Anticipatory Schadenfreude rhetoric
In an essay in The New Republic, Kevin Carey has apparently joined the disruptiness gang: Many factors explain the endurance of higher education institutions—the ascent of the knowledge economy, their crucial role in upper-middle class acculturation, our peculiar national enthusiasm for college sports—but the single greatest asset held by traditional colleges and universities is their […]
How to manipulate data and figures
On occasion, students and reporters ask me what makes me trust or distrust folks who claim to be education researchers, and it’s a harder question to answer than one might think. As an historian with some quantitative training, I am eclectic on methods–I have no purity test other than “the evidence and reasoning have to […]
Odds and ends
It’s been a wild week to be an involuntary observer this week — the week before spring break for me turned out to be very busy for both anticipated and unanticipated reasons, so I was unable to comment on the debate over SB 1718 in Florida (the “parent trigger” bill), the higher ed budget and […]
Minor addendum on the TDR coverage post
In rereading the post I just uploaded, I realized some readers may be surprised at the fact no major news organization earned a B or C. That is an artifact of the herd response by media, where most published the teacher names and (bad) data. In terms of potential favoritism, I have no personal connection […]
Grades for coverage of NYC Teacher Data Report release
Before the New York City Department of Education released the name-and-number spreadsheet on the now-defunct Teacher Data Reports, I wrote and released grading criteria for news coverage. And now, with more than a week of coverage from a number of outlets, the grades (limited to major outlets where I read a critical mass of coverage). ((Thanks […]