StickWithANose

Want to know how far down the road to serfdom [pun intended] we’ve travelled? Look no further than the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal! [proxy]
Those of us who live near the top of the income pyramid are doing very nicely, thank you. Yet our government keeps showering us with Christmas presents. [...]

I’d like to apologize to readers [all 20-30 of you!] for my recent excursions beyond education policy and issues related to schooling [my areas of expertise], but this week’s news offers us some perspective on the Orwellian state of public discourse that impacts everything in our society, including debates over public education.
Yesterday, I posted on [...]

The very serious thinkers running our Banana Republic are all aflutter today over the AP/Stanford University poll which finds that a large majority of Americans think we should make it easier to fire ‘bad’ teachers and pay ‘good’ teachers better wages. Couple of points: First, the take away from this poll is that 30 years [...]

Valerie Strauss poses what should be an obvious question emerging from the hoopla over the latest PISA scores… Since the nation has been on the assessment-based school reform bandwagon for over a decade now and our scores on standardized assessments such as PISA continue to go down shouldn’t we be re-thinking our approach to school [...]

I’ve been thinking about the hollow language of conservatism quite a lot these days. As someone who is interested in the politics of education policy and reform, I’m interested in thinking through a mode of politics capable of achieving the democratic mandate of public schooling within the context of an increasingly dysfunctional political system in [...]

Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, the two dominant fields in the social sciences [Political Science and Economics] cling to a foundational theory that renders much of the research conducted in those fields down to academic navel gazing that does precious little to illuminate the functioning of actually existing human societies. In political science, [...]

With regard to education policy, I’m reaching the point of saturation and despair. The same old characters are pitching the same old policies, and the same old media personalities repeat the same old slogans and message frames without ever bothering to do their job. However, looking around at the rest of Bananamerica doesn’t instill much [...]

I give up. No blogging today… I’ll let Ed give you the real lowdown on the mandate for change expressed by the American voter.
1. Social Security reform that guarantees my current level of benefits, alters someone else’s, and cuts everyone’s Social Security taxes to boot.
2. A world-class national infrastructure that can be built [...]

I frequently make the case that much of what drives education policy at the national level these days is good old fashioned public looting in which private interests seek profit by gaining access to what they see as a bottomless pit of capital… public treasuries. However, as should be apparent to any conscious being living [...]

I hate it when I actually agree with Frederick Hess, but intellectual honesty compels me. While he is certainly fighting a rear-guard action to preserve the gains the Oligarchs have achieved under the Obama administration, Hess’ assessment of the most likely trajectory for education policy in the near future is correct: More of the same [...]