Andrew Delbanco:

The more one ponders the statistics, the more murky their meaning becomes.

Whatever the merits of this or that testing regime or this or that curriculum, the only way to break up the impasse would be for governments and philanthropies to put in place real incentives and rewards for talented, well-educated, passionately committed teachers -- on whom, as everyone knows, everything finally depends.

Have you seen The Class?

Malcom Gladwell:

We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about.

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing -- what one researcher calls "withitness." It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.

Tom Friedman:

The best way to learn how to learn is to love to learn, and the best way to love to learn is to have great teachers who inspire.

Charles McGrath:

In practically all the foxhole memoirs there is a common villain: standardized testing, which the authors agree has been so overemphasized that it is now an obstacle to the very education it was supposed to measure.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Dorothy Sayers (via Alan Jacobs):

However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And today a great number -- perhaps the majority -- of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out our research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits -- yes, and who educate our young people -- have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the Scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning -- the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane -- that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or "looks to the end of the work."

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers -- they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

Gertrude Himmelfarb:

It is said that we need the best as a measure against which to test the second-best, to show us how far we are deviating from the best. In this sense, the best is the ideal to which the second-best aspires. But if the ideal is impractical because inconsonant with human nature, how or why should we aspire to it? The case for the second-best goes beyond practicality. More serious is the fact that the attempt to realise the unrealisable is likely to be pernicious.

Gladwell again:

Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can't but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to accept that there's nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?

Dreams of Better Schools