The American commitment to class mobility through education has always sketchy, despite the myths that cluster around the idea of the American Dream. There have been times that we got serious; the post WWII GI Bill is one example. The Obama administration, too, while perhaps too preoccupied with other issues, has made an effort to strengthen access and pledged to do more.

Usually, though, we are more interested in funding and promoting the already-successful than the could-be-successful. We routinely fund public schools through local school districts, so the wealthiest neighborhoods have the best schools. The top of the educational hierarchy– the Ivy league and the like– is rich beyond belief while the bottom tiers muddle along.

In so-called hard economic…

The recent flap over errors in the APA Style manual has pushed me into pulling a Seinfeld and coining a new term: Cubicle Sourcing. You heard it here first, the day after Thanksgiving, 2009. Cubicle Sourcing is the opposite of Crowd Sourcing, of course.

Crowd Sourcing, Wikipedia reminds us, is “a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call.” Cubicle Sourcing, then, is my neologism for taking a task that ought be done by a community, and assigning it to a team of isolated copywriters and editors.

APA, in other words, did everything backwards;…