Black Friday, rambling emails, and the uses of deviance credits
The recent Onion piece about the (fictional) 75,000-word email from Barack Obama hit the target in several ways. First, it apparently fooled Fox News and a number of Fox website readers who thought it was real. Second, when this parody was attributed to the professorial president (and remember that like the majority of faculty in the […]
Federal long-term budget planning, state planning
As Paul Krugman says, there's a clear and viable alternative to the Bowles-Simpson Very Serious Person theater deficit-reduction plan. Not that I expect this to become law, because the easy money on Capitol Hill and K Street is now made by catering to the rich, but having an alternative makes it easier to fight off […]
Threaten the Florida Virtual School? Hmmn…
Those who have followed the path of the Florida Virtual School over the past few years may be aware that the legislature quite deliberately undercut FVS in the past few years by mandating that county school systems create their own online programs, many of which were bid out to fly-by-night operators by comparison with FVS. […]
Rick Hess, the half-cynic
Rick Hess has a new book, The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas (Harvard University Press, 2010), which argues that the history of education in the U.S. is littered with earnest reformers whose efforts went for naught or created all sorts of unintended consequences. While it is not […]
Jeff Danziger is geographically illiterate
Thanks to Alexander Russo, I just saw Jeff Danziger's October cartoon about an apparent "great wave" overtaking American education: The apparent inspiration for this visual repetition of the first paragraph of A Nation at Risk appears to be Hokusai's Great Wave: Apart from repeating confectionary fairy tales written by Tom Friedman, Danziger can't tell his East Asian […]