keep public universities PUBLIC
Aaron Bady and Mike Konzcal
Continue reading →Category: Education
a validity problem, not a reliability problem
Some people are getting overly worked up about this study, showing a high correlation between machine scoring and human scoring of certain writing tasks. Some of it is glee from people in the university-hating media set; there’s also some rending of garments by those in the humanities who love nothing more than the excuse to […]
Continue reading →my learning community
I’m excited to say that I’ll be teaching a learning community of first generation college students next semester. (That is, students whose parents did not attend college.) Most people don’t associate that demographic with educational disadvantage the way they do with low socioeconomic standing and racial minorities. In fact, first generation college students suffer on […]
Continue reading →the Atlantic‘s war on the university
I could, if I felt like it, take this latest anti-university screed from the Atlantic apart. Laura McKenna’s piece is one of the most tired, cliched articles I’ve read in years, a collection of the classic warmed-over complaints about ivory towers and uninterested professors. It works purely on argument by assertion, speaks only in generalizations […]
Continue reading →Michael Chabon went to college a long time ago
So a Wired post in “A Geeks Guide to the Galaxy,” I think by David Barr Kirtley, and a post on SyFy Channel’s official blog by Marc Bernadin, both quote Michael Chabon insisting that writing professors are biased against genre fiction in general and science fiction in particular. “I had a lot of shameful, cowardly […]
Continue reading →data presentation
This is the sort of thing that I should learn to just keep to myself, but here goes. The just-released issue of Research in the Teaching of English (46.3) has a study I really admire, “Placement of Students into First-Year Writing Courses.” (In the unfortunate custom of academic articles, the PDF is gated, though an abstract is available here.) […]
Continue reading →most e-textbooks will probably never look like the demonstrations
Which isn’t, I’ll hasten to say, a big problem. Last week, I was invited to a bull session about a new, tablet-based ebook version of a writing textbook. The publisher had asked the authors to get creative with brainstorming; they feel, as do the authors, that e-textbooks have not really begun to explore the possibilities […]
Continue reading →homeschooling, unschooling, and selection bias
Dana Goldstein is one of my favorite policy and political writers working today, and this response to the recent n+1 piece on unschooling is a good example of why. Goldstein is fair, measured, and diligent with her citations, while at the same time quite critical in her effect. It’s a great piece. (Astra Taylor’s piece […]
Continue reading →there’s no such (unified) thing as Montessori education
As someone who reads and writes a lot about American education policy, I often hear people assert that Montessori education is the secret weapon we could deploy to solve many of our problems. The people who say this are all well-meaning, and they are typically speaking out of personal experience, with a child of theirs […]
Continue reading →my piece in HuffPo on international students
A piece I wrote about international students at American universities has been published at the Huffington Post. It’s worth saying that I wrote this piece before both this story in the New York Times and the horribly bigoted Pete Hoekstra Super Bowl ad came out. Were I to write the piece now, it would likely […]
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