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NCLB odds
Eduwonk Andy Rotherham lays out the first set of NCLB reauthorization odds this morning. He and I agree that the most likely scenario is everyone’s punting until after the ’08 election. But he puts straight reauthorization as more likely than a dramatic revision by what he calls NEA’s “rewrit[ing] the law to its liking” or a “Conservatives[‘] […]
Draft of Accountability Frankenstein completed
The manuscript is done, or at least the initial drafting is done. It’s a relatively short MS—approximately 68,000 words, excluding references. In revision, that will probably stretch to 70,000, but it’s unlikely to get much larger. (December 28 update: The revised manuscript is about 73,000 words, with 12,800 words in the references section.) In contrast, […]
Brief gloss on pragmatism vs. sociology of knowledge
I’m now done with drafting everything in Accountability Frankenstein except one section, on the problem of expertise in society. For a variety of reasons, I’ve been thinking about this in connection with John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Karl Mannheim, and William James. And I’ve figured out the difference between the sociologist of knowledge and the pragmatist […]
More on teaching to the test
Jal Mehta (guest blogger for Eduwonk) continues the blogule discussion of teaching to the test with a lament about the inability to follow through on the New Standards Project desire for high-quality tests that were not easily susceptible to test-prep. For some reason, this strikes me as very similar to the laments I hear about […]
The last chapter problem
In Improving Poor People (1997), Michael Katz wrote: Historians and other social scientists who offer interpretive accounts of social issues always face a “last chapter” problem. Readers expect them to extract clear lessons from history, offer unambiguous recommendations, and foresee the future. My standard response—my role is to analyze and explain the problem; I have […]