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June 11th, 2011 “I want to have as few people touching our products as possible.” So spoke Dan Mishek, the managing director of an industrial plastic products manufacturer in Minnesota, quoted in Catherine Rampell’s NYTimes article yesterday, “Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers.” Why would an employer want to keep people away from its products? Germphobia? Elitism? No, [...] 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 [...] October 22nd, 2010 Just how cool is it when, as happened at the White House last week, President Obama gives a shout out to technical programs in community colleges?–after all, the guy has actually met the Mythbusters! But for sheer celebrity glamor, I’ll take Ed Begley, Jr.’s blog over a White House Summit any day. A staunch advocate [...] June 17th, 2010 A major report came out of Georgetown University yesterday, stressing the necessity for a “closer fit” between industrial workforce needs and the design of higher ed curricula in the U.S. I don’t quite see how this (not terribly new) recommendation promises much lasting good for either workers or employers: hasn’t industry been trying to minimize 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 [...] April 24th, 2010 Renaissance job? (From www.photosfan.com) In a special section aptly titled, “The Business of Green” (April 22, 2010), the New York Times gave itself over this week to a story on the resurgence of nuclear power and the “many thousands” of new jobs shortly to be created as the country’s 104 existing nuclear power plants [...] February 10th, 2010 An article by Tamar Lewin this week in the New York Times (front page, no less), “For Students at Risk, Early College Proves a Draw”, deserves a close read. The title alone signals the unusually progressive outlook of the program described in the piece; “At risk” kids and “early college” opportunities? A rare combination. Normally, as [...] February 3rd, 2010 For a quick take on my focus in matters of STEM education, take a look at an op-ed I wrote that appears in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer. I hope the piece will call attention to a couple of issues that don’t often make it into discussions of STEM equity. First, I want to stress that we [...] January 18th, 2010 MIT has just issued a lengthy report on its hiring and promotion of underrepresented minority faculty, a document several years in the making. I will be writing more about this report in the next few days, trying to put it in historical perspective. MIT may be one-of-a-kind, sitting well above almost every other technical institution in the country, [...] |
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