I try very hard--and often unsuccessfully--to avoid hyperbole and straw men in my argumentation on behalf of the American institution of public education. My bias is clear, and there is no preventing it from seeping into my writing and speaking and thinking. There's no getting around it. I have friends both in real life and [...]
courtesy discoveryeducation.com Voucher advocates are in an absolute tizzy over a recent paper from the pro-education-reform Thomas B. Fordham Institute. It is truly a thing of beauty. Jay P. Greene is not amused. He is a titan in the ed-reformer ranks and the blog-host of such dandies as "New Column on Florida's Anti-Testing Nihlists" (sic) wherein one [...]
courtesy educationnext.org I promised in a recent post called The Tyranny of the Datum to write about some guiding standards for appropriate data usage, in the spirit of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, and I will do that here today. Before I get to that, though, I'd like to briefly discuss--in a [...]
In the spirit of “War” and “Old Maid,” I present a card game called “Teaching.” (Note: there is something inherently icky about symbolizing students with numbers or, in this case, playing cards. I didn’t create this game to imply that students are merely numbers or that some students are “worth more” than others. Rather, I [...]
Data is a big deal. A great deal of innovation is happening right now in the field of data collection, storage, and management in the field of education. There are some well-documented fears among parents and teachers regarding these trends. Who will control the data? How will the data be used? Will my child’s data [...]