Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure

It only took the majority of educators a matter of weeks to make the same determination. The link to the article in The Federalist.

Critical Thinking

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/category/education/

Rethinking Rewards in School

Read full article at the Mind/Shift website:

"Rewards can be seductive, according to Marvin Berkowitz, a professor of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and author of You Can’t Teach Through a Rat. They’re easy, they seem to work—particularly with the hard-to-reach kids—and many teachers are taught according to the behaviorist model, which posits that people repeat conduct that’s reinforced and avoid what’s punished. “We are breeding a new generation of kids who are well trained to be reward and recognition torpedoes,” Berkowitz writes.

"But a substantial body of social science research going back decades has concluded that giving rewards for certain types of behavior is not only futile but harmful. In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink identifies seven drawbacks to extrinsic rewards: they cripple intrinsic motivation, limit performance, squash creativity, stifle good conduct, promote cheating, can become habit-forming, and spur a short-term mindset. Giving prizes for routine and mindless tasks can be moderately effective, Pink writes. But offering rewards for those tasks that are “inherently interesting, creative, or noble…is a very dangerous game.” When it comes to promoting good behavior, extrinsic rewards are “the worst ineffective character education practice used by educators,” Berkowitz writes."

In-group Empathy vs. Out-group Empathy

BY ADAM WAYTZ

In fact, there is a terrible irony in the assumption that we can ever transcend our parochial tendencies entirely. Social scientists have found that in-group love and out-group hate originate from the same neurobiological basis, are mutually reinforcing, and co-evolved—because loyalty to the in-group provided a survival advantage by helping our ancestors to combat a threatening out-group. That means that, in principle, if we eliminate out-group hate completely, we may also undermine in-group love. Empathy is a zero-sum game.

Absolute universalism, in which we feel compassion for every individual on Earth, is psychologically impossible. Ignoring this fact carries a heavy cost: We become paralyzed by the unachievable demands we place on ourselves. We can see this in our public discourse today. Discussions of empathy fluctuate between worrying that people don’t empathize enough and fretting that they empathize too much with the wrong people. These criticisms both come from the sense that we have an infinite capacity to empathize, and that it is our fault if we fail to use it.

Dipping a Toe into the Cultural and Policital Morass

"Throughout history, the clash of ideologies was never technically between Left and Right. It was always between authoritarian impulses and groupthink versus individualism and freedom of expression. Authoritarian impulses could be majoritarian, or the tyranny of a minority mob." Sumantra Maitra

Simpler Than SAMR...

...yet pretty much covers the bases and gives plenty of executable examples. Tiers of Technology Integration into the Classroom Indicators found at: http://goo.gl/wGiHv.

 

At War with the Press

Book Review: Lincoln and the Power of the Press 

BY LOUIS P. MASUR
1/30/2017 • AMERICA'S CIVIL WAR MAGAZINE

Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion

 By Harold Holzer, Simon & Schuster 2014, $37.50

Abraham Lincoln understood the power of the press. From early in his career, he subscribed to multiple papers, courted editors and tracked reports of his remarks. Following the debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, he gathered newspaper transcripts of his speeches and had them published. Lincoln so firmly grasped the influence of the press that he became a partner in a German-language paper in Springfield—and concealed his ownership.  Newspapers shaped public opinion and “he who moulds public sentiments,” Lincoln proclaimed, “goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

That insight from 1858 serves as the epigraph for Harold Holzer’s sweeping work. It has been more than 60 years since anyone has written on this vast topic, and for good reason. A study of Lincoln and the press requires biographical expertise as well as knowledge of the history of journalism. Holzer, of course, is a prolific Lincoln scholar. But earlier in his career he also was a newspaper reporter and press secretary. In this book, he has drawn on a lifetime of experience and study to produce the definitive work on the subject.

Throughout the book, Holzer weaves together Lincoln’s story with an account of the careers of many prominent editors, perhaps none more important than Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald and Henry J. Raymond of The New York Times. Greeley provoked and embarrassed the administration; Bennett once called Lincoln a “joke incarnated”; Raymond supported William Seward in 1860. Each editor was represented in a clippings file that Lincoln labeled “Villainous articles.” The story of Lincoln’s relationship with these men, and how it shaped the war effort, constitutes a central focus of the book.

In one well-known example from August 1862, Greeley excoriated the president in an editorial for not moving against slavery, and Lincoln responded publicly with a piece in the conservative National Intelligencer reassuring Americans that he would not interfere with slavery unless he had to, yet at that moment he had already prepared a draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Holzer labels the episode an example par excellence of “Lincoln’s genius for synchronized press manipulation.”

Tempestuous Greeley could be kept in check; Democratic editors opposed to the war posed a more alarming threat. Administration efforts to censor the press included controlling telegraph lines, suppressing military news, shutting down presses and imprisoning newspapermen. Lincoln made few overt comments on the subject in the summer of 1861, as several editors were jailed, but his “silence, defection,  and disinformation,” Holzer notes, amounted to approval. Two years later, again using the device of a published letter, Lincoln defended as constitutional the measures his administration had taken to suppress the rebellion.

Through the lens of Lincoln and reportage, Holzer offers an important perspective on the war and has unearthed fresh material. An added pleasure of the volume is the numerous portraits and cartoons that are not simply illustrative but are made integral to the story he tells. Lincoln and the Power of the Press deserves a wide audience and a place on the list of essential Civil War books.