Campbell's Law...

Credit: Heart of the Matter Online

"Campbell's Law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Atlanta has been a slow-moving train wreck for a while. But it's not just Atlanta. It's the natural and national consequence of trying to run education like a business; the academic equivalent of "thieves [selling] in the temple."

New math

Not that I saw, or participated in a 'standardized testing scandal,' but I recall at my first campus (qualified for math and physics) a curve proposed that left me numb...seated at my desk; staring into space in my windowless room. My colleague walked into my room after school:

Him: "You know about the curve."

Me: "Curve? What curve?"

(Goes to my dry erase board): "Take the number of correct answers; divide by the total number of answers, take the square root and multiply by 100...that's the curve." He left.

I walked into the men's rest room. I stared at the toilet, contemplating the efficacy of shoving my finger down my throat. A student interrupted my dark meditations. I went home.

An actual example:

√ 13/20 x 100 = 81%

Hence, my nausea.

I heard young people exclaiming: "I'm a math beast," and I wanted to shout "no, you're NOT!" I was angry, and ashamed that I felt as though I was in some parallel universe where education didn't mean what it meant four years before my birth: it was literally a matter of national security.

The National Defense Education Act (NDEA), signed into law on September 2, 1958, provided funding to United States education institutions at all levels. It was one of a suite of science initiatives inaugurated by President Eisenhower in 1958, motivated to increase the technological sophistication and power of the US alongside, for instance DARPA and NASA. It followed a growing national sense that U.S. scientists were falling behind scientists in the Soviet Union, catalyzed, arguably, by early Soviet success in the Space Race, notably the launch of the first-ever satellite, Sputnik, the year before.

And, I felt myself - post end of the Cold War, duck-and-cover drills and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) - missing the "Ruskies"...

National Education Association