Should banks stay in the student loan business? Secretary Duncan weighs in. (Wall Street Journal)
Which state now has the most ambitious version of a “smart cap” for charter schools? (Detroit News)
What do you have to do to get tenure in L.A.? Apparently not much. (LA Times)
What can graphic novels teach us about verbs? (Sherman Dorn)
All Posts Tagged: 'Sherman Dorn'
QUICK Hits
Student Loan Shenanigans
Sherman Dorn blogged today about the difficulties his wife has had getting Nelnet (a loan company that has engaged in nefarious practices in the past) to process her paperwork for the federal loan forgiveness program. The program provides loan forgiveness up to $17,500 for teachers who teach in hard to staff subject areas, like special [...]
The Loving Hardass
I’ll second Kevin’s link to Sherman Dorn. Sherman’s post does a nice job splitting the difference between the Education Equality Project and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Read it all, but note especially his title, “The Loving Hardass.” I think that’s about right where we should be in accountability for schools: [...]
Dorn Speaks
I’ve sort of resisted buying into the “dueling manifestos” charaterization of this and that, since the makers of the respective documents insist that wasn’t their intent and I’m inclined to believe them. Nor are they really written in a way that allows for clear comparisons. But in the end it’s fair to say that they [...]
Self-Tying Logical Knots
Reporting from the recent AFT convention, Sherman Dorn makes an important point w/r/t a discussion led by Susan Ohanian (who is waaaay out there on the fringes of anti-NCLB absolutism, to the point where she recently took to the pages of Kappan to denounce the NEA for being too moderate on No Child):
Ohanian worried about [...]
Consider the Snark
In cataloguing blog-related irritations, Sherman Dorn says, “Your snark isn’t nearly as funny as you obviously think it is, and it’s going to be less funny tomorrow.” My first reaction was “The funniness of my snark will live FOREVER, dammit!” but of course Sherman is mostly right. Snark is at best a means of making [...]
Perversity
Sherman Dorn says of a new Washington State initiative that would give community colleges financial rewards for students completing college credits, passing basic skills tests, and earning degrees:
I worry that such an incentives structure will affect standards in institutions with weak faculty governance and protection of academic freedom: “We need these students to pass these [...]
Charts You Can’t Trust
Education Sector has a monthly feature called Charts You Can Trust, short policy briefs built around a couple of pieces of interesting data. You can read them all here. They’re fun. We’ve always wanted to run a chart you can’t trust, but never got around to it — and now Sherman Dorn has beat us [...]
Comic Book Guy Can Read
Back from a two-week hiatus, will be catching up on various edu-related stories that occured in my absence.
Starting with the most significant, that of course being this NYTimes piece about schools using comic books as an instructional tool:
In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program [...]
Q&A on Special Education and NCLB
Sherman Dorn raises some great questions about special education and NCLB in response to my CYCT on the topic.* While Dorn thinks that my answers to his questions are all an unqualified ‘yes’, I’d say they’re more of a ‘yes, but…’:
Do schools use special education as an excuse not to educate students identified as having [...]
Teacher Voice on Master’s Degrees
AFTie Ed responds to the posts below on Master’s degrees, just after I chided union blogs for non-responsiveness. My bad. His arguments, as near as I can tell, are as follows:
1) Unions like the AFT are supporting progams right now in places like New Mexico that expand the kinds of professional development for which teachers [...]
Accountability, Responsibility, and Enron
Sherman Dorn notes the upcoming release of Collataral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools, a collection of anecdotes about educators making morally dubious choices when faced with the pressures of test-based educational accountability. Dorn says:
The plural of anecdotes is not representative data, but there are enough concerns over the past 5 years that we [...]
Tenure Wars
Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame has some sensible ideas about tenure for college professors (”Let’s Just Get Rid of Tenure (including mine)”). He notes that instances where professors might be unjustly fired for politically unpopular views–one of the main justifications for tenure–”rarely” occur. My father–formerly the chairman of the computer science department at a mid-sized [...]
Foreign Language Redux
Sherman Dorn takes me to task for generalizing from personal experience in questioning about the value of learning foreign langugages. Totally fair, as I thought I made clear when I said that my question was based “on what is admittedly the worst of all sample sizes of one: myself.” He also makes a point that [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.