CURMUDGUCATION: US Students Lead in Browsing

CURMUDGUCATION: US Students Lead in Browsing:

US Students Lead in Browsing

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is the group that administers that nifty PISA test-- the one that periodically leads to breathless headlines of "Oh Nos!! Our students don't test as well as Estonia!" But the OECD is more than just a test (and attendant PR)-- they've also been taking a look at technology in education.

Back in September they published Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection, a report about the importance of digital learning. If you follow the link, you can order the book, because the OECD apparently has a delicious sense of irony.

The information in the report is from the 2012 cycle of PISA, for which ICT awareness questionnaires were distributed, except not in the US, so there is less information about us in the report than their might be.

Back in 2012, one in five of students in the bottom quartile of income did not have internet at heom. Among the other 75%, only 3% didn't have internet.

Back in 2012, we had one of the lowest student-to-computer ratio in schools among the OECD nations. Pretty sure that this is old news after three years of frantic computer deployment, though it might be interesting to note how many students have access to computers for activities other than taking standardized tests.

But here's an interesting factoid-- our teens are among the world's leaders in web browsing.

No kidding. US fifteen-year-olds were ahead of the OECD average for digital reading. They are better than average at evaluating whether or not a link will lead something useful. And we are CURMUDGUCATION: US Students Lead in Browsing:



Tamir Rice Is Dead

Much has been written about the shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, most of it written in an attempt to put Rice's death in some sort of larger context, or to resist the creation of any such larger context. But what keeps coming back to me is how awful it is, how appalling it is all by itself.

For those of you for whom it has become a sort of background noise, one more example of That Awful Thing That Keeps Happening, I just want to focus on this one stupid death.

Watch the video. Rice is hanging out in the park, and the police car races up, onto the grass. The policeman on the passenger side shoots Rice in less time than it takes to read this sentence, before he can even get all the way out of the car. No warning, no instructions, no chance for Tamir Rice to do much of anything in reaction to the car barreling across the grass in the park.

Why were the police there? Another person in the park made a 911 call about a kid waving a gun around. Probably a fake, but he's scaring people.

What happened next? The police left Rice lying on the ground, dying. When Rice's sister arrived and tried to run to her brother's side, they tackled and cuffed her. And then, Rice died.

There are plenty of questions here. Why drive the squad car so close to Rice in the first place? Why no warnings? Don't even the most casual tv cop show watchers know, "Freeze! Police! Drop it!!"

And one of the biggest questions-- why had anyone given Timothy Loehmann a badge and a gun? His previous experience was four months of police academy, followed by one month on a force during which his superiors determined that he was unfit for duty-- emotionally unstable and unwilling to follow orders. He quit before he could be fired. the Cleveland police department never checked his record, even though it had all happened about a dozen miles away.

Now, as the rest of us welcome in the New Year and clean up the dishes of last night's celebration as we prepare to watch the Rose Parade on tv, Tamir Rice's family faces another holiday for which Tamir Rice Is Dead