“Trust us” and “there’s plenty of oversight, honest!”
What does an education historian bring to the table on national security debates? Just this: When have we heard government officials assure the public that they’re competent and the public doesn’t need to have more information? When we have heard government officials assure the public that there is sufficient oversight of activities? When has security […]
Brief review of Matt Reed’s “Confessions of a Community College Administrator”
I recently read Matt Reed’s Confessions of a Community College Administrator, which was released earlier this spring. Bottom line: read it if you want a good description of community colleges today and an administrator’s perspective on the dilemmas of the public 2-year college sector.
Time enough for love … of learning: more on credit (hours)
Matt Reed has responded twice to my observations last month about competencies and credit hours. First, he directly responded to my proposal that we just strike the word “hour” from the phrase “credit hour:” If we just declare that credits mean whatever a given provider says they mean, then there’s no basis for denying federal […]
How to kill a good report by using Excel
My brain is hurting this afternoon, because someone decided to use a stacked bar chart for two figures in the brand-new Georgetown Center for Education and Workforce report on employment and salary data for different undergraduate degrees, written by Anthony Carnevale and Ban Cheah. Here is the chart on unemployment data for different clusters of […]
“Parent trigger” as a pale shadow of community involvement
During the past two legislative sessions in Florida, I have watched debates over the so-called parent-trigger bills with a mix of disappointment and resignation. Have we fallen so low in discussing parent involvement that a petition or plebiscite is considered involvement? Maybe this is the Facebook Era’s version of maximum feasible participation, a sort of […]