Per this post, this Joe Williams item is truly a museum-quality classic of the genre.
Over at The Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey makes a very important point about the Higher Ed Act reauthorization:
…we live in a world with a crying need for more information about our higher education system. And yet Congress appears poised to, with little discussion or fanfare, usher in a higher education information dark age by prohibiting the creation of a system that would gather that information.
US News takes a look at grad school bloggers and highlights Eduwonk fav Newoldschoolteacher. Apropos, she notes in a recent post:
My school is driving me crazy. Not the school I’m teaching in, but the school I go to. Maybe I should say “school,” since is it really a school if you don’t learn anything? Really it’s just a building into which I am pouring tens of thousands of dollars of money that I have not yet earned. Fabulous.
And, Ed Knows Policy, a fun blog well-worth checking out, writes-up a big research grant score for the Susanna Loeb West Coast Ed Research Mafia and referees the debate about Challenge Index. You can find background on all that here. He agrees with us that sacrificing accuracy for simplicity is a lousy approach. But, his solution, measuring value-added, while theoretically right on the money is a long way from being a reality in most states so if indeed we want some sort of index now (or reasonable NCLB accountability system for that matter) intermediate steps are necessary.