Robert Francis Engs, 1943-2013
Historian Robert Engs died on Monday at the age of 69. He wrote Freedom’s First Generation (1979) about the post-Civil War Black community in and around Hampton, Virginia, and Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited (1999), about Hampton Institute and Samuel Chapman Armstrong. He was also a member of my dissertation committee and really the only faculty […]
Package Rules: Why the Udacity-San Jose State collaboration will beat “unbundling”
This week, two of California’s three higher education systems announced their intent to partner with for-profit online education companies such as Udacity to experiment with online and blended courses. This expansion in online education will be unlike the first courses in commercial MOOCs (massive open online courses), ((A caveat on the term MOOC: Udacity is […]
Why do California’s STAR tests have a structure to elicit a stereotype-threat effect?
I sent the following to the California State Board of Education and the California Department of Education earlier today. About a year ago I read Tedra Osell’s blog entry that included information about the California STAR exam test booklet that was highly disturbing. I contacted a few education officials in California who gave disturbingly vague […]
Overdone test preparation threatens the civil rights of students
Today is the 84th birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. When he and other civil-rights leaders fought for equal schooling in the decades after World War 2, they never would have imagined the level of test preparation we see today, test preparation falsely justified in the name of civil rights. In the name […]
What administrators should say when faculty are controversial
Since both the University of Rhode Island and Florida Atlantic University follow the standard practice of trying to make up responses to controversies over faculty statements, responses that fell well short of a vigorous defense of academic principles, I thought I might provide a boilerplate press release for all colleges and universities that can be […]