Video: Melinda Gates & Diane Ravitch Talk Teacher Evaluation

 

Listen to the Audio or the NewsHour transcript here. Ravitch segment scheduled to air tonight on PBS.

Comments

[Bruce]

Your AM News this morning had several interesting stories, including one on Chinese students flocking to a Michigan high school (just like they would go to one I've been trying to set up here in California). Those students were contrasted, in the comments section following the story, with various types of underachieving American students. I will take the Gates Foundation's point about our needing effective American teachers in all our classrooms; but a major question remains as to how those teachers can get our students to behave more like the Chinese (or other, effective) students in the last years of high school. If our children focus mostly on AP exams and playing computer games in those two years, that behaviour can't compete with that of the students who will get into the schools that our children will wish they had gotten into.

[Sarah]

But I really think there’s a fine line... students in some countries are mistreated. There comes a point where you have to let kids be kids, and under some Asian schooling systems, that’s not a reality.

[Bruce]

I have no problem with letting four-year-old kids be kids; I was primarily focusing on the last two years of high school. If you're letting mid- and late teenagers be kids, I'm afraid you'll find they're still kids, possibly under your roof, in their twenties, thirties . . . . The question is one of when and at what rate children have to grow up. The liberal American parenting style has its virtues, but typically runs into trouble in middle school, which is the age when Western kids more decisively fall behind their Asian peers in terms of achievement (and is also when the major international assessments [PISA and TIMSS] are taken). Many of our children do well in the later years, but by then the majority are behind and disaffected and are near the end of their school careers.