Links for 7/19/10

Alex Tabarrok

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Bill Tucker

Good Education Week overview on the growth of for-profit virtual learning companies in K-12 education. Predictably, the article quotes a detractor focused on the tax status…

I’m pretty sure that nonprofit university does not automatically equal accountable. And I’m certain it’s not a guarantee of quality…

The real issue is quality, not tax code…

it’s an unfortunate comment on today’s education debate that my quest to align public funding with effectiveness is seen as a call for more bubble tests…

Mark Kleiman

peer review, which is supposed to filter out bullsh*t, is equally effective at filtering out criticism of bullsh*t…

Str**sians, r*tion*l-ch**ce political scientists, r*t**nal-exp*ctations macroeconomists, F**c**ldians, L*c*nians, d*c*nstr*ction*sts, ec*n*metr*cians, and practitioners of “critical” anything have formulas that allow mediocre minds to produce arbitrarily large numbers of papers, and other mediocre minds to sort them out as journal referees. That gives their practitioners an edge when it comes to publishing. And the custom of citing one another gives them a further edge when it comes to citations…

JOHN FUND

Bill Gates… Undermining public education, he said, is a system that channels too much money to pensions for retired teachers…

the "accounting fraud" that lets politicians treat generous teacher pensions as a free lunch rewards them for spending more on retired teachers than on current students…