“Teachers college” was always a misnomer
Kevin Carey writes about the dilemmas of regional state universities that used to be teachers colleges. There are real dilemmas of upward institutional trajectories/ambitions, and in many cases, there are institutions that have moved in the way he has, such as Illinois State University, where the city of Normal, Illinois reveals its origins as Illinois […]
Sheldon and Jeremy Stern reply
A few days ago I responded to the Fordham report assigning letter grades to state social-studies standards (from the perspective of the reviewers' beliefs about history curriculum). The report authors, Sheldon and Jeremy Stern, replied by email through Mike Petrilli, and you can read their response at the bottom of my original entry.
Hard predictions at the asymptotes, union version
Shorter story of the Wisconsin conflict over collective bargaining, Yglesias Depressing Version: [T]he classic postwar American dynamic of an economy with a large minority of the workforce unionized is fundamentally unstable. In the long-run the two equilibria are toward a non-union economy or else toward the Nordic model where virtually everyone is in a union. […]
New York Times describes the fall of the blog
The death of the blog was announced today by the paper of record: Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter. I’d say more, but I’m approaching my character lim
Why the “disrupting college” argument doesn’t stick
The Center for American Progress has released Clay Christensen's latest spinoff argument, Disrupting College. Kevin Carey has some smart observations at Ed Sector's Quick and Ed blog. I had a different visceral reaction to the 80-page pamphlet: meh. Not from a "oh dear oh me oh my the sky is falling" angle but "sheesh, this is what Christensen thinks […]