Education

Goodhart’s Law Explains Education Decay 0
- Politics, Education
- January 11, 2023
Everywhere in education, you see incentives at work. The incentives, though, are so far removed from the actual goals of education that they produce perverse results. Goodhart’s Law is usually stated, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Economics textbooks often use the allegory of a maker of nails,
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Why Academics Are Writing Junk That Nobody Reads 15
- Politics, Education
- January 5, 2023
Professors usually spend about 3-6 months (sometimes longer) researching and writing a 25-page article to submit to an academic journal. And most experience a twinge of excitement when, months later, they open a letter informing them that their article has been accepted for publication, and will therefore be read by… … an average of ten people.
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Prophetic Fiction: Literary Accounts of Woke Academia 4
- Education, Literature
- December 16, 2022
I have a very fat file in my computer of crazy things that have happened in my professional life as an academic. Colleagues saying and doing stuff no one outside of academia would believe; encounters with students convinced they knew more about my work than I do; and classes, speakers, and other campus events so
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Should Everyone Go to College?3
- Education, Politics
- December 6, 2022
The call for college to be made “free” to all who want it rests on a number of assumptions, most of them self-serving, some of them well-founded, and at least one that goes to the heart of our cultural, political, and economic ills as a nation. The most important self-serving assumption is that education, like
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Supreme Court Poised to Strike Down Racial Preferences 3
- Politics, Education
- November 3, 2022
Lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are exposing the crude and dehumanizing racial sorting that goes on in the admissions offices at elite universities. The application form asks young people to check a box identifying themselves as either “(1) Asian, (2) Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, (3) Hispanic, (4) White, (5)
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Who Really Shut Down Our Businesses and Schools?5
- Politics, Education
- November 2, 2022
A big issue that has emerged in the final days of the midterm election campaigns is the lockdowns of our schools and businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The public saw with the abysmal test scores of our children the severe and lasting damage done. Voters are angry, and they should be. Lockdowns were a tragic
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