Student debt, social investment in education and the search for a basketful of school
At the Social Science History Association conference this year, there were “author meets critic” sessions on two important books, Kathryn Neckerman’s Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education and Claudia Goldin and Laurence Katz’s The Race between Education and Technology. Together, the two books represent solid new work in understanding urban education (with Neckerman) […]
Study: Self-serving utility of PR can still be outweighed by inherent value of research
Since I’m convinced by Jeff Henig (Spin Cycle) that the process of research can possibly outweigh the distortions of PR spin in the long term, I will give a bit of thanks here to the New Teacher Project’s PR folks who deftly spread a story of TNTP’s supposedly great effectiveness in Louisiana, getting word of […]
Pets, the White House, and common sense
And for the first time in a while, it’s Out of Left Field Friday! I think my spouse is attracted to animals used in research, but only if she doesn’t know about it. When we started dating in college, she had just recently acquired a ferret, long before we discovered that ferrets are used in […]
Top education stories of 2008
I’ll get my chips in early on year-end reviews: The economy. The recession is deep and going to be long, and everyone’s going to be reading Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years (1984). Maybe you’re not, but you should. State budget cuts are going to wreak havoc on base budgets […]
Cosmic-ray bursts. They must be.
By Sherman Dorn on December 17, 2008
Or at least that’s how I explain the odd pattern of phone calls I’ve been receiving recently, where people fail to leave messages even though I didn’t answer the calls. Some of them have been local, and I am guessing they are wrong numbers. But in the past few weeks I’ve received a series of […]
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