If "it’s not easy being green…" so then what? Zero-emission garbage trucks
Wired report today: Investors Find Green Technology Is Not an Easy Win. No big surprise: venture capitalists discover that new technologies are dicey. Isn’t that true of all venture-capital operations, and isn’t that the purpose of venture capital networks? Ah, well. Some day Wired reporters will understand financial markets. But there’s an important issue that […]
Whose values would be valued in a neoliberal education world: Michelle Rhee’s or Marc Dean Millot’s?
Marc Dean Millot explains why he’s a critic of DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee (hat tip), and here’s the key paragraph: What I see in Chancellor Rhee’s approach, abetted, permitted or endorsed by Mayor Fenty, is 1) insensitivity and arrogance towards others, combined with 2) a reliance on fear to control staff, and 3) a considerable […]
Brandeis faculty defend academic freedom and common sense
Kudos to the Brandeis University Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities, whose report on allegations of discrimination by Donald Hindley essentially ripped the administration from head to toe on procedural and substantive violations of academic freedom (hat tip). To wit: Brandeis’s investigation failed to engage in a bona fide investigation of how more than the […]
More pure as the driven up the wall chart rankings
In commenting on the new U.S. News & World Report “best high schools” list and comparing it with Newsweek‘s (aka Jay Mathews’s), Alexander Russo says, The Newsweek list is more pure, focusing on the rigorous and more uniform Advanced Placement courses and tests. Never mind that AP courses evidently aren’t as uniform as one might […]
Wherein we excoriate Everyday Mathematics and also demonstrate the plausibility of letting secondary-grade students use calculators
As Joanne Jacobs notes (hat tip), some of the questions on the NYC-used and Texas-rejected Everyday Mathematics series are just absurd: if math were a color, a food, a type of weather, or a political party, … oh, wait. We have a mashup: if your political party were a color, what would it be? I’ve […]