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Brief thought exercise: why do we keep applying business and market principles to the idea of education?

This will be a pretty short post, because if I wrote everything I wanted to write about it, I’d be here for hours and probably get off into a series of meandering sub-points that wouldn’t ultimately benefit anyone. Lest you… Continue Reading

Matt Teeters and the tricky dance of politics and education in Wyoming

Matt Teeters is a state representative in Wyoming who helped lead the charge for the state to officially reject the new Next Generation Science Standards, becoming the first state to officially do so. (It should be noted that the Governor of… Continue Reading

Why did David Coleman and company keep choosing “synthesis” as the word to best represent the new SAT? Argh.

If you’re unfamiliar with David Coleman, he’s one of the architects of the Common Core standards — and now he’s the guy who led the re-shaping/re-branding of the SAT. Here are the basics of the new test: back to 1600… Continue Reading

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Did David Cicarella and John DeStefano mark the future of teachers’ union compromises in New Haven?

I was a teacher for a couple of years, and I’ve stayed close to the education movement ever since — as a volunteer, an observer, and in other capacities. Some of my friends from teaching are now principals or district… Continue Reading

Are you planning on giving a lot of money to Harvard or Yale, or maybe Columbia? Stop. It’s not really worth it.

Check out that chart above. Basically, at a highly-selective school, a student is 14 times more likely to be from an affluent family than a poor family. That’s from new research via Brookings, which also notes this: There are number of… Continue Reading

In this era of Amazon and Google, could we finally drastically lower the cost of textbooks?

Check out the chart above. It’s from here (AEI) via here (The Atlantic), and basically it captures this idea: since 1978, the cost for college textbooks has exceeded the rising rate for medical services, new home prices, and even inflation. While… Continue Reading

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The only university in the United States to spend the last eight years hiring full-time faculty and shrinking admin hires is Iowa State University

In the past eight years — yep, a decade basically — there’s only one school in America that has consistently hired full-time faculty while slashing admin roles, and that school is … drumroll … Iowa State University. Here’s the main article with the data and here’s one… Continue Reading

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Big data is the future, but no one seems to understand it and we’re not teaching it enough. Can this end well?

Let’s follow the bouncing ball here: 1. The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) released the top 10 office trends of 2014 recently; admittedly it reads a little bit like a press release from someone in their 50s who’s nervous… Continue Reading