Should I go to grad school? Almost certainly not. Are you living a hellish existence as a grad student? I have never been happier, more comfortable, more challenged, or more fulfilled. Won’t I end up a bitter, disgruntled mess if I go to grad school? You’ll end up a bitter, disgruntled mess anyway, unless you […]

Jill Barshay of the Washington Monthly is disappointed with the performance of our high school seniors on the latest NAEP results: When you look at top achieving students in the top 75th and 90th percentiles. Their scores are FLAT. … High achieving students aren’t improving at all. So you can’t blame the infusion of more low performing students […]

Via the Daily Dish, Natasha Loder in the Economist: Although Asian Americans do often come from better educated and higher income families, socio-demographic factors could not explain the achievement gap between Asians and whites. … Being brainier isn’t the answer either. When the pair looked at cognitive ability as measured by standardised tests, Asian-Americans were […]

Let’s pull out a section from this long piece on Pikkety, inequality, and education from David Leonhardt. It’s a perfect example of how the unsupported presumptions of our media elites have created the destructive conventional wisdom that we need to educate our way out of our economic problems. When a society becomes more educated, many […]

This piece is a year old, but I’ve only just now discovered it. It’s by Pasi Sahlberg, an education expert from Finland who has a great deal of experience with Finland’s school system, widely considered to be the world’s best. Sahlberg makes an observation that, to me, is both elementary and enormously important: elite obsession […]

This is me, studying from my rapidly approaching language exam. As I successfully (if not painlessly) passed my prospectus defense a couple weeks ago, it’s the last hurdle between me and my dissertation. Should I successfully complete the exam (two hours, 250 words, a text I won’t know about in advance), I will officially have […]

Via Yasmin Nair, this piece on Quartz lends credence to a phenomenon I myself have observed very often: people who attack the value of a college degree a) all went to college themselves and b) don’t extend that thinking to their children. Now I happen to think that a healthy economy and social system will […]

Along with my petty obsession about the STEM shortage myth, I’m frequently puzzled by the common assertion that we need to send people into trade schools to solve our labor market woes. I find this to be a far less acute problem than STEM mythology, in part because it’s a less common of an argument, […]

Here’s a brief catalog of panels and sessions devoted to labor issues for adjuncts and conatingent faculty here at the conference: First, the Program Chair Adam Banks, Conference Chair Howard Tinberg, and Exemplar Award winners Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher all mentioned the needs of adjuncts in their remarks at the opening ceremony. The Committee […]