Aaaagh. Please: there almost certainly was no such thing as European feudalism.

- not a medieval historian, but one who feels their pain whenever people abuse the incorrect myths they were told in school

Top 10 Hurricane/Movie titles...

I think @bencollins.bsky.social @timheidecker.bsky.social should have the bandwidth to truly do it justice.

In several years, she'll be the classmate in a more temperate-climate college who wears shorts in the middle of winter.

... like my friend Jack, who did so in the Philly region, after growing up in Buffalo.

And this is even before we get to the not-yet-developed regs.

To commit to participate before seeing the regulations is like signing a mortgage without being shown the interest rate and contract language.

"Pay no attention to the K-12 private tuition raising behind the curtain!"

Does the Bennett Hypothesis Hold in Professional Education? An Empirical Analysis - Research in Higher Education Policymakers have been debating the Bennett Hypothesis—whether colleges increase tuition after the federal government increases access to student loans—for decades. Yet most of the prior research has focused on studying small changes to loan limits or Pell Grants for undergraduate students. In this study, I examine whether business schools (the most popular master’s program) and medical schools (one of the most-indebted programs) responded to a large increase in federal student loan limits in 2006 following the creation of the Grad PLUS program by raising tuition or living expenses as well as examining whether student debt burdens also increased. Using two quasi-experimental estimation strategies and program-level data from 2001 to 2016, I find little consistent evidence to support the Bennett Hypothesis in either medical or business schools.

N.B. @robertkelchen.com has several pieces undermining the Bennett Hypothesis in terms of professional education & GRAD Plus loans, e.g.,

The Bennett Hypothesis turns out to have some strong evidence, but not where Bill Bennett and his friends would have wanted to claim it.

Groening 13:32-34.

Fast and Curious This book examines four types of shortcuts in the history of American education—streamlined paths to vocational success, cultural sophistication, college…

Strongly recommended: Hampel, Fast and Curious: A History of Shortcuts in American Education (2017).

Also:

youtu.be/acBixR_JRuM?...

Let him burn! 🔥

Congratulations!

Elsewhere on that thread was the point that blaming drivers gets politicians and traffic engineers off the hook.

On another thread, someone compared Jo Boaler to Dan Ariely, and I see them as very different. I don't know Boaler's work well or her at all, but my impression is that she's a (fascinating </Spock>) case of self-delusion combined with hubris. Ariely seems dishonest on the face of it.

But easier =/= easy. Far from it. As someone who has seen both classroom intervention research & clinical medical research from different angles, I think knowing that there are more design & analysis tools helps us in important ways, but it doesn't eliminate our ability to delude ourselves.

... and there's also a huge amount of work in this era that has stood up to the test of time. Amid the pressure to publish (for more than academia-institutional reasons), some people will do the highest-quality work in any era.

Doing so *should* be easier now, with more technical knowledge.

This was an era of increasing access to statistical software packages on microcomputers, funding of quasi-experimental projects, increasing availability of refereed journals, and growth of meta-analysis.

John Hattie's now-discredited work grew out of this era. & the bulk of Rick Hanushek's ed$ work

Even harder? Individual projects with rigor that also build in ways for researchers to avoid deluding themselves.

Loads of ed research from 1980-2010 was hard, had rigor *as far as the era was concerned,* and nonetheless had loads of self-delusion possible.

We should evaluate both individual pieces of scholarship and broader findings of multiple projects. First, single pubs: Individual projects are generally hard, in all sorts of fields. Individual projects with rigor aren't *harder* exactly, but they require some technical knowledge & skill.

Historian here, but also with a quant grad degree and 30+ yrs reading a broad variety of ed scholarship. To quote Ted Sturgeon, "ninety percent of everything is crap." The question is not whether an individual piece of scholarship is in error, but how do we understand the findings of a field?

Apparently we have a (firewalled) piece on The Argument* about the quality of education research so bad that it just needs gesturing to get people quoting and arguing.

* Because it's published on (leave) Substack, I won't get a paid sub

So Vision Zero is being implemented as See No Evil? 🙈

* assuming

We need edit buttons, @bsky.app!!

People's reading The Argument and assumes its pieces accurately represent the research is ... well, not scandalously bad. I mean, what you're doing is pretty typical of people who read Substack stuff. It's just blogs, man.

Treat yourself!

Don’t go, Jake. The WHCA is doing nothing I can see to boost freedom of speech

I need to come back to this but anyone who thinks clinical medical research is easier than classroom research has never been involved in clinical trials. Please check your assumptions.

Good for you