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, […]
Slowing down the calving of icebergs
One AP news story on the front of the St. Pete Times today is the calving of a new giant iceberg off a Greeland glacier. In many ways, the consequences of the recession for public services is like the calving of giant icebergs, a separation of public agencies, counties, and states into chunks that will […]
Barton and Coley ignore their own data
Yesterday, John Thompson wrote about Barton and Coley report from ETS on long-term trends in the Black-White achievement gap. Like Barton and Coley, Thompson thinks Daniel Patrick Moynihan was correct about family structure and life chances. I’m sighing this morning, because Barton and Coley’s data undermine their argument, and I’m puzzled at how they could […]