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Category Archives: Ed Reform
Testing in Florida: Welcome to the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss (Almost)
Among the many claims that Ron DeSantis made when running for Governor of Florida was that he would do away with the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] and their associated high-stakes testing. Both were, for good reason, … Continue reading
Posted in Ed Reform, Politics
Tagged education, education-reform, standardized-testing, teaching, testing
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Face it. Our K-12 Math Instruction Is an Almost Complete Failure. Here’s Why.
The problem is not with how Mathematics is taught in public schools per se, as Education Deformers think, but with our general approach to the subject in almost all our K-12 schools, public, charter, and private. Our approach is not … Continue reading
The Future Fascists Fashion
“I try to imagine the world, our society, if the [school] privatizers get their way. Kids will be sorted by race, religion, and ethnicity, never interacting with anyone different from themselves. The homeschoolers will know only what their parents know. … Continue reading
Posted in Ed Reform, Politics, Teaching Literature and Writing
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Why Repugnicans Support “School Choice” and a Look Back at the Repugnican National Convention
Republicans face an existential threat. Polling shows that young people oppose them, often by overwhelming numbers, on every issue. And, of course, the country is becoming less white. So, if they are to keep from going the way of the … Continue reading
Posted in Ed Reform, Politics, Religion, Trump (Don the Con)
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from Flor-uh-duh Bob’s EZ Entrepreneurial Guide to Charter Riches!
As a would-be artist of the con, you follow in a great American tradition going all the way back to John D. Rockefeller’s father, the Dr. Marvel medicine show guy who traveled the West selling Everything Cures. Many possibilities for … Continue reading
Posted in Ed Reform, Humor, Technology
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Education Reform as Religious Cultism
Numerology is pseudoscience involving numbers. Lots of Americans, for example, believe in what they call angel numbers—what you see when look at a clock and it reads 1:11 or 2:22 or 3:33, etc. Each of these repeated sequences of the … Continue reading
Posted in Ed Reform, Epistemology
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What K-12 Textbooks Are Like Now: A Sample lesson on the Declaration of Independence
[Begin lesson.] We hold (Did you know that Thomas Jefferson invented an automatic letter copying device? It’s pictured here. Higher-Order Thinking: how are letters different from email?) these truths (Cross-curricular Connections–Math: Truth tables are used in logic. Al-Farabi, pictured here, … Continue reading
Posted in Ed Reform, Humor, Teaching Literature and Writing
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Learning Theories, Models, and Techniques
NB: The following are all either instructional design models or can be adapted to create or at least to inform instructional design models. The list is far from complete, and the definitions are necessarily brief and so, in many cases … Continue reading
Posted in Ed Reform, Teaching Literature and Writing
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The Promise of Ed Tech
Ed tech companies are, of course, trying to take advantage of the pandemic to sell politicians and administrators on replacing teachers with educational technology. So, thought I would try my hand at writing some ad copy for these companies: Help … Continue reading
Combating Standardized Testing Derangement Syndrome (STDs) in the English Language Arts
The dirty secret of the standardized testing industry is the breathtakingly low quality of the tests themselves. I worked in the educational publishing industry at very high levels for more than twenty years. I have produced materials for all the … Continue reading
Bob Shepherd | Praxis 