Peter Ratener, not the swiftest test item writer in the world
The math professor at Bellevue Community College is a fool at best to start out a multi-part question with the following: Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of roof of the 300-foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second…. When originally written in 2004, the exam […]
My students are smarter than ed-policy wonkish types (including me)
Tonight, my students have made fools of us all—or those of us who have talked and written and read about vouchers for the last 17 years, since the creation of the Milwaukee program. That’s all. We’ve been talking about public-private comparisons, competition, sample attrition, and the like, and we’ve been forgetting about the complex, lived […]
September 11, five years later
Personal recollections Five years ago, I remember heading to class just before 10 on a Tuesday morning and stopping by the gathering of people looking at the monitor that someone had changed to CNN. Some time before, a colleague had knocked on my office door while I was screening the PBS documentary School. She was […]
Education reading for next week
The next report in Arthur Levine’s project looking at colleges and schools of education will becoming out next Monday. Educating School Teachers will be the subject of a forum at the National Press Club September 18, 10-11 a.m. (EDT) I expect the report to be released simultaneously on the Education Schools Project site. And it […]
NCLB reading for the week
As suggested by Eric in one of Jenny D.’s Hechinger Institute confab entry, here’s a recommendation for Hayes Mizell’s speech in 2003. Mizell’s explanation of NCLB’s origins (“For decades, local policymakers and school officials turned a blind eye to a set of vexing problems in public education”) assumes there was no such thing as accountability […]