Invisible contributions, acadministrivia version
Before 9 am, I was ready to write an absolutely unique entry about higher ed policy, credit transfer, CUNY, and Kevin Carey's paean to the Open Badge manifesto (or whatever you want to call the Mozilla apparatus). And then reality hit, and now it's 3 pm and I'm still not done with a bunch of […]
What type and level of failure can we tolerate in evaluation systems?
Bruce Baker points out the flaws in the Brookings white paper on evaluation, "Passing Muster" but I think there needs to be a broader take on this. Baker properly sees the circular-reasoning aspects of the Brookings approach (everything but value-added measures is judged by value-added measures, which are judged by … how well they are internally […]
Farewell to Anchovy
My colleagues and I are saying goodbye this summer to the fictional suburb of Anchovy, Columbia, where we set a number of simulations/case studies over the past half decade. These were written for our bread-and-butter undergraduate course to help students satisfy the state's older list of competencies for new teachers, and now that the competencies […]
The dilemma of the Mets fan
Brief and relatively inconsequential news of the month: two of my region's pro teams are shocking the sports world. Jaw drop, giant: after letting almost every high-profile player go to free agency and then starting the season with an eight-game losing streak, plus having their star player Evan Longoria on the disabled-list for a few […]
The epistemological closure of Checker Finn
The "truth": Save for one experiment carried out in Tennessee in the 1980s, which yielded ambiguous results that were, in any case, limited to kindergarten and the first two grades, there is no persuasive evidence that smaller classes yield higher student achievement. Checker Finn in the New York Daily News [emphasis added] "No" as in none, zilch, […]