Links for 10/5/10

Chester E. Finn, Jr, Mike Petrilli and Janie Scull

education professors across the land…

What’s more important to them is forming “change agents”—new teachers who push back against school practices and resist modern reforms, reforms that have little to do with the romantic view of schooling that so many of Dewey’s descendents so ardently espouse. The professors see themselves as philosophers and evangelists, not as master craftsmen sharing tradecraft with apprentices and journeymen…

Darryl G. Greer and Michael W. Klein

states’ structural budget problems virtually guarantee disinvestment in higher education…

We propose, as a long-term strategy to remedy the problems of diminishing state financial support, that comprehensive public colleges and universities should create public service corporations…

The public service corporation should not only provide for greater flexibility and financial accountability, by helping to free institutions from government regulation that inhibits progress, but also provide the impetus for greater institutional accountability regarding the educational product. Public service corporations can make clearer where revenue comes from, and what it pays for…

Edububble

Is college really half a year long now?

Jay P. Greene

The U.S. Department of Education’s “What Works Clearinghouse” (WWC) is supposed to adjudicate the scientific validity of competing education research claims so that policymakers, reporters, practitioners, and others don’t have to strain their brains to do it themselves…

Everyone may make mistakes, distort results, and apply arbitrary standards. The problem is that WWC has the official endorsement of the U.S. Department of Education, so many people fail to take their findings with the same grains of salt that they would to the findings of any other self-appointed truth committee. And with the possibility that government money may be conditioned on WWC endorsement, WWC’s shortcomings are potentially more dangerous…

The heart of the problem is that science has never depended on government-run truth committees to make progress…