Source: The Growing College Graduation Gap – The New York Times It’s also a learning gap. Until the public wakes up to the realities of college, those gaps will only get worse. I taught for three decades, first at a regional state school, then at private research university. I know of what I speak; but, […]
Good Read: The Misguided Drive to Measure ‘Learning Outcomes’ – The New York Times
February 23, 2018 by
Source: The Misguided Drive to Measure ‘Learning Outcomes’ – The New York Times I commented: The elephant in the classroom is obvious to those with experience in higher education; and, as this author points out, “assessment” won’t budge the elephant. Throughout my career as a math professor – first at a state regional school, […]
Corporations and Government and Education – Excellent Analysis by Frank Bruni in NY Times
February 11, 2018 by
Source: Corporations Will Inherit the Earth – The New York Times I posted this comment on the page. Here is Thomas Jefferson on the importance of the type of education that is critical to democracy but not to corporations. “…Preach…a crusade against ignorance…improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know […]
Maybe We’ve Been Thinking About the Productivity Slump All Wrong – The New York Times Me: You Betcha
July 26, 2017 by
Source: Maybe We’ve Been Thinking About the Productivity Slump All Wrong – The New York Times Here is what I wrote To paraphrase a politician, “It’s the education, stupid.” But, don’t we have the greatest universities in the world? Yes, but that doesn’t mean that those universities are doing anything to broadly disseminate knowledge. Our […]
David Brooks See the Symptom – But Not the Disease
June 23, 2017 by
Source: Mis-Educating the Young – The New York Times Here is my comment. You have described the symptoms well, but you have missed the disease. The disease is letting higher education operate as a market economy – while assuming that, as a non-profit, it is altruistic. Just listen to Clark Kerr and David Riesman on […]
“Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs” (NYT) But Here is Why, and They Shouldn’t
March 29, 2017 by
Making America Great Again Isn’t Just About Money and Power – The New York Times
January 15, 2017 by
No, it’s about education. Here is my comment. Op-Eds like this are insightful, well thought out, and well argued, but – and it’s a gigantic “but”, with a gigantically hard solution – what proportion of today’s voters will ever hear this argument, or even understand it if they did? And why? Let’s skip the obvious […]
Just Grade, Please.
September 11, 2016 by
Turning college into a zero-sum game hurts their chances of succeeding after graduation. Source: Why We Should Stop Grading Students on a Curve Here’s my take. I’m a former math professor. From my experience, all of this fuss about grading is really a fuss about how students “feel”; that is, how they feel about their […]
Frank Bruni Recognizes the “Customer” Mentality
May 11, 2016 by
“…It’s not only at Stanford and at Ivy League and Ivylike schools that students have gone from being competitors to clients. That’s a shift that’s occurred over recent decades and over the last decade in particular at scores if not hundreds of colleges. And I think customers is a better word for it than clients, […]
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