Education

After McCain refrained from saying anything about NCLB at the Republican convention Laura challenged me to write about McCain’s education policy. So I dutifully tried, but found it hard not to seem more partisan than I actually am. However, I had a good look at both candidates’ websites, so I was more or less unsurprised by McCain’s answer to the final question in last week’s debate. (Just in case that sounds like a complaint that it was not until the final, rushed, question in the final debate that education was asked about, it isn’t: I can’t imagine anyone’s vote hinges on what a presidential candidate says about education; given how little influence presidents have over what happens in schools that is probably sensible; and anyway all candidates have proven extremely adept at not answering questions).

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The Spencer Foundation has just announced the second of its major strategic initiatives: on civic learning and civic action. Here’s the announcement, and here are the application guidelines. Please direct queries to the program administrator (whose contact details are at the bottom of the guidelines page).

And, if you missed it, the first strategic initiative is on Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice; I am happy to entertain queries on that one.

While you are at their fantastic new website, check out the page devoted to papers resulting from Foundation grants: two interesting papers, one by Eric Hanushek on policy analysis, the other by Helen Ladd on accountability.

Michael Reiss “has been forced to resign as Director of Education of the Royal Society”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/17/evolution.controversiesinscience . Absolutely shocking, in my view. Several of those calling for his head, such as Sir Richard Roberts, made much of the fact that he is an ordained minister. But since at least two FRSs — John Polkinghorne and Bernard Silverman — are also priests, that’s hardly a reason for the Society not to employ him. The RS statement says:

bq. “Some of Professor Michael Reiss’s recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society’s director of education, were open to misinterpretation. While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the society’s reputation. As a result, Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the society, he will step down immediately as director of education.”

Well, no, they weren’t “open to misinterpretation”, they were wilfully misinterpreted by those who were always going to be determined to do so, and it shows real spinelessness on the part of the RS that they didn’t back him. As “I blogged a few days ago”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/09/12/dealing-with-creationism/ , Reiss didn’t call for creationism to be part of the science curriculum, he said (absolutely clearly, _in his original statement_ of his view) that teachers should, as a matter of good pedagogical practice, be willing to engage with students they encounter who come to the class with creationist views. That seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate position for someone concerned with science pedagogy to take. Others may disagree with the substance of his view. That’s fair enough. But to push him out for saying it? Dreadful.

(A list of issues where partisans are only willing to tolerate a simple straightforward and unequivocal expression of the party line (on either side) and will seek to punish deviants: anything touching on religion and education (including this issue); Israel/Palestine; abortion/right to life, ….etc. )

Update: see also James Wimberley “here”:http://www.samefacts.com/archives/britain_/2008/09/fundamentalists.php .

There’s much anger circulating around the blogosphere about “the comments of Michael Reiss, Director of Education at the Royal Society”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/sep/11/michael.reiss.creationism about how to deal with creationism and ID in school science classes. In fact, the whole thing could stand as an example of how on some issues (of which this is one) people only want to hear an unequivocal assertion of a party line and get unreasonably annoyed (and purport not to understand what they understand perfectly well) when someone says something nuanced or pragmatic.

Here’s the question Reiss asked:

bq. What should science teachers do when faced with students who are creationists?

To which he gave the answer that simply ignoring them is wrong and counterproductive. Rather, in his view, it is better pedagogical practice to engage with their doubts about evolution. He also adds that teachers have a duty to explain the scientific position but that they should not expect the doing so will displace creationist beliefs in students. His thought there is that explaining that evolutionary theory provides the best _scientific_ explanation is not necessarily going to cut ice with people who don’t accept the scientific way of looking at the world.

All reasonable enough, or so it seems to me. But then you get headlines like “Leading scientist urges teaching of creationism in schools”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4734767.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1 Of course, strictly speaking that’s true, since he advocated that teachers be open to the discussion of creationism with their students. But it gives the impression that he wanted creationism (and its ID variant) to be given house-room in the curriculum as “valid” alternative explanations of life. And that he didn’t say.

Incidentally, the Times also devoted “a leader to the controversy”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article4735469.ece , comparing _inter alia_ Reiss to Sarah Palin:

bq. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, while not a creationist, has courted the support of those who want to teach biblical creationism alongside evolution in science classes by saying that schools should “let kids debate both sides”. Both Governor Palin’s populism and Professor Reiss’s well-meaning intervention are based on the same mistake – that it is acceptable to teach faith as if it were science.

Since Reiss’s clearly expressed view is that creationism is no part of the scientific world view, that is a gross distortion by their leader-writer who is clearly neither a careful nor a charitable reader.

There’s an ongoing low-level argument in our house about Teach for America, which may reflect our own dispositions more than any actual disagreement. My spouse doesn’t like it much, because it promotes the idea that teaching is something clever people can do just because they are clever, and she doubts that the students who do it are very good in the classroom (she has some experience of non-standard routes into the classroom, having, herself, entered LAUSD as an emergency credential teacher straight out of college, the year before TfA began). I agree with all that, of course, and the students of mine who have done it give very mixed reports back to me. But taking into account the fact that the classrooms the TfAers occupy would mostly be occupied by similarly under-qualified teachers, most of whom will leave within a couple of years and some of whom within a couple of weeks, and having seen on campus the way that TfA has harnessed (and, it seems to me, contributed to) the idealism of high-performing students, I have a more positive take on it (the dispositional difference here is probably between viewing glasses as half-full or half-empty; though our dispositions are reversed when it comes to politics more generally). So when the TES asked me to profile a “thinker who has influenced education”, my wife suggested Wendy Kopp, and I thought it would be a way to work out my thoughts a bit more. It was a nice coincidence because Charles Windsor had just become the patron of Teach First, the UK organisation modeled on TfA.

Here’s what I wrote.

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A Chronicle story, annoyingly behind a paywall, here. The gist:

Kent State University is trying a new and unusual tactic to improve its
status, retention rate, and fund raising—paying cash bonuses to
faculty members if the university exceeds its goals in those areas.
The bonuses are built into a contract, approved last month, that covers
864 full-time, tenure-track faculty members who teach and do research on
the university’s eight campuses. Proposed by Lester A. Lefton, Kent
State’s president, the “success bonus pool” will be divided among
faculty members if the Ohio institution improves retention rates for
first-year students and increases the research dollars it generates and
the private money raised through its foundation.

To key things. The bonuses don’t replace regular pay, and merit increases. Nor does it look as if they will be unequally distributed: it seems that the plan is to distribute them equally among the faculty. The faculty reps seem happy enough with this, as they would be. There’s no word about whether the academic staff and adjuncts are included in the plan; and I just assume that the rest of the workforce, many of whom have the kinds of interactions with students that make a big difference to whether they stay or dont stay, are not included, but I’d like to learn that I’m wrong about that.

I wrote a short piece on Howard Gardner for the TES this summer. They’ve been running a series on thinkers who have influenced education. I’m not sure why they asked me to do Gardner, but I was glad to oblige (I also volunteered, at my wife’s suggestion, to do Wendy Kopp: coming soon). It was a slightly odd experience, for two reasons. I’ve quite recently gotten to know Gardner, not very well, but well enough to make it a bit awkward if I had a negative assessment of his work (I don’t, far from it). The other is that, whereas I imagine the TES editors assumed that, as an education professor, I would have come across Gardner’s work in the course of my professional life, that’s not true. In fact my dad told me to read his stuff, starting when I was in grad school. My dad is Gardner’s #1 promoter in the UK, so at least I got to know his work the same way many of the TES’s readers did. Here’s the piece (I disavow any responsibility for titles, by the way).

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You might want to check out my colleague Lester Hunt’s excellent new edited collection on Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education, which is just out. It originated in a rather well-thought-out conference Lester organized back in 2004. My own contribution arose because he asked me to comment on Valen Johnson’s talk, based on his book Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, and then sneakily inveigled me to contribute a self-standing chapter. The collection is great: genuinely diverse and thoughtful contributions from Clifford Adelman, David T. Beito, Mary Biggs, Richard Kamber, Alfie Kohn, Charles W. Nuckolls, Francis K. Schrag, John D. Wiley and Lester and me. Recommend it to your library, and to your Deans!

In the course of writing my own paper several things happened. I started off assuming (with no real evidence) that grade inflation was real and believing (for no real reasons) that it was bad; I discovered that there is no evidence of grade inflation (which doesn’t, of course, mean that it doesn’t exist) and that the reasons for thinking it would be bad if it did exist are pretty weak. Commenting on Johnson’s book, in other words, convinced me that his subtitle is entirely wrong (even though the book is, actually, terrifically good). It’s not the first time that I have changed my mind as the result of writing a paper, but it is the first that I’ve changed it quite so radically.

I developed, mainly through reading Valen Johnson’s book, a conviction that student evaluations are next to worthless for evaluating teachers. His book also convinced me that grade variation within departments exists and is bad, though not that there is much we can or should do about it.. Finally, I became more and more irritated with Harvey Mansfield’s piece in the Chronicle. So, below the fold, here’s a taster of the book, adapted from my chapter, and arguing specifically against Mansfield:

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”:http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0306&L=philos-l&P=106972&E=1&B=——=_NextPart_000_00C2_01C32DDD.864384A0&T=text/html :

*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.