Seattle teachers and the administrative politics of formative assessment
This week, the expanding protest of teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School has become a topic of national debate. It is difficult to parse out the issues because the tactics of the teachers at Garfield are relatively narrow but resonate with all sorts of larger issues around assessment.
FL Court: “Okay, legislature, you get a pass… but it’s not blanket approval”
A quick note on today’s decision of the Florida Supreme Court that the legislature has the authority to set tuition for the state’s public universities. In 2002, voters approved a state constitutional amendment that created the Board of Governors as a constitutional body to manage the state’s universities. Several key supporters of that amendment were […]
Non-profit as trade association? (Bush foundation allegations)
If anybody had time yesterday to browse the In the Public Interest collection of emails from the Foundation for Excellence in Education, it wasn’t me. I’ve read a few accounts, such as the one on Valerie Strauss’s blog, so the following is a short, initial impression based on someone else’s summary of a few items […]
Three books on heterodox quant: Bayes, econometrics, and demography
One of my resolutions this year is to engage in a long-term effort to upgrade my quantitative skills, as I’m a mid-career historian with some quantitative skills, of the type that inherently grow stale (along with my patience with SAS). I thought I’d share my thoughts about a few books, two of which I’m in […]
Teacher ed reform: short, cynical version
I’ve been having some troubles finishing a blog entry on remedial education–there are multiple moving pieces in my head, and explaining how they fit together is partly a matter of taking them apart and rearranging them. I had intended to finish it Friday, and then Saturday, and now sometime this year apparently. But since there’s […]