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The author, Aaron Swartz, harps on the fact that the film doesn't show enough teaching and instead "hides behind charts and graphs." The author would rather th
by rywang 16y ago
The author, Aaron Swartz, harps on the fact that the film doesn't show enough teaching and instead "hides behind charts and graphs." The author would rather the film show "terrified kids up on the big screen." This seems to me like favoring anecdotes over data.
The author also attributes the crisis in American education to standardized tests. He doesn't back this up. Standardized tests work well in countries like China and India, from which so many of our engineering grad students hail. Granted that no standardized test is perfect, it boggles my mind that Swartz would call it the educational crisis.
- blasdel 16y agoThose brilliant Chinese and Indian grad students are cream skimmed off the top — there's not just millions of merely good students in universities in their home countries, but also two billion mediocre students doing manual labor.
- yummyfajitas 16y agoIf standardized tests didn't work (i.e., didn't separate good students from bad ones), how could they be used to skim the cream off the top?
- aik 16y agoI don't think there is any proof that it is specifically the standardized tests that cause that minority to succeed, but rather the value parents and culture places on education. That makes all the difference.