Getting Stupical In NY
It seems that some state legislatures are competing to pass the worst education laws. Whether it's Kansas deciding to strengthen education by destroying teaching as a career or Florida beating up on disabled children and grieving mothers, there seems to be a race going on, and if it is to the top of something, that's a mountain I don't ever want to see.New York has most recently made its bid for t
Computer Writer Vs. Computer Grader
Les Perelman is a hero of mine. The former director of undergraduate writing at MIT has been one of the smartest, sanest voices in the seemingly-endless debate about the use of computers to assess student writing. And now he has a new tool.Babel (the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator) was created by Perelman with a team of students from MIT and Harvard, and it's pretty awesome as laid
Is There No Common Ground? Well.....
I sympathize with Peter DeWitt, the former K-5 principal who has morphed into a pundit/trainer. In his blog at EdWeek he can often be found trying to chart a course between the Scylla of the CCSS-based Reformsters and the Charybdis of rabid opposition to any changey things in school while sailing under the Pigpen's Black Cloud of corporate deceitfulness with the Pebble of rhetorical purity tests i
4-29-13 Curmudgucation Week
CURMUDGUCATION: The New Enemies ListThe Tea Party threat is over. Well, over-ish.I've been writing about this in the context of other topics, but I believe it deserves its own attention. Over the past ten days, the narrative about the Enemies of the Core has shifted.On April 21, The Daily Beast attributed attacks on the Core to "an unholy alliance between the Tea Party and the teachers' union