Kids, don’t write these sentences at home
I was wondering why I just couldn’t get far in Theodore Porter’s Trust in Numbers (1995) until I came across the following (on p. 15): Lorraine Daston instances Charles Dufay, a French researcher of the 1720s and 1730s, to epitomize a different experimental ideal. So it’s not my lagging attention due to a virus. It’s […]
College affordability, the public university flagship version
Tamar Lewin’s New York Times article this morning profiles my state’s flagship university and the tensions between reputational ambitions and the public mission of the institution. Good piece. Go read it.
Proselytizing teachers
Tina Kelley’s New York Times story about David Paszkiewicz’s proselytizing in a high school class has raised a number of questions about the First Amendment and whether a teacher’s academic freedom should trump parental concerns that their children not be subject to inappropriate pressures outside the curriculum. Let me cut to the chase: what Paszkiewicz did (which […]
Danziger, Contructing the Subject, and the dangers of following the trail
Thanks to a trail of other readings, I’m now delving into Theodore Potter’s Trust in Numbers (1995) and Kurt Danziger’s Constructing the Subject (1990), both relatively dense books discussing topics on the edges of my concerns with testing and professional expertise. While reading the page proofs of a book that will be coming out in […]
So there’s debate among NCLB critics? Big deal…
The reaction of Mike Antonucci to news that Susan Ohanian calls the NEA’s leadership distancing themselves from the “dismantle NCLB” petition “bullying“? “[F]un watching NEA and Ohanian thrash it out for themselves.” (Hat tip: Eduwonk.) Maybe Antonucci is unfamiliar with something called deliberative decisionmaking, which involves discussion, decisions, and acknowledgment of dissent, but the NEA has […]