StickWithANose

The dirty little secret behind all of the political machinations over the un-funded liabilities of Social Security is that there is an easy fix to the whole mess: raise the cap on payroll taxes. With the wealthiest Americans now taking home a third of all income, the amount of income that exceeds the SS wage [...]

From Naked Capitalism:
Nobody I am aware of cares if a firm is able to turn a legitimate profit through their actions in the market. We object not to profit, but to blatant chiseling of the taxpayer after a company or individual makes a bad bet due to their own incompetence or willful blindness, then demands [...]

Lykins set me straight in comments yesterday by asking the simplest of questions:
Is there another education model that is out there now that we can advocate or is this going to take an enormous redirection of the national discussion into places unknown?
Since my dissertation took up this question, it is only appropriate that I begin [...]

I’m an advocate for reforming public schooling, and I do so frequently these days in academic venues. That said… the trajectory of education policy is truly frightening these days. Both of our political parties now pursue identical policy strategies with the intent of fostering the expansion of the education industry despite the lack of evidence [...]

It is a tough time to be an advocate for public education. The movement to relegate the institutional mandate of public education to the private sector that began in the 1980’s and A Nation at Risk has now become mainstream policy. As is to be expected in the American system, the free marketeers of educational [...]

On the Mythology of Adam Smith’s Political Economy: prosebeforehos
Hey EdWeek, the Overall Trend is Flat: NAEP
The Dismal Science will never leave Crazy Land: Economist’s View
Save Dragon Tank Jobs: Lawyers, Guns & Money
More evidence of High Teacher Turnover in Charters: Schools Matter
Using the Madness of Ayn Rand to talk about the Decline of Popular Discourse: Gin [...]

Amid the flurry of nominations that accompanied the entrance of our new president, a big to-do was made of Obama’s new Secretary of Education. Arne Duncan, we were told, had overseen a period of transformational reform that had produced tangible results by closing down failing schools and holding teachers accountable… code words for turning over [...]