An interesting piece by Steve Nelson via Norm Scott from NYC. Excerpts from Steve Nelson's The Disservice of a 'Rigorous' Education Tests, standards, accountability, economic competitiveness, managers, vouchers, data, metrics... does anyone actually care about children? While multi-billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and Eli Broad talk about tough management and data-driven reform, real children languish in abject poverty. That's unfair enough, but then we also rob them of their childhoods. Everything is about money, even their small lives. Social scientists talk about poor kids' education as an "investment" and act as though the worth of children is in their development as resources for the competitive marketplace. Jean De La Bruyère, a 17th century French moralist and philosopher, once wrote: "Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present -- which seldom happens to us." In the South Bronx or in Grosse Pointe, children are too often deprived of the present. At each end of the economic spectrum, we are pressing children harder and harder in the service of a "rigorous" education. It is not mere semantic coincidence that the word "rigor" is most often paired with the word "mortis." As De La Bruyère wrote, the present seldom happens to us. But the present is all that children have. It's heartbreaking to hear administrators and politicians talk about children as raw material to be crafted into productive cogs in the global economy. Read it all: <http://www.feedblitz.com/t2.asp?/225080/20498591/0/http://susanohanian.org/ show_nclb_atrocities.php?id=4072> http://susanohanian.org/show_nclb_atrocities.php?id=4072