Cut scores and democracy
This evening, I’ve been trying to boil down the controversy over cut scores (jump-started by Gene Glass in 1978, in the first wave of minimum-competency tests), and I’ve been trying to pay close attention to the counter-arguments. The one that pulls at me most is one advanced separately by Michael Scriven and James Popham in […]
Spellings Commission draft report, redux?
The second draft of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education is now out, and the reactions are much more positive, with a few exceptions such as ACTA and its head, Anne D. Neal, who lament what she claims is the disappearance of curriculum from the second draft: “The only thing the Commission’s latest […]
A bookstore provides the secret to standardized testing
I’ve been working today in the air-conditioned comfort of a bookstore café, eating and drinking my way through the next few pages. My task today: finish the description of standardized test characteristics key to accountability. Two of them—comparability and consistency—set the stage for test preparation. Because tests sort students either explicitly or implicitly, and because […]
On compromises and bedfellows
A cautionary tale today in the NYTimes today on how federal abstinence-only sex education mandates warp state policymaking. Here is where the Clinton-era Welfare Reform Act in 1996 shows the worst side of political compromises: because the 1996 act created federal support for abstinence-only sex education as a categorical program, it created a foothold for […]
What is fair use in blogging?
By Sherman Dorn on July 21, 2006
I just winced again—a blogger with plenty of witty, sharp things to say quoted 74% of an article: out of 1,047 words from the original source, 771 appeared in the blog. There were, in addition to the massive quotation, 57 words written by the blogger. Is this fair use? I ask because we seem to […]
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