A few weeks ago I looked all over to find an image of the engraving of the edge of the new U.S. “presidential dollar” coins.
Now, of course, I don’t need it — so I found a marvelous illustration at the U.S. Mint site (yes, I checked there earlier).
FYI, and use:
1 Comment | 
Art, Economics, Government | Tagged: , edge engraving, edge incusions, U.S. dollar coin | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Historian David Kennedy of Stanford University attracts flack almost everywhere he writes, these days, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.
A couple of years ago the neocons were angry at him for saying that America’s people are generally unconnected to America’s soldiers in Iraq, and that’s bad for policy. But a few months later when others noted exactly the same thing and issued the same call Kennedy issued to support troops, neocon pundits were quick to praise the idea they’d claimed was destructive a few weeks earlier.
Kennedy wrote a review of economist Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal, for the New York Times. It’s arcane, sure, but economist Brad DeLong at UCLA takes Kennedy to task for not understanding laissez faire economics well enough.
Academic disputes are so bitter because the stakes are so small, still.
Leave a Comment » | Economics, Free market economics, History, Politics | Tagged: David M. Kennedy, Economics, History, laissez faire economics, Paul Krugman, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
You won’t find this in your world history text.
Events in Congo trouble at so many levels. Reports in The New York Times and other places document unspeakable violence: 27,000 sexual assaults in South Kivu Province in 2006, just a fraction of the total number across the nation of 66 million people. The assaults are brutal. Women assaulted are often left so badly injured internally, they may never heal.
Map of Congo, highlighting province of Bukavu where violence against women is epidemic, from New York TimesGenocide you say? Many assaults appear to be spillover from the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in next-door Rwanda. But assaults by husbands on wives also are epidemic. Result of civil war? Then how to explain the “Rasta” gang, dreadlocked fugitives who live in the forest, wear tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys, and who commit unspeakable crimes against women and children? What nation are they from, and against whom do they fight, if anyone — and for what?
The facts cry out for action:
Surely intervention by an international group would help, no? However
Americans looking for a quick resolution to the situation in Iraq might do well to study Congo. At Congo’s independence in the 1960s, there was hope of prosperity and greater peace. Foreign intervention, including meddling from the U.S., regional civil wars, bad government and long international neglect, ate up the hope. Achieving what a nation could be is difficult, when so many forces align to prevent it from being anything other than a violent backwater. Pandora’s box resists attempts to shut it. Quick resolution is unlikely.
So the violence in Congo continues. In this world, when is the “never” in “never again?”
How many other such cases fall outside our textbooks, and off the state tests?
Resources:
2 Comments | Africa, Disasters, Economics, Genocide, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Human Rights, Natural resources, Politics | Tagged: Africa, Congo, Genocide, Human Rights, Politics, World history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
This site has about the most nearly complete, concise case against the Utah school voucher proposal I have found. Is there any chance the voters in Utah still need to be swayed to reason on this issue? Send them to this site, after you have them view the real story about Oreos.
2 Comments | Economics, Education, Education reform, Education spending, Politics, School vouchers | Tagged: Education, Politics, School vouchers, Utah referendum | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Congress seriously considers changes in mining laws in the U.S. — the General Mining Act of 1872 is 135 years old with no serious changes since its passage. President Ulysses S Grant signed the law.
The law affected much of the development of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River, but this issue is generally ignored. The New York Times editorial page endorses the change process in an editorial today.
Originally enacted to encourage economic development in the West, the law gives precedence above all other land uses to mining for hard-rock minerals like gold, uranium and copper. It requires no royalties from companies that mine on public lands and contains no environmental safeguards. It has left a sad legacy of abandoned mines, poisoned streams and damaged landscapes throughout the West.
Now, at last, there is real hope for reform. Representative Nick Rahall, a West Virginia Democrat who has been trying to modernize this law for two decades, has persuaded the Natural Resources Committee to approve a major rewrite.
The law is a major study in economics, government intervention and free markets. It would make a good topic for warm-ups or government intervention lesson plans in high school economics classes.
1 Comment | Economics, Environmental protection, Government, History, Law, Politics | Tagged: 1872 Mining Act, Economics, Environmental protection, Mining, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Editorials in two of Utah’s second-tier daily newspapers spell out exactly why the Utah voucher proposal submitted to voters is a bad one. The Provo Daily Herald urges voters to study the voucher proposal, and then vote for it. The Logan Herald-Journal discusses a key problem for Cache Valley parents and educators, in aging buildings that are often older than the grandparents of the students, but which will cost a fortune to replace.
The Utah voucher plan is only half-vampire (blood sucking, that is; or money sucking), leaving with the public schools some of the money allocated for students who choose to leave — at least for five years. In that one regard, the Utah proposal stands a head above other voucher plans offered in the U.S.
That is not enough to make it a good proposal, however. Why?
Here are “givens” for this article, the basic set of facts we have to work from.
1. Crowding is a key problem for Utah schools. Statewide, public schools average 30 pupils per class. That’s above national norms, and twice the concentration of students that studies show make for the most effective classrooms (15 students). (A new study from the Utah Taxpayers Association, a usually credible source, shows Utah’s public school student population growing from today’s almost 550,000, to about 750,000 by 2022 — requiring more than $6 billion in new construction costs.)
2. Partly because of large families in Utah, per pupil spending ranks near the lowest in the U.S. The usual figure used in the voucher discussions in Utah is $7,500 per student per year, but I can find no source that corroborates that figure. The actual number is probably closer to $5,000 per student, but may be lower. Legislative analysts based their scrutiny of the proposal on the $7,500 figure, and for discussion purposes, that’s good enough. It won’t make any difference in the outcome. (A reader in comments on another post says the $7,500 figure comes from the Park City School District, the state’s richest — it may be high by as much as 40% for the state. Can that citation be accurate?)
3. Utah’s schools perform well above where they should be expected to perform, on the basis of number of teachers, teacher pay, and student populations. Despite crowding and shortage of money, three Utah middle schools were named among the nation’s 129 best last month. Utah students score respectably on nationally-normed tests. A high percentage of Utah students go to college. Utah parents deserve a great deal of the credit for this performance boost. Utah has for years had higher than average educational attainment. With several outstanding colleges and universities in a small state, many Utah parents have a degree or two, and they buy books, and that achievement and the drive to get education rub off on their children.
4. These problems should get worse without drastic action. Utah family size may decrease slightly, but immigration from other states adds to pupil population increases. Utah’s economy is not so outstanding that it can easily absorb significantly higher taxes to pay for schools. (See the Utah Taxpayers Association study, again.)
Those are the givens. Advocates of the voucher plan, notably people like Richard Eyre, who made a fortune investing in Kentucky Fried Chicken, and has since invested much of his time in dabblings in public policy, argue several benefits to the voucher plan:
A. Not much damage to public schools by taking money away. In fact, they argue, during the first five years, for each student who leaves a public school with a voucher, the school will keep at least $4,000 (this figure would apply only to the richest districts, if the baseline number comes from Park City as my commenter suggested). This $4,000 would be spread among the other 29 students remaining, effectively, leaving just under $140 additional money per student in the average classroom. (There are problems with this calculation, of course).
B. Public school classroom size will shrink, to the benefit of the remaining kids.
C. Public school spending can hold steady when schools fire the teachers who lose students (I assume this is a misstatement from the Eyres’ video — that instead, some savings might result from dismissal of low-performing teachers in schools where a significant portion of students leave).
D. Magically, competition will create better education.
Below the fold, I’ll tell you why the benefits will not obtain, and point out some of the dangers of pushing the whole education system over a cliff that are inherent in this scheme.
2 Comments | Economics, Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Elections, History, School vouchers | Tagged: Economics, education economics, Politics, school funding, teacher motivation, Utah referendum, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
With the nation’s first state-wide voucher on the ballot in Utah this November, and with the polls showing a large majority ready to vote the idea down, voucher supporters push every button they can find, hoping one of them is the real “panic” button. 
But, legislators recruiting lobbyists into a referendum? A new blog dedicated to the Utah referendum, Accountability, carries the story with links to local Utah news media.
. . . I know there’s a whole industry built up now to protect the will of lawmakers from their constituents.
But I didn’t think that was the prevailing wisdom here. We hadn’t fallen victim to the political industry like folks have back East.
Then I read articles like Paul Rolly’s column in this morning’s Trib and I wonder if we’re not so far away from succumbing to it, too.
“Lawmakers stack the deck on vouchers” is the headline, and the first sentence tells the whole story. “About 20 lobbyists were summoned to a meeting Monday by legislative leaders who urged them to roll up their sleeves and help save the voucher law.”
Isn’t a ballot referendum supposed to be the voice of the people? In fact, isn’t it the last chance the people have to have their say on a law, after the legislature has had its way? That’s what the Constitution provides. So what’s wrong with informing every Utahn man and woman of voting age what the referendum says, answer any questions they have, then let them vote on whether to keep this law or discard it?
The story as related at Accountability would be a road map for a corruption investigation into the Republican leaders of the Utah legislature for a state attorney general out to defend the electoral process from graft and the legislative process from corruption. Does Utah have such an attorney general? Utah’s relatively clean and open political processes, artificially bipartisan by LDS Church decree in the 19th century, appears to be going the way of all political flesh.
Cash is provided from interest groups far outside Utah, groups that have never considered the effects of a voucher bill on a kid in San Juan County, Utah, who has a 50-mile, one-way bus ride just to get to the nearest public school.
Later stories at Accountability detail the cash flow from outside, and the folly out-of-state and out-of-their-mind interests create in local elections. (I have not found any identification for the author of that blog — does anyone know who it is?)
Maybe it’s time we took a more historic view of this fight, and labeled it for what it is: As Chris Mooney has documented the Republican War on Science, this Utah skirmish is part of the larger War on Education; whether it’s an exclusively Republican declaration of war is not yet clear. It doesn’t bode well for peace, progress and prosperity that the Republican leaders of the Utah legislature are the ones commanding the gun batteries shooting at Utah’s schools.
Leave a Comment » | Economics, Education, Education blogs, Education reform, Elections, History, Politics, Public education, School vouchers | Tagged: Education, education funding, political corruption, School vouchers, Utah referendum, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
From this lead paragraph in a BusinessWeek story could come a heck of a semester of high school economics:
Leonid Hurwicz was born in Moscow in 1917, the year that Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Ninety years later—on Oct. 15, 2007—Hurwicz was awarded a Nobel prize in economics, in part for explaining the fundamental flaw in the central planning that Lenin imposed in the Soviet Union.
1 Comment | Communism, Economics, Free market economics, History, Lesson plans | Tagged: Economics, Lesson plans, Nobel Prize | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007 jointly to
Leonid Hurwicz
University of Minnesota, MN, USA,Eric S. Maskin
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USAand
Roger B. Myerson
University of Chicago, IL, USA“for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory”.
Say again? “Mechanism design theory?” Sounds like a class for patent lawyers who want to work for watch makers and wind-up toy manufacturers.
Nobel publicists were grand. They provided an explanation for what the theory does, without describing in any detail what the theory is:
The design of economic institutions
Adam Smith’s classical metaphor of the invisible hand refers to how the market, under ideal conditions, ensures an efficient allocation of scarce resources. But in practice conditions are usually not ideal; for example, competition is not completely free, consumers are not perfectly informed and privately desirable production and consumption may generate social costs and benefits. Furthermore, many transactions do not take place in open markets but within firms, in bargaining between individuals or interest groups and under a host of other institutional arrangements. How well do different such institutions, or allocation mechanisms, perform? What is the optimal mechanism to reach a certain goal, such as social welfare or private profit? Is government regulation called for, and if so, how is it best designed?
These questions are difficult, particularly since information about individual preferences and available production technologies is usually dispersed among many actors who may use their private information to further their own interests. Mechanism design theory, initiated by Leonid Hurwicz and further developed by Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, has greatly enhanced our understanding of the properties of optimal allocation mechanisms in such situations, accounting for individuals’ incentives and private information. The theory allows us to distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not. It has helped economists identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes and voting procedures. Today, mechanism design theory plays a central role in many areas of economics and parts of political science.
If you want understanding, you can start at the Nobel site with “Information for the Public,” and if you want to impress the finance department at your business, or scare the heck out of your principal, check out “Scientific Background.”
The important analysis: Are they products of, and testament to the quality of, U.S. public schools? Alas, the Economics Prize Committee didn’t provide biographical data.
Leo Hurwicz, now at the University of Minnesota, was born in Moscow, and took an LL.M. from Warsaw University in 1938. It’s unlikely he ever saw a U.S. public school.
Eric Maskin’s earliest education I can find was his 1972 degree from Harvard, in Mathematics. He’s now at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He was born in New York. I’m still looking for elementary and high school data.
And the same goes for Roger B. Myerson, now at Chicago. He was born in Boston. Public schools? Don’t know yet.
Leave a Comment » | Economics, Education success, History | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
One of my elementary teachers used to make a big deal of the Nobel Prizes every year. We’d get the newspaper clips on the prizes, calculate how much they were worth, and discuss what the people did to win them.
Several years ago I started offering grade boosts to economics students who could predict the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. One year I actually had to pay up, after another teacher discovered a Nobel handicapping site, and one student got very, very lucky. What other uses can you find?
I especially remember the prize to Penzias and Wilson in Physics in 1978, because it meant we didn’t have to study Steady State any longer (and I’d always found that description confusing). Steady State was still in some books, more than a decade after their discovery of Big Bang.
Here’s the schedule for Nobel announcements, over the next week or so:
Announcements of the 2007 Nobel Prizes and The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be held on the following dates:
Physiology or Medicine – Monday, October 8, 11:30 a.m. CET (at the earliest)
Physics – Tuesday, October 9, 11:45 a.m. CET (at the earliest)
Chemistry – Wednesday, October 10, 11:45 a.m. CET (at the earliest)
Literature – Thursday, October 11, 1:00 p.m. CET (at the earliest)
Peace – Friday, October 12, 11:00 a.m. CET
Economics – Monday, October 15, 1:00 p.m. CET (at the earliest)
While working in education policy years back I noticed that Nobel winners come disproportionately from the U.S., and disproportionately from the public schools. Watching such trends tends to be a practice of journals outside the U.S., however, such as the Times of India:
Americans tend to dominate the science prizes and last year they made a clean sweep, taking the medicine, physics, chemistry and economics awards. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Books, Economics, Literature, Physics, Science | Tagged: Nobel Prizes | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Labor Day blew away too quickly. We didn’t honor labor as we should have — nor do we ever, in my estimation. Summer, especially in a teacher’s life, is a parenthetical expression between two holidays that fail to honor the designated honorees, Memorial Day and Labor Day. Perhaps that is fitting and proper, but of what, I do not know.
Nor do I wish to live where such dishonoring is proper, or fits.
The United Auto Workers called a strike against General Motors, but a contract agreement arrived in just a couple of days. Today UAW announced a strike deadline for Chrysler, in their “pattern” bargaining, whereby the union strikes a deal with one of the Big 3, then takes that as the starting point for negotiations with the others, who usually have to keep up with the Sloans, Fords, Chryslers and Ketterings (used to be a Romney in there, remember, not to mention Kaiser and Packard and Willys).
NPR’s interviews at the GM strike featured one autoworker who remembered the last GM strike, when 400,000 workers left the assembly lines to man the picket lines. This time? He said he realized the stakes when they announced 74,000 workers would strike. What happened to the other 326,000 people? Gone to competition, mechanization, globalization, and general political wind changes.
Mrs. Cornelius wrote at A Shrewdness of Apes about the labor dream, the union dream, that some of us still remember (not enough of us). I won’t say the dream is shattered. It is not a dream shared by as many people any more.
When you read her essay, note a key part of it, a piece of almost every story about a working, union family in the U.S.: Mrs. Cornelius was the first in her family to graduate from college. Once upon a time a good, basic union job offered the opportunity to raise a family, buy a house to make a home, and send the kids to school and to college, in the hope and expectation that the children would have a better life than the parents as a result of those educational opportunities.
That shared belief is gone. America suffers for its loss.
I wonder whether there is a correlation between the loss of those two shared value planks that once formed the platform of our national morality, the respect for unions and the hope that hard work would help the next generation, and the understanding that educational opportunities would and should be available.
When did we lose those dreams? I first became aware when I left the Senate Labor Committee; while we generally had a few sourpusses complaining about education as a monolithic institution at every education policy hearing, they were vastly in the minority, and their views were not views that generally pushed discussion. Touring the nation with the President‘s Commission on Americans Outdoors (PCAO), we kept running into people who, though not rich by any standards, had adopted the turtle-with-head-in-shell stance of the hereditary rich and other nobles, resisting change in an effort to cling to what property and privilege they had. It was in Lamar Alexander’s Tennessee that fellow driving a decade-old car phrased it succinctly: “I didn’t graduate high school, and I get along pretty well. I don’t want my kids learning stuff they don’t need.” (Lamar was chairman of PCAO.)
Then a few months later, after I moved to the U.S. Department of Education, at a speech talking about changing the ERIC Library System to increase accessibility especially for parents, the usually-angry-at-ED cluster of teachers afterward had a guy who said, “You just don’t get it — the parents don’t care. The parents don’t want their kids to get a good education if it means they can read books and see movies the parents don’t approve of.”
Pete Seeger segués Woody Guthrie’s story of the “Union Maid” into the chorus, “You can’t scare me: I’m stickin’ to the union/I’m stickin’ to the union . . . ’til the day I die.”
When did that become, “I’ve got mine, get your own?” When did the hope of Woody Guthrie give way to the experienced, cynical blues of Billie Holiday?
When did we move from communities that made schools a first priority, as in the Northwest Ordinances of 1785-1789, as in the first things pioneers did once they settled west of the Mississippi, as in the creation of the Land Grant Colleges, to communities where plucking out the bricks of the foundation of education is acceptable government policy? Utah’s pioneers prided themselves on establishing schools as a first order of business once they got to the Salt Lake Valley, in 1847. This year the Utah legislature, no longer dominated by the kids of those pioneers, voted to start unraveling that system despite it’s being a model in many ways, and successful by almost any measure, by using vouchers to take money from public schools.
And how do we make those not sticking to the union, nor sticking to any communities of shared values that emphasize building for the future, get back to the hope that we can make a better future, if we work together?
Announcements for Nobel winners started today (it’s October, after all). I’ll wager, again, that most Nobel winners will be American, and that most of the winners will be products of America’s public schools. How long can we keep that up, if we don’t dream it any more?
There is no such thing as a job Americans won’t do. There is such a thing as a job Americans can’t afford to do on the salary offered.
God bless the working man and woman. They deserve much more than a day off from work. They deserve our respect. They are the backbone of our country.
People are so scared they won’t stick to the union, to any union. That’s not because the unions are too powerful, certainly, or it would be the other way around.
Now, excuse me, but I have to go listen to Taylor Mali again.
8 Comments | Economics, Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education reform, Education success, History, Labor and unions | Tagged: American dream, Education, labor, unions | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
It’s a distinguished magazine. Analysis in the magazine is typically stellar. They promise to invite top people to debate. It might be interesting.
I got this e-mail, below from the Economist. I plan to check it out, and vote.
Introducing The Economist Debate Series. A Severe Contest.
Dear Reader,
I’m delighted to invite you to be part of an extraordinary first for Economist.com.
Our new Debate Series is an ongoing community forum where propositions about topical issues will be rigorously debated in the Oxford style by compelling Speakers. The first topic being debated is Education and The Economist is inviting our online audience to take part by voting on propositions, sharing views and opinions, and challenging the Speakers.
Five propositions have now been short-listed to address the most far-reaching and divisive aspects of the education debate covering: the place of foreign students in higher education; the position of corporate donors; and the role of technology in today’s classrooms. The highest ranking propositions will be debated, with the first launching on Oct 15th.
Choose the most resonant propositions to be debated from the list below:
Education – The propositions:1. This house believes that the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.2. This house proposes that governments and universities everywhere should be competing to attract and educate all suitably-qualified students regardless of nationality and residence.
3. This house believes that companies donate to education mainly to win public goodwill and there is nothing wrong with this.
4. This house believes that the “digital divide” is a secondary problem in the educational needs of developing countries.
5. This house believes that social networking technologies will bring large changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom
Join the Debate
The debate schedule is as follows:
- Sep 17th-Oct 12th – Vote for your favorite proposition and join the open forum to discuss topics
- Oct 15th – Winning proposition is revealed and the Debate begins
- Oct 18th – Rebuttals. Share your comments on issues so far and vote for your winning side
- Oct 23th – Closing arguments by the Speakers. Post any additional comments you would like to share and vote for your winner
- Oct 26th – The debate winner is announced.
To receive debate updates sign up now. We will then contact you to announce the winning proposition and details of the debate as it unfolds.
I look forward to you joining us and your fellow Economist readers for this lively debate. In the meantime, check the site to track which proposition is winning, and to view guest participants and the announcement of key Speakers at www.economist.com/debate.
Yours sincerely,
Ben Edwards
Publisher
Economist.com
Leave a Comment » | Classroom technology, Economics, Education, Education quality, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: Classroom technology, Education, social networking, The Economist | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Few people know about the law. Since 1872, mineral extraction from the public lands of the United States has been governed by a law designed to make it easy for miners to get minerals out. The law is essentially unchanged, though some mining operations are now bound by other laws to protect the environment and other uses of public lands, such as grazing, tourism, scientific study, wood production, grazing, wildlife management and hunting.
The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources opens hearings on reforming the law next Thursday, September 27. The hearing will be webcast, most likely.
The House of Representatives has already had a couple of field hearings.
Watch your claims!
Resources:
2 Comments | Economics, Environmental protection, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, geology, History, Natural history, Natural resources | Tagged: Economics, Environmental protection, geography, History, Mining, Natural history, Natural resources | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
A California woman donated $128 million to a Quaker boarding school. Her fortune is the result of her father’s wise investment with one of his former students, Warren Buffett.
Barbara Dodd Anderson made the gift to the George School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She is the daughter of Buffett’s former professor at Columbia University’s graduate business program, David L. Dodd. Dodd invested with Buffett, having been impressed with Buffett’s acumen as a student.
But Buffett owed Dodd a lot, too. It was Dodd who got Buffett into Columbia, after Harvard rejected him. Here’s the gist of that part of the story, from the New York Times:
In an interview, Mr. Buffett said Professor Dodd had turned his life around in 1950, when he graduated from the University of Nebraska and was applying to business school. Harvard rejected his application, and that August, well after Columbia’s application deadline, Mr. Buffett wrote to Professor Dodd, whom he admired as the author of a respected financial text.
“Dear Professor Dodd, I thought you were dead, but now that I know that you’re alive, I’d like to come study with you,” Mr. Buffett said he wrote in his letter.
“And he admitted me to Columbia!” Mr. Buffett said. “I would not be who I am today without David Dodd. If in response to my letter he’d said, ‘Sorry, its too late,’ I’d never be where I am.”
“Harvard did me a big favor by turning me down,” he said. “But I haven’t made any contributions to them in thanks for that.”
Leave a Comment » | Economics, Education success, Famous quotes, History, Humor | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Text publishers for Texas generally provide websites to accompany their texts. In several cases the on-line version’s chief virtue is offering the full text on-line, in case students leave their books in their locker. Most of the texts offer a few brilliant on-line sources.
In most cases, features of an on-line text are limited so those school districts that purchase the publisher’s books. Access is restricted by sign-in codes and passwords. In many cases the on-line books are a bit clunky.
Textbook Revolution is a site that claims to be “taking the bite out of textbooks.” I hope they don’t mean the intellectual bite.
The site points to textbooks available on-line with no serious restrictions. There are five history texts, four for U.S. history and one with a focus on world history. Economics is a hotter field, with 14 listings, including one from the Ludwig von Mises Institute which promises links to “dozens” of texts. Geography doesn’t have its own category, but a search of the site for “geography” turns up seven texts. The search for “government” is much less successful, turning up a hodge podge that includes chemistry and a rant, “Nudity and Smartfilter.”
See the hopeful little stub on open course-ware, too. (It features the MIT catalog mentioned here earlier.)
Great idea, good execution for an infant or tyro website. What on-line texts have you used and found useful?
2 Comments | Economics, History, On-line education, On-line learning, Technology in the classroom, Textbook Selection, Textbooks | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
