I have argued, for some time, that there’s a basic misunderstanding about why some schools and school districts are considered good. Many argue that, thanks to the vagaries of local districting and funding of public education through property taxes, the hardest to educate kids are systematically excluded from the best schools. They aren’t wrong to […]
Continue reading →One of the hardest parts of being a researcher is getting access to data. This is particularly acute if you, like me, work in research fields where there is very little grant funding available, making it difficult to give language users incentives to give you samples created under the controlled conditions that are necessary for […]
Continue reading →Like many people, I was both convinced and discouraged by this recent piece by Adolph Reed. Reed is one of the most eloquent and useful commentators we have today on the left, and a credible and intelligent critic of the kind of obsessive word policing that many now mistake for left-wing politics. Similarly, I was […]
Continue reading →A colleague of mine sent along this excellent piece by John Ewing of Math for America. It’s a very necessary and important critique of the use of value added models in education assessment. (It’s also– are you listening, Nick Kristof?– an excellent example of academic writing that is accessible and understandable.) I highly, highly encourage […]
Continue reading →So there’s been another spate of journalists complaining about academics lately, which is a cyclical exercise. This time, they’re really working the angle where they claim to show respect to academics in the abstract, but use this ostensible respect as a way to heap more disrespect onto actual academics. The latest flavor: how come academics […]
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