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December 17th, 2010 Innovating Then…and Now? (from eriecanal.org) It’s official: “Innovation” is going viral among American politicians. “Yankee ingenuity” is back, with a vengeance. Our famous inventive spirit will beat back all comers in the quickening global race for economic dominance. Brainpower is the new horsepower. I’m now completely convinced that the anxiety/enthusiasm recipe I wrote about [...] December 8th, 2010 Be Afraid: China’s “stellar” performance on recent standardized tests, described in yesterday’s New York Times (“Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators,” by Sam Dillon), is apparently another sign that America is being “out-educated.” We are at our very own “Sputnik” moment, President Obama tells us, our nation once again threatened by the academic attainments [...] November 24th, 2010 From "H.R. Pufnstuf," Gold Key Comics, April 1971 A page from a kids’ comic book, 1971…a single, marvelous page illustrated in a way that brings home the gendered nature of American work in that era. For boys, a future in drafting. For girls, jobs as librarians. Interesting, too, that we can tell at a glance that this [...] September 28th, 2010 Run, do not walk (or at least link your way quickly), to David Sirota’s recent Salon column on “The Neo-Liberal Bait-and-Switch: Why Corporate-Friendly Democrats Like to Blame our Schools for Not Producing Enough White-Color Specialists.” (Sirota was also a guest on NPR’s “Tell Me More” today). His is one of the first discussions of STEM [...] September 12th, 2010 At an academic workshop a few years ago, I saw a bumper sticker on a Volvo that said “Life is Too Short to Drink Bad Wine.” I fretted. This is just the kind of thing that makes people assume that all professors spend their summers swilling sauvignon on Martha’s Vineyard (the bumper sticker on the [...] May 17th, 2010 I could be projecting here, but it seems to me that 2-year colleges are getting a lot more media attention these days. The coverage brings bad news or good news by the day, depending on how you see the role of higher ed in America. On the worrying side of things for me is a growing conservative enthusiasm [...] May 4th, 2010 An immigrant family works at home, in 1909, but do they work hard enough for David Brooks? from http://ephemeralnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/cigaretterollers.jpg Do you supposed David Brooks’ wristwatch runs counter-clockwise? His column in today’s New York Times, “The Limits of Policy,” certainly seems to try to set the clock back on our understanding of ethnicity and economic [...] March 23rd, 2010 Today’s edition of NPR’s Radio Times spent an hour on proprietary colleges: the for-profit world of DeVry, ITT, the University of Phoenix, and other schools familiar to anyone who takes public transportation or watches local TV, where their ads offer training and quick advancement in nursing, computing, office management, and a host of technical occupations. It [...] January 6th, 2010 In a piece on NPR the other day on Where the Jobs Will be This Decade, Harvard labor economist Lawrence Katz made a vital point about the “polarization” of American labor markets. That term might sound dry or technical, but Katz guides us towards some transformative thinking about the current job situation. Katz explained that without a new [...] December 16th, 2009 Coming Soon to a Community Bulletin Board Near You; with thanks to Darin Hayton. As Obama inches toward implementing his job creation schemes, we hear a lot about the jobs that will be created through federally supported “green” initiatives, including those in retro-fitting and weatherizing buildings. Folks who can afford it can already Google their [...] |
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