Report: Three of every two government statistics are flawed
Okay, I’m joking. The real headline from the Guardian newspaper is One in five Home Office statistics are unreliable, says department head. Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber makes the point that non-neutral claims of facts degrade public discourse. But I wonder whether even a putatively independent body can create trustworthy facts when they’re subject to subtle […]
Martin Luther King, Jr., birthday
Here are some things you could do to use today for a day on, not a day off: Check out the MLK Day of Service website Join the NAACP, American GI Forum, or another organization that works on behalf of equal rights Donate to the United Negro College Fund or other scholarship organizations Donate to […]
Figlio and Kenny paper on merit pay
David Figlio and Lawrence Kenny’s paper Individual Teacher Incentives and Student Performance (NBER, restricted) has been reported by Ed Week and discussed by Joanne Jacobs and at NCLBlog. Howard at AFT (F. Howard Nelson?) lists a number of caveats. Some more information (thanks to David Figlio for permission to crib from our e-mail correspondence): Because […]
John Winn resigns
Yesterday’s surprise announcement that Florida Education Commissioner John Winn was resigning was not a great shock—Governor Charlie Crist had rescinded two Bush appointments to the state board of education, and two others worked with his campaign, so he was about to have a majority of friendly board members—but the timing was interesting. Of all the […]
Shoe blogging
By Sherman Dorn on January 17, 2007
I won’t blog about the video ipods that the dean helped distribute today for the faculty who are participating in the podcasting program for the college, except to say that I’ll figure out how to use the Belkin TuneTalk to record spontaneous material for podcasting, and I managed to get a decent acrylic cover for […]
Posted in Random comments