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I asked this question tangentially in another post, but now I’m asking any regular readers to take a second and share any stories about their favorite teacher. Go ahead, it’s cathartic.  I have a few, but the one I always come back to - the one that stands head and shoulders above all others - is Karen Harris. 12th Grade English. Kudos bar to you Ms. Harris.

I think it’s because she opened up a world I never new existed in literature, music, art, compassion, humanity. Up until that point it was sports, sports, sports and heavy metal and after her there was this entire set of interests in life and culture I never knew I had or wanted. And she showed me that.  She will always be analogous to the Renaissance.

So have at it if you will. I’ve been very much thinking about education and teachers of late and how good ones make all the difference in the world.

So the sinkhole of liberal heathenism best known for annoying baseball fans, drunken Kennedy’s, drunken college kids, gay marriage, taxes and Good Will Hunting has one more trick up its sleeve.

Their students are really, really, really good at math and science.

And to say I couldn’t be prouder right now of the students and teachers in Massachusetts is something of an understatement.

Massachusetts students significantly outperformed their peers nationwide on a prestigious math and science exam, putting the state on an elite international tier, according to results released yesterday.

This was actually several days ago, because the article was published in the Boston Globe on Dec. 10. But I digress, it gets better.

In many cases, the state’s impressive showing on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (conducted by Boston College) puts Massachusetts in the same league with Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore - academic heavyweights that have long made US policy-makers fearful of losing an economic competitive edge.

It also bodes well for the state as it tries to develop a more sophisticated workforce in the sciences and emerging technologies.

Oh snap.  Massachusetts actually enter their students as a country.  Minnesota did the same thing, presumably to not have Alabama and Mississippi bring them down (okay a bit obvious joke and not exactly a fair one at that, forgive me).

Of all the countries that took the exam, Massachusetts place second behind only Singapore.  They finished ahead of countries like Japan, China, India, Hong Kong, etc.  To go it alone as their own entity cost the state $600,000.

Rather than rest on it’s achievements, the state is looking for ways to improve even further.

While state education leaders and education advocates praised the results, they stressed the need for more academic improvement and continued investment in education, even as the state grapples with a weak economy and declining revenue. They pointed out that some nations still greatly exceed the state’s performance on the TIMSS and that those nations continue to ramp up academic rigor.

For instance, even though the state’s fourth-graders ranked fourth in math with a score of 572, Hong Kong topped the list with a score 35 points higher - a difference researchers considered statistically significant.

In other cases, a significantly larger number of students from Asian countries scored in the top tier of the test than those from Massachusetts.

Acknowledging the importance of rigorous education and then doing something about it possibly bodes well for the future of the state.  It’s economy is weak, though that’s not unexpected given national circumstances, and it’s revenues are also down statewide.  But the insistence that education is important regardless should give the rest of the country a compass point at which to start.

“This is a tribute to the work of the Commonwealth’s students, teachers, and administrators,” state Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester said in a telephone interview. “This is a validation of the educational reforms undertaken in the last decade-plus and the financial investment that was made.”

Unfortunately, the article never goes on to say, what specifically the state has done curriculum wise to achieve these results.  I want to know their game plan and yet the article never mentions specifics of what the state is doing better than the rest of the US.

The alternate is what? He hire stupid people? This is something I will never understand about American culture - the notion that intelligence is not valued at all.  There is no arguing this point.  As a society there is no value placed on intelligent, capable people.  As evidence by Alec MacGillis’s WP report.

“All told, of Obama’s top 35 appointments so far, 22 have degrees from an Ivy League school, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago or one of the top British universities. For the other slots, the president-elect made do with graduates of Georgetown and the Universities of Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina.

“While Obama’s picks have been lauded for their ethnic and ideological mix, they lack diversity in one regard: They are almost exclusively products of the nation’s elite institutions and generally share a more intellectual outlook than is often the norm in government.”

The problem with this is the tone is somehow negative.  It’s seething with disgust that President-elect Obama would dare hire intelligent, smart, erudite, capable people.  I fail to see what the downside is, except there are critics.

“The Ivy-laced network taking hold in Washington is drawing scorn from many conservatives, who have in recent decades decried the leftward drift of academia and cast themselves as defenders of regular Americans against highbrow snobbery,” the article goes on to say.  And that would be all fine and good, except we just had eight years of loyalist driven, regular Americans running the country into the ground - six feet under the ground.

I’m sorry but it’s time for Joe Six Pack to take a freaking hike and let the adults who know what they’re doing roll up their sleeves and get America back on track.

“Obama, who wrote a literary memoir at age 33, represents the opposite approach. In a country where politicians often wrap their learning in folksy charm to avoid seeming elitist, his candidacy represented a forthright assertion of intellectual prowess, as he turned his oratory and cerebral demeanor into campaign assets.”

And this is why Obama gives me hope.  Not for a brighter future immediately, but for a subtle shift that education, intelligence and learning will become important in this country.  That teachers will be valued and paid accordingly, that the intelligensia will not be a source of derision but will be looked upon to lead the way.

One of the biggest failures of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind act is its heavy reliance on standardized tests.? Studies have shown that while standardized testing may be a step forward in regularizing education, it oftentimes shoves lower-performing students?and entire school systems?further into despair.

In an eye-opening report from eSchool News, grades K - 12 still haven’t grasped the crucial nature of personalized technology assessment programs to individually foster a child’s education.? Without these technologies, children may find themselves struggling to keep up with classmates and overwhelmed and unprepared for postsecondary education.

Tailored and adaptive educational technology can pinpoint deficiencies in a student’s learning and work to strengthen weak areas.? If struggling students must rely on standardized tests, they risk the possibility of failure, devastation of the self-esteem, a lowering of the school’s NCLB scores?and, ultimately, the amount of funding President Bush’s program wants to dish out to difficult schools.

The good news is that huge strides have been made in the arena of wide-reaching Internet access and security tools to protect student data, applications and documents.

In the meantime, educational publishers are working hard to create these materials to distribute to schools.? The marketplace is booming with technology.? Publishers are less reliant on traditional manufacturing plants, all in an effort to broaden the eBook phenomenon.? Facebook, Amazon’s Kindle, the iPhone and various other personal technologies all make their way into corporate consideration.? But if public schools cannot afford these tools, or are not made aware of them, the nightmare that which is NCLB may continue unabated.