On July 30, Cathy O’Neil posted an article titled “The Manufactured Trucker Shortage” on her mathbabe blog. She opens the article with a quotation from an article in the Wall Street Journal that raises some alarm over the current shortage of long-distance trucker drivers, estimated to be about 30,000 drivers, and, worse, the projected shortage…
In late March, I wrote a post titled “The Meaning of the Failure of the Online For-Profit Universities” It was a response to CNN’s hour-by-hour graphing of a dramatic one-day decline in the stock price of the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix. The stock price had plummeted on the acknowledgement that the…
As Maria indicates in her comment, the first half or so of this post is my own commentary. The material below the line is the item from the Department of Labor. I apologize for any confusion. One can argue that adjunct faculty whose primary employment is outside the college or university at which they are…
Wisconsin state senators struck a bipartisan deal yesterday and approved $250 million in public subsidies for a new arena for the National Basketball Association’s Milwaukee Bucks. The bill will now go to the state Assembly, where approval is likely. Just a few days ago, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed a state budget that includes cuts…
The American Federation of Teachers has officially endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. But the AFT asked each of the candidates to respond to a questionnaire covering a wide range of topics, starting with K-12 public education but ranging far beyond that. Excerpted in this post are the responses of…
The American Federation of Teachers has officially endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. But the AFT asked each of the candidates to respond to a questionnaire covering a wide range of topics, starting with K-12 public education but ranging far beyond that. Excerpted in this post are the responses of…
The American Federation of Teachers has officially endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. But the AFT asked each of the candidates to respond to a questionnaire covering a wide range of topics, starting with K-12 public education but ranging far beyond that. Excerpted in this post are the responses of…
Writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, Chloe Baker reports: “Aspiring teachers who can’t spell or count will no longer graduate, with a new national literacy and numeracy exam being introduced in Australia’s universities. . . . A pilot program will be introduced in August. Student teachers tested as part of the pilot will still graduate even if they…
The federal data that will be presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available…
In an op-ed published by the Providence Journal in Rhode Island, James Baar identifies “Four Crises That Dog Higher Education”: 1. Inflation of product cost. 2. Deflation of product value. 3. Enablement of social and moral dissolution. 4. Lower-priced, knockoff and fraudulent competition. Given the space constraints on most op-ed pieces, Baar addresses each of…