StickWithANose

One of the more interesting phenomena that I encountered in doing research for my dissertation was educational marketing. For charter schools targeting disadvantaged student populations that are also operating in a “high stakes” or competitive context, there is a strong incentive to avoid servicing the neediest students within those populations and target the highest academic [...]

… Larry Summers, that’s who. The latest scuttlebutt from the White House is that Austan Goolsbee has been picked to fill the now vacant shoes of Christina Romer as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. However, as Rortybomb notes [h/t Naked Capitalism], a quick look at Goolsbee’s academic work [pdf] demonstrates that the [...]

Since the president is expected to announce proposals for further economic stimulus that are too small and are unlikely to make it out of congress, it is important to remember that the looting of public treasuries by the same economic elite that created our current disaster in the first place continues unabated, and the usual [...]

One of the most frustrating aspects of education policy is the pre-dominance of ‘free marketeers’ driving public discourse on schooling despite the fact that the world economy continues to struggle after an economic meltdown brought about, in large part, by ‘free market’ ideology. While a small subset of economists and political economists are attempting to [...]

Team Obama floated its first trial balloon on how to pay for Education Jobs without touching Arne’s precious Race to the Top funding… Take the money from food stamps! That 55% of Americans believe Obama to be a socialist speaks volumes about how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone…
We were told we have to [...]

Posted without comment: The Big Picture
I continue to see the Austerian movement in the United States as thinly disguised partisan politics. These are people who will say anything to keep the subsidies and tax benefits flowing to their electoral base. They will say anything –regardless of whether they actually believe these things — to thwart [...]

I have on many occasions pointed out that much of the impetus behind the charter school and school choice movements has very little to do with student learning and everything to do with the private sector tapping federal and state education dollars for its own enrichment. However, this trend is by no means exclusive to [...]

My intention for today’s post was to focus on the news that several states are seeking federal waivers to cut special education funding in response to budget crises. I intended to discuss the impact that these kinds of cuts have on poorer urban schools that have higher proportions of students classified as having learning disabilities [...]

This subject is somewhat off topic for me, but the ideology behind the proposals of Stanford economist Paul Romer is part and parcel with a dangerous trend in elite circles that is attempting to [literally] turn back the clock to the age of colonialism.* The idea goes as follows:
Romer is peddling a radical vision: that [...]