Anniversary
My spouse and I will have been married 20 years, as of this afternoon around 2:30. My gift to her this morning: the complete Far Side collection. We couldn’t fit it on the shelves upright. Ah, well.
Qualitative data on schools
Yesterday’s story in the Washington Post (hat tip) on in-person reviews of schools by external committees is one step in the right direction for accountability: using in-person eyeballs instead of just statistical eyeballs to see what should be done. Rhee sent teams of people into schools she wanted to change. There are some questions I […]
What to do with scoundrels
Since Mike Petrilli’s May 12 blog post, arguing that AERA should not allow Bill Ayers to sit on its executive committee, there has been a host of responses, criticisms of Petrilli from Eduwonkette and Marc Dean Millot, and then rebuttals by Petrilli, Diane Ravitch, and Jeff Kuhner. And don’t forget the last Gadfly podcast, when […]
On not beating around the bush in the classroom
Is there anyone else who winced at the following sentences from the Atlantic Professor X column, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower? A few weeks into the semester, the students must start actually writing papers, and I must start grading them…. I knew that Ms. L.’s paper would fail. I knew it that first […]
U.S. News story on graduation statistics
Almost 45 years, U.S. News first published a piece about dropping out, a short blurb titled “The Facts about School ‘Dropouts’” in its August 26, 1963 issue (p. 11): A high-school education is becoming more important. Each year, it becomes harder for a young person without a high-school diploma to get a job. And unemployment […]