From: kirby urner
On 9/27/06, kirby urner wrote:
So Arthur, in thinking more about your well-founded suspicion of the profit motive, when it comes to curriculum writing and standard setting (test making), I'm thinking we should go over in what ways the public schools, pre college, are already subject to commercial moneymaking.
I said nothing about the test making industry, i.e. ETS. Obviously there's a lot more to this picture than just textbooks, plus New York isn't necessarily a center for K-12. I hear the McGraw-Hill division I used to work for moved to Deluth or someplace, maybe Omaha.
Glad to have that toned down a bit. We are more ethnic (and sensitive about it) then folks tend to be in Portland, for example. Careful - speculating about the influence of business folks based in New York in particular might bring you allies you shouldn't want. And there will be no possibility of a truce, with me. Maybe, in fact, us business folks in New York lost our sense of humor about fringe movements sometime last century, and perhaps our discussions do reflect some of that undertone.
Get the Ed Department to sign off on Everyday Math, and you've got your gravy train for the next fifteen years minimum (but good doobie bureaucrats need job security too, so stamp it with "more study needed").
Just folks.. Happens that the brightest, most committed, most energetic high school math teacher I know is not beating his head against some pillar in the Bowery, or wearing a pirate hat - for that matter. He first co-authored a high school trigonometry textbook with a Russian gentlemen, now professor at a US university, acknoledged to be a Major Living Mind in mathematics. They, I assure you, were only going to write the text book they were willing to write - the publisher's ability to cover costs being the publisher's problem. He was then recruited by the National Science Foundation, to advise on grants related to pre-college mathematics education. Yes he is Old School. Knows nothing about programming and seeing PyGeo didn't seem to light him on fire. But there are years of classroom work, organizing math competitions all over the world, etc. and etc. - all on short pay, at work in his look at things. And he is nobody's lackey, I assure you. The NSF was doing its job quite well in recognizing and recruiting him. In my own small cross-sectional view of things - gained from the simple fact of waking up in the morning and going about my business - I have seen this kind of story repeated enough that my own cynical, pessimistic tendencies have been tamed a bit. OTOH, this same cross-section has included an intense and realistic view of what makes a business tick. And I have no personal problem seeing myself as part of that clockwork. I won't belabor the issue, other then to repeat my conviction that this ticking, brought too close to the classroom, is and is not what it might seem to be. It is a finely tuned clock, indeed - except that it is now attached to a detonator. It is nobody's intention that this be the way it is. But that doesn't help. And something or other about breakfeast cereals, but I'm not sure what. Art