this rather sobering reflection on the state of education today from Richard Peck: You can teach children, or you can fear their parents, but you can’t do both. So true. When teachers pander to parents, children lose. They become spoiled, weak, vain, self-indulgent. Parents can’t always demand enough from their children — we are too close, too sympathetic. A good teacher will take a child and force them to do better than they thought they could. And it will cost the child. It will be hard. It will make them work, think, cry even. But it will make them grow.

while informal writing is an integral part of youth culture, teenagers also overwhelmingly understand the importance of good writing: 86 percent of teens consider formal writing skills essential to future success. While today's "screenagers" may offer but cursory glances at web pages that does not mean they discount the importance of a sustained engagement with a Shakespearean drama.

in the best-case scenarios, teachers will use these changes to demonstrate to students the power of the written word and the importance of communicating clearly, and teachers will then give students new tools and strategies to improve their command of prose and persuasion.

Web pages and accompanying multimedia are now integral primary sources for chroniclers and historians of the 21st century.

creating better student assessments, and improving teacher quality

dummy those standards down

rebrand

a delicate process involving poking “lots of tiny holes in the Congressional firewalls.”

the National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions, a nationwide event involving more than 750 colleges and schools.

“Our job is to educate our people in sciences, business, math,”

University officials responded by explaining that the instructors were not teaching “how-to” courses

"the laws have not caught up to technology."

Other patients tell Randall how sexting and texting explicit messages has caused relationship problems, especially after a breakup, when photos might be distributed out of spite, for instance.

"But ultimately," she says, "I think this is merely another case of technology extending an activity or action that young people have engaged in for years, if not beyond that."

And NCLB takes a surprisingly narrow view of "proficiency" itself, measuring it by standardized tests alone. As any teacher could tell you, such tests frequently fail to capture the real achievement – and the real deficiencies – of flesh-and-blood children. But when it comes to assessment, it's Washington's way or the highway.

This is about as close to getting it wrong as I could imagine.

Too bad they couldn't have found room for politics (which is not the same as policy), economics (sorry, finance isn't the same thing, either), demographics, history, cities and urban planning, trade and resources, or war, let alone art, media, psychology, or cultural studies, too.

almost nothing about the consequences

So where to start

More pointedly still: Creating an opposition between "critical thinking" and "reading and discussing," on the one hand, and electronic/social media on the other, is a logical false disjunctive (in plain talk, a false either/or). Any competent teacher can use the new literacy tools to create new possibilities in critical thinking, reading, discussing, and more, that were only dreamt of in pre-Internet philosophies.

Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did. "Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said. Restrain me, quick, before I break something. Because there’s a missing element in this bit of sloppy science that makes me want to throw my beloved laptop through the window. It’s this: the freaking teacher. So let me correct this: “CLUELESSLY wiring classrooms for internet access does not enhance learning.”

It’s totally schooly, and divorced from the authentic uses we put this stuff to in that non-school place called the real world.