The ultimate LIFO
I’ve been trying to carve out time this week to read José Vilson’s This Is Not a Test, and also continue with Thomas Piketty. The combination of the two has sparked a few musings in the back of my mind, including the fact that someone else has noted, that Piketty’s hundreds-of-pages-long book doesn’t have much […]
Don Heller, debt, and the debt-crisis discourse
On Thursday, Valerie Strauss published a commentary on college-debt debate by Don Heller, the dean of Michigan State’s College of Education. The gist of Heller’s remark is that it is hyperbolic and unproductive to term the status of college-student and -alumni debt a crisis because the total indebtnedness that is allocated to college loans has crossed […]
Walking through a mental neighborhood
Severe storms at the USF Tampa campus pushed me off campus this afternoon, and I’ve used it in part to catch up on reading, such as Joy Ann Williamson-Lott’s article “The Battle over Power, Control, and Academic Freedom at Southern Institutions of Higher Education, 1955–1965” ($$) in last November’s Journal of Southern History. It’s an important […]
Theory tic complaints about teacher ed
U.S. Secretary of Education spoke with Andrea Mitchell Friday about new teacher-education regulations that the U.S. Department of Education is preparing for a set of federal financial supports for teacher preparation programs. Most of the verbiage that you will read and hear will focus on tracking the impact of program graduates on K-12 student learning, a focus […]
The first rule of White Club (privilege discourse and history)
Nevada freeloader-rancher Cliven Bundy and Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling happened to say a lot about American racism this week in ways that sometimes require open prejudice to show: we’re nowhere near a post-racial society.