The celebrity-faculty fallacy
As noted in The Gradebook, Stanley Fish has now waded into ($) the Florida higher-ed funding battle. Like many of our fellow Florida faculty, Fish says we can’t simultaneously have great, universal, and really cheap higher education. Yet Kevin Carey has a point: Fish’s proposed solution is a search for celebrity faculty: Five straight years of steadily […]
Sara Mead: We gotta walk the walk
Last night, former Education Sector staff member Sara Mead wrote an important blog entry as a guest for Eduwonk. She pointed out that teachers unions are not the opponents to a number of reforms supported by Andy Rotherham (Eduwonk), Joe Williams (Democrats for Education Reform), and others such as charter-schools and performance pay. Liberal education […]
George Miller press conference
I’m listening right now to California Rep. George Miller’s press conference previewing his NCLB reauthorization bill. My first impression is that he’s overpromising. (He’s also talking too quickly, but his audience is a group of reporters, and the faster he talks, the more questions they can ask.) Here come the questions, reported here as topics and […]
Mundane faculty sadism
I’m going to borrow a term from pop marital therapy author David Schnarch, compare it to sibling experiences and literary analysis, and then see if the principle applies to professional relationships in higher ed. To Schnarch, couples’ relationships are a pressure-cooker within which the individuals (should) develop. To Schnarch, this pressure-cooker environment is an inevitable by-product […]
Democracy, justice, and teaching
There’s been a fascinating discussion developing in response to Aaron Schutz’s review of Jeannie Oakes and John Rogers’s Learning Power: Organizing for Education and Justice (2006). Sometimes comment threads develop in a few hours. This one is still growing after a few months.