Camille Paglia is always an interesting read, even when she’s way out there, IMO. In the run-up to the election she was an Obama supporter and strongly supportive of Sarah Palin. Here’s the opening of her latest Salon piece:
But then I gulped when Obama also pledged educational reform by putting state-of-the-art computers in every classroom. Groan. Computers alone will never solve the educational crisis in this country: They are tools and facilitators, not primary conveyors of knowledge. Packing his team with shiny Harvard retreads, Obama missed a golden opportunity to link his public works project with a national revalorization of the trades. Practical training in hands-on vocational skills is desperately needed in this country, where liberal arts education has become a soggy boondoggle, obscenely expensive and diluted by propaganda and groupthink.
Ron Bancroft writes in Portland Press Herald about Maine’s stall in implementing a standards-based diploma:
So where is the outrage? Last week I suggested that 30 percent to 40 percent of Maine’s high school seniors would likely not be getting a diploma this year, if that diploma were based on achieving state standards as embodied in Maine’s Learning Results.
If this is the case, and state testing results suggest I am not far off, we aren’t doing our kids any favors by graduating them unprepared for college or work.
My column was prompted by the report from the Department of Education’s Diplomas Stakeholders Group.
That group recommended an approach to a Learning Results-based diploma that would not be implemented until 2016.
This is an embarrassingly delinquent timetable from a state that pioneered state standards 11 years ago with an approach that was to be fully implemented by 2008. In many other states that started after us, such as Massachusetts, Virginia and North Carolina, a standards-based approach has been fully implemented.
In a Bangor Metro interview, our governor defends school consolidation and in fact speaks as though it’s already all implemented. And it’s been a good process.
The state will realize the $36 million. It is in the law, and state subsidy has been adjusted accordingly. All over the state, regions are predicting savings on the local level, modest or nonexistent in the first year or two, but substantial in subsequent years. In the areas where they have gone into the process assuming there will be no savings, they have not found them. In areas where they have put quality educational opportunities for students at the top of the list, they have found ways to save money in noninstructional areas so they can continue to offer the highest quality educational opportunities.