Author: Richard P. Phelps

Richard P. Phelps is founder and editor of the Nonpartisan Education Group. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and is the author of "The Malfunction of US Education Policy: Elite Misinformation, Disinformation, and Selfishness."

Against Federally Funded Education Research Centers

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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Have the Gates Foundation and Its Allies Purchased US Education Journalism?

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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Challenging the Academic Publisher Oligopoly

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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The Curious Ethics of Some Ethics Professors

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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