\doc\web\99\04\bracobe.txt Send reply to: "Gerald W. Bracey" From: "Gerald W. Bracey" To: Subject: Re: [wa-ed-deform] State schools chief wants better funding Date sent: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 16:38:51 -0800 I think Bill Spady is no longer speaking to me because in "Final Exam: A Study of the Perpetual Scrutiny of American Education" I argued that "objectives based education" or "mastery learning" or anything like that will INCREASE the differences in achievement among high and low achievers: while the low kids are busy repeating stuff they didn't get the first time through, the upper kids will be getting "enrichment" activities which actually sound, as described by Spady or Bloom, what kids ought to be getting in the first place. Part of that book was published in Technos Quarterly--a publication of the organization that published the book--as "Variance Happens: Get Over It." Any parent of more than one child knows that in his or her gut. I have often wondered out loud if the press for high skills from people like Tucker is a cynical attempt to drive the wages of skilled workers down even more. You hear a lot about labor shortages, but from what I can tell, these occur only in a small range of info-tech jobs and are due to an expansion of the Net and computers and so forth unpredicted by even Bill "640K is all anyone should ever need" Gates. Economists get goofy on this. In a point-counterpoint I have with Arnold Packer in the April Kappan, Packer argues that there is a skills shortage, but notes that the wages of highly skilled workers are falling--those of low skilled workers are falling faster. My question--since I am dumbfounded by his exposition is "How can falling wages indicate a shortage?" -----Original Message----- From: arthur hu To: gbracey@erols.com Date: Tuesday, February 23, 1999 1:11 PM Subject: Re: [wa-ed-deform] State schools chief wants better funding Thanks, we need all the help we can get in exposing ed reform clowns like this. Now if you can only help us take down marc tucker. You know, he's the guy who says that Japan and Germany educate all their kids to a high "Certificate of mastery" standard when in fact no such standard exists. Can you help dispell this notion? Germany splits up its kids into college, factory workers, and menial labor track schools, Japan also uses test scores to divide up kids into high schools of varying quality. You don't believe that all high school students can get a CIM that proves that almost all American students perform at "the highest world class levels" do you? Send reply to: "Gerald W. Bracey" From: "Gerald W. Bracey" To: "Arthur Hu" Copies to: Subject: Re: [wa-ed-deform] State schools chief wants better funding Date sent: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 11:44:20 -0800 > ÐÏ  ࡱ Arthur Hu arthurhu@halcyon.com Education Deform Critic Index: http://www.leconsulting.com/arthurhu/index/edreform.htm listserver: http://www.egroups.com/list/wa-ed-deform Send reply to: "Gerald W. Bracey" From: "Gerald W. Bracey" To: , , Subject: Re: [wa-ed-deform] Bracey is a critic of OBE! Date sent: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 13:50:20 -0800 As usual, it's more complicated than either/or. I'm against the kind OBE formulated by Spady because it increases differences among kids--the rich get richer, the poor poorer. It seems reasonable to specify outcomes and work back from there to how you might get to those outcomes. The problem with OBE as I see it is that the conception got corrupted--one of the few times I'm likely to agree with Checker Finn. Spady is very clear that his outcomes have to do with cognitive achievements as manifest in changes in behavior. The list of outcomes in, say, Virginia and PA went much beyond that. When I first saw Virginia's list, I said it was nice, warm and fuzzy, but I was sure happy I didn't have to develop tests for some of that fuzzy stuff (the student will appreciate...etc.). Others objected to the content of the fuzziness and I think, esp. in PA., they were right to do so. The affective outcomes were not only fuzzy, they were questionable. Similarly, I object to school-to-work not so much because it extends the domain of the state over the individual and insures a docile workforce, although it might well do that too, and that would be unfortunate, but because it confuses the distinction between education and training. Schools should be about education. It also affords business and industry a break they shouldn't get. Compared to many other countries, the investment of business and industry in on-the-job training is downright miserly. And most of that goes to the already highly skilled--in other countries it's much more equitably split among skill levels and job types.