Research + Politics = Bad News
At the Fordham's flypaper blog, Andy Smarick has some sobering news. Yes, Smarick is from the reformster camp, but what he reports this week is concerning to anybody who cares about education in this country.Smarick is reporting about the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the government agency responsible for gathering and sorting the vast ocean of data related to American schools.
Brookings Hits the Bathroom Scale
When it comes to amateurs dabbling in education, it's hard to beat the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Perhaps it's inevitable that economists want to weigh in education, since economics is another area in which everybody and his brother believes themselves expert.But Thomas Kane offers some grade A baloney with a side of ill-considered metaphor with "Never Diet Without a Bathr
TPM & the Anti-Core Attack Problem
Over at Talking Points Memo, Conor P. Williams uses the pushback against Campbell Brown as a jumping off point for addressing what he diagnoses as an anti-core ad hominem attack problem.In the attacks sites, the heated rhetoric, the strong language, Williams sees an echo of the virulent opposition to She Who Will Not Be Named. And he draws a line to his own experience, in which he finds anti-core
Choice Finance Fantasies (Part II)
I love the internet. In particular, I love the way it allows for conversations to break out between people who would never meet or interact in real life. This is one of those conversations.First, I wrote this piece about what I see as some fallacies in the ideas behind choice financing. Soon afterwards, Neerav Kingsland wrote this response at the blog reliquishment. Kingsland is the former CEO of
9-15-14 Curmudgucation - Granddad Learns About The Common Core
CURMUDGUCATION: Granddad Learns About The Common CoreAs your grandad would not say, "OMG!"The media group 617 has produced a video in support of the Core that is apparently intended to embarrass its opponents into silence. It has decidedly not worked out that way-- you will have a hard time finding the video, which seems to have suffered its own attack of embarrassment, but you can read