Richard P Phelps wrote The Malfunction of US Education Policy: Elite Misinformation, Disinformation, and Selfishness (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) and edited Correcting Fallacies about Educational and Psychological Testing (American Psychological Association, 2008).
Much has been made of recent decisions to re-require ACT or SAT scores in student applications to several elite Northeastern colleges. Start of a trend? Will more colleges now follow suit? Covid-19 accelerated an already-existing trend toward adoption of “test optional” admissions, whereby college aspirants could choose whether to include their ACT or SAT scores […]
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Recent revelations of suspicious, unattributed text borrowings at academe’s pinnacle of prestige—the president’s office at Harvard University—once again draws attention to the pestilence of plagiarism. Plagiarism scandals among elites are nothing new, of course, and pop up frequently in the news both here and abroad, often with serious negative consequences for the accused.[1] Of course, […]
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One of the chapters in my new book, The Malfunction of US Education Policy, relates my experience with a research center focused on educational standards and testing—for decades, the only federally funded research center on the topic. That experience was not good. Long story short, it grossly misrepresented a study I managed that had been, […]
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While employment opportunities have steadily diminished at traditional independent media outlets over the past quarter century, efforts to ameliorate or adapt to the decline have met mixed success. A group of wealthy foundations, however, cleared a rescue path uniquely for US education journalists. Many who followed this path, laid by the Bill and Melinda Gates […]
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Here’s a business plan: Sell a product that … • some of the world’s most highly educated scholars, working at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, invest thousands of hours to create; • governments and foundations subsidize, with anywhere from hundreds to tens of millions of dollars in both direct payments and in-kind services; […]
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Like the seasons, friendships come, and friendships go. It is a melancholy fact of life that around the world at any given moment, thousands of new friendships are born, and thousands of old friendships are dying. Bitterness may remain in the carcass of some expired relationships. For most of us, there is little that we […]
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