Florida SB 736: Overreach and overpromise
This week Florida Governor Rick Scott signed Senate Bill 736, which attempts to change a number of working conditions for teachers in Florida's public schools. The headline issues: For new teachers hired after June 30 this year, it prohibits any employment contract longer than one year. The bill also mandates that a derivative of student […]
Union elections
Tomorrow is vote-counting for our chapter of the United Faculty of Florida. EDU 214 on the Tampa campus of the University of South Florida, beginning at noon, if you want to come watch in person. I am not on the ballot for chapter officers because I agreed to become department chair starting in August, and […]
Confirmation-bias square-dance
Got this in the email yesterday: For skeptics who say school vouchers don't work, Greg Forster, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Educational Choice, decided to go back and review the data… I guess the press-release writer didn't read my blog entry Monday about confirmation bias. I haven't read the think-tank paper, but the […]
Why Faculty Like Me Support Unions
I joined the United Faculty of Florida my first semester at USF, in 1996. I joined because I wish there had been a graduate-student union at the University of Pennsylvania, where graduate assistants in some colleges were paid well below poverty rates and yet were told that if they were given any assistance, they could […]
To put on my wall…
Or at least to post on my blog so others can hold me accountable: [I]f you’ve reached the point where you don’t pay attention to anything that might disturb your orthodoxy, you’re not doing science, you’re not even pursuing a discipline. All you’re doing is perpetuating a smug, closed-minded sect. Paul Krugman, Nobodies of Macroeconomics […]