[lbo-talk] NCLB bites the University?

[Jeffrey Fisher]

oops. i didn't mean to send this at this point in the conversation. it was
sitting as a draft and i was going to let it go for teh same reason i never
sent it, which is that i'm not sure what i think about it and whether it
adds anything at all to the conversation.

so i sure hope you'll ignore it. :-o

sorry

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 9:10 PM, Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com>wrote:


>
>
> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 11:51 PM, <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
>> A little reality check from the front lines.  All of the regional college
>> and university accrediting bodies in the U. S. require assessment activities
>> to be faculty driven.
>
>
> Who all speak the same gobbledy-gook. I've seen it first-hand at two
> institutions, and the conversations are identical. This is not because there
> is some grand consensus about what constitutes learning and how it is best
> done, or teaching and how it is best done. It's because the language comes
> ready to-hand [my brain thinks heidegger, all of a sudden . . .], because
> this is all the stuff we're supposed to be talking about, and we know it.
> Talk about Foucauldian . . .
>
> Beyond that, I don't have much to add to what others have said already,
> except that we can't forget the way that standardization is about rendering
> education efficient. But mostly it's not. And it's far from clear to me why
> this inefficiency should be understood as a flaw or weakness (except, of
> course, that inefficiency costs money). Alan's post actually makes this
> point very well.
>
> I respect your experience, Miles, and I have not been teaching full-time as
> long as you have (although I have been formally teaching in one way or
> another for almost twenty years), but I really find it hard to imagine the
> standardized test that gets at anything meaningful in terms of either
> learning or teaching (and that's another way of talking that gets under my
> skin). That's not because I think in principle you can't tell whether
> someone has learned something. It's because it's a bad way of getting at
> learning. If we would give up on the chimera of efficiency in education and
> in assessing learning, we might have a shot at figuring something meaningful
> out. And that's even leaving aside the command and control issues noted by
> Doug, Carrol, Michael . . .
>
>
>