Florida Department of Education fails math test
What is there to say about the ongoing story of mistakes in applying the Florida state algorithm for assigning a single letter grade to public schools? Somewhere in the country, at least one overwrought accountability system is going to break down every year for a variety of reasons. This year (again), it’s Florida’s turn. Those […]
“Portfolio district” concept as YASBA (yet another silver bullet approach)?
In the last week I had a brief exchange on Twitter with CPRE’s Robin Lake and Fordham’s Mike Petrilli about so-called portfolio districts. A short description of the components of a portfolio district is accessible on the CPRE website, and aside from the jargon that irritated me in the Twitter exchange, the gist is the proposal […]
The revolution in university… extension programs
Last summer and this, my daughter and I have been slowly working our way through the online lectures in Leonard Susskind’s second trimester of PHY 25 (The Theoretical Minimum: Classical Mechanics). ((At least according to Amazon, Basic Books is publishing a book written from all six extension courses in early 2013.)) We just finished the […]
New education acronym needed: YASBA (yet another silver-bullet approach)
Summertime, and everyone’s all a-Twitter over Eau de Me, You the City, Corps Será, and other MOOC platforms (MOOC = massively-open online courses, though they aren’t). ((For employees of these enterprises upset with my making fun of your names, please remember that your own choices gave me the straight line. And the folks at Digital […]
An illuminating mistake by Tyler Cowen
As the common quip goes, remember when teachers, police, and firefighters set up a system of fraudulent real-estate financing and ran our economy into the ground in 2007-08? Me, neither, but guess who’s paying now for it? Back in mid-June, economist Tyler Cowen argued that the reason why teachers were being attacked politically and paying […]