{"id":60,"date":"2015-12-28T10:44:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T10:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/2015\/12\/28\/but-we-don-t-want-to-teach-em\/"},"modified":"2015-12-28T10:44:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-28T10:44:00","slug":"but-we-don-t-want-to-teach-em","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/2015\/12\/28\/but-we-don-t-want-to-teach-em\/","title":{"rendered":"&quot;But we don&#8217;t WANT to teach &#8217;em, we want to LEARN &#8217;em&#8230;&quot;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">True progress is hard; it is always easier to move the goalposts than to score more goals.\u00a0 Human beings are very good at rationalization and self-deception, so adjustments made in ambiguous or complicated situations for varied motivations are not always obviously directly aimed at shifting the reference in order to inflate the metric.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">On the other hand, some are more transparent than others:\u00a0 &#8220;Los Angeles initially required that students earn at least a C in those classes, but the number of students on track to graduate plummeted. Now grades of D or higher are accepted.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">While I&#8217;m not an unquestioning fan of Arne Duncan, in this case he gets the big picture exactly right:<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">&#8220;But `the goal is not just high school graduation,&#8217; Arne Duncan, the departing secretary of education, said in a telephone interview. `The goal is being truly college and career ready.'&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/12\/27\/us\/as-graduation-rates-rise-experts-fear-standards-have-fallen.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/12\/27\/us\/as-graduation-rates-rise-experts-fear-standards-have-fallen.html<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>True progress is hard; it is always easier to move the goalposts than to score more goals.\u00a0 Human beings are very good at rationalization and self-deception, so adjustments made in ambiguous or complicated situations for varied motivations are not always obviously directly aimed at shifting the reference in order to inflate the metric. \u00a0 On&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/2015\/12\/28\/but-we-don-t-want-to-teach-em\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&quot;But we don&#8217;t WANT to teach &#8217;em, we want to LEARN &#8217;em&#8230;&quot;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-perils-of-metrics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}