Not exactly covered with glory in L.A.
The big K-12 story this week is the L.A. Times series on value-added measures of intermediate and middle-school teachers in reading and math in the Los Angeles Unified School District. My brief impression: I don't think anyone in L.A. is covering themselves in glory this week. Folks such as Alexander Russo and Rick Hess have […]
Alternative “mindset” list
There's been the usual annual attention paid this week to the Beloit College "Mindset" list of semi-cute perspectives on generational change. I've been thinking about more realistic ones they never mention: Thurgood Marshall died before they could walk. They can't remember when Aid to Dependent Children was a national guarantee Hillary Clinton has always had […]
Students don’t exit on inflatable slides
Despite all the jokes this week about Steven Slater, there’s something important about his exit from his flight-attendant job: he left the way he dreamed. Not gracefully, and not with a happy ending, but with the drama he may have imagined. In many ways, Slater’s exit is close to the stereotype of the high school […]
Feral NCAT
Ellen Schrecker’s object lesson in Forbes this month is an example of what not to do on the cheap: replace full-time instructors with technology and claim that doing so is always more efficient. According to Schrecker, the passing rates for students at Cal State Bakersfield dropped like a stone when the campus tried to just […]
Blog sample for teaching purposes (Anthologize use)
Anthologize is a WordPress plug-in that allows one to select and edit blog entries for a book-like output: PDF, ePub, RTF (for further editing in a word-processor). It's in alpha form, still pretty rough, but it allowed me to select a sample of my entries for my undergraduate history of education class. The reason? No, […]