Why is a college education like a tulip bulb?
Dean Dad has one plausible response to the latest installation of the “college is the next asset bubble to burst” argument, and every time I come across it I grind my teeth, think of ravens and writing desks, and go on. At least Glenn Reynolds is neither an economist nor an historian, or I’d accuse […]
Of side deals, soup and sandwich, and prayers
A few days ago, the St. Petersburg Times uploaded all of the second-round RTTT local MOUs in Florida they had been able to acquire to one of the relevant blog entries, so I can talk about the elements that are common among them. First, a mea culpa: when reading the Broward document on Safari, the […]
Get your performance-pay evaluation report bingo cards here
So another few evaluation reports have been released with little evidence of student achievement flowing from performance-pay systems. This is going to sound like a broken record from me, but I don’t make too much out of one or two studies in policy research. These studies on systems in Chicago and New York confirm something […]
The value of college III
Part of the value of a good college education is that much of it is surplus. In the same way that the early nineteenth-century education of women could have been perceived as superfluous, a good deal of what students learn could be seen as not directly or immediately useful in their lives. To some economists, […]
More on so-called “side deals”
Andy Rotherham has responded to my blog entry early this morning. Let me skip for now the question of why he was the sole person quoted in the article and address the local MOUs in Florida on Race to the Top. Rotherham wrote in part, “If these agreements have no bearing on the state’s application […]