Harry

My paper with Kailey Mullane on what’s wrong with free public college has been published in Educational Theory, open access so anybody who wants to can read it. Obsessive readers of CT (are there any?) will know that I’ve had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the issue for quite a while, and the arguments we’ve had here helped me and Kailey refine our views and develop the paper. What we did in the end was look at and analyze a hybrid of the Warren and Sanders proposals from the 2020 primary, evaluating it against two relatively simple normative criteria – equity (which we explain) and whether it would raise the average level of educational outcomes across the population. (Later in the paper we consider other values that might also be relevant).

Free public college might sound great if you ignore the cost and compare it with what we have now. But given the way public higher education is actually funded currently, and given the persistent patterns of enrollment (and even on very optimistic assumptions about how those patterns would change if public college were free), for various structural reasons almost none of the new spending would be on students from the bottom 50% of the income distribution and most of it on students in the top 25% of the income distribution. Some people (here) have defended this by saying that under these plans the funds would all come from taxes on the super rich. Even if you believe that, mightn’t there better feasible alternative ways of spending those funds in education? We compare the proposal with i) spending those funds in k-12 (which, unlike higher education, is a universal program) and ii) spending the funds on expanding the Pell Grant program (a very popular and successful program for supporting lower income students). Either of those will be much more equitable (in any reasonable sense) ways of spending the money, and will probably (there’s a caveat to this that you can see in the paper) in raising the average level of educational outcomes.

I can’t speak for Kailey, but I was (naively) a bit shocked when reading the Warren and Sanders proposals how thin and lacking in detail they were, and how clear it was that they had not consulted anyone who knew anything about higher education funding as it currently works. For example, they seem not to understand within each state public colleges and universities are unequally funded, with much more government funding per student going to institutions attended by more affluent students, and much less to those attended by less affluent students; they also seemed not to understand that low income students usually pay very low rates of tuition at the institutions they attend: for those students the financial barrier to college is not, usually, tuition, but living expenses, which eliminating tuition does nothing about at all. Sanders’s requirement that states participating in the free public college not spend any more money on administrators, if it is serious as opposed to crowd-pleasing, reveals that he doesn’t know what administrators do (or what “administrators” means). As things stand the US government (all sources) spend about 30-40% more per student/year in higher education than in k-12, and both candidates (considering their overall education policy offer) were proposing to increase that differential considerably. When I pointed this out to my dad, who was a veteran observer of ill-considered political decisions, he said “That’s not really what they care about. It’s just that nobody in their campaigns has bothered to do the calculation that you have done”.

Because discussions here at CT have had such an influence on my own thinking, I thought some of you might be interested in reading the whole thing so here’s the paper. Please share it with your friends, and feel free to comment!

The text telling me Tim had died came through a few minutes before a series of meetings with students. After the feeling of sickness and dread that hit me I wondered whether to go ahead anyway, and then thought what a strange thought that was. But my stepmum told me later that when my dad learned of my grandmother’s death he proceeded with the talk he was about to give to a group of teachers. I am pretty certain that if I’d been about to teach a class I would have gone ahead with that. But knowing neither meeting was urgent, and worrying that the students would be horrified to learn, later, that I had met them in such circumstances, I postponed. And to be fair, whereas he knew he could drive to where my grandmother was straight after the talk, I knew that I had to decide very quickly, and get ready, if I was going to leave that day, or have to wait another 24 hours (which, in the end, I elected to do anyway).

(Note: this is very long and probably self-indulgent. But I know plenty of non-regulars will want to read it, and I think writing it has helped me some. There’s a lot below the fold. That’s sort of an apology, but of course you can just ignore it!)

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Well, you know that, thanks to Maria’s lovely post earlier this week. I’ll post a long, maybe self-indulgent, remembrance in a week or two (I’ve been overwhelmed by things this week, including the kind of staggering outpouring of affection ad memories on social media, in my inbox (Among the many messages came a lovely email from a headteacher my own age I last saw in 1970, and whom dad, of course, kept up with). Even the Daily Telegraph did a rather good obituary. Now I have to finish my grading by tomorrow, and get ready for Christmas, which dad loved, and I think we’ll all enjoy remembering him). But for now, if you’re interested, here are three things to read/listen to/watch.

The formal, detailed, Guardian obituary is here.

The Radio 4 obituary show, Last Word, is here. David Blunkett is excellent, the clips of my dad sound unnervingly young, and I liked that they took the parts from the interview with me that are about my dad’s appearance. He would have been genuinely horrified by all this fuss, but, bracketing that, he’d have been delighted by the first segment, about Maureen Sweeney, to whom he would have been intensely grateful (as we all should be).

Finally Rachel Johnson of PiXL, whose dad Sir John Rowling worked with Tim at the London Challenge, wrote a lovely tribute, which includes an extended video interview (half way down the page) that she just made available free, here.

The chap serving me at Pret in Heathrow the other day asked if I was going somewhere special for Christmas, and for the second time since Tim died I faltered, and said “I’m going home to Wisconsin, I’ve just been visiting because my dad died on Friday”, and berated myself inside for making him uncomfortable. But he smiled, and said, you know the usual things, and then said “Did he have a good life?” and I found myself grinning widely and said “Yes. He had a great life”, to which his response was “That’s really the best you can ask, isn’t it?”. It was lovely, like something out of the kind of movie that neither my dad nor I would ever willingly watch.

This is my marmalade-making time of the year. Not because it’s the only time I can get hold of Seville oranges – I can get hold of the MaMade tins any time of year, and have only ever gotten fresh ones to use one time that I happened to visit a friend in Arizona who complained about the fruit trees outside that produced oranges that were inedibly bitter (I picked 10lbs and brought them straight home). It’s actually because of the grapefruit.

Only being able to get hold of MaMade (very inexpensive, at Amazon, makes excellent marmalade) gives rise to a problem. MaMade is only sold in a thin cut version. So, what if you like thick cut? I finally figured out the solution, which is to buy two white grapefruit, that are only available, here, December-February, and chop the rind roughly. You simply add that to the marmalade and you have a rough cut Seville orange marmalade with just a hint of grapefruit flavour, but really just a hint.

I’m not finished with the regular marmalade yet. I specifically like Oxford marmalade – once you’ve had that its hard to go back. And I like it bitter. Conventional recipes tell you to substitute black treacle or molasses for some of the sugar, but no recipe has gone far enough for me. And the 4lbs of sugar recommended to accompany a tin of MaMade makes for too sweet a result. So – I use 2lbs of sugar and 1lb of treacle/molasses, which gets exactly the flavour I want.

Still there’s a problem. With only 3/4ths the recommended level of sugar, how do you get the marmalade to set properly? One way is to add phenomenal amounts of pectin. But almost as good is just to simmer the concoction for much longer than recommended, just to reduce the liquid, until you have something that, while runny, is adequately viscous to stay on toast (or if you are Paddington or the late Queen, in a sandwich). I generally cook for about around 3 hours, most of it on a very low heat, but occasionally boiling it while stirring vigorously. You’ll end up with less than 5lbs of marmalade, but with an intense flavour so you use less at a time.

A student the other day revealed her obsession with grapefruit and that prompted to me attempt fully grapefruit marmalade.

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If you haven’t yet listened to Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story, you probably should, now. It’s brilliant, if profoundly depressing. Very brief synopsis: the methods routinely used to teach children to read in the US don’t work well for large numbers of children, and the science of reading has been clear about this for decades. Three academics in particular — Lucy Calkins of Teachers College, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell of the Ohio State University — are responsible for promoting these bad practices (which are pervasive), and persisted in doing so long after the research was clear, and have gotten very rich (by the standards of academics) from the curriculum sales/speaking circuit.[1] Hanford’s documentary has single-handedly changed the environment, and in the past couple of years State departments of education and even school districts throughout the country have been scrabbling to reform, often under the eye of state legislators who have been alerted to the situation by the amount of chatter that Sold a Story has generated.

Go and listen to it.

Although a great admirer of Hanford’s work, which I have known and followed for many years, it took me a while to listen to Sold a Story. By the time I did I was familiar with the basic narrative which, I think, freed my mind to wonder about something that Hanford doesn’t discuss. The role of academic bystanders. People like me.
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BBC obit here.

I have a very fond memory of Parkinson.
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Twenty years and a few months ago Chris asked me to join a group of bloggers who were going to create a group blog so as to reduce the pressure on each to post frequently and combine audiences.

First I asked him what a blog was.
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When we announced several new timbers last Fall we promised more to come. So, now we are delighted to welcome on board the newest member of the CT collective: Elizabeth Anderson. Liz will be well known to the philosophers who read CT, as author of numerous papers and of the recent books The Imperative of Integration and Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It). She is Max Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy, John Dewey Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. We hope you’re looking forward to her contributions as much as we are!

Here, as promised, is a podcast we made at the Center for Ethics and Education based on interviews we did with Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, authors of the excellent book Can College Level The Playing Field, which is an indispensable read if you want to understand the relationship between inequality and higher education, and inequality within higher education, in the US. (For CT discussion of a very poor quality review of the book, see here). Also I unabashedly recommend the whole podcast series!

I sometimes employ an undergraduate to observe my teaching, and criticize what I do. I’ve learned a lot from them over the years, but I really employ them, these days, to hold me accountable to the standards I set myself and to tell me what is happening in the room (this is especially valuable in large classes) more than with the expectation that I’ll learn something brand new.

Anyway, last week my new observer, Allyson, solved what has been a longstanding problem for me. In my large classes students get antsy in the last ten minutes, and start, slowly, and discreetly, to put their stuff away and get ready to go. Each individual student is not disruptive, but having most of them doing this over a 7 minute period is very distracting (for them and for me). Its especially bad in winter because they have lots of clothes to put on. [1]

And I am not blaming them for this. My campus is large, and there is a 15 minute gap between classes. Unless they are ready to go the second class ends many of them will be late for the next class.

Allyson pointed out the antsiness, and suggested the following: 7 minutes from the end of class tell them that they are not leaving till the end of the class, but that I am giving them one minute to get their stuff together.

So, I did it on Monday. It was magical, in something like the way that Think Pair Share is magical: one minute of total disruption, followed by 6 minutes of complete focus. Wednesday was the same. What I really noticed on Wednesday was the different noise at 3.45; I dismissed them and the class went from silence to all the noise happening at once, briefly, as they departed much more quickly than I’ve ever seen.

Obviously, what happens in that last 6 minutes is different from before. They can’t take notes, so the 6 minutes has to be stuff that they don’t feel the need to take notes on: last week it was Q&A (and the questions were great), but I can imagine setting up a 5 minute video, or a brief Pair Share about what they have learned in that day. I haven’t read about this before, and when I asked Allyson whether she’d seen this work in other classes, she said no, she just thought it up as a possible solution to a problem she’s seen in all her classes (and almost all of her classes have been large — she’s an Industrial Engineering major). I’m not the least surprised that she is imaginative, but still it was a stunning success. If you try it, or have seen it work already, I’m curious what your experience is/has been.

[1] This is hardly ever a problem in my smaller classes. Indeed in the class Allyson is actually taking from me this semester, which is the last class of the day, it is clear that I could keep them back for an hour and half of them would be happy. Its also not a problem even in the large class if I am in the Tues/Thurs 11-12.15 slot, because nobody who is in a class in that slot has another class till 1. But I try to teach smaller classes in that slot because I know that students in smaller classes are much more likely to hang around chatting for a long time after class, and that is the one slot in which I can guarantee that will be possible because nobody else will need the room till 1.

Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson recently published a book, Can College Level The Playing Field?: Higher Education in an Unequal Society, which I’d recommend to anyone who wants to understand the structural position of higher education in the US. Spoiler alert here: Their answer is “No”. Most of the book is taken up with explaining why, by showing the multiple ways in which background inequalities and inequalities in the pre-college education system constrain any efforts higher education might make to level the playing field, and showing how unequal the higher education system is anyway, including – and this seems not to be well understood by politicians or a lot of commentators – how unequal the public sector itself is.

Full disclosure: I’m close friends with both of the authors, and read at least 3 versions of the manuscript before it was published and, I just realized by looking at its Princeton University Press page, wrote a blurb for it. The producer of the CEE podcast series is putting the finishing touches on an interview that we’ve done with them, and as soon as it is published, I’ll post about it encouraging you to listen and, again, encouraging you to read the book.

This (extremely long) post, though, is only secondarily about the book. My main interest is in a genuinely awful review of it, and of another book by Gary Orfield (which, I will emphasize several times, I have not read yet), in Boston Review by Christopher Newfield. I’m writing about it partly because it so irritated me that I want to get my irritation out of my system, but also partly because it illustrates some of the failings that are common to many of the books and commentaries I read about higher education.

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A grad student advisee of mine who had previously been a high school teacher introduced me to the Structured Academic Controversy when I observed her teaching a class for future secondary social studies teachers. I’d never seen it used before in class, and have to come to find a variant of it — but not the actual variant she used — a very useful strategy in quite specific conditions. Here’s roughly how she did it:

Students were given a controversial proposition. They were divided into groups of 4, and each of those groups was further divided into pairs.

Within each group one pair received materials favoring the proposition; the other pair receives materials opposing it. Students read material and discussed the most salient points of the argument to present.

Students presented their argument. Each pair had three minutes to present their ideas. After 3-minute presentations, each pair had a minute to rebut.

Then they swapped sides. So the favoring pair now had the opposing materials, and vice versa, and they went through the whole process again.

Then students reported back to the whole class.

The way the exercise is described above assumes that the students have not done any prior relevant reading or research. And its purpose when used in high school is really to get students to see all sides of the issue, and internalize the reasons that are given in the supporting and opposing material. It worked pretty well when my graduate student did it in my class, partly because we hadn’t, in fact, assigned material pertaining directly to the proposition that we were asking them to consider. But when I tried it s a couple more times it didn’t work so well.

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In one of the end-of-term reflections I just read a first-year (freshman) student says “It struck me that there was a no technology rule, something my classmates and I were unfamiliar with… when you disconnect from your online presence, you can fully dive into the discussion”. I have a no-laptop, no phone policy in all my classes, and have yet to hear good reasons to give that up. Maybe you can give me some.

In the background: I believe her that most of the students who went to public schools would be unfamiliar with a no technology policy. The local schools rely on laptops entirely for access to textbooks, and until this year the school district has not permitted schools to have a no-phone policy. I think you can imagine that in high school preventing teachers from telling students to put their phones away and sanctioning them if they don’t comply is a total disaster, and is perceived as such by the teachers and, in fact, many of the students (“If other kids are on their phones the teacher can’t teach so there’s no point in paying attention, so I might as well be on my phone”). I vividly remember the first course in which phones were a problem for me: not until 2014, when 4 girls were just routinely on their phones in a small class in which I could see what they were doing, and I didn’t really know what to do. After that I adopted the policy I have now.

I teach philosophy, which is hard. And I trust that my students can read, so if I have a lot to tell them I write it down and get them to read it. That’s not to say that I don’t go over it sometimes in class. But the point of having class is to do learning that won’t (or possibly can’t) be done outside of class. That is, mainly, problem solving: thinking and talking together about the arguments and ideas that I want them to understand, and practicing the skills of analysis and reflection that philosophy is particularly good at developing, and which are essential to doing philosophy. So they don’t really need the laptops for note-taking.

Not that most students who use laptops use them for note-taking. I spend a fair amount of time observing other people’s classes, usually from the back. Few of the teachers are bad, and many are pretty good. In classes which allow laptops anything from 1/3 to 2/3 of the students have them in front of them, and at any given time almost all the screens I can see are email, shopping sites, gaming sites, and television/movies. I’ve sat in numerous classrooms in which fewer than half of the students are paying any attention to what is happening in class.

I don’t exactly blame them: once inattention is the norm, the instructor often defaults to lecture and its not uncommon for the lecture to be more or less word for word repetition of what is on very text-heavy slides.[1] But when they are not paying attention they are not learning, and it is exceedingly difficult to generate high quality engagement in a room in which half or more of the students are otherwise engaged.

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I started cold calling after a student (a CT reader and commenter, who remembers this because I remind her of it [1]), many years ago, having sat silently throughout my senior-level class in political philosophy, explained why she wanted to attend Law School. “I’ve heard that in Law School they cold-call, so that all the students have done the reading, and everyone is engaged. I want to be in classes like that.” She reminded me of the old TV show, The Paper Chase, in which John Houseman, one of those American actors with an inexplicable English accent, would seemingly bully his Law students by constantly trying to catch them out.

Going to Law School solely in order to get cold called seemed a bit eccentric. But I got the point. She’d missed out on a lot of learning – the learning you do when you articulate your thoughts out-loud, sometimes discovering that they aren’t thoughts at all, and other times discovering that they are more interesting and/or more complex than you had realized. My job was to make sure she did that learning – the learning that other, louder, more aggressive students already did – and I had let her down.
At first it was difficult. It is socially awkward to ask a stranger what their thoughts are, especially when both you and they are completely unused to it. What makes it worse is that students enter the classroom expecting the standard norms of the campus to apply – that they can take a back seat and listen (or, more accurately, look as if they are listening), talking only when they feel like it. I wasn’t skilled at cold-calling at all, and for the first couple of years I would often lose my nerve after a few classes, and retreat to my usual, deficient, practices.

I discovered it was easier for me to call on students if I knew all their names. And it was easier to learn all their names quickly if I called on them to talk (who would have thought that it is easier to get to know people by talking with them than by talking at them?). And it got even easier when I realized that the average quality of the talking is higher if the people who always volunteer talk less, because shyer and more reserved students often have valuable things to say. And I discovered that cold calling elicits more diverse perspectives because the willingness to volunteer to talk is not equally spread across all demographics.

But how to avoid seeming like John Houseman? I want to draw them in, not catch them out. After I had started cold-calling routinely a student observer admonished me: “I know that you don’t mind if a student has nothing to say. But they don’t know that. You have to tell them that, and show them that you mean it”.

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