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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

You know I don’t know, at this point, how anyone could be surprised by the results of Sweden’s voucher system. We are now several decades into the modern education reform movement. Its history is a litany of failure, of vast promises and pathetic returns, of constantly over-promising and under-delivering. The charter school Deion Sanders started […]

 Danielle Kurtzleben reflects on the myth of the STEM shortage and its analytic problems:  [I]t’s not necessarily that there aren’t enough science and math scholars out there; it’s that there aren’t enough people out there with the particular skills the job market needs right now. Spending four years doing biology experiments is no guarantee for […]

I have many issues with this piece on the quality of American colleges and universities by Kevin Carey of the ed reform shop the New America Foundation. Let’s dive deep. Far from being complacent about higher education, America is the site of a perpetual crisis narrative about our colleges. Carey  writes, “While policy wonks hotly debate K-12 […]

It’s just research like all research: conducted by humans, with limitations and caveats, but also deserving of a respectful, accurate reading. There’s way too much student loan debt in this country. (I hold some of it myself.) I’ve written about it at length, and many times, over the course of years. I’ve written about ways […]