stumbling toward clarity, balance, and insight
Posted in Educational on May 26th, 2008
Poverty crouches on one end of the “education problem,” and on the other end perch ridiculously over-priced professions. One example: the models on Deal or No Deal:
While several of the models said they could live just on what they earn from the show, it shoots only two or three days every three weeks. [Deal or [...]
Posted in Educational on May 22nd, 2008
So TMAO’s post about his decision to leave teaching has made some waves on various blogs. I’d like to offer some personal perspectives (which he’s not asking for), but I’m not interested in second-guessing his reasons. I’m pulling some quotes from his post as a jumping-off point to respond to a few of his comments [...]
Posted in Educational on Oct 25th, 2007
Doug Noon is talking about reform and merit-based pay on his blog today. I’ve been exchanging a few brief comments with TMAO about merit-based pay in connection with NCLB. I found the Eduwonkette post that Doug referenced to be helpful in thinking about this issue. The discussion in comparison with other professions [...]
Posted in Educational on Aug 15th, 2007
TMAO brought my attention to these prepared remarks of California Democratic Congressman George Miller, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. TMAO quotes this line:
Even with all of these changes, we will not meet our national goal of closing the achievement gap until and unless we close the teacher quality gap.
While I strongly [...]
Posted in Educational on Aug 3rd, 2007
PayScale is a service that offers salary and compensation profiles for a wide range of jobs, and they’ve just added a service called GigZig that tries to predict career paths and subsequent pay scales.1 It’s been a while since I’ve complained about financial compensation in the world of education, so I thought I’d test [...]
Posted in Educational on Feb 27th, 2007
I’ve seen a number of “argument by analogy” examples in the last month or so related to the ongoing NCLB debate (and have made a few of these arguments myself). All arguments of this sort are, of course, inadequate, but they can also be helpful.
However, I started thinking about the teacher/doctor analogy today. [...]
Posted in Educational on Feb 5th, 2007
A few quotes from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research about teacher pay are listed below, and I’m annoyed enough to want to list some clarifications from a personal perspective. I don’t really want this to be just a rant, though … I also hope it will be informative to people who don’t [...]
Posted in Cultural, Educational on Feb 4th, 2007
I think all schools should be closed tomorrow, the day after the Super Bowl, but not to honor the sporting event. Instead, it might bring some tiny level of awareness to how seriously we, as a nation, take entertainment as opposed to how seriously we, as a nation, fail to take education. (This [...]
Posted in Educational on Jan 21st, 2007
I don’t mean to be negative. I am, in general, a happy person who enjoys life and tends to prefer the optimistic perspective. Unfortunately, I stumble upon stupidity far more often than I’d like, and then I get angry. Here’s a recent example …
One potentially valuable source of funds for reform are [...]
