An advertisement for history
My thanks to the indefatigable Paul Krugman, who writes soberly about how close we came and may still be to a repeat of the 1930s: [K]nowledge is the only thing standing between us and Great Depression 2.0. It’s only to the extent that we understand these things a bit better than our grandfathers–and that we […]
Fish ferociously flubs
Excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the ground after reading Stanley Fish’s latest piece, wherein he argues that because some substantive academic arguments are heated, we should see through the University of Colorado faculty committee’s misreading of a typical scholarly debate as research misconduct. One can make a number of plausible arguments […]
Academic problems are not prostate cancer
I’m sure you needed to be reminded of that, but there’s a question here (one I discussed in my talk today): Should there ever be a thing such as “watchful waiting” when a teacher sees a student having problems? I think the answer has to be no. At her talk this afternoon, University of Pittsburgh […]
Sharpton paid off? Please tell me this is an April Fool’s joke
The New York Daily News is reporting this morning that former NYC Schools Chancellor Harold Levy is involved in a $500,000 payoff set of donations to the Rev. Al Sharpton’s organization, with payments beginning shortly after Sharpton and Joel Klein launched the Education Equality Project in June 2008. With friends like Levy,… In other news, […]
Lies, damned lies, and the Pacific Research Institute
Often, it takes a bit of time to uncover statistical flummery; one needs to dig deep inside arcane methods or the details of data collection. But sometimes it takes just a few clicks. Matthew Ladner’s blog entry today, $243,000 per student school districts?, quoted work by the Pacific Research Institute that claimed two small districts […]