A Teachable Moment

News today that as many expected, student scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) were flat for both English and math. That probably means that we can expect the educationist-commercial complex to gin up their propaganda machine to convince a gullible public that if we just test our children a bit more and threaten their teachers that if their student scores don’t improve they will either be subjected to an administrative harassment procedure or fired – if we just sweat the kids and teachers a bit more, we will be able to compete with any of the high achieving school systems of the world. We won’t hear much, if anything at all, about the effects of our economic problems on student achievement. As for the achievement gap, surely bad teachers are responsible for that too.