Monday, August 6, 2012

Adam Smith Warns: Beware the Profit-Seekers « Diane Ravitch's blog

Adam Smith Warns: Beware the Profit-Seekers « Diane Ravitch's blog:


Adam Smith Warns: Beware the Profit-Seekers

A faithful reader sent the following quotation from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations:
Merchants and master manufacturers are, in this order, the two classes of people who commonly employ the largest capitals, and who by their wealth draw to themselves the greatest share of the public consideration. As during their whole lives they are engaged in plans and projects, they have frequently more acuteness of understanding than the greater part of country gentlemen. As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects than with regard to the latter. Their superiority over the country gentleman is not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest 



What Scholars Say about Merit Pay

The New York Times’ editorial is so unbelievably ignorant!
There is by now a huge accumulation of knowledge and experience about the uselessness of merit pay or pay for performance.
Daniel Pink (Drive), Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), Edward Deci (Why We Do What We Do) have explained why intrinsic motivation matters more than bonuses, and why bonuses may actually impair performance by demoralizing people.
Here are leading scholars in Zurich who explain yet again that merit pay does not work and will never work.
The idea that people are solely self-interested and materially orientated has been thrown overboard by leading 


When Students Awaken, Everything Will Change

I just got this post on Twitter by a student who wants no part of the DFER-like “Students for Education Reform,” created at Princeton to advance the corporate reform agenda. This student is amazing! Impressive research, real understanding about how words can be used to deceive, and a grasp of the issues.
There is a bottom-line question that no one ever answers: If DFER and SFER and SFC and TFA and StudentsFirst and other corporate reformers already know how to close the achievement gap, as they repeatedly claim, why are there no examples of it anywhere? It hasn’t happened in New York City, after ten long years of


News about the Best and the Brightest

Remember Howard Dean? He ran for President in 2004. He is a leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
His son was TFA and now runs charter schools.
Who on the national scene supports public education?