more education hypocrisy

We all have heard that Barack and Michelle Obama have been school-shopping for their 2 daughters. Sidwell Friends ($28,000/yr) and Georgetown Day ($29,000/yr.) are the two contenders in who will educate 10-year-old Malia and seven-year-old Sasha. I guess the very well-funded but horrible DC public schools are not in the running. But what sort of education does Mr. Obama want the rest of the country's children to obtain? Look no further than the credentials of Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University education professor and one of Obama’s advisors, (who) will head the Education Department transition team that is tasked with drafting policy for the incoming administration.

Darling-Hammond is a self-described advocate of “progressive” education, the methods of which she believes are “grounded in a deep sense of curricular intentions, arise from compelling questions, and include rigorous intellectual challenges such as critical thinking and problem solving across disciplines.” The best progressive educators “engage in a dialectic between the subject and the student” and in so doing, the student “is constantly moved to a broader and more thoughtful place in the curriculum.”

Such eye-glazing edu-speak manifests itself in a staunch opposition to traditional testing — i.e., testing that might ask history students, say, to answer specific questions about history. And indeed, Darling-Hammond, when she was a professor at Columbia University in the early 1990s, worked to move New York’s Regents Exams away from paper-and-pencil tests and toward personalized performance portfolios that she said would give pupils “multiple ways to show their learning.” Such as demonstrating what they know about George Washington through, say, a song-and-dance routine rather than an essay. (Liam Julian, National Review)

Bet you $5 that Mrs. Darling-Hammond wouldn't be allowed within 200 feet of either of the prestigeous private schools the Obamas are considering. Because if she was, the caliber of education there would be as dismal as it is in the rest of the district.