Sweden ho! (in June)
In late June, I’m headed outside North America for the first time since 1973. It’s for the 2007 meeting of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, and appropriately enough I committed myself to looking at educational attainment internationally. Even though I’m late with the registration, it’s a virtual steal, only 1000 kronors, and […]
Freakonomics author fails history of econ 101
Steven D. Levitt gets an “F” for understanding the history of his own discipline in his blog entry Let’s just get rid of tenure (including mine). He writes, The idea that tenure protects scholars who are doing politically unpopular work strikes me as ludicrous. While I can imagine a situation where this issue might rarely […]
The bubble kids
Daniel de Vise’s story in the Washington Post today is an illustration of high-stakes testing triage, describing what happened in January in Wood Middle School in Rockville, Maryland: Principal Renee Foose told teachers to cross off the names of students who had virtually no chance of passing and those certain to pass. Those who remained, […]