Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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In place of these old assumptions, researchers are positing new ways of looking at learning that promote: • engaged, meaningful learning and collaboration involving challenging and real-life tasks; and • technology as a toll [requirement] for learning, communication, and collabora tion. The traditional learning model is not relevant to real student needs. These attributes contrast sharply with the discrete, low-level skill, content, and as sessment methods that traditional ways of learning favor. The new workplace requirements for learning are incompatible with instruction that assumes the teacher is the information giver and the student a passive recipient. The new requirements are at odds with testing programs that assess skills that are useful only in school. Technology in support of outmoded educational systems is counterproductive. The reliance on standarized tests is ludicrous. Technology works in school not because tests scores increase, but because technology empowers new solutions. There are no definitive answers about the effectiveness of technology in boosting student learning, student readiness for workforce skills, teacher productivity, and cost ef fectiveness. True, some examples of technology have shown strong and consistent positive results. But even powerful programs might show no effects due to myriad methodological flaws. It would be most unfortunate to reject these because standardized tests showed no significant differences. Instead, measures should evaluate individual technologies against specific learning, collaboration, and communication goals. What is effective learning and how can it be measured?… [Barbara Means of SRI International] identified seven variables that, when present in the classroom, indicate that effective teaching and learning are occurring: These classrom variables are: • children are engaged in authentic and multidisciplinary tasks; • assessments are based on students’ performance of real tasks; • students participate in interactive modes of instruction; • students work collaboratively; • students are grouped heterogeneously; • the teacher is a factilitator in learning; and • students learn through exploration. We took these variables and reorganized them into a set of eight categories of learn ing: tasks, assessment, instruction, learning, context, grouping, teacher roles, and student roles. Centralized systems are likely to inhibit learning to the extent that they use the transfer mode of learning and instruction. This model assumes that the central source holds most of the important information and that it is the student’s job to transfer the information from this central source to his or her location and “learn” it. [Ed. Note: The above text provides an excellent, if not depressing, overview of the transfor mation from education to workforce training. The timing of this article is interesting in light of other reports, some of which are referred to in this book, exposing the limits of computer technology in the teaching of the important basic academic skills. The above article also admits the lack of supportive research on the “effectiveness of technology in boosting student learning,”