The Tyranny of Standardized Testing

What has been happening to our public schools is beginning to happen to our colleges. The tyranny of testing is filtering up. We involved in higher education need to be listening to the experiences of those involved in K-12, as the author of this post, Jamaal Bowman, is:

Stephen King and Donald Trump

…It’s not only the geniuses who have the problem. They are the lucky ones—or, in some cases, the unlucky. At either end of the mass of us…. Stephen King wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times the other day, “Can a Novelist Be Too Productive?” My immediate response was, “No, but who cares?”…

How to Fight for Education Funding

Maybe some of us in higher education might think about what these K-12 teachers in Washington State have done, as reported in Labor Notes: Lawmakers in Washington state are scrambling to get ready for a special session after the state’s highest court announced it will start charging a penalty of $100,000 per day while legislators…

California Task Force Recommends Replacing ACCJC

If you have been following my long series of posts about the accreditation controversy at City College of San Francisco (CCSF), you are aware that I have been one of many critics of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), an independent entity of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) charged…

The US, India, Academic Freedom and the World

People are the same everywhere, I guess. That cliche stared me in the face this morning, when I saw over 30 new comments on the statement we published signed by a long list of scholars on the upcoming visit by Indian Prime Minister Naarendra Modi to a Silicon Valley. Five more have appeared while I’ve…

U.S. Politics for "Tech Nerds" (and Everyone Else)

I usually try to limit my posts on this blog to issues directly involving higher education.  But as AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum has pointed out, “the attack on higher education as a public good is a political attack” that “requires us to respond by entering the arena of politics.”  And today, via Paul Krugman’s blog,…

For a Union, Passivity Equates to a Loss of Collective Bargaining Rights

Yesterday’s NLRB’s decision on the collective-bargaining rights of employees hired through “temp” agencies has meant that very little attention has been paid to a decision handed down yesterday by an NLRB Administrative Law Judge. Although the change in how contingent employees are defined has potentially broad direct ramifications and signals an important, fundamental shift in…