L.A. Times crash-and-burn report
Now that the L.A. Times has made its database on teachers and its VAM scores public, we can and should hold the Times accountable for whether it has responded to concerns professionally. Here is what Jason Felch, Jason Strong, and Doug Smith wrote in part to Jay Mathews in response to his concerns: … teachers […]
EPI publishes white paper on value-added/growth measures and teacher evaluation
Just after midnight, the Economic Policy Institute released a relatively short white paper coauthored by ten well-known researchers, Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores To Evaluate Teachers. Key passage from the executive summary: A review of the technical evidence leads us to conclude that, although standardized test scores of students are one piece of […]
Galactic threats to higher education and software development
It's the start of another school year, and evidently there was a sufficient threat to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to bring the Doctor openly to campus. But I'm not so sure he's going to succeed, because though there are some scurrilous rumors the attached recording came from the recent Google-Verizon talks, I suspect the […]
Colbert “University”
At the bottom of this entry is the embedded 7-minute clip from Wednesday's Stephen Colbert Report segment on college. As usual, the Colbert Report writers neatly skewered for-profit scams, and then Colbert interviewed Andrew Hacker, one of the authors of Higher Education?. I will have more to say about Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's book next […]
OMG–helicopter parents!
Some observations as my daughter watched her friends head to college in the past week and then moved in herself: One friend of my daughter reports that her roommate at a public university brought a flat-screen television along with a microwave and mini-fridge. At first, my daughter thought that this was stereotypical university overindulgence. No, […]