Everything we're doing is wrong

I'm late to the party: most of the people who know stuff about stuff have already talked about this.  But the National Research Council has done national research on incentives and high-stakes testing.  The short version is that they find them wanting.

My favorite line from the summary: "The tests that are typically used to measure performance in education fall short of providing a complete measure of desired educational outcomes in many ways." 

Larry Ferlazzo, as always, has an excellent collection of other people's writing on the topic.  He promises his own commentary presently; he's usually insightful, and I usually agree with him.

I've written before about incentives, but I'm having a hard time finding those posts.  This new report jves with the other research I've posted here, though.  Incentives and disincentives are only good for forcing compliance.  They are worse than useless at encouraging creative problem solving, which is a big chunk of what teaching is.  Teaching is also compliance with best practices, gathering data, good assessments, effective instruction, etc.  But how to apply those materials?  What about the students that nothing seems to work for?  Creatively applying what we know works is how we get the best results.

More stealing toys

Editing edition

I'm going to link to Larry Ferlazzo's post about photo editing tools.  He talks about Wylio and ImgOps.

While I'm at it, a user review of another website I stole from Mr. Ferlazzo.  I've mentioned the website CutMP3 before as a potentially interesting piece of software.  I haven't had a chance to play with it, but one of my students (at my recommendation) used it in a "book soundtrack" presentation.  He said that it was easy, took him not much longer to do than just assembling the playlist would have, and played back perfectly in Windows Media Player.  No word yet on whether it plays in iTunes, but my student gave me all of his source files.  Mac tests are forthcoming.

Incidentally, Mr. Ferlazzo cites TechCrunch as his original source for the picture-editing software.  I think I'll try following them for a little while, too.