Hoping the good news on grad rates is true
The wires are burning up this morning with the America's Promise Alliance Building a Grad Nation report, which asserts a small rise in high school graduation between 2003 and 2008. The John Hopkins research center the Powell group has allied itself with is the one that successfully got reporters to repeat the term "dropout factory" […]
Happy birthday, Jacques Barzun!
The retired historian is 103 today. But if you're interested in nostalgia, you can see his centennial celebration page. Apparently he's slowed down in recent years, taking a few days to read a book.
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. […]