Mediocre education reporting #357
Sam Dillon’s story this morning on the evident pending Giant Teacher Shortage IV: Postapocalyptic Horror… uh, pending retirement of many teachers struck me as extraordinarily poor reporting on a National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future report because Dillon wrote his lede from the first two pages of the report. Here’s what the report says, […]
One teacher’s response to Ron Matus’s article
There’s been lots of coverage of the Ron Matus story March 29 on firing teachers in Florida, but there’s been no follow-up online about the letters to the editor that were printed April 4 (last Saturday), and at this point, I can’t even find the letters on the Times website. But I think one needs […]
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 […]