Helicopter parent with RPG (rocket-propelled grandstanding)
I'm visiting my daughter this weekend, and apart from enjoying the considerably cooler weather and just-past-peak leaves (those in New England, stop laughing: I live in Florida, and when I left Tampa, it was 86 F. and humid), I've been thinking about parent-child relationships after the adult child goes to college. A number of parents […]
Courts of Appeal respond to Roberts Court establishmentarianism
Last week, two federal court cases restricted the ability of both students and teachers to make decisions about what happens in school. In one, an appellate court ruled that a cheerleader had no right to refuse to participate in a cheer specifically supporting her rapist, and in the other a court ruled that teachers have no […]
Erik Hanushek, meet the tort of “false light”
In the New York Daily News today, Stanford education professor Erik Hanushek argues that UFT [is] wrong to fight Joel Klein's attempt to release teacher data. Hanushek makes three arguments here: Value-added methods are valuable even if imperfect The public has a right to know about teacher effectiveness Erik Hanushek personally does not want test score […]
Professor Ramanathan, please meet my relative
G.V. Ramanathan asks, How much math do we really need? in the weekend Washington Post. Jeff Solochek, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times who pointed out the Ramanathan op-ed locally, claims that he hasn't used calculus in his job on the education beat. This comes up every few years in an op-ed column, so this is a repeat lesson, except […]
Testosterone poisoning link found between NYC Education Department and tabloids?
Remember the furor over the Los Angeles Times's release of point estimates of value-added measures they had cooked up from test scores? A number of people raked the Times over the coals for violating journalistic ethics, and these included many who think it's either acceptable or necessary to include student outcome data in teacher and […]