Links for 7/9/10

Kevin Carey

So by the time the standards and accountability movement reached full force in the 1990s and 2000s, people had internalized the idea that the government can improve the lives of disadvantaged children by outlawing discriminatory practices and mandating the provision of equitable resources. Unsurprisingly, this perspective was incorporated into the new challenge of giving all students access to high quality teaching and improving chronically low-performing schools.

It turned out to be a less than perfect fit. Partly because the federal government can’t meaningfully equalize resources among the states when it only contributes 10 cents of every K-12 dollar. And partly because low-performing schools usually aren’t low-performing because of some specific bad practice that can be readily identified and removed via sending in the national guard or other coercive means. That doesn’t mean there are no such problems. But it’s often less the presence of bad things and more the absence of good things that makes a bad school school bad. Which means that even if you successfully expunge the bad things, you’re still left with a bad school…

The comparability loophole is dumb and something should be done to fix it. But doing so feels like a well-used hammer looking for a nail. It’s just, but not necessarily important…

the biggest danger of devoted too many of your limited advocacy resources toward fixing things like the comparability loophole is that, after expending a huge amount blood and tears you might actually win. And then a few years later the latest NAEP results are released and they show, yet again, small improvements here and stagnant results there and nothing like the kind of progress needed to get vulnerable students to where they need to be. Because the nail you’re comfortable looking for isn’t always the one that most needs to be hit…

Mark Bauerlein

the origin of tenure some 100 years ago. Tenure started as a system to protect teachers and researchers from outside forces that didn't like what they said…

But one group posing a threat to academic freedom isn't included in this conception: the professors themselves. What if the danger to open inquiry comes not only from the outside but from the inside as well? What if in their votes on tenure and promotion other professors enforce ideological or other non-scholarly standards just as bindingly as do donors and politicians?...

Emily Babay

Most workers haven't seen big pay increases lately -- much less raises of up to 42 percent.

But college presidents in the Washington area have…

Robert Hall via The Region

the patent regime has to do the things that the patent regime claims to do. The patent has to be original; it has to be an innovation. And there the standard of obviousness comes in.

If what’s happening is that people are somehow able to figure out what the obvious next logical step is and somehow get a patent on that and then collect royalties from that patent even though it doesn’t really make any contribution, then there’s something wrong with the patent regime. But I don’t think there’s any very good evidence that that’s actually what’s happened.