In some respects, but especially in terms of its higher-ed dimensions, the Russian invasion of Crimea seems to echo the American invasion of Grenada. Those readers who were old enough to be following the news in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president, will remember the U.S. invasion of that small Caribbean island with a…
For several months, there was much political debate about the extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. Predictably, people on the Far Right, from Rand Paul to Paul Ryan, asserted that the extension of benefits would amount to a disservice to those receiving the benefits. The reasons ranged from the broadly ideological—for instance, that…
Since the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were introduced, The New York Times has been in constant, clamorous support. Columnists as diverse as Paul Krugman and David Brooks have lauded them; new stories have assumed their obvious utility and necessity. Today, however, that started to change. Columnist Timothy Egan wrote this: The push for Common Core standards…
The following is from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE). The CFHE website can be found at: http://futureofhighered.org/. _________________________ Earlier this year, the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education released a working paper, “Making All Public Higher Education Free.” In that paper the author, Bob Samuels, demonstrated why such a proposal is…
Many pixels have already been devoted to discussing the case of W, the philosophy job candidate who says her job offer was rescinded after she inquired with the department making the offer about what adjustments in start-date, salary, new teaching preps per year, pre-tenure sabbatical, and maternity leave might be possible. Rather than indicating which…
Taylorism, the systematization of labor developed by Frederick Taylor, makes the worker immediately replaceable. Individual skill and knowledge becomes irrelevant–on the part of the worker. Only at the higher levels of management and ownership does creativity count for anything. It’s an elitist system positing that those at the lower echelons are merely cogs, not thinkers.…
Several days ago, in an article for Salon, Lindsay Abrams reported that the state of Wyoming rejected the Next Generation Science Standards being implemented nationwide as part of the effort to increase student interest and achievement in the STEM disciplines. As has been the case whenever and wherever these science standards have been challenged, one…
A student group calling themselves the Young Invincibles has graded each of the fifty states on five criteria: tuition costs, spending per student, burden on families, financial aid, and the degree to which higher education is treated as a priority in state budgets. The scores for each category have then been averaged in a weighted…
On Saturday, Salon ran a terrific article by Suzanne Mettler with this headline: “More Bad News for Millennials: College Is Actually Making Inequality Worse” [http://www.salon.com/2014/03/15/more_bad_news_for_millennials_college_is_actually_making_inequality_worse/]. Given the current attention to the issue of income inequality, the headline does a disservice to what is actually a very complex analysis of the economic impact of enrollment and…