Two Items That Are Worthy Of Consideration

Respectfully Submitted for your consideration are two interesting news items that I ran across earlier today:

Joanne Jacobs has a welcomed piece of news. She is telling us that due to the requirements of The No Child Left Behind Act, students in three grades will be tested in Science starting in the 2007-2008 school year.

This means that many districts (such as ours here in California's "Imperial" Valley) that have been letting instruction in Science "slide" for the past few years in favor of the "tested" subjects of math and reading will now have to begin teaching science once again. (We can't help but like this news here in the Wonk family. Our 13-year-old daughter, the TeenWonk, got very little science or history in grades 4 and 5, much to our disgust...) -------------------------Over at Number 2 Pencil, Kimberly is letting us know about about an article by The Columbia Journalism Review about the No Child Left Behind Act and education reform. Interestingly, the piece states how reporters that write education-related articles don't have a very good grasp about many aspects of NCLB.

Kimberly made some very important observations about the Journalism Review article: (the emphasis are mine)

The authors clearly understand that education reporting improves substantially when stories are presented "straight up from local schools, where the voices of teachers and children bring the national policy home to readers," and when reporters dig "behind the data, analyzing their origins and putting a human face on their percentages."

And yet the one word you won't find in this article is "blog."

Nothing about edublogs, blogs by teachers, blogs by parents interested in reform, blogs by parents who are fed up and now homeschooling, even blogs by psychometricians (like me). Nothing about the revolution in education reporting that has resulted from those fed up with biased and uninformed reporting.

In light of recent controversies involving Dan Rather and the key role played by blogs in bringing about his early retirement, we too, found it incredible that blogging was not even mentioned by the Columbia piece. --------------------------An Invitation: All writers and readers of education-related posts are invited to contribute to the ninth edition of The Carnival of Education. Please send your submissions to: owlshome [at] earthlink [dot] net. We should receive your contributions no later than 10:00 PM (Pacific) Tuesday, April 5, 2005. The Carnival midway will open here at the 'Wonks Wednesday morning. Get our easy-to-follow entry guidelines here. View the latest edition of the Carnival there.

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