When I watched the video of Lewis Black, who it should be noted is a comedian not an educator, I was immediately struck by the passion he showed about his subject. He honestly seemed to care about what to him is the despicable state of the American education system. He calls our schools "broken". He believe schools should not be too complex, he jokes that he "went to school in a Pal Mal. He frequently returns to the lack of commitment, when NBC kicked off their "Education Week" they told people to walk into schools even if their children didnt attend and to ask how they could help. Lewis Black immediately jumps on that statements saying, "Seriously! What kind of idiot just walks into the school and says I'm totally unqualified but I wanna help!" He finishes the clip with a not so encouraging statistic aimed at making us feel stupid. As a narrator explains the fact that out of 30 countries we ranked 25 in math and 21 in science that at least we were number one in confidence we are shown a clip of a stunt rider successfully launching himself of a ramp but then slamming into a rooftop. I understand that as a comedian his approach is to use humor to get his point across but sometimes a little seriousness is needed.
Contrastingly Mike Rose is more concerned with, and I quote, "To have more young people get an engaging and challenging education". That is a goal I share and I must admit that I find Mike Rose's approach a lot more appealing, it's less of a rant and more of an actual conversation. He continues in his narrative to explain the need to stop defining students by test scores and instead by actual achievement. He puts it this way, "To stop making the standardized test score the gold-standard of student achievement and teacher effectiveness."
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