This notice is on the airing of a Jonathan Kozol interview — “US Apartheid Education & Flaws in NCLB” — will be repeated at midnight tonight on CSPAN’s BookTV program.
Another showing: next Sat., 9/12, 9 a.m. and apparently there
Here’s how someone described it:
[Kozol] IS A SHARP CRITIC OF THE CLASS AND RACE BASED EDUCATION SYSTEM IN THE USA.
He also challenges many of the “reform” policies such as the NCLB “teach to the test mania”, rote learning, Charter schools and vouchers. He is not afraid to take on Sec. Duncan and others who want to use a business model for education, blaming teachers and their unions , and replacing many experienced African American teachers with White “Kinderwonder” middle class recent Ivy League graduates who will only stay in teaching a few years as they have in New Orleans and Chicago, etc.
He points out how KIPP and Green Dot charter schools cherry pick their elite students while leaving most other poor children in run- down Ghetto schools.
Grassroots Education Movement 
You can watch this program at this link:
http://www.booktv.org/Program/10694/In+Depth+Jonathan+Kozol.aspx
Posted by Anonymous | September 9, 2009, 11:38 amThanks for this. I wasn’t sure of what the benefits of NCLB were. While stddzaraining aims to create just that standards it sort of plops a grid onto a system without actually changing the system. Excelence generally emerges rather differently, doesn’t it? On the other hand, there is clearly some need to figure out how to measure the quality of a school, and benchmarks for student progress. Are there alternative models out there being used in the US school system? Here in Germany there are various tests as students move through a variegated school system, the big test being after 4th grade when they are tested for whether they will be able to handle the academically oriented Gymnasium (5th-12th or 13th grade, depending on your location in Germany) or whether the technically oriented Realschule is the better choice (5th-10th grade) with Hauptschule (5th-8th, 9th or 10th grade) and Sonderschule (for children with special needs) being the last resort, really. These tests are run by the Bundesle4nder (Bavaria, Swabia our federal states). Each school type allows its graduates to try and enter the next higher one, so doing well in the standardized leaving exam is a gateway, opening up essential opportunities for children. I record English listening comprehension exercises for the tests given to Haupt/Realschule students in Bavaria, and they are multiple choice, so there is some standardization.I took the Abitur (the leaving exam for Gymnasium) at the German School in Washington. It contained aggregated grades from internal assessment by our teachers and written and oral exams that were also administered internally, but supervised by the German state. Our resulting grade wasn’t anything that could be evaluated numerically, like the SAT. I don’t think that has changed. Now, however, lots of universities are instituting their own entrance exams for skills in the target field, eg. English
Posted by Eldar | February 9, 2014, 3:29 pm