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If you’ve been a reader of my blog for any amount of time, you probably know that I’m all about making the world a better place. I do my best to look every situation in a positive light.
That being said, I’ve grown sick and tired of people thinking that by “joining” the latest movement they are actually making a difference.
Take for example the recent viral campaign for KONY 2012. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a disturbing video of the atrocities in Africa and I found the short film difficult to watch.
The video has gone viral. Millions of tweets. Thousands of likes.
But…
How many people will actually go out of their way to make a difference? What lasting change will occur?
The sad reality is, not much. At least in proportion to how many people claim that they want to help.
As my friend Kari likes to say, “we live in a world of slacktivism.”
Do you think Rosa Parks could have done what she did by simply tweeting or creating a Facebook page?
Of course not.
She created change by deciding that she was tired of how the things were.
She created change by risking her life and standing her ground.
She created change by refusing to move to the back of the bus, despite the potential consequences.
The truth of the matter is, we’ve lost touch of what a real movement is. We’ve lost touch of what it really means to give your all to a cause that matters to you.
Jay Mathews is the Washington Post senior journalist on education. He writes frequently about school reforms. This article appeared February 23, 2012; Chester Finn writes often for Education Gadfly. He wrote about Common Core on March 1, 2012.
Jay Mathews:
Virginia, take a bow.
While Maryland, 44 other states and the District are spending billions of dollars to install new national standards for their schools, Virginia has stuck with the standards it has. Mounting evidence shows Virginia is right, and the others wrong.
Common Core standards are the educational fashion of the moment, but your child’s teacher can name many similar plans that went awry. I was impressed at first with the brain power and good intentions behind the Common Core standards, launched by nongovernmental groups with the support of the Obama administration and governors of both parties. I thought the change would elevate instruction and end the distressing difference between what defined student proficiency in Massachusetts (pretty high) compared with Mississippi (quite low.)
But I have been talking to Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, a national expert on this topic, and read his latest research paper: “Predicting the Effect of Common Core Standards on Student Achievement.” He reviewed the research. He assessed the chances of the Common Core standards making a difference. It turns out this is another big disappointment we should have figured out long ago.
As Loveless notes, there are three main arguments for having all public schools teach the same subjects at the same level of rigor and complexity. First, students will learn more if their learning targets are set higher. Second, students will learn more if the passing grade for state tests are set higher. Third, students will learn more if lesson plans and textbooks are all made more complex and rigorous through required high standards.
Loveless analyzed all available research and found that none of those arguments holds enough validity to risk all that money and effort.
The notion that high-quality standards correlate with hig...
A scorpion, being a very poor swimmer, asked a turtle to carry him on his back across a river. "Are you mad?" exclaimed the turtle. "You'll sting me while I'm swimming and I'll drown." "My dear turtle," laughed the scorpion, "if I were to sting you, you would drown and I would go down with you. Now where is the logic in that?" "You're right!" cried the turtle. "Hop on!" The scorpion climbed aboard and halfway across the river gave the turtle a mighty sting. As they both sank to the bottom, the turtle resignedly said: "Do you mind if I ask you something? You said there'd be no logic in your stinging me. Why did you do it?" "It has nothing to do with logic," the drowning scorpion sadly replied. "It's just my character."
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| Joe Hill |
Prior investigators have asserted that certain group characteristics cause group members to disregard outside information and that this behavior leads to diminished performance. We demonstrate that the very process of making a judgment collaboratively rather than individually also contributes to such myopic underweighting of external viewpoints. Dyad members exposed to numerical judgments made by peers gave significantly less weight to those judgments than did individuals working alone. This difference in willingness to use peer input was mediated by the greater confidence that the dyad members reported in the accuracy of their own estimates. Furthermore, dyads were no better at judging the relative accuracy of their own estimates and the advisor’s estimates than individuals were. Our analyses demonstrate that, relative to individuals, dyads suffered an accuracy cost. Specifically, if dyad members had given as much weight to peer input as individuals working alone did, then their revised estimates would have been significantly more accurate.
