Dear Educator Hating Strangers: Your Opinions Belong in the Comments Section. Not in my Inbox.
This is now the third time I’ve written about being harassed for being an educator, but clearly the message isn’t getting through, so I will try one more time to reason with those who spend their lives making it their duty to share their opinions regarding my profession, my areas of expertise, and the work…
The 2015 Official UW-System Faculty Exodus Update Part 3: The “ Why Everyone’s Leaving” Edition
Ebola News Coverage as Educational as Shark Week
I should have expected the exploitative nature of news coverage concerning Ebola. I don’t know why I thought the news media would offer an educational experience. Offerings on television and on websites have much in common with Shark Week and the coverage of the O.J. Simpson disaster. Watching a patient being transported from an airport…
Rubrics Are for Rubes: Is There Any Softer Way to Couch This?
PA State Senators Crafting Legislation to Allow Universities to Secede from State System of Higher Ed
Author’s Note: A version of this post was publish on Raging Chicken Press under the title, “Slow Train to Destruction of Public Higher Ed in PA?: Defund then Divide-and-Conquer,” on Saturday, Feb. 22. If the fall 2013 semester saw the term “retrenchment” – the elimination of faculty, programs, and jobs – become part of daily…
What Are We “Reforming” Education For?
Is learning simply the acquisition of information? Is teaching nothing more than the successful transmission of “answers”? Seems so. Seems, also, that those who know next to nothing about education have so hijacked the discussion that we no longer are able to have nuanced discussions about its realities–the needs, methods and goals of systems producing…
Naïveté? Or Exploitation?
If there was one thing I learned from my Peace Corps experience it was that people everywhere know a lot more than the lucky few in the worldwide elites believe they do—and that the idea of helping them is really, at its heart, an idea of helping that elite. We lucky ones, generally from industrialized…
Reign of Error: the important new book by Diane Ravitch
This is crossposted from Daily Kos at the request of Aaron Barlow: The testing, accountability, and choice strategies offer the illusion of change while changing nothing. They mask the inequity and injustice that are now so apparent in our social order. They do nothing to alter the status quo. They preserve the status quo. They…
Shock Turning to Anger and Mobilization at Clarion University of Pennsylvania
Note: On Monday of this week I posted an article about plans to cut 40 jobs, including 22 faculty members at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Earlier today, I posted another article on the situation at Clarion on Raging Chicken Press. This article features an interview with the President of the Clarion chapter of the faculty…