lululu

Since I’ve been paying attention, education reform has seemed to defy easy political categorization. I found this article a nice explanation of how that happened, from a missed-Democratic-opportunity perspective. And you can tell it’s a serious article about education because it includes the mandatory “Nation at Risk” citation.

Every few days something crosses my mind to post here, but the fact of not updating in a month makes me feel like I need to squeeze out an epic narrative about what we’ve been up to. Rather than wait for that, I thought I’d just start posting those little things. Like this commentary from [...]

My favorite politics/policy blogger speculates that education policy must be a discouraging field to work in because nothing ever works. To which I say “feh!” I’m quite glad he rarely writes about education because when he does, I tend to hate what he says.

Last week, we finally checked two of our four major To Do list items of the list: we signed a rental contract in Berlin (completing all arrangements for the summer), and I accepted a job with a nearby education firm (that shall remain nameless so I can talk about it here without becoming a hit [...]

It’s easy to think that social science fields (like say, education research) have not advanced in the last 30 years in the same way that more technical fields (like say, computer science) have. I mean, we certainly don’t seem to be doing a much better job of actually educating people.
But every once in a while [...]

A couple of (long) articles today give good overviews of things that interest me.
From Time, “Why We Worry About the Things We Shouldn’t…And Ignore the Things We Should” [link] [pdf]
(Short Answer: We’re monkeys.)
From the NY Times Magazine, “What It Takes to Make a Student,” all about the achievement gap [link] [pdf]
(Short Answer: A lot [...]

1. High-achieving low-income students go to college at about the same rate as low-achieving high-income students (according to a new report that looks at National Education Longitudinal Study data). Which makes total sense when I think about all the dumb-asses at my high school that trotted off to [insert elite college here]. Feel free to [...]

I’m doing my best to take at least one day to celebrate before I start worrying about how the Democrats will screw things up before 08. We get one day, right?
I’ve had “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead” stuck in my head since Rumsfeld announced his resignation.
In other news, yesterday I was assigned to read [...]

In keeping with my last post, my knowledge of No Child Left Behind was pretty minimal when I was teaching. By minimal, I mean that it included two things:
- It was all about standardized tests, which blow.
- Bush signed it, so it must really blow.
Now, of course, my understanding of the ways in which NCLB [...]

When I was a teacher, I was very interested in watching how state and federal education policies played out in my school. I knew I was headed to grad school after my two-year stint, so I wanted to pay attention and develop some informed opinions about what policies worked and what didn’t, and whose decisions [...]