StickWithANose

I generally like Steve Benen’s work at Washington Monthly. However, like all professional bloggers, his job often entails highlighting the issues being pushed by the organization for which he works, often issues with which he obviously has little to no expertise. What caught my eye yesterday was that on the same day that Steve published [...]

Today’s “Answer Sheet” features an article by Justin Snider of Teachers College that demonstrates the circularity of educational debate. The issue Snider addresses is the concept of academic rigor, but all that he seems to accomplish is to demonstrate the ways in which education policy has been going in circles for the past three decades. [...]

Noted “progressive” think tank hack Matt Yglesias got his panties all in a bunch the other day after Jeffbinc at Open Left made the observation that crowding minority students into segregated schools built around a teacher-centric militaristic pedagogy that middle and upper class families would never accept for their children just might be, well, racist. [...]

One of the truly depressing characteristics of contemporary news media is its inability to call ‘bullshit’. In order to maintain the false appearance of neutrality, reporters and talking heads alike will allow all manner of patently false statements to be propagated without so much as offering a challenge to the ideologue being “interviewed” [with the [...]

One moment that will forever stick in my mind is the night that “Shock & Awe” was unleashed upon Iraq. Our fearless leader stood before the camera in the White House and announced that we were, in effect, going to war to ensure peace. It was a moment of both clarity and cognitive dissonance that [...]

Earlier in the week, I pointed readers to the dust-up between Aaron Pallas and Frederick Hess over the scoring procedures used by DCPS to determine the value-added scores for teacher evaluations used to fire a large number of teachers in the District. If you’ll recall, Pallas used the only publicly available documentation provided by DCPS [...]

Kevin Carey over at the Quick and the Ed points readers toward this screed by noted hack and think-tank troll Frederick Hess attacking Aaron Pallas’ critique of the Washington D.C. IMPACT teacher evaluation system. I’ll readily admit that I have no expertise in psychometrics beyond the quantitative courses I took in graduate school, so I’m [...]

No Edu-Wonk… Your construct only works in the context of a false functionalist dichotomy that doesn’t exist in the actually existing world in which we live.

In a classic example of projection, EduWonk serves up two points of critique which tell us more about the ol’ Wonkster than the relationship between teacher credentials and student outcomes. The first point relates to what the Wonkster calls the piling up of weak studies that he counters with his own… conveniently provided for him [...]

Well, it looks like the Sherrod incident has brought the issue of race back into the spotlight of popular discourse and [predictably] the same old narratives are surfacing to obscure and dismiss the racial character of American culture. This week Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia offered up more boilerplate opinions that race is no longer [...]