Reader says the single most threatening development in K-12 education is the drastic denuding of our academic curricula of crucial content in favor of a single minded focus and emphasis on “process”.
“Content alone will not make our children successful,” Biedron said. “What will? Critical thinking skills, problem-solving skills, collaboration skills and communication skills. Are these skills being taught by Common Core and PARCC? That’s a big question. Education is organic, it’s constantly changing.”
One hates to say this, since he was kind enough to visit Ridgewood, but Mr. Biedron reveals himself to be either a fraud or a pathetic dupe for laying his point out in this way. Who on earth ever suggested or sought to prove that content alone will make our children successful?
His efforts are not in vain, for he has managed to articulate perhaps the mother of all straw man arguments in the field of U.S. K-12 education. A man in his position in the home of a well-educated and savvy Ridgewood resident needs to be pinned down by withering intellectual fire until he concedes that the single most threatening development in K-12 education is the drastic denuding of our academic curricula of crucial content in favor of a single minded focus and emphasis on “process”. This is not even debatable, and the incalculable damage that has already been done to young minds in this country places us so far behind the eight ball in comparison to our global peers (and up until recently, our inferiors) will take two generations to repair, and that only if we reverse course immediately.
Hundreds of our children are having PARCC testing inflicted on them this very day. Just wait till first-hand accounts start rolling in, revealing the embarrassing details of this bureaucratic flight-of-fancy.
I “opted out’ my RHS junior from the PARCC exam (wha’t the point . . . he’s already demonstrated proficiency on the SAT). He reported that most of his friends were also “opted out”. When I dropped him off at the post-PARCC start of the school day, there were dozens of underclassmen walking or being dropped off. Will Ridgewood provide the numbers, by grade, of students who opted out? The opt out option seemed to have picked up steam as time went on and parents looked at the test examples online.