Dodging responsibility for our children: Reducing learning to test scores

We speak with Samuel E. Abrams of Teachers College, Columbia University. The root problems in K12 education — including poverty-related stress and underpaid and underprepared teachers — are pervasive and expensive to fix. So instead, the U.S. has  adopted a “commercial mindset,” measuring success through standardized test scores and increasingly outsourcing school management to for-profit and nonprofit corporations. Dr. Abrams explains what we can learn from Finland’s education system. Overview 00:00-00:42 Intros 00:42-03:01 What “education and the commercial mindset” means 03:01-05:26 Examples of for-profit and non-profit privatization  05:26-13:57 Effects of privatization 13:57-20:01 What can be done to enable public education to better meet student needs 20:01-21:45 Separation of church and state 21:45-28:37 Potential positive lessons from business; W. Edwards Deming; rejecting value-added measurement 28:37-32:13 Comparison of U.S. and Finnish education systems 32:13-35:27 Key changes that can be made in U.S. education system 35:27-36:50 Outro  Transcript Click here to see the full transcript of this episode. 

There are no comments yet.

Please log in to write the first comment.