Peter Cappelli, a Professor of Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, has specialized in studies of employment patterns and, more specifically, shifts in the American economy that have made some jobs obsolete and that have created demand for new specialties. His most recent book is Will College Pay Off?, and as…
In a recent article for the Washington Post, Lisa Rein has reported the following troubling details about the way in which VA hospitals have been purchasing prosthetics for veterans: “Employees in the purchasing department of a VA hospital in the Bronx had used government purchase cards like credit cards at least 2,000 times to buy prosthetic…
Beyond Wisconsin, Scott Walker is known primarily for his attacks on unions and collective bargaining, on the funding of public education, and more recently, on tenure. But in a recent article for Scientific American, Siri Carpenter reports on his attacks on Wisconsin’s environmental protections, on environmental activists, and on climate science and climate scientists: “When…
In an article for the Detroit Free-Press titled “Tough Choice? EMU Hikes Tuition, Forgoes $1M in State Aid,” David Jesse reports: “Here’s the choice Eastern Michigan University administrators and board members say they faced as they worked to put together a budget for the upcoming school year–-get $1 million in extra state aid by staying…
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 his review of Why Information Grows, by MIT researcher and physicist César Hidalgo, University of Virginia Media Studies scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses Hidalgo’s presentation of the development of the iPhone and comments that: Hidalgo makes no mention of the state-funded research that, in reality, sparked the technology that underlies just about everything in the…
I was at the AAUP Annual Meeting and conference in Washington, D.C. last week. If you’ve never been you should definitely go as it is both fun and informative. Among other things, I met many of the people responsible for this very blog for the first time. But that’s not what I want to…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_q61B-DyPk
By 1970, almost everyone who had worked to create “programmed instruction” during the 1950s and 1960s had moved away from the idea of teaching machines as the centerpiece of education. These tools, they had realized, were only widely effective when in the hands of master craftspeople—that is, trained teachers who understood both the limits and…
I rarely post items to this site that don’t deal pretty directly with higher education, leaving such posts to my entertaining friend Marty Kich and others perhaps more worldly than I. But today I thought I might post something about the case of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP leader from Spokane, Washington, who stepped down after…