Black/Rose

While watching Lewis Black's video on education I agreed with him mostly. He pointed out that our confidence as American students were high even though our test scores compared to other countries were pretty low. He noted that there was a school built for ½ billion, I believe that the building itself and the looks of the school shouldn’t matter- the education should!! One thing that I found ridiculous was the comparison of how much the United States spends on incarcerated people versus what they spend on our children's education. Prospect.org states that "In the 2009-2010 academic year, state budget cuts forced the Houston Independent School District to manage a projected $10 million shortfall. However, in the preceding year, Texas spent over $175 million to imprison residents from just 10 neighborhoods in Houston. In Houston, of the six schools deemed lower-performing, five are in neighborhoods with the highest rates of incarceration. By contrast, of the 12 schools considered higher-performing, eight are in neighborhoods with the lowest incarceration rates."

Two things that stuck out to me from Mike Rose's blog, one was "to stop making the standardized test score the gold-standard of student achievement and teacher effectiveness. In what other profession do we use a single metric to judge goodness? Imagine judging competence of a cardiologist by the average of her patients’ cardiograms." I think it is unfair for teacher's to be judged on how well there students do on testing. There might be numerous thinks that can make a student bad at testing, and one of them NOT be the teaching. The other thing that stuck out was his statement "To ensure that people who actually know a lot about schools will appear on Oprah and will be consulted by politicians and policy makers. When President Obama visited my home state of California, the person he met with to talk about education was Steve Jobs." It completely blows my mind that politicians and policy makers would think that meeting with someone who has no idea about education would be a good way to help plan for America's education. Steve Jobs is a brilliant man however, i would prefer someone who has actually taught our children to help us as a nation figure out what is the best way to help out education system.

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