Marty Kich has provided a useful supplement to Aaron’s review with respect to standardized testing in Texas by quoting extensively from an account of the role played by British educational conglomerate Pearson. He also quotes from two reports on the process by which Texas selects textbooks, in which ideological factors often play an outsized and…
—or, If Moses Was a Founding Father, Then Was Charlton Heston’s Leadership of the NRA Divinely Preordained? Aaron’s post references the addition of new standardized tests in Texas. In an October 11 article for the British newspaper The Telegraph, Katherine Rushton opens a discussion of the UK-based conglomerate’s “challenges” with pointed references to the business…
The Community College Research Center at the Columbia University Teachers College has released a report on “Unintended Impacts of Performance Funding on Community Colleges and Universities in Three States.” The full text of this CCRC Working Paper No. 78 is available at http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/media/k2/attachments/unintended-impacts-performance-funding.pdf. The report’s authors are Hana Lahr, Lara Pheatt, Kevin J. Dougherty, Sosanya…
In an exasperating article on the op-ed page of The New York Times today, science writer Benedict Carey argues for the benefit of testing, conflating all types from yearly standardized tests to weekly quizzes and ignoring the indisputable fact that tests are primarily regressive (they test what is known, sometimes at the expense of what might…
The following is a news release from We Are Ohio, the progressive coalition originally established to oppose Senate Bill 5. This coalition has remained in place because the attacks on collective bargaining rights, public employees, and public education have shown no signs of abating. The Know Your Charter site is a remarkable resource because it…
At this past June’s annual meeting, a chapter leader suggested that AAUP ought to start tracking votes of no confidence—even if not as formally as it tracks its own investigations and censures of institutions for violations of the AAUP’s core principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure/economic security. As it is now, a vote…
In their recent November-December Academe article, Jonathan Alan King, Ruth Perry, and Frederick P. Salvucci look into MIT’s decision to build commercial buildings on campus land and make the argument that institutions often put profit before students’ and researchers’ needs. Their article examines the ongoing debate over academic space on campus and talks about how we in…
This is a guest post by Joel Thomas Tierno, a contributor to the recent November-December issue of Academe. Tierno is a professor of philosophy at the College of Southern Nevada; he has also taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Erie Community College, Buffalo State College, and Elmira College. He is the…