Coverage of the Reform of American Public Education

Dropout Nation

The Conversation at Dropout Nation: Sandy Kress on Accountability, Waivers, Common Core; and the Power of No Child

September 20, 2013 5:08 pm September 20, 2013

On this edition of The Conversation, RiShawn Biddle chats with No Child Left Behind Act mastermind Sandy Kress about why accountability matters, the consequences of the Obama Administration’s efforts to eviscerate No Child’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions on advancing systemic reform, why Common Core supporters must remember that standards won’t work without common measures of achievement, and what must be done to end the soft bigotry of low expectations for poor and minority children.

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2 Comments

Bruce William Smith says:

September 22, 2013 at 2:41 pm

(1) In retrospect, it continues to amaze that Texas, of all states, ever gained any ascendancy in influencing the direction of American education. (2) Mr. Kress, and those who think like him, are enormously susceptible to what Professor Daniel Kahneman calls the availability bias, that is, the practice of substituting the answers to difficult questions (in this instance, “Has education gotten better?”) with those more readily answered (in this instance, “Have NAEP scores gone up?”), and they neglect opportunity costs (in this instance, “What was the price paid for those raised scores, and was it worth paying?”). This immediately calls to mind the writing alleged to have been on the blackboard in Albert Einstein’s office that read, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” (3) America never produced world-class standards in the 20th century, and the Common Core aren’t world-class either, especially in mathematics, since they will continue to leave our students two years behind their foreign competitors in learning calculus, and this will end up costing the next generation an absurd amount of remedial debt, which is the main legacy we are leaving them.
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