What`s fascinating is the market`s obsession with junk.
Lesson #1-they don`t care what works!

Those of us who find this unbelievable are also over it-we see it as the status quo.
Education has become like Wall Street.

I`m not referring to teachers ,like us,they are caught in the claws of administration and Ivory Towers who haven`t taught for 30 years and remain completely unaware that their gospel is applied crap.

I think that direct instruction and drill is a lot more work; consequently educators are looking for all kinds of escapes routes from it. 
PD days (of which we have one more added in Ontario) and the junk posted above are examples of work avoidance.

Raw, Blatant Self Interest In The Education Industry Ensures Bad Practices

What is so striking about these 10 “Trends To Watch” is that, largely, they are variations on the theme — Ensuring Job Security For Education Industry Workers. Though at least 7 “trends” have been fully discredited by research and failures from past practice they continue to serve a useful purpose in ensuring stability to a threatened field.  Both home education and the emerging alternatives to non-public schools (charters, education savings accounts, vouchers, etc.)  are threats.

Seeing the threats, the industry conspires to retain their steady input of students by securing parental cooperation.  This is done by any means necessary — bamboozlement, sweet-talk, etc.  Few parents have any idea of the long-standing duration of these failed practices:  But they sound so good — differentiated learning, for example, seems so helpful when we want all children to learn.

The conspiracy and collusion are real.  Keeping the status quo — the monopoly compulsory schooling and free child-care system — guarantees the jobs of the biggest government employment agency going.  Think — Ministry personnel, unions, school boards, labor relations, school bus drivers, text book publishers, teachers/consultants/remedialists, etc., etc.

The education industry illustrates the biggest disconnect ever between rational thinking and research supported evidence and the prevailing decision-making based on craven needs of the workers in the system.  (A Nobel Prize in Economics would surely come to someone intrepid enough to pursue this line of enquiry!)

The sooner we get true choices in education the sooner these myths, false beliefs and discredited practices will be left — deservedly — behind.

But, let’s pause a moment:  Is it the education industry alone that nurtures bad practices?  NO — let’s remember that our political leaders who make laws and policies are also reluctant to disrupt the status quo. The uneducated and the illiterate are a sizeable voting bloc that is worth cultivating.  http://www.educationviews.org/i-love-poorly-educated/

Snares To Keep On Excluding Parents

As clarification to my previous post about the self-serving nature of these faddish “trends” obviously in my first paragraph I meant that alternatives to public schools (not as was in the post “alternatives to non-public schools) are threats to the dominant, entrenched public schools.  Wish we, as consumers, had more choices such as vouchers, ESAs, etc., as a number of American states are now installing.

Also, to expand on the nature of these trends, which are seen as teacher feedback to a poll or questionnaire done by the Ontario College of Teachers.  It should be seen that teachers themselves are largely unaware of the negative feedback (research and anecdotal-wise) relating to these practices.  This poll verifies that either through school culture, teacher training, professional development, or other factors, teachers still persistent in believing (and likely practicing) these discredited “trends”.  Fads, in other words.

Again, my call is for greater choices.  Both for parents as consumers, and for teachers as producers.  Gravitating to schools that practice effective, proven methods by parents and teachers would start eroding the damaging prevalence of inappropriate methods. 

How can so many teachers be duped by this folly? Where did their common sense go?

One only need pin up a filter called “the history of unionized education” and its evolving impact on the devolution of substantive education. Unfortunately, it is this simple.

The unintended consequences of an educational scene dominated by unions is what we have now.  It isn’t necessarily a conspiracy, just the inevitable consequence of unions taking over the educational agenda and becoming more and more oblivious to the interests of their clients’ clients. 

I would suggest that there is an inverse relationship between the rise of the tutoring business and the decline of the overall quality of public education which will also be inverse to the dominance curve of education unions.

Ditto to unionized public service unions that are barred from striking which are fully insensitive to the plight of small communities saddled with service costs which are closely linked to the cost of the same services in the richest municipalities in the province.

Both of these “union related” divergences from reality issues are fundamental problems that remain to be solved. Or will they come unintended coffin nails in the evolution of modern society ?

Oblivious to the client`s clients-yes

However-the teacher and speech pathologist is not
and they desperately want to help and are staggered by the lack of money for resources and training-also the aloofness for desired improvement.
I talk to them regularly in my field.
It seems that the leadership has no clothes-that is where it is mainly political manipulation!