Notable posts

Opportunistic employment filtering

The press reaction to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce report Help Wanted was muted (and one could even say the press ignored it after a day or two in mid-June), but the Pope Center's George Leef took a crack at the economic analysis and a crack at the policy implications more recently. Leef's […]

The value of college III

Part of the value of a good college education is that much of it is surplus. In the same way that the early nineteenth-century education of women could have been perceived as superfluous, a good deal of what students learn could be seen as not directly or immediately useful in their lives. To some economists, […]

A hexadecimalful for hacking the academy

I do not regret not applying for THATCamp Prime (The Humanities and Technology unconference) this year, as it fell on the weekend of my anniversary, but I do miss the conversation as I woke up this morning reading the tweets (#thatcamp if you’re curious), and I hope those participating in the game jam write up […]

How can we use bad measures in decisionmaking?

I had about 20 minutes of between-events time this morning and used it to catch up on two interesting papers on value-added assessment and teacher evaluation–the Jesse Rothstein piece using North Carolina data and the Koedel-Betts replication-and-more with San Diego data.  Speaking very roughly, Rothstein used a clever falsification test: if the assignment of students […]

How to steer CYA-oriented bureaucracies, or why NCLB supporters need to think about libel law

Someone at USDOE sent me an invitation to listen to the June 14 phone conference where Arne Duncan explained how disappointed he was in Tennessee, Indiana, and other states with charter caps, let alone states such as Maine with no charter law, and how that disappointment might be reflected in the distribution (or lack of […]