By Ian Reifowitz Contemporary conservatism is based around one simple myth: those at the top deserve to be there, and so do those at the bottom. A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research helps destroy that myth.
In last week’s blog, we spoke about the need for America’s colleges and universities to come together in new configurations to create efficiencies and economies of scale. While acknowledging the many reasons not to proceed, we argued that the drive to hold down sticker price, competition with each other and from for-profit and accredited online…
Proponents of standardized testing often set up the straw-man argument that we need assessment and that those against their favored tests, therefore, must be against testing completely. This is nonsense, of course. And soon it will be moot. We are beginning to see the consequences of our testing mania. And they are not good.
“An example I came up with: A guy stabs another guy and then the victim is in the hospital. The guy who stabs him comes to the victim’s bedside with the victim’s family, just to tell him everything is going to be alright. That’s how I am feeling.” Kyle D. Johnson Millersville University Student Class of 2013 [POST…
Those of us who teach composition know the difficulty of convincing students to think of audience as they write: Just who are they addressing? What do they expect in response? Why are they saying something? Writing is about convincing, entertaining, conveying, demanding, contacting…. However you describe it, writing is as much a two-way street as talking.…
American colleges and universities have reached a tipping point in their evolution. The old business, financial and program models are insufficient. Consumers now balk at the advertised sticker prices charged. Local government, trapped by a spiral of declining revenues in a long and deep recession, challenges the nonprofit status of these institutions. Endowments – at…
Last week, porn star James Deen spoke to a class at Pasadena City College, but administrators banned a planned public event with Deen. In a press release misleadingly titled, “PCC Instructor Agrees To Cancel Public Event,” the PCC administration claimed, “Pasadena City College administrators met with instructor Hugo Schwyzer today and came to agreement to…
At my monthly department meeting yesterday, the department’s representative to our University Senate gave his report on their last meeting. As part of his report, he told us some of the concerns our university president, Javier Cevallos, expressed about a recent drop in enrollment. Cevallos’s remarks before our University Senate echoed a statement he released…
The greatest irony in the increasing privatization of public education is that the deficiencies that the “reformers” typically claim to be trying to correct are often exacerbated by the very “reforms” that they are advocating. There is now a tremendous amount of statistical evidence that, on average, students in charter schools perform worse–and often much…
Last week, I finished the manuscript of a book (it will be called The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth, in case anyone is interested, and it should appear in August). It is caught up in history and historicism, culture and commentary–in what other people have written. While writing, I was surrounded…