American Dialect Society 2016 Words of the Year

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH POLITICAL WORD OF THE YEAR deplorables (basket of): epithet used by Clinton in speech about Trump supporters nasty woman: epithet used by Trump addressing Clinton in final presidential debate Pantsuit Nation: popular Facebook group for Clinton supporters post-truth: belonging to a time in which facts matter less than beliefs and emotions…

The Russian Model and Student-Loan Debt

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In September, about six weeks before the presidential election, Abby Jackson wrote the following short item for Business Insider: Russian Education and Science Minister Olga Vasilieva called for a return to mandatory farm labor for school children, according to Russian state-operated news agency RIA Novosti via The Moscow Times. Vasilieva said that students should be…

Toolkit for Opposing the DeVos Nomination

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The Network for Public Education [http://networkforpubliceducation.org/] has put together this Toolkit for Opposing Betsy DeVos’s nomination as Secretary of Education. Although the emphasis is on K-12 education, it seems very likely that DeVos will support the expansion of for-profit colleges and universities, the increased privatization of public colleges and universities, and…

More on Higher Ed’s Haves and Have-Nots

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for PBS News, Ben Markus of the Hechinger Report, highlights the uneven degree to which cuts in state subsidies to public colleges and universities have impacted the institutions that serve the highest numbers of economically disadvantaged, academically at risk, and non-White students. In the first half of the essay, Markus…