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 […]
Post-Bush education reform politics emerging
So what’s with Morton Kondracke’s column, which appeared in today’s Detroit News (and presumably elsewhere)? Andrew Rotherham thinks the combination of financial reforms with performance-pay for teachers is the germ of a Grand Coalition on reforms. Maybe. Me, I notice there’s nothing in there about school-level accountability, the heart of NCLB. Change in topics? Maneuvering […]
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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