Dropout prevention theater… or at least concerts
Apparently John Legend is going to be singing for Proctor & Gamble's "anti-dropout promotion" campaign. This PR effort is deja vu all over again, from this historian's perspective. There have been anti-dropout PR campaigns since World War I, sometimes government sponsored (as in WW1), sometimes public-private combinations (as in a summer 1963 campaign partly funded by a […]
The incentives are critical, but they’re not responsible for critical choices
Today's David Brooks op-ed column ends with a mild zinger about overzealous test-prep being the choice of individual school officials rather than inevitable from high-stakes testing systems. That is precisely the argument I made in class yesterday with a handful of students, and it is absolutely in the capacity of school officials with authority to […]