There are at least four ways of meeting a decline in labor demand: laying off workers, cutting nominal annual salaries, cutting hires, or reducing hours. It is difficult to lay off tenured faculty; but in this recession, universities are using two other methods of cutting payroll. Some schools have imposed faculty hiring freezes. Others are furloughing faculty: Arizona State, for . . .
Several years ago I watched a particularly memorable “Law Revue” skit night at Yale. One of the skits had a group of students sitting at desks, facing the audience, listening to a professor drone on. All of the students were looking at laptops except for one, who had a deck of cards and was playing solitaire. The professor was outraged . . .
Not many economists are great teachers. The sorts of skills that get you into graduate school (like getting an “A+” in Advanced Real Analysis) are not highly correlated with being a star at the blackboard. Combine lack of natural talent with weak incentives to teach well at the top research institutions, and the results in the classroom are often not . . .
My son’s first-grade teacher recently held an open house to tell the parents what their kids will be learning this year, and how they’ll be going about it. I have to say, it was pretty impressive. My favorite part had to do with turning the kids into first-grade (if not first-rate) empiricists. The teacher, a wonderful veteran from Texas named . . .
Online education is seriously on the rise, garnering praise from congressmen and even gaining share among elementary school students. In the realm of higher education, more and more schools are offering online degree programs as an alternative to in-class courses, with some schools creating online-only engineering and law degrees as well as bachelors’. But have you ever wondered who’s on . . .
Shortly after Brian Jacob and I did our research on teachers who cheat, we thought about starting a company that would provide cheating detection services to schools systems. What I quickly discovered, however, was that there were few things in the world that school systems wanted less than to catch teachers who cheat — suffice it to say that school . . .
Send in your nominees for the Blogging Scholarship Award. Venezuelan government considers regulating baby names. Sure, Michigan lost, but in revenue terms, they still won. (Earlier) Do teacher credentials affect students’ achievements? (Earlier)