StickWithANose

Not content with leaving the nation in worse shape than did his mentor Herbert Hoover, the Bush family is celebrating the launch of the Bush Institute for Knowledge Pollution at SMU with the announcement of its first policy initiative: The Alliance to Reform Education Leadership. The goal of the initiative is to train educational leaders [...]

Two points that I consistently discuss on this blog are: one, the current trajectory of policy proposals coming from both political parties is almost totally lacking in scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of those proposals; and two, the “evidence” used to justify the policies being pursued by both political parties comes from privately funded think-tanks [...]

Tom Hoffman makes an important point in this discussion of Finnish national standards. American reformers love to cherry-pick data from countries like Finland to back up their proposals for policies such as national standards. However, when you dig beneath the surface, you find a concrete reality that undermines the larger argument those “reformers” make. The [...]

Team Obama starts a week long PR campaign today to breath life into its republican education policies by building on the buzz over “Waiting for Superman”. This morning President Obama made the case for a longer school year by quoting misleading statistics.
President Barack Obama started the school week Monday with a call for a [...]

I’m moving this weekend so posting will be light until Monday or Tuesday. Here’s what caught my eye this morning…
Turning Schools Into Robot Factories: The Answer Sheet
As a teacher educator and educational researcher, I have been visiting classrooms for years, and, for the most part, I don’t like what I see. Many of [...]

As a follow-up to my previous posts on the publication of the Point study on teacher incentives and the attempt by noted think-tank intellectual Matthew Yglesias to polish that turd, I want to share with you a very small example of how incestuous the world of philanthropist funded think-tanks and policy centers really are. Yglesias [...]

With yesterday’s release of Vanderbilt’s POINT study, the knowledge industry has kicked into high gear in order to put a happy face on data that undermines much of what they’ve been telling the nation about incentives and education for the past two decades. Today, that great fountain of village consensus thinking Matt Yglesias does his [...]

Of all the think tank trolls I’ve read, I must say that Fredrick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute is my favorite. This is not because I hold his work in high regard. Quite the opposite. In conducting my dissertation research, I had the pleasure of reading the very large number of books that [...]

I’ve taken issue with the Krug-man on many occasions, however his most recent commentaries on the political economy of contemporary America have been simply brilliant. In today’s column, he sums up the zeitgeist of our political discourse concisely and accurately.
The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would [...]

The weather is too nice, I have too much on my plate, and I’m too annoyed with the world to offer anything substantive. Here’s a slice of Bananamerica…
Lot’s of buzz about the Fenty/Rhee loss but the future doesn’t look much brighter. There’s a whole crop of Broad Academy alumni waiting to fill Rhee’s shoes. Schools [...]