Composition 2.0

detachablehalo:

I have said for quite a while now that standardization and standardized tests erode or eliminate the quality and value of education, instead of increasing it. And doubly so when the standardized scores puts people’s livelihoods (jobs/pay) on the line.  Now it’s being exposed that teachers are cheating to improve scores, and I can’t say that I’m a bit surprised by it.  Once performance is reduced strictly to numbers, it’s only a matter of time before someone figures out ways to pad or alter the numbers.  Note the following quotes:

“I think the broadest issue in the [Atlanta scandal] raises is why many school districts and states continue to have high-stakes testing without rigorous auditing or security procedures,” says Brian Jacob, director of the Center on Local, State and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan. “In some sense, this is one of the least worrisome problems in public education, because it’s fairly easy to fix. The more difficult and troubling behavior would be teaching to the test, which we think of as a lesser form of test manipulation, but which is much harder to detect, and could warp the education process in ways that we wouldn’t like.”

And this is the most frightening statement in the entire article:

“And that’s what ought to alarm us,” adds Ms. Downey, “that these professionals ultimately felt their students could not even pass basic competency tests, despite targeted school improvement plans, proven reforms, and state-of-the-art teacher training.”

(via )

technoccult:

The results of Geoffrey von Maltzahn et al. in their Nature Materials publication reveal that nanoparticles that communicate with each other can deliver more than 40-fold higher doses of chemotherapeutics (anti-cancer drugs) to tumors than nanoparticles that do not communicate can…

technoccult:

MIT and Harvard researchers have developed technologies that could be used to rewrite the genetic code of a living cell, allowing them to make large-scale edits to the cell’s genome. Such technology could enable scientists to design cells that build proteins not found in nature, or engineer…

technoccult:

Grist is calling this a trend, but doesn’t it take three times to make a trend?

Hey, remember the woman threatened with 93 days in jail for growing a garden in her front yard? She could have a cellmate! Dirk Becker of Lantzville, British Columbia turned his scraped-dry gravel pit of a…