A blogger named “thequotableyeti” provides a high-school teacher’s warning to college professors about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Though she or he starts out a little unkindly toward us, the points made are important. After the complaint, the blogger begins with a very good point: The common core purports to make students college and…

When I said “Blind peer review is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet” (it was picked up by Inside Higher Ed),  I was thinking narrowly. At that point, all I really was advocating was for a more fruitful method of peer review, something we can certainly establish (and cheaply) in our current digital environments. Today,…

David Coleman, head of the College Board (of SAT fame) and sparkplug to the creation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), seems to believe that if we can measure it, we can know it and evaluate it. He also seems to believe that measurement results in truth absolute, not truth relative, a mindset more…

Two years ago, I delivered a paper at the Modern Language Society annual meeting on blind peer review. I don’t much care for it, I said. Though I am uncomfortable with peer review as a whole, it was the “blind” part I was addressing particularly. Perhaps I was too timid. Perhaps it takes a Nobel…

American educational institutions are in the process of shooting themselves in the foot. Not only are we often abusing students financially (see my earlier post referring to Suzanne Mettler’s work), but we are allowing corporate ideas (ones that are demolishing the stability of the American economy by squeezing the American workforce–as Barbara Garson, among others,…

Suzanne Mettler’s The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy was quite useful to me when writing The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth. She’s onto something, arguing (to quote from my book) that the: startling unwillingness to recognize the support we have received over our lives has had the surprising…