College debt acceleration and income-based repayment
Brad Hargreaves somewhat exaggerates the role of student debt in Occupy Wall Street, but it is true that student debt has played a role in both the comments of protesters and the changing dynamics of social mobility (or at least social stay-in-same-placeability). On the one hand, college graduates have been less vulnerable than others to […]
Jeb Bush, Distance Learning, and the Hype Cycle
Stephanie Mencimer’s article in the November/December Mother Jones, Jeb Bush’s Cyber Attack on Public Schools, strikes me as accepting far too much of Bush’s argument about the technical viability of online education. All of this deserves much more of the Gartner Hype Cycle approach, and while I think consultants with reports to sell should be […]
ESEA reauthorization politics, short version
With all the twists and turns in the last week, reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is looking more like the end of the major-league regular season than deliberation, which may be a good thing considering the tales of legislation and sausage. But it’s turning my lack of commentary on specifics into a virtue. […]
“Breaking with the past” as an old idea
In his interview with CNN this week, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said (in part), The new realities are technology has changed our lives forever, the world’s moving faster, we’re in a globalized economy … and yet the institutions, mostly public, that we’ve asked to be able to equip us have been mired in the […]
My dangerous colleagues in anthropology
My eternal thanks go to Florida Governor Rick Scott, without whom I would never have known that the 0.8% of Florida state university system graduates who major in anthropology ((In the last 10 years reported, through 2009-2010, there were 446,733 BAs awarded by all SUS institutions, of whom 3,395 or 0.8% majored in anthropology. Source: […]