Florida’s public-sector purgatory
Happy Labor Day: what are your plans for being laid off? Because whatever you'd like, I'm thinking about your being laid off, or having a hard time finding work. Let me approach this more gently: The details in the BLS "Employment Situation" table as updated 9/3/10 look depressing, less because of the unemployment rate (not […]
Popperian chutzpah
I have no idea whether Andy Rotherham is correct in claiming that the Economic Policy Institute paper on value-added scores and teacher evaluation is marginal to the current policy debate. The historian in me wants to talk about contingency and the human vulnerability to confirmation bias, and it seems the EPI paper follows one line […]
Week o’ slogging
It's a little before noon on Tuesday, and I can tell this is going to be the week when I wade through the swamp, tearing out invasive plants one by one. Or maybe I'm pulling the sled alone. Or on KP duty. Pick your metaphor: lots of tasks piled up and 238 emails in my […]
Please leave your magic numbers on the magic carpet with the magic wand
The shorter Bill Tucker: "No, you pull a number out of the air." Well, buckaroos, if anyone's going to be all airy-fairy on this quantitative-component teacher-evaluation thing, it's going to be all Ivory Tower, historian me. But I don't think you'd like that. Maybe I should explain. Tucker's argument in a nutshell is, "Okay, if […]
Emotions and history
As my colleagues in the social-studies education program at USF would point out, one goal some teachers have for history is using a form of (past) culture shock to develop students' empathy. I think some version of empathy is useful for reading primary sources and identifying potential interpretations and questions, but "developing empathy" is not […]