Education

Talk about burying the lead! All the press coverage of Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove’s recent speech to the Institute of Public Policy Research focused on the fact that he had a bit of a go at “Nuts” and “Zoo”[1]. But they missed the real highlight of Gove’s speech, which is that he favourably cited CT’s own Harry Brighouse (and some bloke called Adam Swift, who is less newsworthy. Yay Harry.

If you look at Gove’s speech, it’s actually surprisingly socially liberal and sensible stuff – a bit of apologia for the Tory Party’s historical treatment of gays and single mums, a bit of blah about communitarianism and a strong hint that Crooked Timber will be invited to draft future Conservative education policy once they get into power (I may be reading a bit too much between the lines here). I could almost see myself voting for the guy if it wasn’t all so transparently a pack of bollocks. I mean really, the Conservative Party, in office, is going to subsidise unprofitable post offices? I was born during a shower of rain, but I wasn’t born during the last shower of rain. Increased devolution to local government? Subsidised maternity nurses on the Dutch model? I scratch my chin, sir, and nod vaguely in the direction of the marginal rate of capital gains tax. About the only thing in this speech which you’re ever going to see is the education vouchers proposal, and I confidently predict that the administration of that one is going to be cocked up on an epic scale.

But nonetheless, the philosophical underpinnings of Cameronism, in as much as Gove sets them out here, are both interesting and sensible. Worth a look.

Update: Despite the implication given by the title of this post, the Conservative Party are not currently the government.
[click to continue…]

The eternal trench warfare between teachers and students over exams and other forms of assessment has long been a popular topic here at CT (unsurprisingly, viewed mostly from the teacher’s side of the barbed wire).

Having been on both sides at different times, I’m an observer of the process these days, since my research fellowship doesn’t involve running any courses (though I give a fair number of guest lectures in various subjects). Back in the 60s and 70s, when I was a student, the whole system of examinations and marks was one of the big targets of radical critique; even if relatively minor in the great scheme of things, exams loomed large in our lives, and seemed like a symbol of much that was wrong with society.

That kind of debate seems to have disappeared entirely. While a variety of alternatives to exams have been tried, the pressure to cut costs has driven universities (in Australia at any rate) back to heavy reliance on exams, and, within that, to heavy use of multiple choice and short-answer tests. But the real question is why universities spend so much time and effort on marks and grading, with the consequence of continuous low-level war between teachers and students.

[click to continue…]

My dad called earlier today to say that he was about to attend, and speak at, the farewell do for my old school, which is about to be closed after being in special measures for a few years. It made me feel a bit sad – I wasn’t there long, and didn’t have an especially enjoyable time, but to know that somewhere you spent formative years is to be no more is a shame. And formative they were.

[click to continue…]

They play a great game in the UK every summer (no, not cricket, that’s far more important than a mere game). In May and June 16 and 18 year-olds take externally and anonymously graded exams (A-levels for the 18 year olds, GCSE’s for the 16 year olds), and the results come out later in the summer. In June lots of journalists write about how much easier these exams are than they used to be. (This is an especially appealing hypothesis for those of us who took O-levels before they were abolished in favour of GCSEs, and struggled to get B’s and lower, but who see our friends’ children sailing through with lots of As). When the results come out in August, the same journalists look at whether average results have gone up or down. If they have gone up, this is proof that the exams are getting easier (grade inflation); if they go down this is proof that the students are stupider or the schools are worse. This happens every year, without fail, as if no-one has noticed that it happened last year and the year before. Hence this piece from Minnette Marin.

I’m going to ignore Marin’s curious attacks on my friend John White (curious, because she seems to agree with him pretty much exactly on all the issues, so I don’t understand why she feels the need to be so hostile to him) and focus on the other things she says.

First, grade inflation.

[click to continue…]

Sarah Waldeck has some thoughtful responses at Concurring Opinions to some of the comments made in the previous post as well as Larry Solum’s post on her paper.

I blogged this long ago and somewhere else, but the annual chore of assessing exam scripts has brought it back to mind. Bill Pollard and Soran Reader at Durham devised this ideal exam :

Philosophy Exam – First Year

Answer two questions

Two hours

1. Patch together some things you have heard in lectures, in no particular order.

2. Has this question vexed philosophers for centuries?

3. Create an impression of original thought by impassioned scribbling (your answer may be ungrammatical, illegible, or both).

4. Does the answer to this question depend on what you believe?

5. How much irrelevant historical background can you give before addressing this question?

6. Describe two opposing views, then say what you personally feel.

7. Rise above the fumbling efforts of others and speculate freely on an issue of your choice.

8. EITHER

(a) Answer this question by announcing that it really means something different (and much easier to answer).

OR

(b) Write out your answer to last year’s question on this topic.

9. Protest your convictions in the teeth of obvious and overwhelming objections.

10. Keep your reader guessing about what you think until the end. Then don’t tell them.

Via Larry Solum, an interesting article by Sarah Waldeck on private university endowments in the US. She analyses the data, arguing that it is more informative to look at endowment:expense ratios than absolute endowment sizes (on the ratio ranking, Harvard is #9 and Grinnell #1, whereas on endowment size Harvard is #1 and Grinnell #25). Waldeck points out that taxpayers subsidize these endowments (by giving substantial tax deductions to donors) and suggests that one reason universities benefit from largesse is that they find it easy to absorb large amounts of money and so are attractive to donors. They also, unlike foundations for example, have no obligation to spend the money! She is pretty convincing that there is no good literature defending the accumulation of endowments. But, like Solum, I am a bit skeptical of some of her proposals for taxing and regulating endowments. In particular, in so far as her aim is to lower tuition across the board, that seems a regressive measure: regulating endowments so that they lower tuition ends up reducing the price of an elite education for children of the wealthy (most of these schools already have incredibly low true tuition for children from non-wealthy families). Solum:

[click to continue…]

The Spencer Foundation has just announced a small grants program, specifically to encourage philosophers to work on issues in education. The grants are up to $40k and the application process is relatively easy. This is part of a larger long-term Intitiative to help build Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice. (Full disclosure: I’ve been working with the Spencer Foundation over the past couple of years to develop this intitiative, and am, with Mike McPherson, its co-director). One of the things I have noticed during my career is how many people who work in ethics or political philosophy start doing some medical ethics or bioethics, usually after being enticed, or invited, by medical schools to comment on various issues. Although there are numerous fascinating and difficult issues in the institutional world of education, it seems to me that far fewer normative philosophers get pulled into that arena, and the Initiative is an attempt to start to correct that. We’re especially hopeful that good philosophers who are nearing (and reasonably confident of getting), or have just gotten, tenure will explore this opportunity, even if they haven’t previously worked in this area.

One other comment. I kind of fell into working on educational issues, and did so before getting tenure. I probably would have done it anyway, but the strong encouragement of a couple of senior colleagues was a big help in assuring me that by taking up a neglected field I was not doing something that would be disapproved of. I suspect that some younger scholars worry, and usually wrongly, that philosophy of education and applied ethics generally might be frowned upon, so if you are a senior philosopher and have a junior colleague whom you think should take this up, it would be a good idea to tell them about it, approvingly, and directly.

Nancy Folbre, who is widely considered to be one of the most knowledgeable economists on issues of care work, has recently started a new blog, called Care Talk. It’s a research blog that aims to bring together interdisciplinary insights on issues of care—child care, care issues related to primary education, elder care, care for disabled, and health care. Care is a neglected issue in several disciplines and subdisciplines, including economics and political philosophy, and I can only applaud this initiative. I hope that this will become a genuine international blog— much can be learnt from looking at how care work is organised and divided in other countries.

Folbre published earlier this year her new book Valuing Children which I have here on my desk. I promise our readers a review of that book sometime in June.

No-one will be surprised to know that I admire Richard Rothstein, especially given how often I seem to parrot his arguments myself. Some readers may be more surprised that I also admire Frederick Hess (of the AEI no less); in fact one of my minor betes noir is the frequency with which NPR, when it wants a right winger to comment on an education policy issue, goes to Heritage or Cato, rather than to the AEI who have someone on staff who is a genuine expert, and smart with it. (If you want to understand why I like him, read Common Sense School Reform, which is typical of his work: lots of well-informed analysis and imaginative critique, peppered with just enough free-market ideology to signal that he’s firmly on the right but not enough to obscure the quality thinking). Both are somewhat skeptical of mainstream school improvement rhetoric, with Rothstein emphasizing out-of-school interventions, and Hess emphasizing the need for reforming school governance and organisational structures. If I had any power at all I’d force all public school officials ranked assistant principal or above, as well as all Education PhD students, to read Rothstein’s Class and Schools and Hess’s Common Sense School Reform. So I’ve always been curious what a Rothstein-Hess debate would be like and, to my delight, now I know: smart, sensible, and bereft of “invented artificial points of disagreement” (as Rothstein puts it). Cato Unbound commissioned Rothstein to write a 25th anniversary comment on A Nation At Risk, and recruited Hess as a critic. The other critics are not so interesting (partly because in order to criticize Rothstein they have to misinterpret him, which his critics frequently do, both from the right and the left). To help you out, the correct order of reading is Rothstein, Hess, Rothstein, Hess, Rothstein, Hess. Cato Unbound is often worth reading, and none more than this one.

Dina has kindly posted a draft of a chapter that I wrote that is forthcoming in a volume on Philosophy in Schools. I wrote most of it a long time ago, when I was working at the Institute of Education, and involved in developing the Citizenship Education program there. Conversations with teachers, teacher educators, and researchers confirmed that a lot of teachers who would be leaned on to teach Citizenship Education lack the necessary confidence and resources to teach about controversial moral issues in a non-dogmatic way. This is not a criticism—it is what I heard from them, directly. It seemed to me that the experience of college-level philosophy teachers especially of service courses (such as my Contemporary Moral Issues course) might be useful for teachers to reflect on. What especially struck me at the time was that teachers did not have a lot of written material to read, either to prompt discussion in class or to help them prepare for managing such discussion. So the chapter linked to basically outlines the way that I tend to introduce my CMI course, and outlines a way of thinking about the values at stake in various debates, but then, at the end, gives very short (1500 words or so) accounts of some of the moral debates around two issues in bioethics—abortion, and designing children. I’ve copied the “designing children” section below the fold, but encourage teachers to read the whole thing.

A comment Dina made to me in an email—that she was preparing to use a thought experiment from my book Justice in class—prompted me to think it might be useful to collect a bunch of such precis in a single place, readily available on the web for any teacher who wanted to use them. I don’t mean to be prescriptive (though the chapter probably sounds that way)—I realise that the way I go about teaching these issues will work for some people, not for others—but it seems to me that if a teacher has an analytic turn of mind resources like these might be helpful. If I make any headway on developing such a resource I’ll let you know. Anyway, here’s the bit on designing children:

[click to continue…]