:: The 4th Era ::

by Mark Walsh

Summary by Carnegie Perspectives

"Harper's Magazine weighs in on the debate over expanding Algebra 2 to all high school students. "Wrong Answer: The case against Algebra II," by the novelist Nicholson Baker, argues that the course should not be forced on mathematics-hating students or required for college. Students, he writes in the September issue, "are forced, repeatedly, to stare at hairy, square-rooted, polynomialed horseradish clumps of mute symbology that irritates them, that stop them in their tracks, that they can't understand." "The homework is unrelenting, the algorithms get longer and trickier, the quizzes keep coming," Baker writes. "Sooner or later, many of them hit the wall. They fail the course and have to take it again. And then again." He examines the textbook Algebra 2 Common Core, from Pearson, and concludes it is "a highly efficient engine for the creation of math rage: a dead scrap heap of repellent terminology, a collection of spiky, decontextualized, multistep mathematical black-box techniques ..."

by Travis Andrews

News Corp plans to cash in on education with custom-made tablets and curricula. But what's the financial curve, and what does the corporation stand to gain?

"Even so, News Corp.’s $540 million investment shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. We seem to be on the precipice of one of the biggest changes education has seen since Socrates coined his method. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in the country, just awardedApple a $30 million contract. For $678 apiece, every student will have an iPad. Meanwhile, Florida is rushing to meet a new statewide standard requiring half of all classroom instruction to use digital materials, by fall 2015.

"Textbook and curriculum creation is a $7.8 billion industry that, until now, Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have mostly controlled. But once 45 states adopted the Common Core State Standards Initiative, it opened the door for companies like News Corp.

"Common Core offers a countrywide set of mathematic and English language arts educational standards, effectively making curriculum creation easier. Instead of developing for each individual market, one size fits (almost) all. 

"Potential financial boons like this don't come around often.

"Add in a tablet computer, class management tools and educational video games, and News Corp.'s gamble isn't such a longshot."