Highered Intelligence

Horrible Multiple Choice Questions

2012-01-08T14:13:00.001-08:00

People often complain that standardized tests are "culturally biased." In a textbook I've read recently, there's the following anecdote:

It seems every teacher who has worked in Alaska's rural school system has a story of the cultural ignorance of standardized tests. A question that stumped a student in my wife's 2nd-grade class asked for the best choice on how to get to a hospital: boat, ambulance, or airplane. Since the nearest hospital is 300 mile away, the student circled the logical, yet "incorrect" answer: airplane.

The problem isn't that the question is "culturally biased." The problem is that the person who wrote that question is a bleepin' moron who is as lazy as they are incompetent.

I've spent a lot of time writing multiple choice questions for quizzes and exams during my time as a philosophy graduate student. It's something of an art form for me. And the number one principle that I adhere to is that a multiple choice question should have a clearly and unambiguously right answer. There should be no wiggle room: any interpretation that might make one of the other answers even arguably right should be eliminated by the structure of the question. Here's a good example of a bad question:

William Ockham thought that a term in spoken language represents real objects:
(a) Alternatively
(b) Primarily
(c) Secondarily
(d) None of the above

There are numerous problems with this question. First off, it's asking what someone who is dead was thinking, which is a stupid thing to do, and it doesn't even provide a timeframe for that thinking, which might have changed over the course of Ockahm's career. Even if it were the "correct" answer (which it isn't) "None of the above" could arguably be a poor choice here because in selecting it, you're endorsing the idea that terms in spoken language represent real objects, which isn't necessarily the case. (In fact, it is the case here, but only contingently.) There are at least two other things wrong with this question, but they're minor quibbles at best.

Anyway, here's the question, written much better:

In the first book of his Summa Logicae, William Ockham states that when a term in spoken language represents real objects, it does so:
(a) Alternatively
(b) Primarily
(c) Secondarily
(d) The question includes a false premise: Ockham denied that spoken language represented physical objects.

Now some "test bias" is real; the old stand-by of the tale of the "Regatta" question is a good example of that. But a vast amount of it is, I think, just shitty test-writing.

This is particularly on my mind because I had cause to run into a really, really awful test question just the other day. I'm reproducing this from memory, so some of the minor details might be wrong (in fact, I'm rounding the numbers to make it easier to solve in your head). But I'm confident I've got the structure right.

Mary is taking a road trip. She will be driving from San Diego to Marin County, a 520 mile trip. She plans to refill the tank when it is only 1/4 full. She will travel at an average speed of 50 mph. Her car gets 25 miles per gallon average gas mileage, and has a 20 gallon tank. Assuming she starts with a full tank, how long can she drive before she has to refill?
a) 5 hours
b) 10 hours
c) 7.5 hours
d) She won't need to refill

This is an awful question. What does it mean when it asks how long can she drive before she has to refill? Does it mean how long till her tank is empty and she MUST refill? Or does it mean how long until she reaches the point where, according to her plan, she SHOULD refill?

On a purely technical level, it must be the former (and the answer should be (b)), because that's what "how long can you drive before you have to refill" actually means. But in the context of the question, it seems obvious that the question's author wants an additional step in the calculations -- how long till she gets to a quarter-tank, in which case the right answer is (c). In fact, I'm inclined to think (and I marked down) the correct answer is (c).

After all, why would there be useless information like that bit about her plan in the question, right? Well... why would there be useless information like the names of the cities? Questions have useless information in them all the time.

My point is just this: a lot of test questions really suck. And we shouldn't necessarily scream "bias" when, in fact, the problem is idiocy.

Threats and The School-as-Family

2012-01-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

Last week I wrote a little bit about a proposed law governing online threats made off-campus, pointing out what I thought were some ambiguities and incoherencies (is that a word?) in the statute's language. Today I just wanted to rattle off a few brief thoughts about the notion of schools' exercising control of their students' lives while off-campus in general. My apologies... this is sort of jumbled and confused, and I'm too lazy to tighten it up.

What I find really interesting about the thinking behind the move to regulate students' off-campus behavior is that it often coupled with the mindset that schools should be tolerant and welcoming of all cultures, and shouldn't be in the cultural missionary/assimilation business. Yet it seems to me that if you are going to make a moral (as opposed to a legal) argument for being able to punish students for off-campus behavior, you have to accept that one of the missions of a school is to shape its students into a certain type of person, with a certain type of values.

Some of you reading this are probably thinking to yourself, "Of course school is about shaping values. Duh!" But not everyone agrees with this; some reject it vehemently. Still others think they disagree, but what they really think is that schools shouldn't attempt to instill values that they don't believe in themselves.

A private school can kick a kid out for off-campus behavior, because they can have a code of conduct that says, "If you want to be at this school, there's to be none of behavior X, period." (There may be difficulties in enforcement, but that's another matter.) The key difference between a private school and a public school, of course, is that the family is (usually) paying for the student to attend the private school. Attending is an option.

Attending public school is also an option, in the strict sense. But it's also often the only "costless" alternative to meeting a state mandate that your child be formally, officially observed during business hours. In other words, for many families the choice is send the kid to public school or go to jail/pay fines under truancy laws. And that's the reason, I think, that some people -- especially people on the left -- get intellectually or emotionally bothered when public schools get into the character-moulding business: there's no easy way to escape it. The normative commands of the public school are, ultimately, the normative commands of the state, which has a monopoly on force.

In other words, when the public schools can tell you that there's no making online threats, it's really the government telling you that there's no making online threats. And that's probably not a big deal, as long as we're talking about threats, right? I mean, threats are bad, right?

Yet people could reasonably be worried that if a school can ban online threats, then it can expel a student for not going to Mass, or not saying his five daily prayers. Now, you might say, "Wait a second... that's a first amendment issue!" But threats are a first amendment issue, too, and many of the sorts of "threats" that get kids suspended and expelled these days in no way pass the true threats doctrine, which is the test for determining when speech can be regulated by the government because it's a threat. (Typically, a threat is only a true threat if the “speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals" and "objective observers would reasonably perceive such speech” to be a threat.) Most incidences of fiction-gone-wrong and online venting about teachers and principals aren't really intended as a "serious expression of an intent" to work violence.

"But we can't be too careful in this post-Columbine world," some people say. Well, yes, actually -- for the purposes of the First Amendment you can be too careful. And it's especially egregious when the speech in question isn't even occurring on campus. The student didn't make a statement on campus; the fact that other students are disrupting the school environment by using their phones and computers to access the students' writing isn't grounds for punishing the student.

My point is just this: either you think that schools are in the character business, or not. And if you do, either you think that the First Amendment actually matters, or you don't. Unfortunately, I think that there are a lot of people out there on the left who claim that schools shouldn't be in the character business, but really think they should, and a lot of people on the right who think that the First Amendment matters, but are willing to toss it under the bus when it doesn't fit their policy agenda.

Some Off-The-Cuff Legal Analysis

2012-01-03T07:57:00.001-08:00

So it seems that the Illinois state legislature has gotten it into their head to pass a law that allows schools to expel kids for online behavior. Here's the summary from the legislature:

Provides that a school board (including Chicago) may suspend or by regulation authorize the superintendent of the district or the principal, assistant principal, or dean of students of any school to suspend a student for a certain period of time or may expel a student for a definite period of time if (i) that student has been determined to have made an explicit threat on an Internet website against a school employee, a student, or any school-related personnel, (ii) the Internet website through which the threat was made is a site that was accessible within the school at the time the threat was made or was available to third parties who worked or studied within the school grounds at the time the threat was made, and (iii) the threat could be reasonably interpreted as threatening to the safety and security of the threatened individual because of his or her duties or employment status or status as a student inside the school.

So there are several elements here, and I want to talk briefly about each.

1) There must be an explicit threat.
This is the most interesting, because the incident that is being reported as the catalyst for this law apparently didn't involve an explicit threat. The 2005 Oswego district incident was a student who apparently posted the phrase, "I'm so angry I could kill." Even if what was actually posted was something like, "I'm so angry I could kill Mr. X, that son of a bitch", that wouldn't be an actual threat. Maybe if it were said in Mr. X's presence, while you were holding a knife and twirling it menacingly... but then the bulk of the threat would be the knife twirling.

My suspicion is that this law is going to run into problems about what is and is not a threat, and that districts are going to have to resort to a "disrupts the school environment" defense for their expulsions, a la Tinker vs Des Moines and related cases. I predict that these attempts will be successful. In other words, I predict that the "explicit threat" requirement of this law is going to essentially be written out by judicial interpretation and that this will just be a law that extends the school's power over student speech on campus to govern speech on the internet as well -- but I'm a pessimist. Maybe the courts will actually enforce the statute as written and will require an explicit threat.

2) It must be against school-related personnel.
I'm not really sure what that means, other than employees and students -- maybe they're talking about PTA moms or something. Maybe they're talking about guest-speakers who come to campus? No real problems here.

3) It must be made on an internet website
I'm not an Illinois lawyer, but this might be problematic because there's much more to the internets than "websites", at least how that term is used in a technical sense. Presumably this is an easy thing for courts to ignore, though. If it's on the internet, I bet they'll consider it a "website" because it's a site on the web.

4) The site must be school-accessible:
This is an interesting requirement -- that someone at the school (even, presumably, office staff sitting at networked computers) -- must be able to access the website at the time the threat was made. There are three problems that I can see.

First, it's hard to determine when an online threat is "made". Is it when it is typed? When it is posted? When it is read? This isn't like me walking up to you and saying something, after all. What if a threat is posted to a secure website that is not school accessible, and is only accessible to certain non-campus IP addresses, but then those protections are removed? When was the threat made? There's probably case law on this sort of thing, which I'm too lazy to look up. But it seems like a thorny issue.

Second, I wonder if the access from school can count someone violating school policy. Let me explain what I mean. Let's say the threat is posted to a Facebook page that is only viewable by "friends". Let's also say that the school has a strict no-internet policy, but that some students violate that policy by bringing smartphones onto campus and using them. Does that count as a website "accessible within the school"? What if students are not supposed to use school computers for Facebook, but do anyway? Does a student have a right to rely on school policy to protect him from expulsion for making threats?

Third, I'd want to know what "accessible" means. If a page can be reached, but is password protected, is it "accessible"? Does it matter who knows the password? Does it matter that the password can be hacked, or that doing so is a violation of law?

I'm imagining that something like the following rule is going to be followed: if it shows up on someone's computer or wireless device, it must have been accessible. But you might think that a student should be able to tell whether his or her behavior is going to get him or her expelled before some super-hacker at school goes to work on the website in question.

5) The threat could be reasonably interpreted as threatening to the safety and security of the threatened individual because of his or her duties or employment status or status as a student inside the school.
I won't lie... this last bit has me confused.

Presumably, if we're taking the "explicit threat" portion of this proposed law seriously, there's already a requirement that the threat "threaten the safety and security" of the threatened individual. So that can't be what this section is about; the important part really has to be the "because" clause. But I have absolutely no idea what it means for someone's safety or security to be threatened because of their relationship to the school. The most common-sense interpretation is probably a sort of motive-analysis: is this threat being made because the threatened person is a student or employee?

But the answer to that is almost always going to be "no". Threats get made because people do things that make people angry, not because someone happens to be a student or a teacher. So is the real question whether the underlying antagonism had its genesis in the schoolyard, or in the principal's office? So maybe it's not OK to threaten the teacher online if you're threatening her because she gave you an F. But it would be OK to threaten her because she cut you off in traffic? That seems like a weird result. Would it matter if she cut you off in traffic on the way to school?

If a fellow student eggs your house, and you threaten him online, are you threatening him "because" of his status as a student? Well, on the one hand, no. He egged your house, and that's why you're threatening him. But on the other, he wouldn't have egged your house if you hadn't mouthed off to him in school the other day...

One could imagine that this provision is taken VERY literally, but then we get ridiculous situations where the only actionable threat looks like this:

"If you don't unenroll from school immediately, I'm going to box your ears in."

That's silly. No one makes threats like that. But I'm really at a loss to understand exactly what's supposed to be being required here.

So those are my thoughts on the specifics of the proposed law. I've got some more general concerns... like if this law is being passed because of concerns that off-campus online activity is currently protected by federal law, how is passing a state law going to change that, exactly? There's still this thing called the Supremacy Clause, and you can't take away federal protections through a state law. But I've gone on long enough for now.

I'll have some more abstract thoughts on this general topic in a day or two.

The Fundamental Choice in Education

2011-12-16T08:38:00.000-08:00

I'm doing some thinking and some reading this morning. That's what philosophers do when we're unable to write coherently. And one of the things I've been thinking about is the problem of subsidization, namely, the iron-clad rule that if you subsidize a behavior, you get more of it.

We've got a compulsory school system. For all sorts of reasons, I think this is a terrible idea. But, following the rule of Chesterton's Fence (see McArdle's discussion here if you aren't familiar), it's not enough merely not to like the compulsory nature of school. We should attempt to understand why we have it before we tear it apart.

The easy (mostly false) answer is that we're in a quasi-facist state that wants to control its youth and brainwash them into service to the Leviathan. But that's only a very small part of the story.

We mostly have compulsory education because there are parents out there who won't send their kids to school otherwise, because some families would put their kids to work and deny them the supposed benefits of sitting in a desk learning from "highly qualified" teachers. So to prevent these kids from missing out on these opportunities, to prevent the sort of feudal social calcification that such behaviors breed, we institute mandatory schooling.

But now we run into the subsidization problem. You can think of mandatory schooling as a form of subsidy, a subsidy for the behavior of not valuing education. On average, if you don't value education, and your kids don't value education, your kids are going to have a less economically productive and, I think, less meaningful life. They may grow up with a narrower world view and a provincial focus. (That might have been an ironclad certainty in the days before the inter-tubes; now I think it's just a risk.)

But if you mandate education, you are taking away these penalties that normally attach to the failure to value education. You're subsidizing the attitude.

And that means you're going to get more of it.

And really, it's just common sense. Compulsory education is "free" (or appears so to most people), and you have to be there whether you want to be or not. Does that sound like something valuable? Something that's not just given away, but given away to everyone? Valuable things are usually kept locked away, with restricted access. Things like Harvard. Harvard gets locked away behind some walls and an admissions committee. Harvard's valuable.

It's a natural sort of thought to think that the schooling offered by your neighborhood public school isn't valuable. The subsidy creates more of the attitude whose effects it is designed to ameliorate.

Now, because we have compulsory schooling, you can't threaten to kick someone out of the school. Not really. Sure, there are the extreme cases involving guns, knives, and things like hugging or flying an American flag that might run you the risk of permanent expulsion, but by and large expulsion is a rare bird, and it's almost never EVER given for mere non-engagement, for absolute, total academic failure.

What if it were? What if we told students who were, say, 12 or older, "You don't want to be here, and you don't want to learn? Go ahead and get out of my classroom. Leave."

I've floated this idea with people before, and I generally get something along the lines of the following in response: "Too many kids would just walk away from school and we'd have hundreds of kids on the streets missing out on their best years for learning."

I have to say, that's a damn good point, and it gives me pause (which is why I'm not quite ready to fully endorse something like the idea I just sketched out). But I also think it overstates the case somewhat. Yes, there would be kids on the street. But we'd have stopped the subsidy of the poor attitude towards education, so there would (if my hypothesis is correct) be far fewer people who didn't want to deal with school. School would become something seen as more valuable by most people, precisely because you wouldn't have it by default. It would be something you'd have to work for.

Private schools don't have this problem, because they kick people out all the time. And the students are paying to be there. Expulsion is a credible threat.

It's sort of like nuclear weapons. If you have one, and people believe that you're going to use it, you almost never have to use it. Likewise, I think it's possible that once you've credibly tossed a few students out on their ears, the number of students who would seek or deserve such tossing is likely to decrease dramatically.

This strikes me as the fundamental choice facing American Education: to subsidize or not to subsidize the non-valuing of school and education. For the last century at least, we've come down firmly in the subsidization camp -- to the point where I'm not sure people (including me) are even able to clearly understand what would happen without the subsidy. It's affected our culture, our institutions, our views of what school is supposed to be.

Let me be perfectly clear -- or at least as clear as our President is when he says those words: I am not advocating ending the subsidy. I'm advocating that we look at the way we think about it, and ask ourselves the following questions:

1) How many of the panoply of woes currently afflicting (or at least supposedly afflicting) our educational system in this country is a direct result of this subsidy?

2) How bad would things really get if we ended it?

3) And finally, given the answers to the previous two questions, is it still worth it keeping the subsidy?

The answer may well be "yes". I'd just like us to think openly and clearly about the matter.

Gratuitious Repost: Practice, Failure, and Evaluation

2011-12-16T08:32:00.001-08:00

(This is a wholly gratuitous re-post of something I wrote for Joanne a few months back. I'm putting it here because it's one of my better posts, represents some of my clearer thinking, and... I just spent 35 minutes searching around the internets trying to figure out where exactly I wrote it. I'd like to be able to find it in the future. So here it is.)

I wanted to take a few minutes to ruminate more deeply on something I said in passing in a comment thread a few weeks back. Here’s what I said:

When a student has not been allowed to fail, they will learn that failure isn’t something that can happen. When a college professor gives them an F, the result is confusion.

Unfortunately, failure *is* something that can happen, regardless of the attitude one takes towards it in primary and secondary school. It happens with devastating results, sometimes. Now, school is supposed to be a place where you can fail without devastating consequences, where you can learn from your failures and become better at things, but failure in school is often seen these days as a devastating consequence itself. (e.g., YOU RUINED MY CHANCE TO GET INTO HARVARD!)

That’s a problem. Certification should be the secondary mission of schools, not the primary mission.

There are really three different points here.

First, there’s an assertion that failure is always a possibility. That’s probably true: one can avoid failure only by never attempting anything not guaranteed success, which is itself a sort of failure… at life. We’ll come back to this in a moment.

Second, there’s an assertion that school should be a place where failure is constructive. That’s a much dicier proposition. We all know the old saying: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” If you don’t know it, you should learn it, because it’s a good saying. But there’s another saying, too: “Insanity is trying the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” If you consider both of these sayings together, the resulting imperative seems to be something like “If at first you don’t succeed, keep altering your approach until you do.” And that’s really great advice.

Of course, there are times when you don’t want to have to try again. Operation Overlord comes to mind this time of year. No one wants to fail when they’re invading Europe; it’s too expensive, too much is on the line. Failure isn’t an option in such situations; if Eisenhower was pushed back into the sea and tens of thousands of soldiers died for naught, well, it would take great presence of mind to say, “Let’s try this again, but put the seventh division over here this time.” No, you drill and practice as best you can before the big invasion, and try to work out the possibilities of failure in a low-consequence environment.

Whether success is a must or merely a goal depends on the consequences. That last-second three-point shot isn’t a laboratory for experiment because the game rides on it; if you’re a professional NBA player, you’ve already had all the consequence-free practice money can buy. Now’s the time to succeed.

School, I’d like to argue, needs to be a place for consequence-free practice. My favourite analogy for academic education is martial arts; it’s not actually an analogy, because I think they’re the same thing. Schools essentially are (or, I argue, should be) kung-fu academies for the mind. When you walk into a martial arts dojo, you practice. That’s not to say you don’t get hurt: people get hurt all the time in practice. That’s how you can tell that the practice is really good practice: you’ve got all sorts of bumps and bruises. But they aren’t the sorts of bumps and bruises you get when you’re on the ground in an alley doing your level best to drive your elbow through someone’s temple before they choke you to death.

So I’m not saying school should be completely consequence-free — but the stakes need to be lower than they are in the environment for which one is training.

And oddly, they aren’t. They’re higher. Yes, it’s true that how you do in college, say, matters more than how you do in high school. But that’s only half the story, because where you do how you do in college depends on how you did in high school. If you get a 3.9 at Yale, then yes, that makes up for your 2.1 in High School. But good luck getting in to Yale. And that’s because high school (and, let us be frank, to a great extent college) is a certification system, which brings me to my third point.

High schools have three jobs, really. First, they need to keep the kids off the streets, corralled, and out from underfoot. I personally find this role of the high school to be both demeaning to the teenagers, counterproductive to actual learning, and immoral.

Second, High Schools need to instruct their students in a certain body of knowledge. Now, this body of knowledge is schizoid in the extreme, and it’s created substantially by committee, so it’s not what anyone would call a “coherent” body of knowledge. But there needs to be some teaching going on, some imparting of skills, some training for the rest of one’s life. This is the function I consider absolutely primary.

Finally, High Schools give diplomas: they certify a certain level of competence. Just how much competence they certify and how worthwhile their certifications are will vary from school to school and is the subject of many an essay, op-ed, and book. But that’s the third job, and it’s the certification that is driving all the consequences that I was talking about above. I want to argue that the certification mission is substantially interfering with the education mission, precisely because it is causing the practice itself to be less practice and more real-performance. That “F” on your English essay should be a signal to try again, to rewrite it with a new technique, a new approach. Instead, it’s 20% of your grade, which is 4% of your final GPA. In other words, that ONE essay that you just wrote is .8% of your final GPA in high school.

Bruises acquired in a martial arts dojo during practice heal, and the students emerge stronger, wiser, and more skilled. The bruises stay in the dojo, and in the mind of the student. We need to figure out a way to keep students’ failures inside the school, to give them more opportunity to practice — just practice. How many ungraded assignments that get substantial feedback have any of you given in the last few weeks? In my entire high school career, the only ungraded practice I had was in French. Everything else was graded, it went on the record, it became part of my certification.

That’s super-useful if you’re the person depending on the certification, and you just want people with natural talent who pick things up right away. But it’s horrible for the student who might need a little practice.

Of course, you might question (as many of my students do when we discuss these things) whether students would actually do any ungraded practice assignments. That argument — that grades are primarily about motivation — seems to me at once to be a good one and to prove my point. The reasons that grades motivate is because they matter. If they didn’t matter, they wouldn’t motivate. But the fact that grades matter (and that everything is graded) is precisely why I think there’s a problem.

I’ve gone on long enough for a blog post. Too long, probably. But I wanted to try to get my head around some of these ideas and I think it’s helped.

"Students' Mastery of Learning Outcomes"

2011-12-11T16:30:00.000-08:00

I read that phrase today here.

I want to point out something: students master skills, games, texts, the weather (if they're divine), and all sorts of other things.

But people don't "master" "outcomes". It's just not the sort of thing that gets mastered, because outcomes are just the results of mastering other things.

Some might say that I'm being nitpicky. But words mean things. And if you can't speak/write clearly about what it is you're doing, odds are high that you don't really have a clear idea of what you're doing in the first place.

From the Archives: Teaching History

2011-11-30T23:43:00.000-08:00

I probably don't blog enough to warrant titling a post "From the Archives", but I was re-reading some comments by an Anonymous commenter to my post about History which, oddly, is by far the most trafficked post on my blog since I started it up again earlier this year.

Anyway, here's the relevant portion of the comment:

The whole business of studying history is to upset everything we reflexively believe.

* * * *

And the job of educators is to bring unreflective practice into line with more current, sophisticated research and thinking.

The comment itself is mostly on a tangential issue to the original post, and I'm not really interested in its substance, anyway. I'm concerned with the underlying view of "education" that I see represented in the two excerpted sentences. If it were just one sentence, I'd think, "Eh, whatever. Off the cuff writing." But two sentences makes it seem like something the writer actually believes.

And I think he's wrong.

You see, I tend to think that it is the job of educators -- history and otherwise -- to do their best to speak the truth. And sometimes the truth is what we reflexively believe. (Actually, this is true a lot more than it is false -- we've got VERY good instincts about the truth.) I also think that sometimes the truth is not in line with the "more current, sophisticated research and thinking" and various subjects, even assuming that one could come up with some objective measure of which thinking is more 'sophisticated'.

We have a saying in Philosophy that I've heard at least five different ways, but it always boils down to the same thing: say the true things, and try not to say the false things.

Lots of very smart, sophisticated people think that Rawls' Theory of Justice is right. If it's right, then it's right. But if it's right, it's right because it accurately states the truth about morality and social governance. It's not the fact that lots of smart people think it is right that makes it so, and in fact -- as a very smart person myself -- I happen to think it's mostly malarkey. Well written and thought out malarkey, but fundamentally mistaken.

One problem with some of our teachers might be (is that enough qualification?) that a lot of them see the study of various subjects as the mastery of a body of dogma rather than an excursion into the truth. Some history teachers are teaching a body of facts. Some English teachers are teaching points 3 through 7 of the Style Guide. Some teachers would be incapable of giving a cogent explanation of why what they are teaching is important. (Which is why students love asking that question so much -- it's so often a stumper.)

Our only concern in education should be the truth. Not being "current" or "sophisticated", not being revolutionary or upsetting our reflexive paradigms. And not meeting some political agenda, he mutters wearily.

Defining "Success" and Graduation Rates

2011-11-30T08:53:00.000-08:00

Today, over at Joanne's, there is (by way of Joanne's other blog, Community College Spotlight) a link to a somewhat disturbing story:

At its final meeting on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the 15-member Committee on Measures of Student Success (CMSS)—which includes several community college leaders and individuals who have served public two-year colleges—voted to approve its 26-page report. Among the recommendations: including part-time, degree-seeking students in the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), and collecting data on federal student aid recipients and students who are not academically ready for college.

The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) was especially pleased that the committee urged the Education Department to calculate and publicize a single completion rate that includes students who receive degrees and certificates, as well as those who subsequently enroll in another higher education institution. The combined graduation-and-transfer rate would vastly improve the student success rate, AACC said in a statement, noting that the combined rate is required by federal stature but has not been implemented.

“The community college completion rate would immediately increase to 40 percent from the current 22 percent if this single recommendation were adopted,” AACC said. .

The first, most disturbing aspect of the story is this: there's an organization in the government (in the Dept. of Education, specifically) called "The Committee on Measures of Student Success". You can read a little about it here. Their sole job, as far as I can tell, is to write reports about how to help clarify for implementation the provisions of another law. All hail the regulative state, I suppose. When I was young, I was under the impression that the courts were the ones who interpreted the law when it wasn't clear. Silly me.

That's not really what I wanted to write about, though. I want to write about success.

Anyone with a pulse should be able to spot the logical problem with a statement like, "The completion rate would immediately increase from 22 to 40 percent." It's not the same rate if you change what you're measuring. Now, I don't mean to say that the people at the AACC are stupid -- they mean "the rate measured by law", and they're just using the word "completion rate" somewhat inartfully. I didn't come here today to pick on perfectly smart people speaking casually. That's allowed.

But this concern over how to define completion rates bring up an interesting set of issues. In this case, the concern seems motivated by the reporting requirements of federal legislation. Those requirements are in turn motivated by an apparent belief that measuring "successful outcomes" at a school is how to determine if a school is doing its job.

Which is sort of true, I suppose, but problematic if you don't look outside the school's own standards for determining "successful outcomes." Let me explain what I mean.

Naval SEAL training is a school. It's an excellent school. We can tell it's an excellent school because its graduates go out and proficiently defend their country in a wide variety of extremely difficult situations. Their "outcomes" are damn good. But their outcomes are measured in terms of actual, real success -- not just success at school. Indeed, the success rate at the school is somewhat abysmal, something on the order of 20%.

But here's the interesting thing about SEAL school failures: they're mostly "successful outcomes", too. If you put someone into a high intensity combat situation who isn't ready for it, and they slip, miss, stumble, or just choke and get people killed, that's a failure for the school. It's not a success at all, despite the fact that the school's graduation rate might be higher because they passed.

If you take a community college and judge its success by its graduation rate, something entirely within the control of the school, then a perverse situation develops. The school going to be able to increase its number of "successful outcomes" (as we use the term officially) by lowering its standards and shuffling more people out the door, diploma in hand. More graduates, yes, but they could be less skilled than otherwise might be the case.

In other words, the schools will be able to increase their official success rate by decreasing the number of real successful outcomes. Which isn't to say that they would do that -- but if that's even a possibility, it's a pretty strong clue that our way of measuring success is all messed up.

But, you might say, schools like Naval SEAL training "weed out" people. That shouldn't be the job of second grade!

Well, yes. It should. Second grade should "weed out" the people who aren't ready for third grade. And third grade should "weed out" the people who aren't ready for fourth grade. And so on.

The reason for this is that at some point the school system is going to have to weed people out, and it's not fair to put someone in twelfth grade and ask them to demonstrate high school academic proficiency if they weren't ready for the training in the first place. The lower grades are supposed to prepare you for the upper grades, which are supposed to prepare you for "life" or something like that. That's the theory. And if people are going into sixth grade unable to do sixth grade work, then the fifth grade teacher is failing to generate "successful outcomes", no matter how blisteringly high the graduation rate is.

If you look at graduation rates to determine success -- or even transfer rates, which while a little better, can similarly be affected by academic fraud on the community colleges' part -- you're not looking at anything substantive at all. You're looking merely at process: how many people are being approved by this school? The answer, of course, is always going to be "As many as the school approves of." Think about that for a second and ask yourself what substantive standard is involved there.

We could, of course, look at the schools themselves and what they are actually doing. Are the classes filled with interesting, useful, and challenging information or are they busywork? Do the professors/teachers demand excellence or are they just marking time? Is failure of various academic sorts frowned upon or cavalierly tolerated? Is the environment supportive, competitive, combative, or apathetic? These are all substantive questions about what the school is doing and how it is doing it. And they have no necessary connection whatsoever to graduation rates. A graduation is only a "successful outcome" if it's an accurate signal for a certain kind of competence.

Let me distill my thoughts down to a short paragraph, something you can take away and quote:

Success might be its own justification, and it might have many fathers. But when you're teaching in a school, your success is your students' success. And their success is out there, not in here with you.

Hugging in School: The Power of the Inter-Tubes

2011-11-09T06:56:00.000-08:00

From Professor Volokh over at the Conspiracy, we are treated to a blog post devoid of comment and linking us to an article which informs us that

[Nick Martinez, age 14,] said he quickly hugged the girl, whom he called his best friend, between classes. The principal saw it and hauled them off to the dean for an in-school suspension. The principal even told WKMG Local 6 that the hug was innocent....

The school has a strict no-hugging policy and is the only school in the district where hugging is not allowed. Under the policy, there is no difference between an unwanted hug, like sexual harassment, and a hug between friends....

In the former version of this blog, I wrote extensively about zero tolerance policies and my natural antipathy to them. I may do so again, but that's not what I want to do here. What I want to do now is talk briefly about the Internet, or the "Inter-Tubes", as I sometimes call them in moments of mirth.

Here's a comment from a Conspiracy reader:

Steve: I realize everything is stupid today, but way back in the Golden Age when I attended public school, I recall fairly strict policies against “public displays of affection,” as they were known.

****

(I)n the cable and Internet age when every local story is shared with a national audience, the fact that one kid somewhere in a nation of 350 million got sent to detention for a hug is obvious proof that everything is going to hell.

And here's another:

We weren’t even allowed to hold hands in public at my high school.

This is a normal thing. But the fact that Eugene blogs it, and in the context of other things Eugene blogs, it seems like some kind of damning indictment school administrators.

And two more:

Back in the early ‘50s when dinosaurs roamed the elementary schoolhouse halls, we played football with real tackling, mumblety-peg with real pocketknives, and marbles and tops for keeps. Some girls played these games too. We had no idiotic rules against “touching” either.

and

At the public school I attended there were always kids hugging, giving kisses, and even feeling-up each other alongside the lockers between classes.

I didn’t think it was such a great idea at the time because it seemed that the kids who engaged in this behavior were less academically successful, less likely to participate in extracurricular activities, and were less achievement oriented in general.

My own high school experience (I talk about high school despite the fact that the story is about a Middle School because the kid's 14, which means 9th grade; 9th grade is high school out here) is filled with a lot of memories. Leaving out names to protect the innocent, one of the starkest is noticing how sorta adorable two of my fellow classmates were kissing between classes. (I was also a little jealous/in awe of their relationship, which didn't last, btw.) I also recall being vaguely bothered by the intensity of the touchy-feeliness of another couple. In other words, there very clearly was hugging, kissing, and even some groping going on in my high school, even between 14-year old freshmen.

So let's go back to that first reader comment. Steve (the commenter) says with just the right amount of snark that it's silly to get worked up about a single failure of judgment in a nation of 350 million people. I pretty much agree with him -- that's a silly reason to get worked up. But as I read through the comments, I started to muse that even if this incident was a single lapse in judgment, and the fact that only one school in the district has such a policy suggests that it is, it needn't be thus. There could, conceivably, be districts where this sort of treatment of hugging is an every-day occurrence and there are social norms about such things that differ dramatically than what I grew up with.

And so I started to think about the Internet and the constant deluge of information we get these days. Perhaps, I wondered, the Inter-Tubes might be allowing us to see what happens all the time in other parts of the country, and perhaps this isn't always a good thing. I wonder if one of the reasons our country was able to survive so well for as long as it did wasn't that we didn't always make every local policy choice a national issue.

That's sort of abstract, so let me bring it down to the level of the concrete. I think policies on no hugging are silly and stupid, and I would argue against them in my community. But they also would be exceedingly unlikely (I hope) to happen in my community, because that's not how we roll. In other communities, as we can see in the comments above, that is how they roll. But with the Inter-Tubes, we get to read about it all the time.

In other words -- and I'm speculating wildly here -- people like me could have gotten just as upset about what those weird no-touching schools were doing back in the 50's, or back in the 80's and 90's. We just didn't know what was going on because we didn't read about it with our morning tea. It was happening on the other side of the hill.

So I'm wondering if having this sort of accessibility to "foreign" practices, that is, understanding all the things that your neighbors in the next town or next state are really up to on a micro level, is such a good thing. People don't go to war over nothing. But they often go to war because those godless heathens in the next town eat lamb, or something like that. I wonder if perhaps we weren't protected against stirring up that sort of inter-cultural nastiness -- at least to some extent -- by the relative paucity of information we used to have about what occurred elsewhere. We know those folks on the other side of the hill vote for President, just like us, and that's good enough for us!

But now, with the Inter-Tubes, we have 24-hour access to the happenings of the Edgefield school board in Posterior County, Egyptia. We get to see what they do as a matter of course, and we have the opportunity to get upset, and to make it an issue of national culture. The internet enables the little cultural facist lurking in all of us, who wants everyone to do things like we do. (Truly being a libertarian about things is hard work, and anyone who tells you it is the natural state of mind is lying to you.)

Please bear in mind that I'm not saying that this sort of hugging suspension happens all the time in the county in question. I'm merely suggesting that it's possible, and that the internet age has had a profound effect on how we relate to manifestations of that possibility, or possibilities like it. Finally, I want to caveat that I think the district policy on touching is a separate issue from the obvious ramping-up of penalties that has occurred in the last few years. That, I suspect, really is a national concern and not merely a case of differing local sensibilities finally coming onto each others' radar.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking this morning and that's what this blog is for.

Some Lighthearted Frivolity

2011-11-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

Via Althouse, I came to a fascinating little photo essay at the Daily Mail online. It's a side-by-side of some modern celebrities, and the Old Skool celebrities that they resemble. The headline asks, "Do today's icons measure up to their classic lookalikes?"

Just for S&G's, let's find out. No politics. No nostalgia. Let's just see who looks better -- as a combination of beauty and style -- because appearance is what really matters, right?

George Clooney vs. Cary Grant: This seems to me like a no-brainer. Clooney's good looking on his own, but next to Grant he looks like an over-surgeried boy-man. Point for the old guard. 0-1

January Jones vs. Grace Kelly: I have to remind myself that we're not judging talent, interview skill, or choice-of-roles here. It's just pure looks and fashion. Jones actually has more of an old-style, low-cheekbone classical look. That picture also gives her more of a pouting-19th Century painting look. In fact, if you made her picture black and white, you might think that Kelly was the modern day actress -- there's a little more vivacity there. This is a close one, very nearly a tie. Based on these pictures, it's Jones. 1-1

Penelope Cruz vs. Sophia Loren: Seriously? 1-2

David Beckham vs. Errol Flynn: This is almost an apples to oranges comparison. Beckham and Flynn are two very different kinds of style and face structure. Were I choosing someone to put up against Flynn, I'd probably pick Sean Penn. Still, a choice is a choice. Beckham has a really great Clint Eastwood vibe going in that picture, so we'll give it to the Tyros. 2-2

Brad Pitt vs. Robert Redford: When both were in their prime, this would be a much closer contest. But it looks like they're comparing the older versions of these two actors. That's Redford's territory, hands-down. 2-3

Carey Mulligan vs. Mia Farrow: This gets my vote for the picture that started this column. Someone (Claire Cisotti) probably saw the picture of Carey Mulligan... who is... I'm not sure exactly.... and said, "WOW she looks like Mia Farrow." A column idea is born. These two are, in this picture at least, basically twins. But Farrow looks like she'd be more fun. 2-4

Keira Knightley vs. Audrey Hepburn: This match-up seems to be the result of, "But it's Audrey Hepburn. We have to include her. Who can we credibly put up against her?" A hair cut doesn't do it. Neither does being thin. I would have picked Natalie Portman for the Hepburn match-up myself. They're much closer in terms of their style and the "type" of beauty they have. But with that said, I've always been a fan of Hepburn's acting rather than her looks, and I think Knightley's earth-scorching drop-dead hotness comes out on top here. 3-4

Scarlett Johansson vs. Marilyn Monroe: Marilyn Monroe is typically thought to be better looking than she actually was, in my opinion. But I'm evaluating the beauty of a person (or the picture of a person), not a concept. Johansson has the worse picture, but they probably had to pick a bad picture of her to make it seem like a fair fight. 4-4

Catherine Zeta-Jones vs. Cyd Charisse: That sound you just heard was Cyd Charisse scraping Zeta-Jones off the bottom of her shoe. 4-5

Hugh Jackman vs. Clint Eastwood: Physically this is a dead tie, as near as my woman-oriented libido can tell. But I try to imagine Hugh Jackman saying, "Just because we're holding hands doesn't mean we're going to take long, hot showers together till the wee hours of the morning," I choke on my coffee because he doesn't have the mystique to pull that off. Personal style is part of this competition, so Clint takes it. 4-6

James Franco vs. James Dean: Like the Farrow competition, above, this is like comparing twins. One of whom is strung out on meth and drinks too much. But that's like the worst picture of James Dean on the first page of the Google Image search, and a strikingly good picture of James Franco. Victory is officially out of reach of the new guard with our first tie. 4-6-1

Katie Holmes vs. Natalie Wood: The caption says "Katie Holmes and Natalie Wood captivate with a glance." There are some things missing from that sentence. It should read, "Katie Holmes. (pause) And Natalie Wood captivates with a glance." 4-7-1

Old Skool wins. As my friend Russell once said, "It's a bitch when those twentieth level fighters come out of retirement."

And that's my frivolous, superficial opinion for the day.

The View From the Bleachers

2011-11-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

There's a fight going on. Depending on who you ask, it's a fight between the New Class Elites...

In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.

... or a fight between the haves and the have-nots.

As the police in Oakland, California, breaking up the occupy protests there, "Occupy Oakland." Part of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is for economic justice. This one in California, the police moved in with batons swinging, they tore down tents and smashed signs.

They sent tear gas grenades into the crowd. The cops are also alleged to have fired rubber bullets, something they are denying, despite injuries to protesters that look like they were caused by rubber bullets. And police admits to firing bean bag rounds, though.

It might even be a fight between the taxpayers and the government dependent class.

America is engaged in class war, but not of the sort one reads about in the mainstream press. The truly indigent - young African-American men, for example, most of whom are now unemployed - have little to do in this war. Large corporations for the most part are bystanders as well; they will make their peace with the victor. This is a war of survival between the productive middle class on one hand, and the dependents of the state on the other.

But those fights seem to me to be mere power struggles, purely economic and political in nature. The fight between the haves and the have-nots is not -- despite the rhetoric -- grounded in a moral complaint. The fact that someone has a lot of stuff doesn't make them evil, no matter how much you shriek that it does.

That's not to say that the possible outcomes of these fights can't be talked about sensibly in moral terms. I'm merely pointing out that the conflicts themselves aren't really about moral complaints.

But there's another way of looking at this conflict that does make it a moral issue -- one that I, frankly, find compelling. Via Joanne, we are given a number of arguments by Alex Pareene over at Salon about why it is that the 99% has gotten such a raw deal. On the whole, the piece is excremental and its litany of broken promises can be refuted simply by pointing out that adults make choices, sometimes things don't work out, and ultimately the only person responsible for you is you.

But there is one line of argument that Pareene raises which can't be dismissed this way:

For the young, higher education was said to be a ticket to class mobility, or at least a secure career. Instead, middle-class students have taken on billions of dollars of inescapable debt during a prolonged jobs crisis. Lower-income students are blatantly ripped off by usurious scam artists working for educationally dubious for-profit schools. Even those seeking to join the professional class, through medical school or law school, find themselves with mountains of debt and dwindling job prospects.

This is a real complaint. It's one thing to be misled by political leaders as adults. No one put a gun to your head and forced you to vote democratic, or forced you to purchase that home that the laws of mathematics said you couldn't afford.

But it's another thing to be misled as a child, to be given a false vision of the world, and to take your first steps into adulthood in trust of that vision. I think the "broken social promises" complaint Pareene presents is a valid one when it comes to the young. They're adults now (maybe), but they weren't really fully autonomous when they made the decisions that they did. Indeed, we've been structuring society precisely to make them less autonomous. (Stay on your parents' insurance till your 26???).

This complaint is, morally speaking, much more grounded and coherent than the disorganized class warfare blather that generally comes out of the Occupiers/99 percenters as rhetorical cover for their praxis struggle.

Indeed, and this is where the title of this post comes in, as a member of Generation X, what this moral conflict looks like to me is a fight between the Boomers and the Millennials. "Our parents lied to us about life!" seems to sum it up nicely.

And the millennials are right. The Boomers really screwed up. They should be ashamed of themselves, and if they had any sense of shame, they'd do what they could to make things right.

Unfortunately, as a generation, they don't. Have shame, that is. So what sort of redress can be given for this moral wrong that has been perpetrated against the Millennials?

Well, just because you're correct that your parents were horrible and lied to you doesn't mean you get compensated for it. You just have to deal. Yes, you have the moral high ground -- it was wrong for your parents and their friends and coworkers and the others in their generation to lie to you about the efficacy of the college degree, just like it was wrong of them to destroy its value at the same time by beginning the transformation of college into a high school extension program in order to subvert the Draft and establish a wider political power base.

So to the extent that their complaints actually reflect a genuine, grounded moral outrage, I have great sympathy for the mis-named "99%". I genuinely feel bad about how they were misled and saddled with unsustainable personal debt to pursue worthless degrees... all because they had faith in what the Boomers told them. It's an awful place to be and it's unjust.

That doesn't mean there's compensation coming. Not by moral implication, anyway.

Though there may well be compensation coming. As I said above, in addition to the valid moral complaint, there's also a pure praxis struggle going on -- a raw force fight for political and economic power. There's even odds, I think, that the Occupiers are going to win this fight, so they'll probably get their compensation for their parents misleading them -- it will just be because they took it, not because they morally deserve it.

And, knowing how history works, it's going to be us Gen-Xers in the bleachers who are going to have to pay it.

Pass the mustard. I'm going to enjoy this hot dog before someone down there tries to take it from me.

Why college-mania could be hurting our high schools, and so on down the line.

2011-10-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

A thought experiment I was having this morning:

1. Assume that you've got a population with varying levels of natural academic/intellectual ability. Hard to imagine, I know. But bear with me.

2. Assume that N% of the age-appropriate members of that population attend college.

3. Let x be the number of Professors needed to teach classes to that N%. Within certain variation limits, we can imagine that x is a function of n that is not inverse in any way, so that the more students you have, the more professors you require.

4. Now, while there will be some latitude, generally x will be drawn exclusively from some definable upper reach of the population in terms of academic/intellectual ability. Let's define that reach as the top Z%.

5. This population will also want high school teachers. But while some of those high school teachers will come from the top Z% (remember, there's some latitude there because not all smart people become professors), the range from which the high school teachers is going to be drawn is going to be much larger. Let's call that the top Y%, where Z>Y. Now because teaching college is, in general, such a better lifestyle choice than teaching high school, HS teachers are generally going to be drawn from the range between the top Z% and the top Y%. So the two general rules are (with exceptions, of course):

1. Professors come from the top Z%.
2. Teachers come from the top Y%, but generally from the range between Y% and Z%

6. So that's our baseline. Now let's assume that somewhere along the line, it is decided that everyone should go to college. That's unrealistic, of course. But let's imagine that the push results in a tripling of n. So now we're sending 3N% of the age-appropriate population to college.

7.An increase in n is going to require an increase in x. So x will go up as well.

8. The relationship between x and Z%, however, is going to be inverse in some way or another. The more professors you need, the "deeper" into the intellectual bullpen you need to go. So as x increases, Z% is going to DECREASE by some amount, call it B.

9.As Z% decreases, the number of people in the gap between Y% and Z% decreases. So unless more of those people start teaching high school (and why would they? they've got other jobs already), in order to keep the same number of high school teachers, Y% is going to have to drop as well. Because the distribution of academic/intellectual ability is somewhat normal, the decrease will be smaller than B. Let's call it A, where (A < B). So two new rules:

1. Professors come from the top (Z-B)%.
2. Teachers come from the top (Y-A)%, but generally from the range between (Y-A)% and (Z-B)%

Conclusion: The more college professors you employ, the lower the range of academic/intellectual ability from which you must hire your high school teachers. In other words, as college demand expands, it eats up the good instructors who would otherwise be teaching high school.

We can plausibly imagine that similar effects take place with respect to junior high school and elementary school teachers.

So am I crazy?

Two Different School Systems

2011-10-21T11:24:00.001-07:00

I think we've got two different school systems, and I don't mean in the sense in which there are (supposedly) two Americas.

I spend a lot of time talking with people about education, and something I've noticed is that -- in general -- the more well-educated someone is, the more they are concerned with high school (and perhaps junior high school) rather than with elementary education. I myself am quite guilty of this, despite the fact that I've actually worked in an elementary school.

I was thinking this morning, as philosophers are prone to do, about why I and others that I know have this tendency. And I came to a hypothesis that I think might actually be true: students with strong family educational backgrounds don't really need elementary school. Their parents can teach them to read, and can expose them to basic history and math. What those students need is high school -- subject specialization and teachers who know Chemistry and Calculus and more advanced literary theory.

"At risk" kids, on the other hand, kids whose families don't have an academically infused environment, really need elementary school to succeed academically. And they need the elementary portion of their schooling -- reading, writing, 'rithmatic -- to be done right; there's not a lot of margin for error. When it doesn't get done right, junior high and high school turn into remedial programs.

So from one point of view, the elementary school is a nice safe place to store your kids until they're old enough to start studying more complicated subjects. From that point of view, elementary school doesn't matter so much, and the focus of school reform needs to be on how to best deliver advanced content at the high school level. So long as the elementary school teachers are nice, supportive, and don't screw things up too badly, all is going to be well.

From another point of view, elementary school is where the hard, important work is. once the fundamentals are mastered (if they are), then junior high and high school become the place to store your kids safely until they're ready to work. Elementary teachers need to be engaging the students and shaping them. As I said, there's not a lot of room for error.

These two school systems often inhabit the same buildings, and employ the same teachers. But there are two very different systems at work, and in discussions about school reform, I think it's important to bear in mind which system you are talking about.

Well At Least He's Being Honest

2011-10-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

There's an illuminating and fascinating opinion piece over at EducationNews this morning. Why College Is Always Worth It. Kevin Wolfman comes right out and admits why college is great. I've got some thoughts on some of his reasons, so let's go through them, briefly.

As a group, people with a college education are more supportive of the right to free speech and public assembly, even if they personally disagree with the positions of the speakers.

I'm actually not convinced that this is true. But if it is, well... great. College teaches people about how the Constitution works. That's probably a good thing. If it's true.

They are more accepting of the idea of a female president, as well as being more committed to gender equality in general.

OK, so the value of college is that it generates certain substantive values. This seems like a pretty good value to have, all things considered -- but reasonable people could be worried that perhaps the purpose of college isn't to instill values. I'm not saying it isn't the proper purpose of college, merely that reasonable people might wonder.

They consume more news, and as a result are more informed about current events.

I have serious suspicions that this is a correlation-causation problem in the making. I doubt very much that college gets people to read more news. Rather, I suspect that both college and news-reading are symptoms of a certain type of intellectual engagement with life. Now, as a brief aside, Mr. Wolfman addresses this issue in the comments:

Correlation does not PROVE causation, but it does IMPLY causation if the correlations are statistically strong and numerous. The evidence for the link between higher ed and the values listed above is everywhere in the research literature. It’s common enough that we can assume it’s valid and true, in the absence of other contradictory evidence that is even stronger.

That's just silly -- he must have mispoken (mistyped) because even a bright high school student knows that a super-strong correlation's strength isn't what does the explanatory work. Statistical strength doesn't imply causation no matter how strong it is. What implies (in the loose, non-logical sense that Wolfman is using here) causation is strong statistical evidence and a plausible theory of how the causation supposedly works.

Example: Every time I leave the kitchen, I'm less hungry. 100% statistical correlation. This does not mean that it's reasonable to think that my leaving the kitchen relieves my hunger. And the reason it's not reasonable is that there's no plausible theory for how that might work. Now, we might be able to come up with something strained: the kitchen smells like food, and when I leave the smell of food, I become less hungry. That's not completely ridiculous.

But a better theory is that I'm eating in the kitchen, and that my eating means that I'm no longer hungry and I have no reason to stay, so I leave. Both are caused by my eating. Now we've got a plausible theory. That's still not a proof; scientists don't "prove" things in the technical sense.

Let's get back to his article.

They are more knowledgeable about the political process.

Not necessarily a great thing (see Rational Ignorance theory), and again, there's a serious correlation-causation problem at work here; I'd want to hear the theory. This also runs into the values-instilling issue again.

They are less approving of the use of violence to achieve political and social ends, by governments and citizen groups alike.

I'm not even sure that this is a good value to be teaching, even if it's true that colleges cause people to be less approving of the use of violence.

Violence, like everything else, has a place in the world. We'd be hard pressed to live without it; a ready preparedness to inflict devastation on our enemies is vital to our continued existence as a country, and a ready preparedness to let loose great injury on criminals is vital to our continued existence as an ordered society. So let's not be too quick to praise the devaluing of violence. If everyone went to college and ended up disapproving of violence, who would hold the gun in the guard tower in the prison?

I once again suspect a correlation-causation issue here, though. Pacifists like their books.

Speaking of politics, they are more skilled at articulating and defending their political beliefs in sophisticated and factually sound ways, rather than resorting to half-baked sound bites and unsupported “gut feelings” to back up their positions.

Is it true? Maybe. Good argumentation doesn't need to be "sophisticated", though. I have plenty of friends who didn't go to college who can argue a LOT better than my undergraduate students (and who could do so at that age, too)

Frankly, I think that this particular reason is just collegiate chauvinism at work. All those bumpkins out there... they just don't know how to argue. It's probably more an issue of the bumpkins not sharing all the same sorts of premises that the college grads hold -- premises that aren't necessarily true because they're held by more educated people.

They are more likely to vote and be politically active in general.

Not clearly a good thing. I need to be convinced that indifference isn't its own special sort of virtue.

They are more ideologically consistent...

What does that even mean? Consistent with what?

...meaning they are less likely to be swayed or duped by the disingenuous spin and outright lies that dominate today’s cable news outlets and anonymous Internet forums.

Hmmm. This is proof that just because a clause starts off with "meaning" or some other word indicating an explanation, does not mean that an explanation is actually in the offing. I don't see how being impervious to bad argumentation (let's assume that he's right about the bad argumentation in various media formats) is a mark of ideological consistency. It's more a form of rational intractability.

And "ideological" is such a strange word to use in this context. Or maybe it's not so strange after all.

.And they are less supportive of both authoritarianism and dogmatic thinking.

Not clearly true at all. Though if it is true, I can hardly complain. That's a pretty good value to instill.

Nevertheless, the original problem with instilling values is still on the table.

As for personal values...

See, this is where I think Mr. Wolfman has tipped his hand. He doesn't actually see any of the things listed above as personal values; for him, they are just truths. Violence is bad, and college is a place where you can learn that fact. Political activity is good, and college is a place where you can learn that fact.

You might think that maybe the values described above aren't, on Wolfman's view, "personal", but rather universal in some sense. But the rest of the sentence pretty much lays that theory to rest.

...college-educated Americans are more aware of the needs, perspectives, and feelings of others. They are more willing to associate with and befriend people outside their own ethnic group. They are more altruistic. They are also less self-centered, less racist, and less homophobic.

The list of virtues goes on and on.

I seriously question the "more altruistic" and "less self-centered" claims (or at the very least I think he owes his audience the technical definitions and findings of the studies on which he is relying), and I don't think that any intelligible sense can be made of the claim that college-educated Americans are "more aware of the feelings of others". Maybe they care more about those feelings, but it's not like college teaches you how to be empathic any more than working in a job or sitting in a museum watching people or reading a good book.

But, according to this author, college is good because it instills virtues. Very specific virtues.

I'm not saying that these are bad virtues (well, except the violence-attitudes which I'm willing to suggest are problematic). But one might be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Wolfman likes the idea of college because it supposedly turns out people who hold substantive values that are very similar to his (regardless of whether his descriptions of those values are accurate).

At least, though, he's being honest about it. And that's why I think that this is such an interesting article. Usually, people who hold this position try to hide it.

Flip, Flip, Flip

2011-10-11T07:06:00.000-07:00

For the third time in just a few weeks, Joanne's got a post up about "Flipping". (The previous entries are here and here, with my initial reaction to this in the comments here.)

The upshot seems to be something like this:

The model—in which teachers introduce lectures online for students to access at home and then use class time for group practice and projects normally relegated to homework—is not unique to Khan Academy, however. Advocates of the approach say it allows students to work through meat-and-potatoes background on their own, giving teachers more time to go in depth through discussions, projects and other activities in class.

Critics, though, argue the model is too reliant on online materials and will prove difficult to use in schools without major technology infrastructure.

I was thinking about this some more this morning, and there was something nagging at the back of my head. I couldn't quite figure out what it was -- but this "flipping" thing seemed awfully familiar for some reason. I was getting an intense sensation of deja vu.

Then it hit me: books. The "video lecture" is absolutely NOTHING more than an animated, talking textbook. That alone might make it superior to the textbook, mind you -- and it might save some trees in the process. But my purpose in this post is not to debate the relative merits of books and video. Rather, I want to make a point about this "flipping" stuff.

Flipping is a return to the traditional method of instruction: student goes home, student reads book, student comes in and grapples with the material with teacher support.

What changed in the interim, what makes flipping seem like it's something new, is that students who aren't in honors classes often aren't actually expected to read anything: instruction, practice, and assessment all takes place in class. Based purely on anecdote and conversation, the practice is, I take it, supposed to help "level" the academic playing field by not giving any curricular advantages to those who don't have the resources/time/support to do extensive homework in their somewhat dysfunctional home environments.

But if that's the case -- if that's why we don't just give the student a book and say "READ" -- then how do we imagine that the student is going to sit through the video lecture?

It seems like we're returning to the old ways because the old ways worked, but we're going to find, I think, that the old ways don't work for everyone.

My only slightly-tongue-in-cheek prediction: six to seven years out, educators will abandon "flipping" and will have students watch videos on their own in class, with the teacher providing (1) custodial supervision; and (2) academic support in the limited time available.

Absence

2011-10-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

I've been light on posting the last few weeks because I've been preparing for my oral examinations and advancement to candidacy in my PhD program.

I've passed.

Life will now return to something like normal for at least a while.

In Which I Remind Elizabeth Warren of Her Benefit in the Social Contract

2011-09-22T16:17:00.001-07:00

Elizabeth Warren said the following, in case you haven't heard:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody! You built a factory out there? Good for you! But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You, uh, were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did.

Actually, Professor Warren, you didn't have to worry that the rich guy with the factory over there was going to hire marauding bands of "private security" to protect his investment.

YOU got to sleep comfortably at night working in a university without worrying that the rich guy with the factory over there was going to use his superior resources to turn you into his serf.

The guy with the knowledge and gumption and wherewithal to build a factory is the same guy who could build a castle and enslave you in another world.

So how about you cut him a little slack, and stop pretending that he's the one really benefiting from our bargain?

It is the weak, the unambitious, the unskilled, and the unlucky who benefit most from our arrangements. That we provide roads and police and so forth has the additional fringe benefit of allowing any of us who wish to to make our own fortunes.

UPDATE: My ruminations on the ability of the social contract to bind power reminded me of one of my favourite examples in the movies of someone speaking from a position of power:

Really Powerful Person: "It may seem like we have each other over the same barrel. But it only seems that way."

Less Powerful Person: "I want..."

Really Powerful Person: "You want?"

Less Powerful Person: "May I... May I have the first question?"

Bonus points if you recognize it.

Value-Added Analysis and the Really Real World

2011-09-14T18:33:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal just claimed that value-added measures of teacher quality are utterly useless.

OK, the Wall Street Journal didn't quite say that. They didn't even really mean to say that, and would probably deny it if you asked them. But if what they say is true, then they pretty much delivered what I think is a death blow against value-added analysis.

If I were running a wrongful termination lawsuit on behalf of a teacher who was dismissed on the basis of value added metrics, I'd send the WSJ a Godiva gift box for telling me what me strategy should be.

Here's what they say, in an article that I found through a link at Joanne's site:

For the first time this year, teachers in Rhode Island and Florida will see their evaluations linked to the complex metric. Louisiana and New Jersey will pilot the formulas this year and roll them out next school year. At least a dozen other states and school districts will spend the year finalizing their teacher-rating formulas.

* * * *

Janice Poda, strategic-initiatives director for the Council of Chief State School Officers, said education officials are trying to make sense of the complicated models. "States have to trust the vendor is designing a system that is fair and, right now, a lot of the state officials simply don't have the information they need," she said.

* * * *

For states and school districts, deciding which vendor to use is critical. The metrics differ in substantial ways and those distinctions can have a significant influence on whether a teacher is rated superior or subpar.

(Emphasis added.)

Let us assume that we live in the really real world and that, in addition to its being the case that there ain't no coming back, whether a teacher is good or bad is a matter of actual fact. Let us further assume that we have just such a teacher.
Let us also assume that we have just two metrics -- one of which tells us that our teacher is "superior" and the other of which tells us that the teacher is "subpar".

How are we to tell which metric is right? They can't both be right. ("You are also right!")

Well, obviously, we can look at the teacher's teaching with our own eyes and tell if she's doing a good job. We can then go back, look at our metrics, and know which one of them is getting it right in this case.

But people are using these (untested) metrics to attempt to determine who the good and bad teachers are in the first place. In other words, the way to prove the metric's efficacy is to... consult the metric.

You can't do that. You have to test these metrics first, scientifically, to determine their efficacy in determining teacher effectiveness. Because teacher effectiveness isn't what they measure: they measure student test scores and how they compare against statistical projections. That the test scores themselves are imperfect proxies for student learning (I've tanked more than one test in my life just out of spite) only compounds the problem.

I hate to sound like a stick in the mud, but if you want test scores to serve as a PROXY for (rather than merely as a definition of) good teaching, then you have to take a group of recognizably good teachers, and a group of recognizably bad teachers, and run the various metrics across the two groups to see if the results bear any semblance to reality. So who wants to volunteer their kids to be in the recognizably bad classrooms for this experiment? (Would that even be legal?)

Districts aren't doing this, as far as I can tell. And neither are the statisticians. They're just concerned with the data -- and the data aren't about teachers, but about student test scores. Instead, what we get is this paragon of scientific precision:

Principal Gregory Hodge of New York's Frederick Douglass Academy said data for teachers generally aligns with his classroom observations. Mr. Hodge said the data for teachers generally aligns with his classroom observations. "It's confirming what an experienced principal knows," he said.

I'm less than impressed. If we're going to trust the metric because it "generally aligns" with principal observations, and principals are going to make those observations anyway, why not just use the principal observations in the first place and save districts a significant amount of money?

I'd feel much better about this if all the various metrics agreed with each other, and if they were all "just confirming what the principal knows". But I am informed by the WSJ, and on that basis believe, that they don't.

Two different metrics that say different things cannot both be confirming what every principal knows. This is the really real world.

Of course, it's entirely possible I'm just overreacting to a single sentence, and that the WSJ just has its facts wrong. Maybe all the metrics produce identical results.

...

...

...

Let's count that as my joke of the day.

A Possible Explanation for Grading in Education Departments

2011-08-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

From the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, via Inside Higher Ed, via Instapundit, we are invited to read about "Grade Inflation for Education Majhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifors and Low Standards for Teachers". Professor Cory Koedel (Economics, University of Missouri, PhD from UCSD) is essentially writing commentary on a statistical report from the New Teacher Project.

I looked around the internet briefly, searching for the original data report. I was unable to locate it. So take everything I have to say with a grain of salt. But Koedel's analysis has a hole in it so large that I could pass the complete corpus of Aristotle through it and still have room for a Winnebago.

I wonder why it is that anyone would expect education majors to have the same grades as anyone else. Do you expect the grades in "Advanced Metamorphic Pressure Studies" and "Rocks for Jocks" to be the same? Of course not: some classes are just easier.

Likewise, we might expect some majors to just be easier, or to have different grade profiles. Physics is harder (for most people) than Qual Sociology. Chemistry is harder (again, for most people) than English/Crit Theory. Philosophy is very easy to pass, but extremely hard to do well in. Some subjects have bimodal grading distributions. None of this should necessarily be a cause for alarm, I think. At least I've not been given any real reason to be alarmed by this report.

Koedel seems to be operating from the assumption that all majors should be equally challenging -- or at least in the same ballpark. But that doesn't strike me as an obvious truth. Should every major be as challenging as is necessary to teach its corpus of knowledge?

Now Koedel's premise might be true -- maybe we should make sure every major is equally challenging. But you have to convince me of this. You can't just assert it. Why should they be equally challenging? Is there something about challenge itself that is necessary to learning?

Koedel seems to think that the answer is "yes":

Grade inflation is associated with reduced student effort in college—put simply, students in classes where it is easier to get an A do not work as hard. This is not surprising, and a recent study by Philip Babcock quantifies the effect.8 He shows that in classes where the expected grade rises by one point, students respond by reducing effort, as measured by study time, by at least 20 percent.9 It is straightforward to apply Babcock’s result to the data from the two schools depicted in figures 1 and 2. If the grading standards in each education department were moved to align with the average grading standards at their respective universities, student effort would rise by at least 11–14 percent.

We are thus supposed to think that a rise in effort would be a good thing. As I said, maybe it is. But I'm not necessarily convinced. Koedel admits that...

...(f)or the increased effort to be beneficial, it must be the case that either the content of classes taught in education departments adds direct value in terms of teaching quality, or teachers gain other skills indirectly as a result of a more demanding college experience (for example, skills in time management or improved work ethics).

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Let's put aside the big, difficult question: for increased effort to be beneficial to whom, exactly? (My completely unfounded suspicion is that Koedel would reply by saying something like, "beneficial to the involved parties".) What we are given are two options for justifying greater effort: better results in teaching, and better results in something that I'll call "life skills" -- time management, work ethics, learning to follow instructions, etc.

He admits that there's no real evidence for the first option. Nevertheless, he seems to think it's probably true anyway, a position that I actually find somewhat dubious. I'm not convinced of the value of education majors generally. Saying that you could make better teachers by having more of an already ineffectual curriculum of training is like trying to make up a per-unit loss in terms of sales volume, as the old joke goes.

The second option is odd: that effort could have value if it imparts what I'll call here "life skills" (time management, following instructions, etc.). Teaching life skills by themselves is just weird: I could assign my students 300-page, handwritten papers with all sorts of ludicrous formatting requirements (like every fourth word has to be in a different color ink). And I could make them write about the quality of their toe jam. This would "teach" them all sorts of time management skills, as well as valuable skills in following arcane directions. But it's jackassery of the highest order. And the meaningless of it all would probably undermine whatever lesson is being taught, assuming there was a lesson.

Life skills are taught best doing something substantial and relevant; when students do work, the doing of the work might impart life skills, but the work itself should be a substantive end; an education course should teach about education, or its simply a fraud. If you wanted to just learn life skills, you could take a class called "Life Skills 101".

Of course, it's possibly to make an assignment harder than it really needs to be in order to learn/demonstrate mastery of the actual course syllabus. That way, you're getting more effort, and better life skills training, than you would if you just had an assignment that reflected the substantive issues in the course alone. But that seems silly and wasteful.

The second option -- life skills -- doesn't look like it's going to work as a justification.

So really, the first option is the only option: increased effort is only going to be valuable if the material itself generates some sort of benefit. But as I said, I don't see why we should think this, and Koedel gives us absolutely no reason whatsoever to think it's the case.

As I said at the outset, maybe education courses are easier because the subject matter (what is the subject matter of education courses, anyway?) is simpler and actually requires less effort. But Koedel doesn't even entertain this idea. No, for him the easier grading is itself a problem:

It seems difficult to argue with the notion that low grading standards in education departments at universities are bad for students in K–12 schools. But Weiss and Rasmussen documented these low standards over fifty years ago, so this has been an ongoing cultural norm for some time. What is causing the problem, and what can be done to fix it?

It's not difficult to argue with that notion; I'm doing it. I'm arguing (not entirely sincerely, mind you -- I don't have an informed opinion on this precise subject) that the low grading standards are just fine for the subject. Indeed, the fact that this has been a cultural norm for some time suggests (but does not prove) that maybe it's not really a "problem", after all. Maybe learning how to teach someone to read is actually kind of easy compared to, say, learning how to synthesize polymers or learning to parse one's way through a paragraph by Kant.

As I indicated earlier, I'm not really endorsing this view substantively. I'm just flabbergasted that Koedel doesn't even seem to think it's an option, and instead decides that what's really needed is for every major in college to require roughly the same amount of effort.

That's a weird idea, even for an economist.

Bad Joke of the Day

2011-08-23T08:22:00.001-07:00

A brand new bit of not-quote funny from your original spinner of jokes, Michael Lopez (who is perfectly aware that someone, somewhere, probably made this joke up first):

Why are some rocks so emotional?

I don't know. Why are some rocks so emotional?

Because they're sedimental!

I'm here all week.

Accountability and Obligation

2011-08-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

This is the sequel to my prior post, Some Thoughts on Accountability and Prepositions. As promised, this post is about what obligations teachers actually have, and whether it is reasonable for them to take those obligations on.

In the last post, I claimed that many people speak vaguely of holding teachers "accountable", but that the only reasonable interpretation of that position is to think that the teachers owe their schools a duty to produce student achievement. Now I want to talk briefly about what sort of obligation that is. (Keep in mind that while I don't think that accountability has anything to do with enforcement of obligations per se, as I said in the last post, I'm assuming, arguendo, that being "held accountable" includes being subject to enforcement measures/punishments that are appropriate to the obligation.)

There's a saying that comes in many forms: "Don't let your ego write checks that your body can't cash", "Don't let your mouth write checks that your soul can't cash", etc. All of these sayings amount to the same thing: a caution not to take on obligations that are beyond you.

Now, "beyond you" can mean many things. If I promise someone that I'm going to run 100m in 9.5 seconds, well, that's just beyond me. It's just not going to happen. It probably wasn't going to happen before my catastrophic car accident, and it sure as hell ain't gonna happen now. However earnest my intentions, I'm simply not capable of that level of performance.

But there's another sense in which things can be "beyond me" -- the sense that something is completely outside my control. I could promise, for instance, that my wife will show up at a banquet. That's dicey business, and the reason that it's dicey business is that I'm promising that someone else will do something.

Now I can physically drag my wife to the banquet over her protests (maybe). I might have to cripple or kill her if she was resisting enough, but it's conceivable that I can deliver on the letter of my promise without my wife's cooperation. That's not really what I promised, though. The spirit of my promise is that my wife would show up and at least pretend to do so voluntarily. That means that I'm going to have to persuade my wife. Maybe I'll have to guilt her into it. Maybe I'll have to bribe her.

But my ability to manipulate her into doing what I want her to is far from unlimited. Certainly because of the nature of our relationship, I can expect a certain amount of influence, and it might even be likely that I can convince her to show up. But there's always the possibility that, for one reason or another, she just won't be moved to attend, and I will have failed to deliver on my promise. My mouth wrote a check that my soul couldn't cash -- in this case because the ultimate outcome wasn't really dependent on me.

Things would have been different if I had simply promised to make my best efforts. Promising best efforts (in good faith) is not promising results, and any promisee accepts a promise for results that aren't 100% in the control of the promisor is either (1) ignorant, (2) filled with faith, or (3) really accepting a promise for best efforts anyway, despite what is said.

You should be able to see where this is going now: in order for teachers to be "accountable" in the way I discussed yesterday, they need to have a duty to produce student achievement. That would be all fine and dandy if the students were beanstalks or 1974 Pontiac engines or some other sort of insentient matter. But the students are autonomous, sentient agents. They get to make their own decisions (in a strong, narrow sense) and their learning is, in great part, up to them. It is not entirely in the teachers' power, any more than my wife's attendance is entirely within my power.

Teachers can manipulate students in various ways -- they can coerce, cajole, coax, conspire, and a whole host of other words that don't begin with "c". Teachers can attempt to make learning easier. They can attempt to demonstrate the worth of their subject. They can try to make it entertaining. They can be the best teachers in the world, but the final decision as to whether there will be any learning of the subject at hand isn't up to the teacher.

So why would we expect a teacher to be "accountable" for student results, or the improvement of student achievement? Why would a teacher promise such a thing, even implicitly, and why on earth would any administrator accept such a promise?

It seems likely to me that most teachers never made any such promise, and don't view themselves as having made that promise. This is why you see so much push-back from teachers on issues of accountability. It's not that they don't want to be good employees and good teachers, or that they are lazy or unmotivated. It's that the promise for which enforcement is being sought in the name of "accountability" isn't one that they think is either realistic or legitimate.

Teachers (and I'm generalizing here) likely see themselves as having made a promise either for "best efforts" or, at the outer limits, for actual results that are within their control: something on the order of "I will deliver objectively interesting and informative classes and will present the curriculum in a manner that, in my best professional judgment, will maximize the return on any attention and effort the student wishes to invest."

The question, then, is whether the position of public school teacher carries with it the more unreasonable obligation of guaranteeing student results, simpliciter. In other words, does a teacher, merely by agreeing to take the position of teacher, assume responsibility for things that are, ultimately, beyond his or her control?

I rather think that a lot of people think that the answer to this question is "yes", and that many of those people think that the answer should be "yes". They think that teachers should be held accountable for student achievement, even though actual student achievement is highly dependent on the student himself. Now if the teachers voluntarily take on this obligation, they are acting wrongly because they are writing checks their souls can't cash. But as I said, I don't think teachers do undertake this obligation, at least not knowingly. And an obligation that is both unrasonable itself and held against someone who is in no position to reasonably make it cannot be a morally legitimate obligation.

All of this, of course, depends on whether or not student achievement really is something that is highly dependent on the student himself. I think that is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning, but it's conceivable, I suppose, that I am mistaken about this. Nevertheless, I am not going to offer an argument in its defense, at least not here, not today.

I'm not trying to get teachers "off the hook" for their legitimate responsibilities, and I'm not denying that there are a lot of teachers who really don't meet (and some who don't even make a good faith effort to meet) their reasonable, legitimate obligations. I think holding teachers "accountable" for legitimate obligations is perfectly fine, and that it should even be a policy priority. I'm merely arguing that it's unreasonable to hold teachers accountable for things beyond their control. Such attempts ignore what it means to be legitimately "accountable" for something in the first place.

And as we're proceeding under the (false but apparently widely-accepted) notion that being held accountable is the same as being subject to enforcement, you can't legitimately punish teachers for failing to deliver on an obligation that's not morally legitimate. Obviously, you can treat teachers like the Whipping Boys of old and punish them for things they didn't do, but then you really are just bullying. (And I mean real bullying, not just some pattern of ill-defined, nebulous behaviors that some education writers rhetorically call "bullying".)

The bottom line: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. And you can hold your stablehand accountable for leading your horse to water, but only an idiot would hold the stablehand accountable for making the horse drink.

Some Thoughts on Accountability and Prepositions

2011-08-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

Everyone says that they want "accountability" in education: teachers must be "accountable", administrators must be "accountable", even parents must be "accountable". This sort of talk often leaves me feeling... unsatisfied. Let me explain why.

Now, one of my favorite fallacies is the fallacy of the missing preposition. It something that I came up with one day when I was watching Babylon 5. There's a great scene with Lyta Alexander and the Vorlon Ambassador. He pretty much dismisses her, and then we get the following:

Lyta: Damn it, I have earned some respect!
Ulkesh: Respect? (pause) From whom?

It's the missing preposition fallacy: Lyta thought she deserved respect in the abstract, but forgot that respect is a two-place predicate, and that some particular entity has to go into the second place which may or may not make the statement false. People make mistakes like this all the time.

When was the last time someone said to you, "It'll be great!" and you thought to yourself, "Great for whom?" Or "This is really important!" and you thought, "Not to me." These are all examples of the MPF. This fallacy, which is, basically, taking a statement like "I love Betty" and universalizing one of the objects so that it comes out as "Everyone loves Betty" or, more conversationally, "Betty is loveable" (yeah... to you), might have a real name somewhere -- but I call it the Missing Preposition Fallacy.

Anyway, I see the workings of the MPF in almost every discussion of "accountability" in our schools. Accountability is a three-place predicate (at least). X is accountable to Y, for Z. And X gets held accountable to Y, for Z.

So if teachers are "accountable" for dismal student learning outcomes, then they must be accountable to someone in particular. Who is that? The school? The state? The parents? The student? To whom exactly are teachers supposed to be accountable?

One way to answer this question is to ask ourselves what it means to be "accountable" for something, and further, if it is any different from being "held accountable". Here's what dictionaries say, though I warn my readers that dictionaries are guidelines to words' intended meanings, not authorities.

Accountable: 1. subject to the obligation to report, explain, or justify something; responsible; answerable.; 2.capable of being explained; explicable; explainable.

We can dispense with the second definition. The first definition is pretty much what you'd expect from looking at the word: a person is "accountable" if their actions can, at least metaphorically, be charged to their karmic "account", that is, if they have some sort of duty to someone else. That duty, that obligation, is really the foundation of what it means to be accountable. In the absence of a duty, there can be no accountability.

To be "held accountable", then, is just to be recognized by the person towards whom one has some duty or obligation as being responsible for that duty or obligation.

Being held accountable, by itself, tells us nothing about punishment or enforcement mechanisms. Punishment/enforcement comes into play because (and only if) the person to whom the duty is owed has legitimate authority to enforce the duty.

If you promise to bring me a cup of sugar tomorrow, I can "hold you accountable" for your promise. Your promise created an obligation. That doesn't mean I have the authority to burn down your house and kill your pets if you forget to drop it off. The obligation carries with it, in the context of our interactions, its own enforcement mechanisms. I get to express a certain amount of disapproval, perhaps. Maybe I can call you up and legitimately guilt you into bringing it over RIGHT NOW -- if the situation calls for it. Maybe I just get to tease you about it once or twice.

The point is that it is the duty or obligation, taken in its context, that defines the right to punishment or enforcement. There need not be any enforcement mechanisms whatsoever. I can rightfully hold someone accountable, but be absolutely powerless to do anything about it without committing a moral wrong. We might imagine that politicians who do things in bad faith are an example of this: the corrupt politician is accountable for his actions, but those to whom he is accountable are powerless to act.

Some people would say that this means that he's not accountable at all, though. Some people think that "to be held accountable" means, roughly, "to face enforcement measures for your obligation." That's simply not true, as I've just discussed. But let's say we grant this.

If teachers are to be "held accountable", that means that there is going to have to be some sort of enforcement mechanism to enforce their obligation. That means it's even more important than ever to identify the person to whom they have this obligation.

Let us assume that the obligation is to raise student academic achievement. (Let us also put aside the notion that any teacher who undertakes an obligation to bring about a result that is not within his or her power is a moron. I will talk about that in another post.) To whom is this duty owed?

From a purely legal standpoint -- and it is the law with which we must be concerned first and foremost because much of the enforcement that people wish is the sort of enforcement that requires the law's blessing -- the teachers only owe their duty to their employers. A parent or student cannot sue a teacher (currently) for failing to generate that particular student's academic success. (The relation there would be 1-1; obviously, a teacher would not owe Student A a duty of any kind for Student B's success absent some extremely special circumstances.) But employees have a duty to their employers to do their jobs.

Teachers surely have a moral duty to parents and students, and that moral duty carries with it its own enforcement mechanisms: the parents and students can rightfully say bad things and think ill thoughts about a teacher who breaks the obligations. But that's not what people want. They want penalties with "teeth" -- financial penalties like reduced salaries and unemployment.

So the legal enforcement will have to come from the school. The teachers must be accountable, then, to their schools. (Though there can obviously be all sorts of non-legal enforcement of various moral obligations.)

The picture, then, is something like this: The teacher has an obligation to the school to produce student achievement. The school can hold the teacher accountable for this obligation, and can enact enforcement measures if it is not met.

My point, really, is just to point out that vague talk of "accountability" is non-productive. When one speaks of accountability, one needs necessarily speak of specific obligations owed to specific entities. One needs to ask if the obligations that are being described are real, and if real, if they are reasonable. One needs to consider what sorts of enforcement mechanisms, if any, are or should be available to meet the specific obligations that are owed to the specific entities.

No one just "gets held accountable" -- they are always held accountable to someone, for something. That's just how the word, how the concept, works. Ignore it at your peril.

In my next post, I will look more closely at the obligation that teachers supposedly owe.

The Stupidest Sentence I've Read All Week

2011-08-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

On the previous incarnation of this blog, I had an occassional feature called "The Weekly Dumb-@$$." Now that I'm older and wiser, I shan't continue with such sophomoric rhetoric. Now I'll just weasel it in on the cheap by talking about how I used to use it, and then putting that casual reference next to this mind-blowingly stupid sentence from an article by... well, there's no author listed. It's some staff piece from EducationNews.org.

Which is probably part of an explanation how you can end up with this: (the sentence in question is in bold font)

Thousands of students are facing the problem of necessary remediation as they enter college. Roughly one of every three entering a public two- or four-year post-secondary school will have to take at least one remedial course, writes Leanne Italie at the Associated Press.

Doing so dramatically increases the odds that he or she won’t graduate, according to a March report from the nonprofit Alliance for Excellent Education.

You might have thought that taking a remedial education class (assuming you need one) would drastically increase your chances of graduating, because, you know... it's part of the requirements, and fulfilling requirements for graduation tends to increase one's chances of graduating.

Now there's a charitable way to read this sentence. We could take "doing so" to mean "having to take" rather than "taking". So "having to take at least one remedial course" drastically decreases your chances. But that interpretation has a problem. The phrase "doing so" is active, and "having to take" is, semantically if not grammatically, passive; it's the equivalent of "being required to take".

Second, and this is an issue for either interpretation, having to take the class doesn't change anyone's odds. It just helps signal what those odds actually are. So saying that it "increases" the odds of not graduating is just false.

Big Thinking, Little Thinking

2011-08-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of commenting recently on a NYT opinion piece by Virginia Heffernan. (See these posts at Joanne's and Rachel's sites, respectively. Cedar Riener's post at Rachel's site is particularly interesting and worth reading.)

The piece is, essentially, Ms. Heffernan's endorsement of an argument that is made by Cathy Davidson in her book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, which I freely admit that I have not read. I also admit that I should read it before making this blog post, but I have a lot of things I have to read this weekend and I just don't have time for the book. I am thus going to rely on Ms. Heffernan's synopsis of Ms. Davidson's arguments. The argument seems to go like this, as best I can tell. It's hard because I'm having to create what I think are some of the implied premises.

1. It is not knowable what sorts of careers our society's children will have because the technological and economic landscape can be expected to change quite quickly.

2. Any given educational approach or method is only going to be best-suited for some particular set of jobs and/or activities; apprentice systems might be best for trades, while collaborative activities might be better for certain types of businessmen.

3. From 1 and 2, we cannot know what sort of educational approach or method will be best-suited to the jobs/economic activities that children will have in the future.

4. Teachers have, in the past, assigned a certain type of solitary, inward-looking work, typified by the "term paper".

5. Modern students write terrible term papers.

6. Modern students write very elegant, insightful, and persuasive blog posts. They also demonstrate a great deal of intellectual agility and originality in their collaborative, digital work.

7. From 3 and 4, teachers do not know that the "term paper" teaching in which they are engaged is in fact the teaching best-suited to their students' futures.

8. From 5, 6, and 7, it seems likely that digitally-oriented, collaborative work can't be ruled out as a form of teaching that isn't best for students' futures, and at the very least, it seems like it can obviously function as a way to practice certain important skills.

9. From 8, we should re-orient teaching to de-emphasize things like term papers, and emphasize things like blog posts and digital media creation/criticism.

So like I said, that's the argument. I'm being as charitable as I can be, but obviously it's got some holes in it. For instance, 9 and 3 seem to to be contraries (thought probably not contradictories), because if we have reason to think a course of action is the best one, and if it is, then it seems we can know what the best course of action is. There's also the inexplicable move from "students enjoy/demonstrate skills while doing X" to "X is probably a good way to teach", that seems to rely on some form of "If X is an easy way to teach, then it's a good way to teach."

Some of these problems might be Davidson's fault -- she's an English professor, not a philosopher. But I'm willing to bet that most of it is just Heffernan's being sloppy.

Still, I didn't write this post just to cast aspersions. I wanted to talk about why I think that the discussion that Heffernan is attempting to have in her piece is profoundly misguided. I think that the arguments presented rest on the idea that literary thinking, skill at writing, and all the other wonderful things we try to teach students, is fundamentally the same whether they are writing a blog post or writing a term paper. In other words, the skills that are being taught are the same, and what changes is the way in which they are acquired.

Now this might, at first blush, seem to be contraindicated by Heffernan's own words:

The new classroom should teach the huge array of complex skills that come under the heading of digital literacy. And it should make students accountable on the Web, where they should regularly be aiming, from grade-school on, to contribute to a wide range of wiki projects.

She expressly says that it's an entirely different set of skills, whereas I'm saying that she believes that they are essentially the same skills. Clearly, the burden is on me to demonstrate that I'm not just putting words into her mouth. I think that she and I are using the word "skills" in two different ways, here. She is using "skills" in a narrow, precise sense: the skill of putting together a Quicktime Video, for instance, or the skill of composing a jingle. I am using "skill" in a much broader sense -- as referring to certain types of general aptitudes: argument, logic, rhetorical persuasion, grammar, and so forth. When I talk about skills, I am talking about the sorts of things that are contrasted in this sentence:

After studying the matter, Ms. Davidson concluded, “Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers.”

The "skills" here are putting together an elegant sentence, being persuasive in writing, having original ideas, mastering grammar, etc. And the same skills that are not demonstrated in term papers are being demonstrated in the "digitial media" work that is under discussion.

So that's why I think that this argument is, fundamentally, one about how we should go about teaching some one, important set of skills.

I just happen to also think that it's a mistake to think that term papers and blog posts (a term I use as shorthand for a whole range of digital work of the kind argued for in the article) are teaching the same skills.

Forgive me while I switch into analogy mode for a second. I find this a very persuasive way to make points.

Term papers don't teach grammar and writing, any more than marathon training teaches you how to move while remaining upright. True, marathon training is a type of moving while remaining upright, but it's a very specialized type, and you can't really engage in it until you've mastered the basics of walking and running. And once you do, it's an entirely different kind of movement. And it's not just learning how to perform some repeated movement, but how to approach the entire race: running twenty some-odd miles is a single action, and it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In marathon training, you don't learn to run, but how to run a really long distance. In this way, marathon training is imparting a fundamentally different skill than, say, training for the 100 meter dash.

Anyone who tries to teach someone to run by teaching them how to run a marathon is asking for trouble. First you learn to walk, then you learn to run a few meters. Then once you've got that down, you can start learning the intricacies of sprinting, or the intricacies of long-distance running. But if you can't run to begin with, well, there's no point in more specialized training.

There are similar points to be made about writing. Before you can write a term paper, or even a decent blog post, you have to have command of the rules of grammar; you have to understand what it means to put a single idea down as a sentence. That students are (supposedly) able to do this in blog posts (again, I'm using that term as a proxy for a whole host of performances) is evidence that the students have mastered the basics.

But writing a term paper isn't about mastering the basics. If writing a sentence is about getting a thought down on paper (and I think it is), it's about getting a very small thought down on paper. Students in their early years learn to write things like "I enjoyed going to Disneyland" or "The leaf is green." These are small thoughts.

Learning to write, say, a two or three paragraph essay/blog post is learning to write a medium-sized thought. But the important thing about the project isn't learning to write the thought -- if you can write the sentence, you can write the essay. The important thing about the shorter project is that you're learning to have the thought. The writing is the easy part; it's the thinking that's hard.

That students write great blog posts, or that they can put together great five-minute satire, tells us two things: (1) They've got the basic process of translating thought into media down; (2) They've got pretty good skills at having medium-sized thoughts.

Term papers, on the other hand, are exercises in BIG thinking. A twenty-page paper requires that a student have an extended thought -- one that requires twenty pages. A fifty-page paper requires an even bigger thought. And a book requires a goddamn lot of thinking: the book itself is a record of the very, very, very large idea that the author possessed.

But if students aren't any good at big thinking, then when they are asked to write a term paper, they're going to crash and burn. Even their grammar will be awful. This is to be expected: when you ask someone who can run 100 meters to run a marathon, they become unable to even so much as stand up after a while, let alone walk, let alone run the 100 meters that they've been able to do so well before.

So term papers are really exercises not in writing, but in thinking. They are demonstrations of the ability to think an extended thought -- an argument that has more than two premises, or that synthesizes more than a handful of evidential propositions. Big thoughts are hard; they are conglomerations of propositions and speculations held together by the laws of logic and evidence.

That Ms. Davidson's students write terrible term papers doesn't mean that the term paper is a bad teaching tool; it means that the students don't have the capacity yet for thinking that sort of big thought.

And they aren't going to get it writing blog posts. They're only going to get it by having a teacher walk them through the process of liking their thoughts together in ever-larger assemblages. They're only going to acquire that skill through practice and instruction in that particular skill.

Davidson (or Heffernan) isn't really arguing that we should teach the same skills with different methods; that's just what they think they're arguing for. What they're really arguing is that we don't train marathon runners, that we become a nation of intellectual sprinters, content with our short little bursts of clever, well-formed prose.

Which may well be right; that might be the best course of action. Maybe we should stop trying to think big, extended thoughts and focus on the fast, the punchy. But what we are presented with is not an argument for that course of action, but a mere proclamation that we should stick with sprinting, since we seem to be good at it.

Philosophy Joke: Low-Hanging Fruit

2011-08-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

So I fully admit that this is sort of an obvious joke for philosophers, and I have doubts that I'm the first to come up with it. But I'm claiming independent invention. I made this up while I was working on a paper today. Here it is:

Luke Skywalker is sitting in the swamp reading some action theory. He scratches his head, puzzled, and looks over at Master Yoda, who is cooking some beans.

"Master Yoda...", whines Luke, "I don't quite understand. When is it that I actually do something? I mean, if I start to Φ, then I haven't Φ-ed, yet, so I'm not really Φ-ing. But if I stop Φ-ing, then I'm not Φ-ing any longer, I've only Φ-ed. How do I Φ?"

Master Yoda looks over and says, "Told you this already, I have. Do, or do not. There is no Φ."

I'm here every night...

Differentiation, Again

2011-08-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

There's a discussion going on at Joanne's about differentiation again, inspired by this witty little essay about how "differentiation" is the new magic buzzword (cf. "diversity").

I find some sympathy with the article's main points, I actually don't have a problem with the notion of differentiation itself, but I am opposed to it insofar as it is ever going to be practically implemented. (In this way, you might think that my opposition is similar to my opposition to communism, which would be great IF everyone were saints. But they aren't, so...)

I wrote a little while ago about the wide variance in human ability. There, I proposed not just tracking through classes, but opening entirely different kinds of schools to deal with different types of students. Now, obviously that's a resource-intensive solution.

Let's say the budget's strapped, there's no more cash, and you have this wide variety of student ability and only one teacher, one classroom. You're going to have to use "differentiation" -- it's just not practical to have separate classes because you can't afford that many teachers. What are your options?

Let's say you're teaching a geometry class. That's what the schedule says, and that's what you're being paid for. The powers that be have sent you two students, the first (let's call him Johnny) with a 3rd grade math ability, and the second (Timmy) with a 9th grade math ability. They're both in your geometry class.

The teacher has three options, as I see it:

First, the teacher can teach the geometry class to the Timmy, and more or less ignore Johnny, who's not going to understand a damn thing. Timmy will get an A or a B, most likely, and Johnny will just fail. Granted, he shouldn't have been in the class to begin with, but times are hard and this is the classroom that had an open chair.

Second, the teacher can teach a remedial math class. Johnny, if he works hard, will get a B or a C, most likely, and will develop his math abilities perhaps as far as 6th grade math. This is a great outcome for Johnny. Timmy will either get an easy A or an F, depending on whether he decides to revolt in his boredom or not.

Third, the teacher can "differentiate" -- teaching geometry to the Timmy, while running Johnny through a remedial math program. This requires a lot more work from the teacher, but hey -- times are hard and this is the job that's available. And maybe the teacher can pull it off with skill and aplomb. Maybe both the students get A's or B's, or at least C's.

Now the problem: The second and third cases both result in grades being given for a class called "Geometry" that in no way reflect the student's accomplishment in geometry. In the second case, both grades are effectively fraudulent. In the third case, only Johnny's grade is fraudulent.

I'm not a fan of fraud. Frankly, I prefer good, honest robbery. SO what's our solution, given that times are hard and we can't afford more teachers and more classroom space?

I should think it obvious. Have the teacher just teach two classes at once. Put both students in the teacher's classroom at the same time, but enroll the second student in geometry while you enroll the first student in remedial math.

There's no rule that says the classroom has to be the class. The class is just a curriculum, the teacher, and the students following it. There's no reason two different classes can't occupy the same spatio-temporal location.

And if you call the courses what they are, well... you're not committing fraud anymore. And I think that's a good thing.

This is obviously not what I consider an optimal solution. I prefer heavily tracked classrooms and even schools, as I said. But I also admitted above that my preferred solution costs money, and if we aren't going to pay for the best, let's at least do the best we can in the world of the possible.

A Quick Note About the Blog Title

2011-07-21T13:06:00.000-07:00

A lot of people I talk to in real life mistakenly think the name of this blog is "Higher-Ed Intelligence". It's not.

It's "Highered Intelligence", six syllables (five if you really press the dipthong), not seven. It's supposed to be a pun on "Hired", as in mercenary and "Highered", as in a made-up word for "Made Higher." After all, if you're going to hire intelligence you'd want to hire the most highered you can find, no?

The fact that it is a triple pun (visually/orthographically) on college-level education, well, that's gravy.

Thoughts on the Atlanta Cheating Scandal et al.

2011-07-21T09:06:00.000-07:00

It's all over the news, so I'm not going to bother linking to any specific discussion. I just wanted to share a few only-semi-connected thoughts:

Thought #1: I've had occasion to tell a student or two a variation on the following: "If you put as much effort into actually reading your book as you did into trying to cover up the fact that you copied this paper from the internet, you'd have been able to write it yourself." This goes for teachers, too. If they spent as much time TeaCHing as they did CHeaTing...

Thought #2: In a just world, students who lie or cheat in college would be expelled without question (see this discussion of UVa's Honor Code and the recent Perkins dust-up). High school students would be given F's and suspended.

And teachers would be fired, having their credentials revoked by the state.

There's enough outrage flying around that the latter may actually happen, but I wouldn't count on it.

Thought #3: Teachers who knew about this and said nothing are moral cowards who should be ashamed of themselves.

Thought #4: Corollary to Thought #3 -- it seems likely that there are very few people in the affected districts who aren't moral cowards.

Thought #5: Corollary to Thought #4 -- given that behavior like this isn't likely to be limited to just a few high profile districts, it seems likely that there are very few educators in this country who aren't moral cowards.

Thought #6: There's going to be a temptation to chalk this up to a few bad apples -- probably people closer to the top who can be excoriated without having to actually inflict any substantive penalties. It's not a problem of a few bad people. It's a problem of widespread moral cowardice, of institutionalized workers "going along to get along", and the hell with what's morally right.

There's a very famous saying that gets abusively misinterpreted: "You can't legislate morality." It's often thought that the saying is about how one can't really pass laws about moral issues. But really the quote is an insightful one about human nature: passing laws doesn't make people into better human beings: morality in the population is what gives laws their force, not the other way around. So we're not going to be able to address the root causes of scandals like this by passing laws, or putting in place new policies, because it's not policies that are the problem. The problem isn't that we're not watching teachers and administrators carefully enough.

It's impossible to watch them all the time.

But it's not impossible that they should watch themselves all the time. And that's what we need: teachers (and citizens generally) who understand that they must speak up, they must take a stand against what is wrong.

Much like actually enforcing penalties for misbehavior leads to having to deploy those penalties less often, a population with the courage to stand up and say, "YOU! You're misbehaving and I won't tolerate it!" finds itself in the happy circumstance that people have to stand up and speak out less often.

Thought #7: Corollary to Thought #6 -- The individual sense of moral responsibility is stronger when one considers oneself as a member of a community: whether a church, a town, or a nation. The sense of belonging can help give others the courage to stand up and say, "You're betraying us all!" I have a nagging suspicion that multiculturalism, while no doubt wonderful for many reasons, erodes the sense of community unity needed for the public enforcement of moral standards. In a "culture" with no solid, unified foundation other than law, only the law will serve to regulate behavior, and that is insufficient to the task.

Thought #8: Moral cowardice isn't the only thing to blame for the cheating scandals. Laziness plays a part, too. Enforcing standards is hard work.

In conclusion: I wish I had a solution, or even an overall point. I don't. I just have a vague sense of unease about the future of our country, and a worry that two months from now this will have all been swept under the rug in the name of convenience and not wanting to make a fuss.

Who says it's easy?

2011-07-16T12:11:00.001-07:00

Via InsideHigherEd, a survey that shows that we're overwhelmed with A's these days in colleges.

The statistics are one thing -- 40+ percent A-grades is a mere numerical fact. Some editor gave the article about the study the title "Easy A" -- but who says it's easy? Maybe 40+ percent of the students are really just that good. (I know... I have trouble saying it with a straight face, but bear with me.)

Of course, if the point of grading is differentiation rather than threshold-signalling, you're going to want finer criteria. That is what the study authors believe, by the way -- they say as much:

It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use . . . as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers.

Which brings us to this tidbit, quoted from the study:

"When A is ordinary, college grades cross a significant threshold. Over a period of roughly 50 years, with a slight reversal from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, America’s institutions of higher learning gradually created a fiction that excellence was common and that failure was virtually nonexistent," they write. "The evolution of grading has made it difficult to distinguish between excellent and good performance. At the other end of the spectrum, some students who were once removed from school for substandard performance have, since the Vietnam era, been carried along. America’s colleges and universities have likely been practicing some degree of social promotion for over 40 years."

Here's the study's conclusion summary:

Conclusions/Recommendations: As a result of instructors gradually lowering their standards, A has become the most common grade on American college campuses. Without regulation, or at least strong grading guidelines, grades at American institutions of higher learning likely will continue to have less and less meaning.

That's an empirical claim you see there: instructors have gradually lowered their standards. Have they?

Maybe. It may be true that common excellence is a fiction, that grades are inflated, and that the A's that are so liberally distributed aren't actually tied to superior quality work and achievement. But the mere grade numbers by themselves don't prove that. You need to do comparisons not just of grades, but of the work produced by students -- and that would require controlling for certain types of variables like changing curricular design (say, more of an emphasis on specialized, narrow-focused courses over the last few decades, which could affect student work).

Don't get me wrong -- I'm inclined to think they're right. But this is supposed to be a scholarly study, and it seems sort of slapdash, at least what I've read of it.

What exactly are they doing in school?

2011-07-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

Let me start with a caveat: I know my own experience is not generally applicable, and that I shouldn't use personal anecdotes as a basis for setting policy. As legions of very smart people have told me time and time again, I don't count. I accept this.

That said, I was struck by a sentence I read this morning over at The Chronicle of Higher Education. This post isn't about that article -- it's just about the sentence. Here it is:

Many Americans learn at a two-year college most of what they will ever learn—in a formal setting, at least—about writing, critical thinking, the history of our culture and civilization, the environment, and human behavior.

I suppose this sentence is almost trivially true for certain values of the word "Many", but the implication is for a reading where many means something like "Lots -- more than you might think", not just "more than one or two."

Anyway, I was looking at this sentence and I found myself wondering, "What the hell did they learn in high school?" I learned most of my math in 6th grade and 9th grade. I learned most of my science in 7th and 8th grade. I learned most of my history in 7th grade and on my own, and I learned most of my reading/writing/critical thinking in grades 10, 11, and 12.

That's not to say college didn't matter. I learned a great deal in college and sharpened many of my skills there. But if what Rob Jenkins is saying is true, and two years of college is where "many" students learn most of their writing, critical thinking, and history, I'm forced to ask:

What the #%$&@!? were these people doing in high school? Or even in junior high? What the hell were 12 years of formal schooling for if most of what's important in an education is going to be delivered in two years?

Now, one easy answer is that Rob Jenkins is simply wrong. He's overstating his case in a rhetorical effort to justify his existence.

But even if that's true -- it's well-established that many students heading off to "college" require remedial work. (See here, here, here, and here just for a few examples.) As a graduate assistant who spends a large chunk of his time grading undergraduate papers, I know well what is considered college-level work these days; it's not always terribly impressive, and some of it is downright embarrassing for anyone with half of a sense of shame. (In my students' defense, some of it is quite good!) And I can only grimace at what must occur at the remedial level. (I otherwise fully confess my ignorance of what is covered in these classes.)

But students are sitting in chairs for 12 years. Twelve years. You can do a lot in twelve years. You can get two PhD's, if you're really on top of things.

What is happening in those twelve years?

I don't mean this as a rhetorical question, nor as an indictment of the "school system" (as if we had a uniform school system). I'm not concerned in this post with the intractables or the schools filled with criminals and whizzing bullets. Presumably those are completely separate problems. I mean my question as a literal, interrogative question about the students who are, we should think, "successfully" taught.

Time and money are being spent and diplomas are being delivered. There's something being done.

What is it? Because it's clearly not analytical writing skills or logical fluency. (And maybe it shouldn't be.)

If we can figure out what it is we're actually doing -- and I feel like this shouldn't be that hard -- then maybe we can figure out how to do what we want to do, if it turns out that's something different. But twelve years is a lot of time. I find it hard to believe that it's being totally wasted.

But on what is it being spent?

Sic Semper Tyrannis

2011-07-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

Note: That's an ablative plural Tyrannis up there, not the traditional dative (although they look the same, down to the long vowel). I mean to say something less like "Thus do we always render up to tyrants our vengeance" and something more like "Thus always is the manner of the tyrants." It's meant as a warning not to the tyrants, but to the populus. Please enjoy the rest of your post.

What the hell is up with laws that have waivers in them? From Education Week, I learn:

Duncan, who predicts 82 percent of schools will be labeled failing this year, has declared the law broken. If Congress does not rewrite it, he has said he will grant waivers to states to bypass its key components.

The Council of Chief State School Officers, (which now represents all states but Texas), plans to lead an orchestrated effort to flood the department with waiver requests that would allow states to use their own accountability models, which would be based on a common framework.

Kentucky is out in front on this, and already has asked for permission (unlike the Idaho way of ask-forgiveness-not-permission) to use its own accountability model.

Duncan & Co., who so far have refused to articulate their waiver plan, are at risk of losing control of this debate over what happens to NCLB in the interim.

Let me back up. There's a very famous quote of which many people -- particularly but not exclusively those moderns who call themselves "progressives" -- are excessively fond. It reads thusly:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

I've always had a sort of ambivalent appreciation for this quote. On the one hand, Anatole France has a point: when you're prosecuting people who sleep under bridges and steal bread, you're pretty much deciding to prosecute poor people. On the other, you're prosecuting them for an action, not merely because they are poor. No one is going down the street and saying, "Hmmm. You look poor. You're probably the sort of person who is going to sleep under a bridge and steal bread, and that's trouble, so we're going to arrest you for being poor." (Actually, the authorities do do just that, with vagrancy laws and startling regularity, but that's a separate issue that I'll discuss on another distant day.)

The reason I'm ambivalent is that I don't object ex ante to laws that outlaw activity, but I do object ex ante to laws that outlaw identity. In other words, I'm a fan of Equal Protection. If a law says "Black people need to ride in the back of the bus", well, supporters of the law could argue (pathetically) that the law is applied equally to whites and blacks: everyone is equally subject to the law, after all. It just has differential outcomes for different groups of people.

Of course, the differential outcome here, unlike in the case of vagrancy and theft laws, are written into the law. And that's what makes the law a bad law. The vagrancy law isn't a bad law on its face; it's just that when put in full context and coupled with biased enforcement, it becomes something nasty.

Anyway, here's what the NCLB Act says:

`(a) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in subsection (c), the Secretary may waive any statutory or regulatory requirement of this Act for a State educational agency, local educational agency, Indian tribe, or school through a local educational agency, that —

(1) receives funds under a program authorized by this Act; and

(2) requests a waiver under subsection (b)

In case you were wondering, the restrictions in section (c) aren't restrictions on how the Secretary is allowed to exercise his discretion in granting waivers, but rather restrictions on what parts of the law he is allowed to waive.

Think about a similarly crafted murder statute:

(a) IN GENERAL - Except as provided in subsection (c), the Sheriff may waive application of this homicide statute to any person who:

(1) is subject to prosecution under this act; and
(2) requests a waiver in writing

Would you feel safe, being protected by such a law? What if it were a law that forbade driving a gas-powered vehicle (for the environment, of course)? Using incandescent light bulbs? Gas for me and my friends, says the Secretary of Energy, but bicycles for you. Warm, solid light for our homes but flickering, cold light for thine.

The very idea that a law has a provision for waivers built into it is dictatorial, and a blatant violation of Equal Protection -- not in the "discrete and insular minority" sense (that would be a question of a challenge against enforcement and application of the waiver provisions), but rather in a very fundamental "This law on its face does not apply to every citizen equally, though we'll have to wait and see who gets screwed" sense.

Sic Semper Tyrannis: Gold for me, but not for thee. Freedom for me, but not for thee. Differential treatment under the law is the cornerstone of tyranny and dictatorship.

Obviously, this is just as applicable to discretionary waivers of Obamacare or waivers of any other program. If your law sucks so badly that you need to be able to waive its application, rewrite the damn law.

Transferrability and Reputation

2011-06-29T14:38:00.001-07:00

Over at Instapundit, I find the following link and short comment:

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Despite Faculty Opposition, CUNY Board Votes to Standardize Some Requirements and Streamline Transfers. I don’t see why transfers should be easier among colleges and universities in general. I think it’s absurd that you can switch institutions and lose a big chunk of your credits.

I agree with the Blogfather on most things, and I'm not 100% certain he and I really disagree here. But there's the possibility that we disagree, and I want to explain why.

Prof. Reynolds assumes, like most people who argue for easy transferrability, that classes among various universities are more or less fungible, that one intro course in psych is more or less like any other.

Except it isn't, and the assertion that all intro psych courses are created equal is facially absurd once one takes ten seconds to think about it.

An intro psych class at John Miller Community College outside Portland, Maine, (were there such an institution) is unlikely to be the same as an intro psych course at Harvard, and both are likely to be different than an intro psych course at Cal State Fresno. That's not to say that Harvard's course is going to be better, mind you, merely because Harvard has more "prestige". It may well be worse. But they're going to be different.

When you get a degree from Harvard, you're getting the University's endorsement of your curriculum, of your academic accomplishments. Same thing when you graduate from UC Davis or from Florida State. They can give that endorsement because they know (more or less) what their own professors are teaching, what sorts of performance are required in their classes, and what the grades in those classes actually mean.

One of the reasons that a Yale degree is "worth more" than a degree from Millertown JC is that it's widely recognized that classes at Yale are harder and demand more of a student. (Not more effort, necessarily, but a higher level of performance. Nor is it necessarily true, mind you -- merely recognized as such.)

I'm not arguing that the information regarding the actual values of diplomas is perfect; it's a mess. But institutional reputation means something, and the free transferability of classes undermines an institution's ability to control the quality of its graduates, to effectively vouch for their learning and performance. If Yale has to accept credits earned at Cal State Fresno, the end result is going to be a lot fewer transfer students accepted from Cal State Fresno. (Let us have assumed, for sake of argument, that there were any such students to begin with.)

Now it's one thing to say that a single unified University system like CUNY, or the UC's, is going to standardize its degree. That's fine, and I applaud it, even. But you have to understand that when you standardize a degree among multiple campuses like that, you're eliminating the differences between the campuses: you're standardizing the value of the diplomas, too. It's no longer a question of getting a Baruch degree, or a Hunter degree -- what you're really getting is just a CUNY degree. And the faculty know this. From the linked Chronicle of Higher Education article:

The University Faculty Senate has issued several resolutions opposing the proposal, which it said would undermine its authority to determine the curriculum and maintain a unique academic identity on each CUNY campus.

It's not merely about "identity" -- it's about reputation. This could have some serious consequences for the "flagship" campuses of many systems. If I can take all my UC Riverside courses and transfer to Berkeley, then the sole differentiating factor between my Berkeley diploma and my friend's Riverside diploma becomes the fact that I was able to get admission to Berkeley. (To be fair, many people argue that this is the primary value of colleges anyway. See this discussion.)

That's not to say that credits shouldn't be transferable, or that you should have to start over from step one at every new school you attend. But I don't think, as Professor Reynolds seems to think, that it's "absurd" that you should lose a big chunk of your credits. I think it depends greatly on where your credits were earned, and what the administration of your new university thinks of the faculty from whom you earned them.

What Grades Mean

2011-06-24T11:08:00.001-07:00

Much like diplomas (see discussion in this post), grades are carriers of information. They represent a type of evaluation. Unfortunately, much like words, they often mean very different things to different people. This leads grades to be an imperfect indicator of a student's academic achievement, which is why standardized tests are so popular: whatever a 2080 SAT means, it means the same thing for everyone. That is a huge advantage not to be dismissed lightly.

A discussion about what's "above average" at Joanne Jacobs' site recently segued into a discussion about grade inflation, and one of the regular commenters there, Sean Mays, made the following observation:

C is a penalty grade now, has been for some time.

Now, I don't think it makes sense to talk about what a grade "is" in some unified objective sense -- other than to say that a grade is a letter, a bit of language, and an evaluation. There's a difference between what a grade is and what a grade means, and sometimes I think that our use of language, while what we really mean is clear enough, can cloud the issue. So forgive me for being nitpicky -- I just want to be precise.

Anyway, Sean Mays is absolutely right in spirit: an awful lot of people see a "C" as a "penalty grade". I get students all the time who get, say, a C+ on a paper, and they come to office hours slightly indignant and ask, "But what did I lose points for?" They're flummoxed when I tell them they didn't do anything wrong at all, but that the things they did right were just uninspired, rote, and merely adequate. They demand to know what "mistake" they made to deserve such a grade. When I try to point out the very obvious differences between some exemplar "A" paper and the paper that they turned in, they continue to assert that they didn't do anything wrong.

Clearly Sean Mays has bugged my office.

This all leads me to suspect -- these are just suspicions and I stand ready to be corrected -- the following about the junior highs and high schools where these students learn their grading-response habits:

1) I suspect that it's assumed (a la Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds) that everyone starts out with an A. The A is yours to lose, as they say.

2)I suspect that it's thought that a student must make mistakes to lose points, otherwise the student gets to keep the "A". Other grades -- B, C, D, and F -- are, as Sean Mays says, penalties imposed for saying something other than the "right answer".

3) I suspect that, in line with #1 and #2 above, grades are seen by students as a sort of mechanical "response" to a performance by the pupil, rather than an evaluation by the teacher of the student's work. The student mindset does not seem to admit of the possibility of a grade being a judgment -- it's an automatic reaction to an approved stimulus, and if the student performs properly, he or she is entitled to the grade. As a side note, a lot of people probably see this model of grading as a net benefit, and think that something as important as grades shouldn't be subject to individual proclivities and opinions.

People do sue over grades, suggesting that they feel as if there is an entitlement to them after certain types of performance (examples of litigation here and here and here). It makes sense that, in the face of such an attitude, schools might play along and remove the individual teacher as much as possible from grading. (For a discussion about how the importance of grades warps the educational setting, see my guest-post at Joanne's blog here.)

4) Likewise, I suspect that there are administrative practices in place that reinforce the notion that if the student believes that he or she has performed the appropriate stimulus, any grade other than an "A" must be the result of individual teacher bias: the teacher doesn't like me, doesn't like boys, doesn't like white people... whatever. My suspicion (and it's just a suspicion) is that high school and junior high administrations cater to this sort of view by pressuring the teachers to give certain types of grades, by overruling teachers' grade decisions when there's enough squawking, and generally creating opportunities to reinforce the view that the teacher is wrong about low grades that are given.

As I said, these are just suspicions based on the products that are coming to me from high schools. And I'm no doubt getting a slanted view, as my "evidence" consists entirely of college-bound students. But if my suspicions are even on the right track, then what a grade means for many teachers and students in junior high and high school is very, very different than what a grade means to a number of college professors and instructors.

Are grades "supposed" to differentiate between different levels of threshold success? In other words, if the assignment is, "Perform some music", do both the person who bangs out "Happy Birthday" on the piano and the person who composes and conducts an original symphony get an "A"?

I'm not just talking about Grade Inflation, though certainly that's a related topic. I'm talking about whether grades are actually capable of, and intended to be capable of, marking a difference between mere fulfillment of the assignment and some true achievement of excellence. As I said elsewhere, the variety of human ability is quite large; we might think that our evaluative tools should be appropriately sensitive to those variations. I'm getting the distinct impression that we're moving away from such sensitivity.

Grades mean things, but they don't mean the same thing to all people. As with much else, our ability to use them in fruitful and productive ways as a society will depend in great degree on our collective ability to be clear and explicit about what we're doing.

High School Level Math: What is it?

2011-06-22T17:14:00.000-07:00

There's a pretty decent discussion going on over at Joanne's about an EdWeek article that recently came out, itself about a study that recently came out about "dyscalculia". Now, this isn't anything new. I remember blogging when this same issue came up back in January of 2003, although at the time it was something that schools were facing in Italy. Now it's a 10-year study in America (which means the study had started back in 2001 -- so maybe it wasn't just an Italian thing back then).

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. That's just by way of introduction. Some of the comments over at Joanne's site have suggested that maybe this dyscalculia thing opens the door to a way to get rid of the Algebra I requirement for a High School Diploma. Which left me thinking:

What exactly does a high school diploma stand for, in terms of mathematics?

We know what various exit exams call for -- and it's something on the scale of complex arithmetic with fractions (see the study guides for California's test here). Ostensibly, tests such as the CAHSEE cover Algebra I and Geometry; but it's usually non-logic-based Geometry (i.e., it's just calculations of the kind you do in 6th and 7th grade, not proofs and theorems) and the threshold for passing is pretty low; it's not clear that you actually need to know Algebra at all to pass them (I'm sure some states have stricter standards, but I'm also sure some states have lower standards).

So what is high school level math? What degree of proficiency should a high school degree convey? Or should it merely be a marker that someone sat in a chair for X number of hours studying some kind of mathematics?

Because that's kinda what it is right now, I am afraid. For what follows, I'm going to use the California exit exam as my whipping boy; I want everyone to know that I recognize I'm picking on one particular test, and that other states might have better measures. (Some might have worse.)

So the exit exam helps, some, with pinning down what counts as high school math. If it's on the test, then it's high school math, right?

Well, not quite.

If they were serious about it, they'd have each section graded (and passed or failed) separately: Arithmetic, statistics, geometry, and Algebra. Strength in one area wouldn't be able to overcome weakness in another, and a passing grade wouldn't be 350 out of 450, which sounds impressive until you know that the lowest possible score is 275, making the passing score essentially 75/175, or around 42%. I should note that this is a "scaled" score, so it's not as if getting 42% of the questions right means that you passed; it's closer to 53%, or at least that's what I got after running a weighted average on Table 4 of this 2010 scoring document.

But it's also a multiple choice test where you can guess. FOUR-ANSWER multiple choice, for that matter. Here's a math problem for you:

Let's say there were 80 questions, and you needed to get 43 of them right to pass the exam. Let's assume that you can get 25% of the questions on which you guess right without knowing the material. Holding that guess-yield rate constant, how many questions would you actually need to really know to pass the test?

Answer:
Let K=Number of questions really known, G=Number of Questions guessed

We have two equations:

K + G = 80
K + .25G = 43

So: G=80-K
So: K + .25(80-K)=43
So: K + 20 - .25K=43
So: .75K + 20 = 43
So: .75K = 23

K = 31 (when rounded up).

31 questions out of 80. If you know 39% of the math on that test, you know enough "high school level math" to get your diploma.

Why am I going over all this? For exactly the same question I was asking the question above: just so we can all be clear about what it is a high school diploma actually means with respect to mathematics knowledge, if it means anything at all.

Which maybe it doesn't.

And maybe it shouldn't.

But we need to be clear about it.

College For Everyone: A Brief, Terribly Unfair Field Study

2011-06-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's taking the time to read this blog has probably heard about "College for Everyone" or "College for All" -- the social and rhetorical push to make sure that no one under 21 or 22 ever really commits to a career or thinks about starting up a company before they've learned about Tolstoy and taken an acting class, to ensure that the success conditions of our education system are marked by collegiate sheepskin.

As you can tell from my tone, I'm not a fan of this line of thought, and thankfully it's not gaining ground nearly as quickly as its supporters would like.

Now last night I went to a high school graduation for someone I care about very dearly. It was by far the largest, longest high school graduation to which I'd ever been, but I had good company up in the nosebleed seats of the UCI Bren Events Center and some of the speeches were entertaining. (Someone needs to think about the stress on the poor band, having to play Pomp and Circumstance while 600+ names are read.)

But something happened there that I thought was blogworthy. Knowingly or not, a member of the School Board gave a speech in which she thought she was being quite nice; I thought she was being -- taken on her own terms -- quite rude.

The El Toro High School Class of 2011 has a very large percentage of people going to college -- I forget the actual number but it was something high like 85% or so. The speaker mentioned this, and then proceeded to name about 15-20 of the most prestigious and most notable local schools: Yale, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Biola, Chapman, and a bunch of others. Then she mentioned that a goodly portion of students were going to community college. Then the full statistic on how many students were continuing with higher learning. This was really the centerpiece of her speech: congratulating the class on how many of them were staying in school.

Then after that, after a brief digression into other topics that I don't actually remember, there was a single sentence about students who were going (this is a paraphrase quote) "on into higher learning, into the military, or into a career."

And that was it.

If you were going on to college, you got to be the focus of almost the entirety of the woman's speech. (Not that, being a high school student who's probably never even thought about the school board, you really cared about her speech.) If you were going out to die for your country, or to be a productive member of society, you got a single sentence (which felt like it was put in there precisely so no one could say that she actually ignored all those other students).

Now by itself, that isn't a big deal. I don't care so much about how many people go to college, so if someone wants to talk about people going off to college, that's fine by me. You might just as well quote statistics about the class's total weight, or how many of them have gone skinny-dipping off the coast of Japan, or how many cans were raised in the food drive (which was mentioned several times by many people).

But it was fairly obvious from this lady's tone, and the speech itself, that she was filled with all sorts of warm fuzzies for the students who were going on to higher learning, that somehow the prestige of the school's academic future enhanced the prestige of the institution of which she's a representative. There wasn't a doubt in my mind: she would have been happier if 100% of the students had been going on to college. She would have died, right there on the stage, in paroxysms of ecstasy if every single one was going to an Ivy League or to Stanford. And that sentiment was apparent in her speech (as whitewashedly political correct as the speech was).

So taken on her own terms, she was congratulating about 80% of the class on achieving something that she valued, while more or less dismissing the other 20%. Which, again, is fine taken by itself. We do things like this all the time in day to day conversation; it's called making judgments. It's what humans are good at.

Except that this isn't a graduation for the kids going to college -- it's a high school graduation, and she's a speaker at this graduation. Context matters. Let me put this in other terms:

If I bake cookies for a bunch of people for Christmas, and deliver them out, no one accuses me of not getting Christmas cookies for the people I don't know. I exclude them because I'm not going to bake 6 billion tins of bookies, and that's fine.

Now imagine that you're in a class of 30 other students. If you bring cookies for you and your best friend, then you and your best friend have cookies. If you bring cookies for you and your five best friends, you're starting to get a little cliquish, but it's still fine. But if you bring cookies for 27 of the students, and leave out the three students towards whom you don't feel as warmly, you're being rude. Cruel even. Context matters.

And if you spend 2-3 minutes talking glowingly about how wonderful it is that all these students are going on to college, if you go through all the attention-giving trouble of naming a lot of the schools, and then dismiss 20% of the class in a sentence, at their graduation and right in front of them, you're being rude. You're telling them they're a disappointment (which I don't think they are) and that if they weren't part of the class, if the college percentage was higher, you'd be happier. Which might be true, but is a terrible thing to say to someone at their graduation.

She wasn't really giving out cookies -- as I said, I don't think anyone really cared what she thought. But she thought she was giving out cookies. And she didn't give them to around 20% of the class.

Now I'm being somewhat unfair -- I don't know what was going on in this woman's head, and I'm only making the best educated guesses I can about her inner motivations. Maybe she doesn't actually think that everyone should go to college, and she just isn't a very good speaker who conveys ideas she doesn't actually hold. But sometimes an act is rude whether or not you intend it to be rude -- not always, I think, but sometimes.

This is one of those times. And someone who is a professional in education, who is in a position of authority such that she's asked to speak at a graduation of a number of students it's unlikely she's ever met (which, to be fair, is what school board members do!), should know better anyway. And my suspicion is that this is being repeated at other fairly well-to-do school districts around the country.

Accountability and Standards: In Which a Prediction is Vindicated and I Clarify My Views

2011-06-16T06:43:00.000-07:00

There's an opinion piece by a Professor James Alexander (Kentucky Wesleyan) that was written in April, but which I just got around to reading this morning. The piece isn't remarkable for its conclusion: it's essentially a "me too" to Ravitch's latest round of arguments that it's not teachers that are to blame for whatever education problems we're having, and that research shows that the big elephant in the room is "out of school" factors: poverty, parental engagement, and time spent on homework.

One of the things that has confused me about Ravitch and company's recent set of arguments is that I wasn't actually aware that people were blaming teachers for poor educational results. I've a long history of complaining of poor teachers myself -- Lord knows I've had my share in my education -- and I've often argued that we should want to increase our "teacher quality" -- by which I meant that we should want the brightest, most capable teachers possible with the greatest enthusiasm and expertise in their fields, instead of settling for the often second-rate intellectual talents that we do. But one thing I don't think I ever did was say that the problems facing of our worst public schools (primarily, but not exclusively urban schools) and the widespread functional illiteracy of many of our students was the fault of poor teachers. And I didn't think anyone else was saying this either. Indeed, while I've often been critical of accountability testing, I've always understood that its usefulness was not in identifying our "problem" teachers, but rather in preventing a very specific type of educational fraud: the "everything's fine here's your high school diploma even though you can't read it" fraud. I didn't like NCLB when it came out, and I don't like it now, but I never thought it was somehow supposed to find the "bad" teachers. It was, I presumed, simply designed to prevent our pretending not to see that so many of our schools and student populations were actually in serious trouble and not everything was fine.

Apparently I've not been paying close enough attention, because a lot of very smart people seem to think that "poor education is the fault of teachers" really is the argument to which they must respond.

You'd think I wouldn't be surprised by this: I saw it coming. On December 21, 2002, at the old version of my blog which exists no longer, I wrote the following, which I redact somewhat because I was less temperate in my younger days:

STANDARDIZED TESTING: I just came from reading several posts over at No. 2 Pencil. I have these thoughts. The standardized testing craze isn't going to fix our schools. It isn't going to give us better teachers, make schools more accountable, or make our children any better educated. If anything, it's going to take time away from education.

What the standardized tests that have sprung up like dandelions will dohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif, however, is allow us to see how pathetic our schools are. * * * * What standardized testing may do is take away our ability to hide from our failure.

But then what? What do we do once we are faced with the God-Awful truth that we have failed thousands and thousands of children? How do we recover from something like that? How do we make it so that the children of the ignorant do not continue the cycle?

These are the questions which will face us, and for which we must have answers when the standardized testing has passed its course. I fear that people will simply demand more and more accountability, and that the "curriculum" will be reduced down to a list of things that must be taught, and innumerable tests to show that we have managed to reach our goals. (That's what El Presidente is trying to do.... set the bar low enough that everyone passes.)

What we are faced with is a drastic problem, and it may take something quite draconian to fix it - if that's what we really want to do.

So if Ravitch and Professor James Alexander are to be believed, what I feared has actually come to pass (and I apparently missed it!): we've come to the point where we're demanding accountability. But where I had imagined the response to the demand to be merely tighter curricular control, it seems like people are getting ready to scapegoat the teachers.

Look -- the teachers in this country (taken as a corps) need some work. But so does my house; that doesn't mean it's not a nice place to live. I'll advocate for higher teacher standards and an end to union control of the school-as-workplace and principal autonomy in hiring and firing and higher salaries, and I'll continue to criticize what I see as a profoundly anti-intellectual teacher culture, and point out that some nontrivial portion (not a majority but more than 1%) of our teaching force is simply inadequate to the task.

Those are issues I care about.

I just want to make sure I'm also unequivocally saying for public record that I don't think that the systemic sorts of educational failure we have in this country are the fault of teachers. And I'm puzzled by people who do.

To some extent, I suppose that the teacher-as-scapegoat route is the low-hanging fruit, something we can focus on. You know the symptoms of this kind of behavior: you're three months behind on the mortgage and you spend money you don't have on new sodding for your lawn, because that's something that's within your control; you can't pay the mortgage but you can fix the lawn. And taxpayers might not be able to fix the "real problem" -- whatever that might be -- but they can demand that teachers be fired or whatnot; and as I said, some nontrivial portion of teachers really could use some firing (unless teacher quality has soared since I was in school) so it's even easier to think that this might help. It won't, but it's easier to think that it will.

But what is the solution? As I said earlier, I think it's likely to be quite draconian, if its possible at all. James Alexander, for his part, decides to fart fairy dust:

So, I repeat, the entire enterprise is flawed. No one can fault standards as the basis of a curriculum guide. Beyond that standards, testing, and accountability form a devastating trio. It simply cannot be decreed that all students will be on grade level by a certain date (2014). It doesn’t work that way. It leaves teachers anxious and demoralized. It does the same for kids. What we need is not more tests and standards and accountability but, rather, a great societal turning.

Is that all we need? A "great societal turning"? Well, gee, why didn't I think of that sooner? Crap. It was sitting there in front of me the entire time...

Sarcasm aside, James Alexander, PhD, is right, in part. A "great societal turning" wherein all families decided to spontaneously do what was really best for their kids and all parents decided to participate in civic culture and Borders was saved from bankruptcy by the sudden renewed interest in reading would do the trick.

I'll stop here, on this ambiguously depressing note.

UPDATE: Title fixed. I have been spending way too much time on medieval logic, and wrote "Predication" instead of "Prediction".

In Which a Student of History Isn't Disturbed by Historical Apathy

2011-06-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

Joanne Jacobs has a brief bit of commentary on and a link to yet another article bemoaning our country's lack of history knowledge. You know how it goes:

American students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject, according to results of a nationwide test released on Tuesday, with most fourth graders unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War.

I majored in a history field (Medieval Studies) in college. I took my high school history seriously. I read books on history all the time. In my work as a graduate student, I'm teaching undergrads about Medieval History and how the institutions and cultural shifts of the Ancient World were expressed in Philosophy.

I love history.

And I'm here to tell you that the sort of history most people think about when they think about how awful our students are at history is pretty much worthless. There's much hand-wringing about the dearth of "historical facts" in students' heads, as if that were important.

Now, I want to make a caveat up-front: I'm am not here advocating that students not be taught historical facts, any more than I would advocate that they not be taught literature and poetry. All of these things make one's life a better place. But I do want to try to argue that it's not the end of the world if students aren't learning them, or even if they're not interested in them. (Indeed, it would make me feel a lot better about students' not learning about poetry and history if the students were affirmatively uninterested in them.)

Let's look at an example of what people are so worried about:

Diane Ravitch, an education historian who was invited by the national assessment’s governing board to review the results, said she was particularly disturbed by the fact that only 2 percent of 12th graders correctly answered a question concerning Brown v. Board of Education, which she called “very likely the most important decision” of the United States Supreme Court in the past seven decades.

Students were given an excerpt including the passage “We conclude that in the field of public education, separate but equal has no place, separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and were asked what social problem the 1954 ruling was supposed to correct.

“The answer was right in front of them,” Ms. Ravitch said. “This is alarming.”

If I can digress for a moment, it's easy to say "the answer was right in front of them" -- except that the NAEP questions are generally well-written. I don't have the Brown question in front of me, but any question-writer worth his or her salt is going to have an option in there about women integrating into universities, and another about immigrants being able to enter public schools, both of which are perfectly plausible given the quote.

But back to my main point: it's not necessarily a great tragedy that few people know about Brown vs. Board of Education. I mean, really, how many people , let alone high school seniors, know about Marbury vs. Madison? That's at least as important a case, historically speaking. But no one worries that Johnny doesn't know about the establishment of judicial review just because they can't line up the case name with the concept. And that's in part because a lot of people don't care about Marbury the way they care about Brown. The reason that people want students to learn about Brown is because they value it, not because it's particularly interesting in and of itself. Really, in terms of the average American going through his or her life on a day to day basis, knowing about Brown vs. Board of Education is every bit as important as knowing the name and medical conditions of the seventh son of the daughter of Count Edward Thimblefinger, Earl of Grouse.

In other words, not very.

The study of history is the study of people, of how they react to different situations. It's basically a giant lab experiment that would be totally unethical if tried in the present, but because it's being done retrospectively, in the past, it's perfectly fine. You'd go to jail if you said, "Gee, let's drop two atomic bombs on Japan and see what happens..." and then proceeded to experiment. But looking back through the study of history, since someone actually went and did it, you can get all the data you want about it, or at least as much as is available.

If you want to know what happens to a legislature-governed people when you grant indefinite emergency powers to a unified executive, well, you can either do it (and find out) or you can look back into the laboratory of history and see what happened the last couple of times. Ceasar... Hitler...

But it's the lessons, not the facts, that are important. You don't need to be able to say that Brown vs. Board of Education overturned Plessy in order to learn the lessons it teaches: that separate schools and separate water fountains and separate theatres and separate train cars are inherently unequal, and that while people can deceive themselves, or at least put up a pretense of deceiving themselves to protect their financial and social interest, they can't deceive themselves about that forever.

Indeed, I've always been underwhelmed by Brown vs. Board of Education, and to the extent I'm interested in it, it is primarily for its effect on evidence law, which was much more revolutionary. Insofar as it relates to racial relations, far from being "the most important case of the last seven decades", the case itself is really just the "crack" of a cultural tree that was already falling under its own weight. The social attitudes were already in place for that decision and fetishizing it as some sort of momentous, earth-shattering decision gives the wrong impression of what it is the Supreme Court is designed to do anyway. The case was merely the way in which one side of an argument called the bluff of another side. And this time, there wasn't a Civil War, which there likely would have been if Brown was anywhere near as revolutionary and nation-changing as people like to pretend it is.

(A benefit of studying history: bluffs sometimes get called to disastrous result!)

Now, I'm not saying that you wouldn't get the same results (or worse) if you were asking more general questions to these high school seniors about the cultural shift to racial integration in the mid-20th Century. It might very well be worse, because most high school students aren't taught to think about history like that. They're given a list of names and dates and events and told to "learn history." They're told that it's important that they know what Brown vs. Board of Education is.

But it's not, not really. The case got decided, some law got made, and now life goes on. At best, the case evidence for the important part of history, evidence that should be reviewed and treated with a healthy amount of skepticism with respect to any given conclusion. At worst, it's the jargonish name for a legal (and possibly ethical) principle that we attorneys use to try to win cases. Why on earth should it be some sort of moral imperative that high school students learn it?

Well, obviously the answer is in part "because the state put it down in the curriculum." And "because it's on page 243 of the textbook and the law says we have to teach the kids what's in the approved textbook." And surely there's a reason to sit up and take notice if the things we mandate by law aren't happening. (Perhaps we should sit up and notice that our laws are stupid, but at the very least we should sit up and pay attention!)

But I'm not going to get all upset because students can't tell me which products went where in the old slaves-sugar/cotton-rum/textiles trading scheme. That's just more evidence that can be used by students for drawing conclusions about Life. Sure, if I teach history, I'll teach my students about Triangular Trade, and I'll advocate that it's both interesting and useful to know about these things because of what it allows you to do in your thinking about the present. And the more history you know, the easier time you have thinking through human and societal behavior. But you could learn many of the same lessons by paying very close attention to the world around you, to the way people interact on a daily basis. And if you don't care about history, if you'd rather learn about carpentry and how to build a better house, well... I say more power to you. It's not like you won't learn history (at least the history of house buildings and flood plains) in the course of your studies. History is tied up in everything we do, in both subtle and obvious ways. You can't entirely escape history, but you can, if you wish, escape its formalized study as a distinct discipline. I don't recommend it because, as I said, I love history and I think it has greatly enriched my life; but it's certainly an option, and not an entirely unreasonable one.

I want to close with a quote from Alfred North Whitehead, recently the topic of some discussion between Diana Senechal and me:

I pass lightly over that understanding which should be given by the literary side of education. Nor do I wish to be supposed to pronounce on the relative merits of a classical or a modern curriculum. I would only remark that the understanding which we want is an understanding of an insistent present. The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. No more deadly harm can be done to young minds than by depreciation of the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future. At the same time it must be observed that an age is no less past if it existed two hundred years ago than if it existed two thousand years ago. Do not be deceived by the pedantry of dates. The ages of Shakespeare and of Molière are no less past than are the ages of Sophocles and of Virgil. The communion of saints is a great and inspiring assemblage, but it has only one possible hall of meeting, and that is, the present, and the mere lapse of time through which any particular group of saints must travel to reach that meeting-place, makes very little difference.

The Right Expert for the Problem

2011-06-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, Michelle Rhee came to speak at UCLA. One of the things that struck me about the way she was greeted by what can only be described as an extremely hostile crowd was the way that people reacted when she was asked how much teaching experience she has. She said three years, and practically the entire room groaned in disapproval. The message was clear even before one of the earnest fellows (it was a woman, mind you, on fellowship) from the Principal Leadership Institute at UCLA actually was rude enough to put it into words a few moments later: no one with just three years of teaching experience has any business attempting to make educational policy.

That night was in the back of my mind a few weeks ago when I was reading this post about the influence of Bill Gates on education, over at Joanne Jacobs' blog. Many of the commentors reflected what I think can fairly be called a healthy skepticism about Gates' qualifications to engage in the project of education reform; there was much talk about his misguided efforts, his reliance on experts. The meme is fairly common; I've heard this sort of thing about Gates before:

As much as Bill Gates knows about making money through monopolistic business practices aided by neo-liberal economics and libertarian politics, he knows next to nothing about education, and worse, he refuses to listen to experienced teachers, instead dismissing us as enemies.

You've doubtlessly heard similar criticisms directed towards other ed-reformers: "You don't have any experience in administration", or "All your experience is in suburban schools", or "Education reformers are all ivory-tower academics, not real people with real experience in teaching", or my absolute favourite, "What can you know about education? You're not a parent."

So I've been thinking the last few weeks: what exactly would "qualify" someone to be an education reformer? Thankfully, it's not like there's a major one can get in Education Reform -- or if there is, it's sufficiently ridiculous that no one takes it seriously. There's MPA programs, and EdD programs, and all sorts of other programs, but none of those seem to uniquely situate people to engage in education reform. (Which, I admit, is a vague, broad term, but bear with it for now.)

Who among us has 15 years of teaching in blighted urban schools at both the elementary and high school levels (to understand the problem), 10 years of teaching at successful urban schools serving the same populations (to understand some possible solutions), 10 years of experience in suburban schools, has done fellowships studying the education of children in other countries, has experience in on-site educational administration and finance -- but not too much experience, otherwise you become part of "the system", has been a member of teachers' unions but has never participated in their leadership or institutional activities, has 10 years of experience as a superintendent, has run a successful business, has served as the Secretary of Education, has a PhD in Child Psychology and an MPA with a focus on education, is a parent of more than one kid, all of whom are doing perfectly well?

No one, of course. And even if someone did have such a CV, it doesn't mean that their ideas would be any better than the ideas from a stay-at-home Mom in Indiana, or a second-year Junior High teacher in Seattle. Anyone might come up with a good idea. But who is qualified to judge whether an idea is any good?

I think the answer is that you are. I am. And the guy down the street is qualified. Human beings are pretty cagey creatures, and we tend to know good ideas when we hear them. Sometimes things go badly, but by and large we've been pretty successful. If Bill Gates were to come into my living room and tell me that the solution to public education's problems was shopping off the ring fingers of all the boys, and the pinky toes of all the girls, I'd be pretty sure he was off his rocker. Likewise, if Michelle Rhee were to tell me that what we need to do is turn every public school into a Spartan Military Academy, well, I'd be pretty sure that was a bad idea, too.

I don't think we do anyone any service whatsoever by making ad hominem attacks -- and that's exactly what a criticism of someone's qualifications amounts to. If Gates is wrong, then there's some premise from which he's operating that's simply false, or he's made a mistake in reasoning. If Rhee is wrong, then there's some premise from which she's operating from that is false, or she's made a mistake in reasoning. People say, "If the teachers' unions weren't in control of the schools, they'd be better." That's either true or false -- and it's probably false. People say, "Charter schools will make inner-city education better." That's either true or false -- and it's probably false. We can tell it's false by running a simple thought experiment: imagine a district with dozens of Charter schools filled with child molesting meth addicts for faculty. Clearly merely having charter schools isn't the answer.

There's no one who is an "expert" at education form. There can't be, because it is by its very nature a speculative enterprise. If you want to drill an oil well, you can call a well-drilling expert who's done it before.

But no one has ever really gotten a public school system like the one that the United States has to work before. In the first place, it's a new project, this goal to educate everyone. In the second place, you can say "Well Finland did it!" but the fact is that whoever is the expert from Finland is the expert of what works in Finland. We are not they.

That's not to say that the Finland-guy doesn't have useful things to add to our discussion and debate. He surely does. But he should be explicit as to why he thinks the things he thinks, so that we can judge for ourselves whether they are applicable to our individual situations. We shouldn't discount what he says simply because he's from Finland.

This sort of qualification-hunting and discounting that I'm talking about, this sorting through people based on their resume, is a sort of intellectual shorthand. We use it so that we don't have to parse through 10,000 different people's ideas. We dismiss people as not knowing what they are talking about because, often, that's the only way to make it through the day. Maybe that guy at my door really does have the miracle product that will make my carpets cleaner; but the fact is that I don't have the time to bother with it because I don't think he knows what he's talking about.

But when we're seriously debating issues, big, important issues like education reform, we need to put away our interpersonal heuristics. They aren't helping us. There is no "Right Expert" for the problem, and if someone is serious about throwing their hat into the education reform ring, well, merely on the basis of that qualification I'm willing to listen to what they have to say, and to see what they can do.

Gratuitious Link of the Day

2011-06-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

As if there's anybody reading this blog right now who doesn't come here from Rachel's blog, I'm going to tell you to go read this post on teaching English. It's quite wonderful.

The Challenge of the Application-Challenged Family

2011-06-11T07:41:00.000-07:00

Julia Steiny, you may have heard, is writing at EducationNews.Org these days. Her inaugural column was a rumination on how things could be better if only people would just care about kids (presumably the way she does). I was rather put off by the self-righteous tone, but I thought to myself, "This is someone who's been at this for a while and has clearly thought about these issues; a first column can be allowed a little egocentric indulgence and biography. It's not like I'm never self-righteous, after all. Let's wait and see what she does next. She even kinda looks hot in a Cathy Siepp-sort of way, may she rest in peace."

Well, her second column is here. Overall, I'm unimpressed. But amidst confused arguments and some possibly bad ideas, there's a glimmer of what I think is a good idea.

Probably the biggest problem I have with her column is that it undermines itself. She uses that tired expression, "left behind", to talk about seriously troubled kids whose parents don't care enough to apply to charter schools.

For now, it’s fabulous that more lucky parents are as satisfied and engaged in their child’s learning as the private-school and affluent parents are.

* * * *

(But) an unintended consequence of the otherwise-terrific choice movement is that some of the toughest kids to educate are left behind in certain regular public schools – in increasingly high concentrations.

The worse-off kids are, we are to believe, finding themselves in an increasingly perilous position as the better-off kids leave, as the "concentration" of these toughest kids rises.

On this basis, she argues that all kids should share in the benefits of school choice:

But in the meantime, states need to look long and hard at their reform strategies. Hard-to-reach families must be integrated into the benefits of the choice movement.

But that seems a very odd argument to make, given that she acknowledges that the bad situation is bad precisely because of the presence of those who are being "left behind". We know that they are the proximate cause of the bad situation because as the "concentration" of these disengaged, unsupported, suffering kids increases, the schools are (she argues) getting worse. That's not to say the kids are to blame for the bad situation, merely that they are the proximate cause of it. (If you are confused as to what I mean, imagine that a terrorist puts a bomb in my suitcase and I carry it on the train. The bomb causes the crash, and I cause the crash, and the terrorist causes the crash, but really the terrorist is the only one to blame.)

Steiny assumes that the charters aren't, in and of themselves, academically superior schools. So what exactly are the benefits of school choice? Well, the assumed academic parity suggests that the primary benefit of the school choice movement is getting away from the kids with problems that stem from the fact that their families have problems that interfere with their ability to make school choices, the "application-challenged" families. (Her term, not mine.)

So how do we "share" those benefits? If the benefit of my train ticket is that it takes me far away from someone else, I can't "share" that benefit by getting them a train ticket, too. That destroys the benefit.

So this strand of Steiny's column makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But, thankfully, that's not all she has to say. She also has some thoughts about how we can flat-out improve the lives of the application-challenged. (Yes, that's a little bit of mockery you hear in my writing when I'm using that term.)

One day, in a happier future, let’s hope that all families have so many good school options that every one of them makes active choices. Outreach programs help them choose.

Now, we've already established that the problem isn't a lack of choices. It's a lack of capable, motivated choosers. And good options don't make for motivated choosers, so the first sentence is rendered almost unintelligible: you can't possibly get enough good options to make everyone into an active, motivated chooser.

But the outreach idea isn't a bad one. Direct work with the families probably has a place in the grand scheme of things. I don't know how efficacious it will be: it's not as if there aren't tons of such programs already. You'd have to be a bit more invasive than normal, because these aren't the sorts of families that are going to seek out benefits.

But invasive, it seems, is exactly what Steiny has in mind.

And then, if a family fails to fill out an application or preference sheet, a red flag goes up, indicating possible domestic distress.

So if the parents don't get on board by demonstrating that they are engaged in their kids' education by filling out an application... we'll what? Put up a red flag? Then everyone can point and say, "Hey... it's the red flag! How pretty!"

I jest. Red flags are calls to action. And since we seem to be talking about the government here, we know that there's always going to be an iron fist hiding somewhere in the velvet glove.

Wait for it...

Wait for it...

Social services goes out to visit the home and gently offers help.

So if the outreach programs fail, we're going to have more outreach?

Of course, Steiny is either being naive or disingenuous; I suspect that she doesn't really mean "gently offers" at all, because that's presumably already been done through the outreach she calls for. But whether she means it or not, there's no "gentle" with social services. There's a threat to take kids away from their parents, pure and simple. That threat might be hidden behind smiles and brochures and applications and "monitoring visits" and all that, but that's what it comes down to in the end. Social services is the opposite of gentle.

Now, maybe that's what's really needed. Maybe not going to PTA meetings or failing to enter a charter lottery, or just not giving a crap, is a form of child abuse, and we should just take those kids away and put them in better, "application-ready" homes. I'm not a fan of that kind of policy, frankly. I support parental autonomy just as I support free speech, and that means I have to put up with a certain amount of behavior of which I do not approve. But it's not an inherently unreasonable position to take, and even though she's being mealy-mouthed about it, I can understand the sentiment.

I like Steiny's last idea the best, though she almost manages to make it unappealing:

Or if we’re going to concentrate the Dennys of this world into certain schools, they should be showered with help for what is essentially a special special-needs population, made more difficult by segregation.

First off, what a god-awful sentence. "They should get help for a population that is made more difficult." What the hell? But putting that aside, if I'm understanding her correctly, this is actually a pretty good idea. It's more or less what I advocated a few days ago. Why not have a special set of schools for dealing with kids who are hell-on-educators because their home lives are a disaster, the "intentional non-learners" as they're coming to be called?

But it's not that their situation is made more difficult by segregation. Their situation is made worse by the fact that there are a certain number of them, not by their distribution in the population. Once you reach a critical mass of such students (around 4 or so) in a class it doesn't matter how many good students you pack into the classroom with them. The class is shot. And the only way to avoid having that low of a concentration is to disperse them to schools all around the country (which, I suppose, is possible if Social Services is taking them out of their homes; why not send a few to rural Iowa?). But the way things are situated right now, in urban centers the natural concentration is already way past that stage, and the presence of the "application-ready" families isn't really helping that much (which is why they're eager to leave).

No, if she's right, then this segregation could be the key to making their situation better. And that, I think, is a fine idea. It will take more resources, and a certain amount of political will, but, well... I put that Latin phrase up as the motto for my blog for a reason.

Update: Minor stylistic/wording change to the second paragraph.

Administrators: How much is too much?

2011-06-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

Imagine you were designing a university. You'd want buildings. You'd want books and/or computers. You'd want faculty. A theatre or two. Some workshops. Tables and chairs. Maybe a printing press. Some athletic fields. Dorms, maybe? A dining hall.

And you might think to yourself, "Gee... I should probably get some people to run this place." So you have a President, and he has a secretary. And you maybe have a few deans, each with their own secretaries: a dean of admissions/PR seems like a good idea. A dean of academic affairs/faculty relations seems like a good idea. A dean of university services, maybe? (Or maybe call that person a VP?) You'd want a VP for finance, and probably under that person a Financial Aid Director, a Director of Accounting. An assistant director of accounting who is primarily responsible for student accounts. Maybe a Registrar with a staff of assistants (I'm thinking 2 assistants, plus 1 for every additional 5000 students). You'd want a GC, maybe with one assistant and an EEOOC/Title IX compliance officer. A Physical Plant manager, maybe with an assistant. I'm sure there's lots of other people you'd want to: someone to head up IT, a good chief librarian, etc. The list could get pretty long.

But would you ever think that you'd need more administrators than you need faculty? It's not as if we're discussing total university employees, which one would expect to be quite numerous, but rather people classified as administrative/professional who aren't faculty -- people with titles like "Deputy Under-Assistant Dean of Tuesday Services" and such. These are not the people on hourly wages like your groundskeepers, electricians, registrar assistants, work study students, etc. It probably (I'm speculating) doesn't even count a goodly chunk of the secretaries.

Surely such administrative bloat is ridiculous, no?

On the other hand, talking about Administrative Bloat is a popular pastime among people who don't know much about running organizations. It's always harder to point at a particular position and say "We don't need YOU." It's like government spending: everyone likes to reduce it in theory, but in practice that gets harder.

So just for perspective, here's a list of administrahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftive positions at a local college (Chapman) that I cobbled together from their "Key Department" listings and the associated links. It's almost certainly incomplete, and I've tried only to grab titles that sounded like they would actually be admin/professional. I've left out almost all duplicated titles (on the grounds that they can't be that important and are really just titles for worker bees), anyone who looked like they might be faculty, and I've tried to eliminate as many duplicative spots as I could find (i.e., where the same person has more than one position). I was unable to get any information on their External Education or Legal Affairs offices -- there doesn't seem to be any sort of generally accessibly telephone directory for the university.

Controller (Accounting/Financial Services)
Assistant Controller
General Account Manager
Accounts Payable Manager
Financial Manager
Payroll Manager
Director of Grants and Contracts
Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief Admission Officer
Director of Undergraduate Admission
Associate Director of Admission
Associate Director of Admission and Int'l Admission Officer
Assistant Director of Admission (TWO OF THEM!)
Assistant Director of Admission: Transfer / Int'l
Communication, Publications, & Events Coordinator (Admissions)
Chancellor (Adult Education)
Director of Athletics
Associate Director of Athletics
Senior Women's Administrator (Athletics)
Assistant Athletics Director (TWO OF THEM!)
Sports Information Director
Business Manager (Athletics)
Recreational Sports Manager
Director of Student Business Services
Assistant Director of Student Business Services
OC Student Account Advisor Supervisor
Vice President of Campus Planning
Director of Property Management
Director of Career Development Center
Chancellor
Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs and Assessment Liaison Officer
Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education
Vice Chancellor for Special Projects
Vice Chancellor and Dean for Enrollment Management
Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Dean of Students
Vice Chancellor for Academic Administration
Assistant Chancellor
Director of Institutional Research
Director of Academic Technology and Digital Media
Director of Academic Advising
Director of Fellowships and Scholar Programs
Financial Operations Manager
Testing Administrator, Academic Advising Center
Dean of the Chapel
Director of Conferences and Event Scheduling Services
Director of Facilities Management
Associate Director, Facilities Management
Building Trades Manager
Contract Services & Events Manager
Project Manager, Facilities Maintenance
Director of Financial Aid
Assoc. Dean/Director of Housing & Residence Life
Assistant Director of Housing and Residence Life
Vice President of Human Resources
HR Services Coordinator
Equal Opportunity Officer
Employment Services Manager
Director of Employee Relations and Performance Management
Benefits Manager
Director of HRIS and Compensation
Chief Information Officer (IT / Tech)
Director of Communications and Media Relations
Public Relations Coordinator
Public Relations Editor
Public Relations Writer
Chief of Public Safety
Director of Purchasing
University Registrar
Associate Registrar - Registration & Enrollment Records
Associate Registrar
Associate Registrar - Datatel & Clearinghouse Management
Assistant Registrar - Transfer Credit & Articulations
Assistant Registrar - Degree Audit & Curriculum
Director, Student Health Services
Executive Vice President, University Advancement
Assistant VP, University Advancement
Director of External Relations (Univ. Adv.)
Manager, Advancement Communications and Gov't Relations (Univ. Adv.)
Assistant VP, Advancement Operations & Information Systems
Director, Prospect Research (Adv. Op. & Inf. Sys.)
Director, Alumni Engagement
Assistant Director of Alumni Engagement
Assistant Director, Alumni Oportunities
Director of Annual Giving (I'll assume the three managers have glorified titles)
Assistant Director, Parent & Grandparent Relations (Annual Giving)
Manager, Donor Relations (Annual Giving)
Director of Special Events (Annual Giving)
Director, Corporate & Foundation Relations (Annual Giving)
Director of Planned Giving (Annual Giving)
Vice President, Strategic Marketing and Communications
Associate Director of Creative Services
Director of University Services
Operations Supervisor (University Services)
Dean of Business & Economics School (BES)
Associate Dean (BES)
Assistant Dean (BES) - Graduate and Executive Programs
Assistant Dean (BES)
Director: Center for Economic Research (BES)
Director: Center for Real Estate and Finance (BES)
Director: Center for International Business (BES)
Dean, Education College (EC)
Associate Dean (EC)
Assistant Dean - Undergraduate Education (EC)
Director, Athletic Training Education Program (EC)
Director, PhD Programs (EC)
Director, Teacher Education (EC)
Dean, College of Film and Media Arts (FMA)
Senior Associate Dean and Chief Academic Officer (FMA)
Associate Dean (FMA)
Dean, Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS)
Director, Undergraduate Writing
Co-Director of the Guggenheim Gallery (two)
Director, Center for Holocaust Education
(Most administrators in HSS seem to be faculty)
Interim Dean, Law School (LAW)
Associate Dean of Academic Affairs (LAW)
Associate Dean for Administration (LAW)
Assistant Dean of Student and Alumni Affairs (LAW)
Interim Director, Law Library
Assistant Dean of Admission & Financial Aid (LAW)
Dean, College of Performing Arts (PER)
Director, Conservatory of Music
(There's no dean of the College of Science because it's filled by the Vice Chancellor for Special Projects)
Senior Associate Dean, College of Science (SCI)
Associate Dean, Earth and Health Sciences
Associate Dean, Health and Life Sciences
Associate Dean, Computational Sciences
Director, Marriage and Family Therapy Program
Director, Food Science Program
Director, Hazards, Global & Environmental Change Program
Director, Health Communication Program
Director, Economic Science Institute
Director, Honors Program
Director, Undergraduate Research
Dean of the Libraries
Associate Dean of the Libraries
Collection Management Division Chair
Library Systems and Technology Chair
Public Services Chair (Libraries)

That's quite a bit - around 130. Total enrollment at the school for all of its various colleges is around 6,000. They've got around 400 professors (calculated from a 15:1 claimed student faculty ratio). So it doesn't seem that bad, does it?

Well, obviously this proves nothing at all -- I have no idea whatsoever how many I missed in my really, really brief trip through their web pages. I could have gotten 70%, or only 20% -- I don't know. But I think it helps put it in perspective to actually see all those titles.

We should also bear in mind that a lot of those titles -- particularly the Center Directors, are specifically endowed positions, so it's not like the university is losing money by paying them.

I guess my point is just this: having more administrators/professionals than faculty seems like it's a generally bad idea, but if it's a bad idea it's a bad idea because specific administrative positions aren't needed. It's not a bad idea in and of itself -- after all, the modern university does a LOT MORE for its students than mere academics. Now maybe you think that shouldn't the part of the university mission (I'm rather of that mind myself), but then you're problem isn't really with the number of administrators at all, but rather with the university mission itself.

Double Majors

2011-06-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

Erin O'Connor has an interesting post up about the value of humanities majors in college, to which I wish to add only the following thought:

All three of the "Hugh Akston heroes" in Atlas Shrugged (Galt, d'Anconia, Danneskjöld) studied both Philosophy and Physics. To the extent that one thinks that there was something valid in Rand's portrayal of a morally centered, competent person (I don't agree with her philosophy in toto, but neither do I dismiss it out of hand) one might think that what Erin is suggesting has some prior support.

Destroy Education to Save It?

2011-06-09T09:09:00.001-07:00

That's what Zombie thinks. He went to a teachers' rally and didn't like what he saw.

Will it mean chaos for a generation of students? An unstable and ever-shifting educational landscape? Maybe. And I wish that wasn’t so. But I see no other viable alternative.

Do I wish there was another, more palatable solution? Sure. But these leftist teachers like the ones you see on this page leave me no option: They’re not going to change their political stripes, and they’re not going to voluntarily relinquish control of our public schools or our children’s minds. So as I said at the beginning of this essay:

We have to destroy education in order to save it.

And after everything has collapsed and been rebuilt, maybe then we could re-create public education from scratch, free from politics and indoctrination. But until then I will have to reluctantly assume the role of the villain in the school funding debate. It’s for the children!

I confess I have trouble taking his blog post seriously, even if he meant it in all seriousness. (And sometimes it's hard to tell whether a blogger is serious, joking, or simply hiding a serious point within decidedly unserious rhetoric.) If we've come to the point where political divisions prevent us from having a foundational system of public education, well, houses divided and all that. Such a nation isn't long for this earth.

If I take his post seriously, I must simply despair.

That's not to say he doesn't have some good points. I'm all for lowering the compulsory education age as far as ten or twelve. And I think that Pierce v. Society of Sisters needs to be taken more seriously (along with the 9th and 10th Amendments), and that homeschooling and other alternative forms of education need to suffer from less "oversight" and regulation. But none of that means destroying public education.

His wish to destroy public education seems entirely partisan; I doubt he'd have any problem with it if it weren't a bastion of his political enemies. (And I seriously question whether it is; perhaps in Los Angeles it is, but it is a common lament among college professors that high school teachers, by and large, are exquisitely conservative and that they've brainwashed the poor kids who now need to unlearn all their conservative instincts.) Indeed, it's odd to hear someone who apparently disdains "progressives" adopt one of their fundamental tropes: destroy the old system and bring out a new future! Does he understand how much he sounds like the stereotypical college revolutionary?

Maybe we need reduced funding. Maybe more flexible funding. Maybe we need alternative funding mechanisms like endowments -- but I'm simply not on board with his thesis that we should destroy the public schools. In fact, I think it's a little ridiculous. And it is the duty of the citizen, inter alia, to condemn silly ideas when they enter the public forum.

Mass Differentiation

2011-06-09T06:57:00.000-07:00

Kids and young adults don't understand expertise, that is, they don't really understand how wide the range of human ability in a given area really is. They can't, because they don't have any real experience with it. Even if they are experts in something (I'm thinking of, say, teenage chess phenoms), they haven't had a lot of experience with other experts, and they (probably -- I'm having to guess at this point) think that they're just better than other people without understanding how much better. They might understand that, say, LeBron James is an expert, or that Gary Kasparov is an expert, but they don't really "get" how much better an expert is at something than a non-expert.

Just by way of example, a bright high school graduate might think that they understand world history -- after all, they've taken three classes in it since 7th grade, and they got A's! Oh sure, there are people who know more history. But it's just a matter of studying a little more. Then they go to college, and they realize that they didn't know much history at all. But now they've majored in history -- surely they know history now! Well -- not so fast. Now they decide to go to graduate school, let's say. Now they come to understand that even undergraduate history majors don't really know that much about history.

And it's right about then that they start to understand that it's not just history: it's everything. An expert mechanic can often tell what's wrong with your car just by listening. An expert plumber can finesse a stuck snake out of a pipe when you and your five friends couldn't get it out with all the tools and effort in the world. An expert juggler can do things that the juggling club in college never dreamed of.

Humans can get very, very, very good at things. It's part of our DNA -- we learn, and we adapt. But it takes time for us to develop a sense of how good people can get at things (and how narrow of a focus an expertise can have). It takes experience and exposure and thought to really understand how wide the various gulfs of human talent and ability are.

But if that's true on the macro-level, I think it's also true on a smaller level. I don't think that people generally appreciate the size of the ability gap between a smart and well-prepared student and a somewhat dim and ill-prepared student. It's enormous. There are 8th graders who know more math (and better) than a lot of 12th graders will ever know. There are 10th graders with a greater understanding of poetry than a lot of people will ever know. And there are students who only in high school get to the level of academic ability where most of their classmates were in 6th grade.

It's not just a matter of talent, either. Academic ability, or as some people call it, "cognitive ability", is a combination of natural mental aptitudes (flexibility, memory, etc.), practiced aptitudes, actual knowledge, and motivations. There are plenty of really "bright" kids out there with good mental flexibility, decent memories, and a little practice at being clever who are actually low achievers because they didn't (or don't) have motivation or background knowledge; they have, often through no fault of their own, squandered some prime learning years. It's easy to think that, with just a little extra work, you can get these bright kids "caught up" with their more advanced peers. (There was a commenter on one of Joanne's posts a short while ago, BenF, who made this exact point in the context of a discussion about AP classes for everyone.)

But it's a mistake to think that. What you're seeing isn't just talent that hasn't blossomed; you're seeing an achievement gap that is the result of years of differentiated development. The well-prepared 6th grader isn't just better prepared than the ill-prepared 6th grader: he's years ahead, even if they have identical natural mental potentials. And the kids who are really at the bottom of the class aren't just behind, requiring a little more attention and motivation: they're years behind, even by 6th grade.

Knowledge and ability builds upon itself. It's like compound interest in that way. If you've had a lot of enrichment very early, and a lot of exposure to knowledge and a lot of social motivation to academically excel, you're going to be able to take advantage of the time in grades 1-3 in a way that isn't going to be possible for your less-well-prepared classmates. While they're learning to sound out words, you're going to be reading books, acquiring more knowledge, thinking more things. And that gap is only going to grow. And once again, this is true in reverse of those at the bottom end of the ability spectrum -- whether they are there for reasons of natural deficiencies, social reasons, or simple lack of knowledge: they are going to fall further and further behind even their average classmates because they are still learning to recognize letters.

So what are the consequences of all this if I'm right? Well, for starters, it seems like "Differentiated Instruction" (by which I mean the practice of teaching at multiple levels within the same classroom) is made even more difficult than people already think it is. You might think that not only should we break apart subject-specific classes in terms of ability level, but that we need more levels. Maybe instead of a year-long algebra class for everyone, what we need is a six month algebra class, a year-long algebra class, and a two-year algebra class. Maybe we need to divide up the grades into more grades, K-24 instead of K-12, and allow kids (with parent approval) to simply test through some grades if they want.

Computer instruction offers a wealth of possibilities for supra-individuated instruction. I don't personally think it's any sort of panacea, and I think that there's something vital and important in real-life student-teacher contact that can't be duplicated with recorded lessons and flashing programs. But technology is at its best when it makes what we are already doing easier to do -- and if a computer network can help a teacher keep track of a larger variety of students, then maybe that's a good thing.

My suggestion is just this: we need to seriously consider that our student population is far, far more varied than we typically think, and we need to consider adjusting our institutions to meet this hyper-heterogeneity. We should give serious thought to whether opening different types of schools in the same district isn't a good idea. And I don't just mean arts magnets and tech magnets and so forth. I mean outright different types of educational institutions: remediation-intensive boarding schools, two-year high schools, half-day math schools and half-day reading schools -- I hate to use a cliche, but I'm talking about really outside-the-box sorts of institutional change, with smaller, more individualized schools and sub-schools. I'm already seeing some motion in that direction across the country, but I'm also seeing movement the other way: common core curricula, de-tracking, etc.

Of course, another reaction to my arguments is that we should just stop pouring resources into doing anything other than helping those who are on the lee side of this gaping ability chasm. After all, they're not only behind, but moving more slowly. And to some limited extent, I think that we've adopted this approach. We stick the bright, well-prepared kids into the same class and tell them to sit down, shut up, and be quiet. (We have to keep them off the streets, after all.)

In our more reflective moments, we hope that they will help their less advanced bretheren -- and we stupidly think that this will help close the ability gap. This, actually, has to be one of the silliest ideas I have ever heard. Do people who advocate this not remember the second principle of teaching? You never learn a subject better than when you teach it to someone else. If we were serious about closing the ability gap, we'd lock the bright, motivated, and/or well-prepared (pick two) kids in a room by themselves and turn off the lights for 8 hours a day.

Anyway, this is just a blog post. I'm not professing to have all the solutions to the world's ills. Heck, I don't even have a solution to what Mrs. Johnson should do with her 4th period class, because, frankly, I'm not an expert in her 4th period class the way she is (or should be, we might hope). I'm just an attorney and a philosopher and an educator thinking hard about a problem, and what sorts of things might work as solutions.

Guest-Post at a Better Blog

2011-06-08T20:32:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the magnanimity of my hostess, I've got a guest-post up at a much more interesting (and well-trafficked) blog than mine. It's about diversity at our mutual alma mater, Wesleyan University.

When Cheating is the Only Way to Win

2011-06-07T08:03:00.001-07:00

Something that has come up a lot in recent discussions in the edu-blogosphere (I'm specifically thinking of this conversation at Joanne's blog) is the "success" achieved by schools that experience tremendous rates of attrition. Many people are critical of this sort of "success", to the point where they think it's a form of failure. One regular commenter, CarolineSF, had this to say:

If I ran a school that were experiencing such high attrition (or, in the case of AIPCS, such a major transformation in demographics), it seems like my common-sense strategy would be to celebrate the successes of the remaining students, maintain good relations with my funders and school community, and LAY LOW, refraining from the public preening and boasting that prompts busybodies to look up the statistics.

The assumption is obviously that the high attrition is something to be ashamed of, something that runs counter to academic "success".

You might think that high attrition rates are a form of cheating, that true educational success involves educating everyone that walks through your door. LIkewise, you might think that not letting in the more difficult cases is like refusing to fence/wrestle/race against better opponents. Yes, you'll have a great record, but you're never getting to the Olympics that way.

Let's digress for a moment and talk about Star Trek. You've heard of the Kobayashi Maru scenario, I hope? If you haven't, follow the link and go read. Now, Kirk "cheated" because he changed the rules of the game. But the game couldn't be won with the rules it had -- all it could do was test your character as your ship was destroyed. That's great if what you're trying to do is see how people respond under pressure, it's not so great if you're trying to see who can actually succeed and who cannot.

I want to suggest the possibility that people who accuse high-attrition schools of 'cheating' (bearing in mind it's my word, not theirs) are misunderstanding what is going on, and that there is a difference between testing a school's character and testing a school's ability to educate students. I first brought this line of thought up in the comments to another post at Joanne's site. CarolineSF was making a similar point then to the point she makes above: namely that a school with a huge attrition rate can't be claimed to be "superior". Much of what I am going to say from here on is an elaboration on those comments.

Whether a school can be called "superior" or not depends entirely on what you think the goal is. For example: in SEAL training, the goal is to produce maximally competent and adaptable military operatives; because this is the success condition, the training has a huge attrition rate, and doesn't even let all that many people in in the first place. Likewise, you might imagine a training program that defined "success" in terms of producing as many people who can make a three-point shot as possible. They're going to run like an assembly line: anyone who is going to take more than a few days of training is going to be dismissed because the resources needed to train that person can be better used to train five others.

We need to understand what it is we believe the success conditions of our public school system to be. Understanding those success conditions will tell us what we should do vis-a-vis students with a wide range of "problems": poverty, illiteracy, various forms of social blight, hostility, sociopathy, disability, etc. If our success condition is "EVERY SINGLE BIOLOGICAL HUMAN THAT COMES THROUGH THAT DOOR NEEDS TO BE ABLE TO GET 1200 ON THE SAT", well, then that's our success condition.

But is that really what would make for a good school? I doubt it. I'm of the mind that the success conditions of public education should be twofold: First, any human being who presents him or herself as a student should be accepted by the teachers. Second, any student accepted by the teachers should meet some minimum threshold (say, a 1200 on the SAT. Or a statewide graduation exam, or something like that.)

Now it's the "presentes him or herself as a student" that is doing all my work for me, so let me explain what I mean. CarolineSF -- and people like her -- seem to be claiming that a "win" in education involves not just delivering the opportunity for a high-quality to every single human being under the age of 18 (I am loathe to call them all either children or students), but having that person successfully receive that education.

That position can't possible be right. It's a Kobayashi Maru scenario: all you're going to test is the character of your educators and administrators as your schools fail at the impossible. And I do mean "impossible", because learning isn't entirely up to the teachers. If I can quote St. Anselm's De Casu Diaboli for a moment:

Therefore, that which he did not receive to keep because he deserted it, he did not receive not because God did not give it, but, rather, God did not give it because he did not receive it.

Anselm's point here is that the Devil was not "fated" to turn to evil because of something God did: it's not that God did not give the devil the power to cleave unto the truth and the light. Anselm thinks that the receiving of something -- a facility, a quality, etc. -- can be conditioned on two separate requirements: that the thing be offered or given, and that the thing be accepted.

I'd like to posit that something very similar must occur with an education. It can be given by the teacher, by the relative, by the parent, but not received by the learner. And it is thus not received, but it is not received not because it is not given, but because it is not received. (Yes, I just compared some students to the Devil. I'm sure most teachers understand.)

In other words, at some level or another, a student has to want to learn; he or she has to be willing to receive instruction. Merely placing a human body in a classroom doesn't make them a student. A teacher must accept a student, and a student must accept the authority of a teacher:

First make sacred pact. I promise teach karate. That my part. You promise learn. I say, you do, no questions. That your part.

Daniel-San was a highly motivated learner. Not all students are going to be quite as motivated. Some will be of mixed minds, and some will be outright reluctant. It's surely true that some teachers are better than others at breathing life on the embers of interest. But that's an interpersonal talent that's dependent on chemistry, not really a teachable skill at all, and it's extremely context dependent. *I* might be the right person for getting Johnny interested in math, or Clara interested in Homer. But I might be the wrong person for getting Clara interested in math or Johnny interested in Physics. And in any case, there have to be embers there.

It might be possible to coerce learning, to some extent: reasonable minds differ on this point. Surely it's harder to coerce learning than mere behavior, but it strikes me that if I beat you (or even just threaten you credibly), I might be able to get you to "want" to do whatever it takes to get me to stop. And that seems like it's at least part of what we do with students right now: "get good grades or your future is doomed" we tell them. It's not a recipe for a good education -- for it puts the focus on the wrong things -- but it yields at least some results.

But there are human beings under the age of 18 who will not choose to be taught, who will not choose to be coerced, and who do not wish to receive what is offered to them. And it may just be that the right thing for a school to do in such a situation, assuming that your goal is educational success and not some sort of fascinating Kobayashi Maru psychology experiment, is to remove them from the school. Not necessarily permanently -- just until they decide they want to choose to learn, until they present themselves as a student.

Clearly this intuition of mine flies in the face of how we have our schools set up now. They are compulsory, and -- within certain limits -- we arrest kids and parents who don't attend. We tell teachers that they have to take as a student every human being who walks through their door. The teacher is deprived of the ability to pick and choose their students, to a certain extent.

And that's probably as it should be. Mr. Miyagi wasn't earning his keep as an instructor, otherwise he would have added "You promise learn and pay 19.99 per lesson." He was taking Daniel on as a charity case, which is noble. (And indeed, Socrates used to think that teaching for money was suspect.) So he got a choice. Teachers are working for the state (or for a private school, funded by parents). They agree, as part of their job, to take on any student who comes along.

But it's one thing to say that you have to teach all your students regardless of ability or economic background or culture or education level. That's fine -- call it "social justice" if you're inclined, or just call it "equal opportunity" if you're not. It's an entirely different matter to say that you have to teach all the human beings in your classroom, even if they don't want to be taught. The fact that the teacher is accepting a paycheck for such a task doesn't make it any less unrealistic a prospect. (N.B. - we do let people out of contracts on the grounds of impossibility...)

But if that's the success condition we have -- if Caroline SF is right -- then this is why I think that, in a sense, the "cheating" involved in attrition and dropout rates may be the only way to win: if you want a good school, if you want a school at all, you have to be able to get rid of human beings who do not wish to be students at all.

Alter v. Ravitch: A Call For Facts

2011-06-06T20:45:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Joanne Jacobs' excellent edublogging, I've been following what seem to be two sides of an argument that's shaping up. It started with Diane Ravitch in the NYT, which Joanne blogged about here. Then recently, Jonathan Alter (who I'm always confusing with Eric Alterman for the obvious morphological reasons) wrote a response to Ravitch, which Joanne blogged about here.

Except it's not really two sides of an argument at all. It's Diane Ravitch presenting an argument (that's probably wrong, I should note), and Jonathan Alter launching a rhetorical diatribe about her recent positions based not on their falsity, but apparently on their being, well, depressing:

While healthy skepticism is a virtue, Ravitch seems bent on extinguishing any hope that our teachers and schools can do better. In an op-ed in the New York Times on June 1, she derided the impressive progress made at three public schools as “a triumph of public relations” based on “statistical legerdemain.”

Yes, but is she wrong?

Also from Alter:

“This was a very cynical statement that she doesn’t believe teachers and schools can make a difference in high-poverty areas,” says Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston, a former teacher and principal whose sweeping tenure-reform law is a national model. “We can debate facts at particular schools but you just can’t deny that some places are getting phenomenal results -- results that should be celebrated, not called out as fraudulent.”

Except that Ravitch does deny it. And just because she's cynical doesn't mean she's wrong. That's not an argument: it's an insult coupled with a flat-out contradiction.

Let's take the case of Bruce Randolph School. Here's what they have to say. I apologize for the lengthy quotes, but I want to get their arguments right next to each other on the page so you can see what's going on.

Ravitch:

True, Randolph (originally a middle school, to which a high school was added) had a high graduation rate, but its ACT scores were far below the state average, indicating that students are not well prepared for college. In its middle school, only 21 percent were proficient or advanced in math, placing Randolph in the fifth percentile in the state (meaning that 95 percent of schools performed better). Only 10 percent met the state science standards. In writing and reading, the school was in the first percentile.

Alter:

Her so-called evidence that the school is cooking its books is that Randolph’s ACT scores are far below the state average, as if such comparisons to wealthy districts somehow disqualify Randolph’s impressive year-over-year improvement in most areas. (And since when does Ravitch credit test scores?)

Ravitch also goes after the performance of Randolph’s middle school without mentioning that the results from sixth- graders -- one-third of the school -- merely reflect how poorly the students were prepared by the schools they previously attended, a significant though hardly atypical example of her misuse of statistics.

I'd like to point out first that the ONLY before-and-after statistic that we have for this school from either of these two is the graduation rate, which is going up. Ravitch cites low test scores, but how do we know that the low test scores aren't actually a vast improvement? Ravitch is a frackin' professor writing in the NYT. She should know better.

But Alter doesn't really claim improvement in test scores -- he makes vague claims about year over year improvements in "most areas", whatever that means. For all I know, it could be finger painting and plays well with others that have seen year over year improvements. He sure makes it sound like the test scores are improving, but no competent attorney would let a wishy-washy, noncommittal statement like that pass in deposition.

Maybe the test scores are going up. But the real question is this: are the test scores going up enough to justify using a term like "phenomenal results"? If they are, then Ravitch really does seem to be making the untenable argument that the "reform" she's critiquing isn't justified unless the worst schools turn into the best schools, which is ridiculous. On the other hand, if they aren't, then Alter's being somewhat misleading, because I do not read Ravitch as asserting that test scores haven't gone up, merely that the degree to which they have isn't really a cause for joy, celebration, or wholehearted endorsement of certain reforms.

But instead of all this debate, what say we instead have some dialectic? How about some real, actual facts about the schools in question? Here's what I could find:

Bruce Randolph Writing Scores Over Time (2004-2010): There's some signs of a general trend over 5 years upward. Alter would probably proclaim "Proficiency levels are up almost 100%!" Ravitch would probably claim "Proficiency has inconstantly moved from below 10% to below 20%."

I have to give points to Alter on this one, though. There does appear to be improvement. In fact, if things are as Ravitch posits them -- if the problems of poverty are severe and systemic -- then the results are even more impressive. Nothing like arguing against yourself...

(Still, it looks like the school is suffering major attrition -- just watch the "number tested" fall from grade to grade. That makes its graduation rate a lot less impressive, and could affect how we're looking at test scores, too.)

Math Scores Over Time: No question about this -- there's some pretty remarkable improvement. Point Alter.

Reading? Again, definite improvement.

How about Miami Central?

Reading.
Math.

Imrovement in both cases, it seems. Especially if you're looking in the "meets standards" column over on the right.

Are these results "phenomenal"? I don't think so, but I encourage you to go judge for yourself. Don't trust any of the sides of the debate to give you actual facts, even when they're right. In the case of Bruce Randolph, it looks like hard, steady, grinding improvement, with all the sorts of inconstant ups and downs you'd expect of a work in progress. In the case of Miami Central, it looks a little more impressive.

My final conclusion? Ravitch is mostly wrong: the improvements seem nontrivial and wanting of an explanation that could very well have to do with the reforms in question, even if she (and I) wouldn't characterize those improvements as glowingly as some people might. The alleged spike in graduation rates, though, seem disproportionate to the actual learning being accomplished (at least the tested learning). So that's an area that needs to be looked at more closely.

Alter, on the other hand, is apparently a sophistical polemicist who can't even make a point well when the evidence is on his side. Maybe Ravitch is shilling for the unions. I don't care about her motivations: I care about the facts.

So, based on my incredibly unscientific internet-digging, it seems like maybe there's some considerable improvement. And there's definitely reform. That's a correlation, maybe. We should want of control groups if we're going to be serious about this. There could be some new television program out there that's turning kids into geniuses. But let's say Ravitch is wrong, tentatively, on the facts.

NOW we can start arguing about causation. Anyone got some popcorn?

An excellent article for high school students

2011-06-06T08:43:00.000-07:00

Megan McArdle, economic policy blogger extraordinaire, is a woman of vast and divers talents. Today she's put up an amazing essay that I think I'm going to start recommending to students, and that I heartily recommend to high school English teachers everywhere.

The essay, which you should go read for yourself, is about the relationships among authors, their works, and their audience. Specifically, her concern is with the audience's relationship with the work in light of their moral evaluation of the author.

The main point is a really sound one: we shouldn't throw out works of art merely because the authors are, in some way, unpalatable. This is a lesson that some progressives would love dearly to teach conservatives, whom they see as discarding a cornucopia of art on the basis of racism, homophobia, etc. But it's also a lesson that some progressives could learn themselves. The fact that Mel Gibson might be a racist isn't really a good reason not to enjoy Braveheart, which is a fine film (gross historical inaccuracies and the wobbly axe aside), and I've heard well-intentioned people say that they would not watch that movie anymore. I think there's a saying about cutting off one's nose...

But there are other important lessons buried in this excellent essay. I was particularly struck by her identification of what makes art, particularly literary art, persuasive:

But when art-as-politics airbrushes out the dead people at the steel works, it can be very convincing, which is why advocates like it; Uncle Tom's Cabin did more for the Abolitionist cause than a hundred thousand lectures. The problem is, it can convince of the bad as easily as the good--Gone With the Wind reached many more people than Uncle Tom's Cabin, in part because--despite its ugly racial politics--it's a much better book with richer characters and more believable action. There are also the heroic misfires, where the author rouses fierce passions about the wrong issue. * * * *

You see the point: what makes a political narrative convincing is not the correctness of its ideas, but power of the characters and the imagery.

Literature, if McArdle is right, when it is in its argumentative rather than merely entertaining mode, is more about non-deliberative manipulation than it is about arguing a point rationally. This doesn't make literature or poetry evil or even morally questionable -- we manipulate people to good ends, and with good effect, and using permissible methods all the time. It merely underlines her point: that something is aesthetically convincing doesn't mean it's true.

That distinction is probably the source of the deepest divide between literature and philosophy, a divide that I often lament. Philosophers as a class are often not interested in poetry, likely for this very reason. The other day I said something about Winnie the Pooh's being lumpy. One of my colleagues said, "That's ridiculous. He doesn't exist. He can't be lumpy." I'm only exaggerating slightly when I say that the typical philosopher's response to "The moon was a ghostly galleon" is "False."

Anyway, that's a lot of talk for what amounts to a simple "Go read this" link, so I'll stop now and just urge you to share this essay with your students.

Homework

2011-06-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

Via EducationNews, I learn that there's a district that is considering a "ban" on homework over the weekend and over holidays. Apparently "the homework debate" has picked up in recent years -- what with mounting concerns about children's stress levels and such.

I'm not writing to take sides in this debate, other than perhaps to say that I don't see how a child can learn to write a 10-page paper without actually writing it, and that it seems impossible to both teach how to write such a paper and write it in the same 50-minute increments that make up the typical classroom. Presumably this would carry over to certain other specific kinds of tasks, too.

I'm writing today to talk about the nature and purpose of homework. What's it for? Galloway Township, the district that is the subject of the article, has this to say:

The Board of Education believes that homework relevant to material presented in class provides an opportunity to broaden, deepen or reinforce the pupil’s knowledge. Teachers must use discretion in deciding the number and length of assignments. The board encourages the use of interrelated major homework assignments, such as term papers, themes and creative art projects.

I have to say, that's not terribly helpful. "Broaden, deepen or reinforce"? Well which is it? (Let's put aside the serial comma rule for now.)

Deepen and broaden seem almost to be synonyms to my ear. One deepens one's knowledge of a subject by broadening one's view of what's relevant to it. An example might be a history research paper on a topic only mentioned in class. Perhaps the teacher spent 6 minutes talking about Guadalcanal, for instance, in the course of discussing the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific. Now the student can go write a paper focusing on the strategic value of the airfield or something. The student's knowledge of the battle is being broadened, in that new facts are being added, and deepened in that these new facts are being integrated into his or her view of what was at stake and how things fell out.

Likewise, you might assign students some poems to read and think about for homework. Their overall knowledge is broadening by being exposed to new poetry, and their knowledge of poetry itself is deepening in that these new poems are becoming part of what they think about when they think about poetry.

Reinforcement, on the other hand, just sounds like practice. And practice is really necessary for any sort of skill. If you pay some rice to study kung-fu with the ancient master, for instance, you don't just practice it when you're in his immediate presence. You also practice it when you're by yourself. Presumably you practice because you want to get good at it. Likewise, if you want to get good at math, it's probably a good idea to practice until the operations become second nature. That's how you develop fluency, and expertise. (It's entirely plausible to say that this is a form of "deepening" one's knowledge; that's not how I'd use the term, but I'm hardly the arbiter of semantic content.)

One might be forgiven for thinking that fluency and expertise in a subject is the very purpose of education. On the other hand, smart people have told me that the purpose of college is to make one an acceptable conversationalist at cocktail parties, so go figure.

These are two VERY different roles that homework, according to the board, can accomplish. And it seems to me that they are justified in very different ways. The first type of homework -- broadening/deepening -- is justified in the same way that any other curricular content is justified: it is part of what is being taught. The fact that it is assigned as homework is merely due to the fact that there aren't enough hours in the school day. Otherwise it would be perfectly appropriate to have the students work on their papers in the classroom or in the library.

The justification for the second type -- practice -- seems far less stable to me. Practice in class and practice at home seem like very different things, and the latter is, on my view, wholly dependent on the student's caring about developing fluency and expertise. If he doesn't want to practice, well, he won't do as well on the test. But that seems like it should be his business. Using homework to show that a student has "sufficiently mastered a skill" seems rather backwards to me. That's a thing for exams under controlled conditions. To go back to the kung fu analogy, if you don't practice, you don't get the red sash of the Flopping Dragon school, because the Master won't pass you.

So I can see a reason to have the first type of homework as something assigned. I can only see the second as justified in terms of providing optional opportunities for practice.

I make the conclusions about justification tentatively, and I certainly don't think I've proven anything. But I am certain that the underlying premise -- that the justification for homework depends on its nature and purpose -- is correct. I invite comments, as always.

Yes. I'm really back.

2011-06-05T10:27:00.000-07:00

I've been writing such long, extended comments at other people's blogs I decided it's time to get Highered Intelligence up and running. I blogged fairly consistently for three years in my previous incarnation, and so I know the workload I'm taking on. It's time, though. I'm simply too full of myself to keep quiet any longer. I'm going to probably be focusing on longer, more in-depth posts than I was before, but that's just part of how my writing has changed in the intervening years.

I'd like to extend my personal thanks to Joanne Jacobs, Diana Senechal, and Rachel Levy for helping me realize what I've been missing the last few years.

Values Education, Indoctrination, and Methods

2011-06-05T09:12:00.000-07:00

This post came out of a comment that I attempted to make on Rachel Levy's excellent blog. It arises out of an exceedingly interesting exchange that she's having with Mr. Yglesias about values education. I've really enjoyed reading it. It started here with Yglesias arguing that Charter schools may be doing necessary work given their context, with Rachel's comment here, then Yglesias responded here, leading Rachel to post this, to which I was writing the comment that led to this post. The disagreement, on its face, is over whether poor kids need to be taught middle-class values. But I think there's something more fundamental under the surface that needs to be addressed.

Now, I've a professional interest in this debate -- it falls pretty squarely in the area Philosophy of Education on which I'm writing my dissertation -- so I hope that my readers will forgive me if I go on at length, and my colleagues will forgive me if I'm abrupt and cursory in some of my argumentation. It's also of paramount importance that you read the back-and-forth posts before continuing. Much of what I say won't make sense if you don't.

I don't think that Rachel is being as charitable as she could be about Yglesias' argument. I certainly don't think that this is because she's being disingenuous in any way, but because I think there's a buried (and true) assumption that Yglesias is making about how values operate that isn't coming across in his postings, and if it were, I don't think the two of them would seem (or be) so at odds. He doesn't make this point explicitly, though. And while it's possible I'm reading way too much into this, here's what I think is going on.

Let's take this paragraph of Rachel's as a starting point:

Undoubtedly, kids learn norms and behaviors in school from one another--that's part of going to school. The value attached to these norms and behaviors all depends on, well, what each individual values. That being acknowledged, it's not my job as a public school teacher to teach social values beyond, say, teaching students how to get along, and how to peacefully resolve disputes that might arise in my classroom. Rather, it's my job to provide an education. Now, I do need to teach the values or habits of a good student, for example, completing assignments in a timely and comprehensive manner, reading as much and as often as possible, participating respectfully in class discussions, listening to teachers and classmates, coming to class on time, not plagiarizing or cheating, and I have no doubt that KIPP teaches their kids to have the habits of good students. But ultimately, to get students to practice these habits, I need to show them the value of what I'm teaching and that I value their time and effort.

So, we're given that there's some set of values or habits that she wants to teach to her students. Now, while 'habit' and 'value' are distinct concepts, the difference between a value-in-action and a habit isn't always clear: one way to think about values is as certain types of attitudes, that is, as habits of decision-making. You can tell that I "value" my group identity (or, put another way, that group loyalty is one of my "values") because when I have a decision in which group interests can focus as a reason, I am inclined to give such reasons more weight in my deliberations.

This is different, though, than mere behavioral habits that aren't expressions of deliberation (scratching my head when I'm trying to decide between two options, for instance, or swishing my soda around in my mouth before swallowing).

Now, I take it that if pressed, Rachel would say she wants to teach students to value good student habits in the sense of the word "value" that I just used, and not just in the raw sense of thoughtless habit. That's not only admirable, but, I think, the proper attitude for an educator. I also think she is absolutely right when she says:

(Y)ou can't teach kids to value education by telling them to value education.

But how does one teach kids to value education, and what does that actually mean? More specifically, what are the success conditions of having taught kids to value education?

On this point, it seems pretty clear to me that success has not occurred if a kid can merely recite to you what it means to value education, and what sorts of decisions he would make if he valued education. It seems like the success conditions of teaching a student to value education are that he actually values education, and that means that at some point in the process, values were inculcated. Another way of saying this -- and I don't mean to bring up the term in any morally charged way -- is that the teacher in order to succeed has to engage in some sort of process of values indoctrination.

Now there are LOTS of ways to to indoctrinate values -- some of which are morally troublesome, some of which aren't. You might think that the "organic" way that kids pick up on values by modeling the behavior of others isn't on its face morally suspect, but that, say, a regimen of suggestibility drugs coupled with torture designed to make you really love (i.e., "value") Big Brother is morally suspect. You might think it's OK to engage in certain types of non-intrusive interpersonal manipulation, and so forth, but not, say, to lie to the kids in the course of inculcating values. (You could even think that the morality of values lies in the realm of content rather than process, and that the ends of indoctrination can justify at least some means. That's another view.)

But one thing that we should take into account - and this is the implicit premise that I see in Yglesias' argument -- is that there's a certain amount of "meta-valuation" that goes on in the shaping of a human personality. We not only value things such as group loyalty and so forth, but we value values themselves. Now we might have all sorts of different reasons for valuing a set of values: perhaps we want to fit in, perhaps we want to get love from our family, perhaps we have some greater value (duty to country, say) that we see as requiring us to take on some other, subordinate set of values (martial values, respect for authority, etc.).

I take it that Yglesias' point, if he were to slow down and think about it, is that poorer kids, by and large, don't have as part of their natural value system the sorts of values that cause them to adopt certain other values, such as valuing education, valuing certain types of work ethics, etc. And I also take it that he thinks that one way to adopt these second order values is the organic, modeling way that kids pick these things up, but that failing that, a certain amount of more heavy-handed (though not, by his lights, immmoral) indoctrination is in order.

Rachel's response to this is, as best I can tell, is to say that she doesn't want to engage in values instruction. But it seems this leads to a necessary contradiction. Let's revisit two sentences:

The value attached to these norms and behaviors all depends on, well, what each individual values.

That seems right, as far as it goes. There are some values, and then there's a meta-valuative structure of other values, and a child's attitude towards the subordinate values is going to be determined by the higher-order values. But then Rachel also says this:

But ultimately, to get students to practice these habits, I need to show them the value of what I'm teaching and that I value their time and effort.

But what is this "showing them the value" if it isn't the actual indoctrination of a higher-order value designed to get them to adopt the lower-order values of "valuing education"? In other words, the course of action she is prescribing just is a certain kind of interpersonal manipulation through example, persuasion, etc. (and I don't mean "manipulation" in a morally charged sense) designed to get them to "buy in" to the values set that both she and Yglesias want the kids to adopt.

In other words, they're both advocating the same thing at a more general level of description: engaging in the imprinting of second-order values. They just disagree about the process that should be used. Rachel thinks that the teacher's role should be more subtle. (To be fair, an opponent might say more "seductive" or "insidious".) Yglesias seems to think that there are two options: the organic way that a child grows into community values and some sort of more structured, focused sort of indoctrination.

But there does not seem to me to be as much daylight between them as either of them thinks there is.