After being informed by the chair of Vermont Law School’s retention committee that the school stripped 14 law professors of tenure, the American Association of University Professors has questioned whether the school followed proper regulations. In a June 19 letter sent to the school’s tenure and retention committee chair, the AAUP conceded that under “extraordinary circumstances because of...
If monopolies are bad, what about traditional public ed?
Many of my friends who defend public education are also the political type who are very worried about monopolies. They often point to the damage that companies with large market shares—think Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Google—can do. These friends point out how these companies’ large market presence allows them to squeeze out competitors, exploit employees, and hold customers captive. Those points, of...
Why everyone hates faculty meetings (except dept. heads and lickspittles)
One eternal problem has been their inefficiency. In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson, an academic and legendary writer on management, came up with the law of triviality, that “the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved.” In that same spirit, this columnist would like to propose an even broader principle, applying to gatherings of ten people...
More data on human feces in SF
A foul odor permeated from a massive bag of human excrement sludge left on a street corner in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district Saturday. The horrendous smell and sight quickly gained notoriety when a Reddit user posted a screen shot of a report made to San Francisco’s Citizen app for identifying crimes. “Twenty pounds of feces dumped onto sidewalk,” the report called...
Elon Musk also runs his own K-12 school
Ad Astra encompasses students, not employees. For the past four years, this experimental non-profit school has been quietly educating Musk’s sons, the children of select SpaceX employees, and a few high-achievers from nearby Los Angeles. It started back in 2014, when Musk pulled his five young sons out of one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious private schools for gifted children. Hiring one of his...
Faculty respond to incentives; who would have guessed?
National policies take varied approaches to encouraging university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural experiment: the end of the “professor’s privilege” in Norway, where university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their innovations. Upon the reform, Norway moved toward the typical US model, where the university holds majority rights. Using comprehensive data on Norwegian...
Data on human feces in San Francisco
Block-by-block surveillance reveals the deterioration of downtown San Francisco. Of 153 city blocks surveyed, 41 contained used drug needles and 96 had human feces present.
Yikes! That’s about 2/3 of city blocks with human feces.
I have received the highest honor in educational research
I was criticized by that famous nutjob Diane Ravitch: The second post links to a pretty hilarious review of our study (). The writer, Kris Nordstrom, writes as if he’s uncovered a nefarious plot. Sorry, it’s just a propensity score analysis paper written by some nerds. Over several paragraphs he breathlessly states that the private schools in our sample were a non-random sample and...
“Summa cum laude” is now pornographic, according to Publix
The image speaks for itself:
Sad!
Three good books about India
I’ve been pondering a family trip to India, so I’m reading books about India like a fiend. Maximum city: Bombay lost and found, by Suketa Mehta I couldn’t put this one down. Part autobiography, the author is an Indian who returns to India after spending some time in America. He intersperses anecdotes about his life and daily living in Mumbai with descriptions of his interactions...