Individualism in America
Writing in the The New York Times back in May, David Brooks writes: So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it […]
Articles by Aaron Barlow
Just What is “Breitbarting”?
Well, for one thing, it is not journalism. When I wrote “The Pride and Reward of Falsification: Post-Objectivity as Post-Responsibility” for the recent book News with a View (edited by Burton St. John and Kirsten Johnson) centering […]
Lessons for Academics: What Journalists Know About Gatekeeping
In preparing my talk on peer review for the MLA conference in Seattle last week, I forgot that few of my fellow academics have much familiarity with ‘gatekeeping,’ certainly not to the extent that journalists have, especially […]
Diane Ravitch on the Failure of High Stakes Testing in Two Parts
Diane Ravitch: The Virtue of Admitting Error In a speech last week, education expert Diane Ravitch (and not for the first time) did something that our politicians are scared to death of doing: She admitting that she […]
How Far We’ve Come: Eroding CUNY’s Mission One Test at a Time
Oh, How We Justify! Oh, How We Turn Away! October 31, 2011 Yesterday, in partnership with Learning Specialist AE Dreyfuss, I presented a paper at “The CUNY Conference on Best Practices in Reading/Writing Instruction.” We […]
The “He Said/She Said” of Education
Jay Rosen provides a smell test for he said/she said journalism: There’s a public dispute. The dispute makes news. No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense […]
“No Dog in this Fight”
When someone says: I had no dog in this fight Look out! What they are saying is that they do (or did), but don’t want to admit it. Personally, I have never seen any claim of impartiality that […]
No More Teachers?
At the start of “Good-bye, Teacher… “ Fred Keller quotes one version of that old doggerel: Good-bye scholars, good-bye school; Good-bye teacher, darned old fool! I learned it as: Good-bye pencils, good-bye books; Good-bye teachers’ dirty […]