The Echo

I stumbled upon this little piece of deformist heaven and would be remissed if I didn't share it with you all:
http://www.arthurhu.com/index/edgloss.htm  Thank You Arthur Hu, whoever you are, for taking the time to break the education deform culture down so that it can be understood by non-educrats. 

Here's a sampling.  Really just a sampling.  So many more links and deeper explanations and humor can be found through the link above:

• Block Schedule : Education Reform: Arthur Hu's Index
• Another questionable school "reform" program, typically replaces 7 1 hour classes with 4 longer periods on the assumption that you can't learn enough in an hour and too many interruptions.
• Instead of taking math, english, music and PE throughout the year, you take "4x4", four courses in the first half, and four in the second half, or eight for the entire year. Critics say students get bored after an hour and simply waste time, leads to disasterous reductions in academic performance, and just a bad idea.
• Music teachers say students drop out because they can't schedule music throught the year, and the SAT and AP people say it has a terrible effect on math scores as well because you go for a half year without doing any math or science.
• It supposedly is well suited for school to work work assignments, but that makes it even harder to schedule in music or PE.
• Another variation is to teach groups of up to 70 students
• Big Anti-Block Schedule Attack Pieces:
• The Case Against Block Scheduling by Curator: Jeff Lindsay , Studies show students perform worse, and there are problems with retention, attention span, and less time spent teaching.
• More on Block Scheduling Here (with links) http://www.arthurhu.com/index/block.htm

• Constructivism The teacher no longer teaches, the students "construct" their own learning
• Discovery Based Learning Constructivism asks why spend 10 min just teaching kids when they can spend a week "discovering" the pythagorean theorm or that circumf = 2 * Pi r?
• Drill "Drill and Kill": Constructivists believe that practice is bad.
• High Performance Organization Marc Tuckers' term for the "new organization" where every worker performs management functions in the 21st century, but Ford of Mexico does will with 9th grade level workers!
• Higher Order Thinking If you don't get high scores with basic skills, then maybe you should work on higher order thinking instead. If you can figure things out, then you don't actually have to learn or know anything.
• Higher Standards movement Standards not based on fact-based knowledge, promoting whole language and new new math, throwing out norm-based references for new standards with arbitrary cutoff "proficiency" points based on what people think kids can do, not what real kids can do.
• Invented Spelling Don't even try to point out incorrect spelling, they will eventually get it right, in fact, encourage them to make up their own spelling. Teachers can now spot classes that are taught whole language when none of them can spell.
• Job Shadow Spend class time hanging around employees at a real job site instead of spending time learning academic skills.
• Learning Education and Teaching are Out. Learning is "in".
• Reconstitution If students don't study, fire the teachers.
• Standards Based Reform Movement Latest mutation of Outcome Based Education. Led by Marc Tucker's NCEE, a witches brew of OBE, STW, progressivism, constructivism, performance base assessment, and other reforms backed up by blue ribbon commision findings and the best PR money can buy. It covered up to half of children educated in US by mid 1990s.
• Science is just a social construct Who needs objective facts?
• Science Integrated Curriculums Whoopee This Stinks! Mix up all kinds of science instead of distinct "real" Biology, Physics or Chem.
• Site Council Elaborate scam to make it look like your school is making its own decisions, but really a fancy way to insure district policy is rubber stamped at the school level.
• Social Promotion New policy is to ban social promotion, but the alternative is retention, or pretend that everyone performs or can be made to perform at an acceptable level.
• Progressive Education The underlying model for most new reforms. Critics say they are based on Marxism and Socialism in setting equality for all at a very low level.
• Restructuring Our education system is in crisis, and it's not ready for the high-tech 21st century, so lets' toss everything we know about an education system that works, and completely change it with every new fad we can think of. \
• Natural Learning Style :( Studying hard and memorizing lots of facts isn't natural, so we want to discourage underperformers from emulating the nerds who get high grades and test scores "unnaturally".
• Core Knowledge E.D. Hirsch system that students actually need to know content, not just "learning skills for lifelong learning". They should know how to add and divide, and spell, not have to figure it out when they'll need it. A top enemy of reform, up there with Saxon.
• Correct Answer An archaic concept that is damaging to self esteem of students who are judged to have "incorrect" answers. Questions are rated on a "rubric", and often questions which demonstrate mastery of a concept can be given full credit even the the answer is not numerically correct.