New York Times reporters and editors fail reading comprehension test
First read this headline: Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say. And the lede: "Taking a test… helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques." Now read the following text: Without the [chosen] passage in front of them, they wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 […]
Gainful employment: an immodest proposal
So for-profit universities have hired Lanny Davis to get some friends to become strange bedfellows fighting the federal government's draft gainful-employment rules, which would require colleges and universities that engage in vocational education/workforce training to document that the cost of the education does not completely overwhelm the likely benefit (with measures of repayment rates and […]
The inside debate on teacher expectations
In the past few years, there has been so much focus on arguments about the use of student outcome data to help evaluate teachers and the role of evaluation in personnel decisions that there has been too little attention paid to the ways teachers in different circumstances view the issues. So here comes Stephen Sawchuk with […]
Public spaces, private interests, religion and schools version part 376
On occasion, K-12 school systems can back into reasonable ways of negotiating church-state boundaries. In Collier County, Florida, as a result of conflict between the schools and a group wanting to pass out bibles, the Collier schools established a day that community groups could collectively present pamphlets, literature, etc. for students. The two conditions for participating […]
Please don’t prove me right THAT quickly
Yesterday morning I wrote a brief entry anticipating (and dreading) overgeneralization from the Arum and Roksa book, but I never expected Kevin Carey would be the quickest example out of the chute, complete with a straw-man caricature of administrators (which may well be true of some private college/university administrators, but I think Carey has a foot-wide brush […]