolutionary goal – almost total proficiency. There is no easily articulated goal which all citizens can rally around: the standards are convoluted and the metrics for success are continually redefined in contradiction with themselves. Doug Noon perfectly captures this, in the context of Kennedy’s space program:1
If we’d have used an NCLB-style approach to the Apollo moon mission, President Kennedy would have simply ordered NASA to fly conventional airplanes higher and higher until they fell out of the sky, and then blamed the pilots for lacking the will and the know-how to get the job done.
How can we reach for the moon with education?
We are truly in the information age. Everywhere, data is being constantly collected, distributed, analyzed, and visualized. Increasingly, government data (which has long been collected, but cumbersome to access) is being opened up. Additional social data augments this twelve-fold. In short, the depth and breadth of data sets are rapidly being expanded. Some applications of this data are very useful, such as Google tracking flu activity through search queries.1 Other implementations are far more fanciful, like the hypnotizing Now dashboard from Sprint. The page is filled with data about now, with a background track of various statistics and slogans playing. Despite its limited practical use, the page serves as an apt example of both the data available and the ensuing information overload. As the voice instructively shares, “please keep your hands inside the moment at all times.”2