I’ve made this point before, but it bears repeating. 9/11 was a crime and a tragedy. It was one crime and tragedy in a long history of humanity’s capacity for evil. I don’t diminish the loss of life; nothing could. But I insist that people acknowledge that similar or worse has been meted out again […]
Continue reading →My friend Isaac Butler of Parabasis clued me in to a nice little illustration of Campbell’s Law, which states “The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social […]
Continue reading →I’d like to take a minute to make a couple of reading recommendations and to offer an explanation. First, I can’t recommend this Jacobin piece by Allie Gross highly enough. It’s an exhaustively researched piece of investigative journalism, and totally damning of Detroit’s charter school and the profiteers who have created them. Second, I’d like to recommend […]
Continue reading →As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a qualified supporter of the Collegiate Learning Assessment+, the Council for Aid to Education’s standardized test of college learning that is the subject of my dissertation. For awhile now, I’ve been poking away at a post about why; it sometimes disturbs my fellow education reform skeptics to hear that I […]
Continue reading →Back in 2011, the Libyan intervention was a bit of an obsession of mine. It wasn’t just that we were starting yet another deployment of American military power in the Middle East. It was how desperate liberals, after years of complaining about Iraq, wanted to be seen as tough, cool, and serious. Self-styled liberals and progressives […]
Continue reading →I’m grateful to Bloggingheads and Conor Friedersdorf for having me on again. This is an issue about which I feel great passion. I’d like to point you in the direction of this excellent Jacobin piece about the charter school takeover in New Orleans, which is pretty much exactly what I’m talking about with Conor here when I […]
Continue reading →Man, this dude is incorrigible. @dunndunndunnTL;DR Freddie says he didn’t accuse SK of lying because he doesn’t consider her a “source” regarding her own experiences— alex dunn (@dunndunndunn) July 24, 2014 That is emphatically, totally, and non-negotiably not what I said. It’s an utter lie. It’s someone representing something as true that he knows to be […]
Continue reading →I’ve been reading Julie Pennington’s The Conquest of Literacy, which is a study derived from the 15 years Pennington worked at an elementary school in Austin, Texas. The elementary school was 93% Hispanic students and about half-and-half Hispanic and white teachers. (Austin, by design, is an immensely racially and economically segregated city.) In the book, Pennington […]
Continue reading →This here is Alex Dunn, a PhD student in the Philosophy department at UCSB and someone who started a blog about Harry Potter. (“A blog for people who take silly things way too seriously.” What a novel idea on the internet!) Last night, Alex told some lies about me on Twitter. “his finest moment was […]
Continue reading →Emily Gould is a talented young writer. Here are my thoughts on her first novel, Friendship. “What are your grandest aspirations?” That’s a question on a job application that stymies one of the main characters, Bev, near the very beginning of Gould’s book. If it challenges Bev, it animates Friendship. The question hangs around in the back […]
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