Archives for August, 2011
Firing bad teachers doesn’t create good teachers
Posted by Josh Rosenau on August 15, 2011 Sara Mead writes at Ed Week about teacher legislation, especially new policies allowing “ineffective” teachers to be canned, or at least to be laid off first: But what about teachers who are rated “Needs Improvement” [the second lowest category] –but never actually improve? Under many of these laws, a teacher could remain in the “needs…
Brad Delong sums up modern politics
Posted by Josh Rosenau on August 15, 2011 Delong, a former Clinton economist and current econ professor at UC Berkeley, writes: You Know, I Arrived in Washington in 1993 to Work for Lloyd Bentsen’s Treasury as Part of the Sane Technocratic Bipartisan Center… And it took me only two months–two months!–to conclude that America’s best hope for sane technocratic governance required the elimination…
A year ago today
Posted by Josh Rosenau on August 8, 2011 Good times, then and now.
The political aftermath of the debt ceiling
Posted by Josh Rosenau on August 4, 2011 I didn’t blog about the debt ceiling because… ugh. The idea that the Republican party would hold the country, and indeed the world economy, hostage is unimaginably awful. The idea that, in the midst of a recession barely worse than the Great Depression, we’re talking about cutting government spending is also absurd. It’s a failure of…
On the Overton window
Posted by Josh Rosenau on August 3, 2011 In the comments on my post the other day about the importance of evidence in skepticism and science outreach, RBH leaves an interesting comment that’s worth digging into a bit. I replied in the thread, RBH’s invocation of the Overton Window struck me. He writes: We hear about the Dunning-Kruger effect; let’s not forget about…
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the