Shoveling day
Friends and relatives in the mid-Atlantic are spending this week shoveling loads of snow. I’ve been shoveling, too, if not snow. It’s time to deal with projects of various sorts, and I can’t complain too much about them: recruiting people for certain tasks; responding to a bureaucratic emergency or three; getting various bills paid; talking with colleagues […]
Additional thoughts on performance pay politics
An addendum to my entry earlier this morning: I think that there is a politically-robust rationale for performance-pay policies, but it’s not at the level of incentives usually used as the justification. The more plausible rationale for performance-pay policies is at the level of public-sector accountability: most people with jobs do not expect identical salaries or […]
Why the Teacher Incentive Fund and Race to the Top are long-term dead ends for merit-pay advocates
The apparent push in the proposed 2011 Obama budget for an enlarged Teacher Incentive Fund on the heels of Race to the Top makes me think that merit-pay/performance-pay advocates may be spreading their political capital very thin on teacher evaluation. Most advocates of paying teachers in part based on test scores are also advocates of […]
Peer reviewing, redux and redux
I regularly attempt some form of student peer review process for short writing assignments and am regularly frustrated with the inadequacy of the process–inevitably someone falls down on the job either in terms of participating in peer review or submitting draft work or providing advice that is counterproductive… and leaves an awkward gap and a […]
College visits: some good, bad, and ugly ideas
Valerie Strauss’s blog entry yesterday discusses the standard advice for high school students’ visiting colleges and then provides links to the College Board and ACT college-visiting pages (which are surprisingly slim). Again, Strauss is speaking directly to parents — “Be sure to contact the school in advance… If you child can sit in…” — which […]