May 4, 2010

The State of Education: Same as It Ever Was

I'm glad to discover that an education blogger can take a five month sanity break and come back to find out that things really haven't changed at all.  Good news for me for sure; not so good for education though.

I skimmed through about 5000 posts in my news reader and didn't feel particularly compelled to comment, not because some weren't particularly good (or bad), but that I'd just be repeating the same observation I'd made previously.  That gets boring.

And, that, in a nutshell, is the problem in education:  despite the sad state of our education system, there are no significant improvements on the horizon. At least none that haven't been tried in the past, usually under a diferent name, and haven't already failed.

I'm still in favor of blowing up the entire system and starting over.  But, that's not going to happen.  So, in the meantime we are forced to make fun of the dopey, ineffective proposals being floated around and wait for some unexpected groundbreaking change to surface somewhere else that has the effect of blowing up the existing education system.  Kind of how the internet is in the process of blowing up print journalism, brick and mortar retail, cable tv, and the like.

We lack the political will to boot out the entrenched interests in education, so an external force needs to get the ball rolling for us.  We shall see.

In the  meantime, we're stuck making the same obseervations on the same old repackaged reforms that don't go to the root of the problem:  the perverse incentives of the existing command and control system.

In other news, I have about 1000 spam comments in my moderation queue.  Apparently, the spammers have found me. So, I've made some changes to the comment policy.  No more anonymous comments,  Comments are only open for 14 days.  And you have to deal with the captcha nonsense.  Hopefully, that will keep the spammers at bay while letting through the legitimate comments.

So, I think I'm back from hiatus for now.  As long as I stay motivated.  The problem is that doing real abalysis is very much like work.  Certainly too much to do it for free day in and day out.  So we shall see how long it lasts.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Happy to have you back!

-Former NYC Math Teacher (who must now sign in under another name attached to his Google account, though he fully understands and appreciates why)

KDeRosa said...

Good to have you back as well.

The changes have reduced the number of spam comments per day from upwards of twenty to zero.

LynnG said...

Hey Ken -- just realized you are back. Glad I got my comment in under the 14 day window. Now I have to read through all of your other posts.

I've missed your voice, even though I don't always agree with you.

KDeRosa said...

Hi LynnG, I like when people disagree with me -- sometimes they're right. And when they aren't, it gives me a chance to defend my position. So glad to have you back and keep on commenting.