How to steer CYA-oriented bureaucracies, or why NCLB supporters need to think about libel law
Someone at USDOE sent me an invitation to listen to the June 14 phone conference where Arne Duncan explained how disappointed he was in Tennessee, Indiana, and other states with charter caps, let alone states such as Maine with no charter law, and how that disappointment might be reflected in the distribution (or lack of […]
The right kind of infection
The Powell et al. article on cultural complexity 90,00 years ago, published in the June 5 issue of Science, has some interesting consequences for education policy, though it’s an archaeology article. The argument the authors make is that one needs a certain population density before one can find surviving signs of cultural complexity (archaeological evidence […]
Nothing fuzzy about fuzzy math
George W. Bush is probably responsible for people calling constructivist math advocacy “fuzzy math”. There is a field called fuzzy logic, and while I know very little about it, I’m irritated that the former president’s maladroit use of English is messing up technical terminology. Fuzzy logic is a useful tool in engineering, and while Lotfi […]
See-no-knowledge in education policy?
I seem to be reading several “we don’t know anything so let’s plow ahead” arguments in education think-tankery, from Mike Petrilli’s argument that because we don’t currently have a solid research base about how to turn schools around, we shouldn’t try, to Kevin Carey’s consistent argument in Education Sector’s blog that because there is no […]
One more reason not to use Elsevier
If fake journals created at the whim of pharmaceutical companies weren’t bad enough, how about paying people to assign five stars to textbooks in Amazon’s review system?