Care to Really Understand Federal Education Policy?

In my humble opinion, Jo Boaler‘s, recent Education Week column, Where Has All the Knowledge Gone?
The Movement to Keep Americans at the Bottom of the Class in Math, is one of the most important pieces of education journalism in some time.

Is this just a coincidence? Can President Bush really have been so badly advised as to ignore almost all of the research that could have informed the report, or was there something more deliberate at work? How acceptable is it for a government to control the forms of knowledge that are released to the public?

Dr. Boaler is a former Stanford University Mathematics Professor who clearly and succinctly documents how “science” and “research” are used as a blunt weapon by the United States Department of Education. Boaler describes how the President’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel was constrained from publishing the best advice for improving mathematics education. Such ideological interference in mathematics education is consistent with the Reading First mess at the center of No Child Left Behind.

Gary Stager

Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.