I’ve been offline for the past week visiting with my family.   But, I managed to learn anyway…I downloaded to my iPod a couple books and some issues of Harvard Business Review that dealt with leadership and change.  I listened to Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s Good Business and Peter Senge’s The Dance of Change as I drove and […]

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While I learned about the Education Trust from Bracey, he does not trust them at all.  Here’s his take on the On Point broadcast I referenced in an earlier post.

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I just finished reading Gerald Bracey’s Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered.  It was an excellent review of my quantitative research class as well as a very real-life application of the information from that class.   Bracey spends several pages discussing the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.  This test, which began […]

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I just started reading Gerald Bracey’s recent book about educational research: “Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered.”  He recommended checking out the database at the Education Trust.  Here is their mission statement:
The Education Trust works for the high academic achievement of all students at all levels, pre-kindergarten through college, and forever closing […]

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Just got my afternoon update from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It referenced this article from The Birmingham News.  A fight has been going on over two-year colleges.  Joe Reed, the number 2 man at the Alabama Education Association, wrote a scathing letter to the chancellor of the two-year college system in which he compares […]

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I just had one of those “ah-ha” moments of connections.  I am reading David Nye’s Technology Matters.  He points out that during the 20th century, corporations added research and development departments to their companies as inventions led to patents which led to profits.  I jotted a note in the margin about how schools don’t do […]

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So, here’s the article from the the Boston Globe reporting findings of a recent study of infants and educational videos. The article seems to suggest a cause/effect relationship between watching videos and a reduction in vocabulary. They interview one of the researchers. “I would rather babies watch ‘American Idol’ than these videos,” […]

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This article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, while it is a year old, provides interesting insight into the way government and schools dance together to create this thing called education.  While the article quotes a vriety of negative opinions of the law, its description of some of the steps one Pittsburgh school has taken makes you […]

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Mike Rose’s book, The Mind at Work (2004), is subtitled, Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.  Using examples of professional waitresses and carpenters and plumbers in training, Rose discusses the intellectual challenges of physical labor.  His discussion of the use of power tools helps illuminate Nye’s discussion of tools and technology.   Rose quotes carpenter […]

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