Category: Education

Yglesias has an odd post today asking: what do widespread cheating scandals within schools captured by the Education Reform Crowd prove? He dedicates most of the post to attacking the idea that cheating scandals provide support for using non-test-based teacher compensation systems, e.g. those based on seniority and degree attainment. I am not sure who… Continue reading Cheating scandals undercut theories of reform success

Regular readers will know that I do not share the sentiments of many on the left that seem to fetishize the university. I like learning, researching, and theorizing, but the university system as a whole is an anti-egalitarian nightmare. So far, I’ve tended to talk about the class composition of universities, the extent to which… Continue reading The corrupt university

Another post over at Policy Shop. An excerpt: With that said, there is something really bizarre about keeping student interest rates so high. The whole point of the Federal Reserve’s zero interest-rate policy is to drive the cost of debt down. That is the channel through which it is meant to be stimulative. Among other… Continue reading Policy Shop: Why Congress Should Cut Student Loan Interest Rates

New post at Policy Shop. It is about the way in which state funding of higher education is actually not nearly as good as federal funding. The easiest way to counteract the regressivity on the revenue side is to take states out of the funding mix and replace them with the federal government. Federal taxes… Continue reading Policy Shop: The Problem With State-Funded Higher Education

I have a new post over at Policy Shop. It concludes thusly: On average, SAT scores in all subjects track household income very closely: the poorer you are the lower you score, the richer you are the higher you score. Ultimately, it is only by changing that disparity that we can hope to make a… Continue reading Policy Shop: Why Poor Kids Really Don’t Go to College