Thursday, October 8, 2009

Today's Random Thoughts

-Principals in Philadelphia will now be judged, in part, on how many students eat breakfast at their school.  While I applaud the effort to both make sure kids don't come to school hungry and make somebody accountable for the program, I can't fathom how this is going to work.  What happens when kids eat at home?  Will principals be punished for that?  How will they avoid incentivizing principals to encourage bad parenting ("don't feed your kids breakfast: we'll take care of it")?

-Alexander Hoffman has kicked off what looks to be an excellent series on the utility of standards (especially national standards) in schools.  I think I know how I'd like to respond, but I'll wait for part 6 to see if he covers my objection to his argument (so far) or not.

-Kevin Carey wonders why researchers refuse to acknowledge which institution or city they studied when it's blatantly obvious to any reader.  Personally, I blame overly sensitive Institutional Review Boards, but there may be a more complex reason.

-Alexander Russo has a somewhat interesting table of past and current educational trends.  Though I'm not sure all of the things he mentions in the "then" column are really in the past.

1 comment:

KG said...

On (not) hiding identities -- My favorite example of this was a paper co-written by two professors, one from Harvard and one from Lesley University. They compared students from two universities, one an unnamed Ivy League institution in New England, and one a teachers college in the same city. Hmmmm, I wonder who they were talking about...