Education

In his post on education, Chris

floats a hypothesis for commenters to shoot down if they want to.

However, since most of the commenters agree with Chris, it looks like I’ll have to provide the other side of the debate. I’m also not linking to any evidence, though I discussed a fair bit of it here

I’m going to argue, contrary to Chris and most of the commenters on his post that there’s no reason to suppose that, in aggregate, the proportion of the population undertaking post-secondary education is too high, and every reason to continue trying to remove obstacles to participation in education for students from poor and working class backgrounds. Further, I don’t think credentialism is an important factor in explaining observed changes in participation in education or the labour market.

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Maria’s “post about America”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/04/myths-about-america/ got me thinking about issues to do with social mobility. Here I want to offer some completely data free speculations, to float a hypothesis for commenters to shoot down if they want to. That hypothesis is that there’s far too much higher education in Western societies and that it constitutes a real barrier to social mobility (and is probably bad for demographics too). To put it in a nutshell: strategies for improving social mobility by getting a broader swathe of the population into higher ed are bound to fail because it is too easy for the middle classes to maintain their grip on access to education. A better strategy would be to take that card out of middle class hands by abandoning the insistence on credentials that aren’t materially relevant to the job at hand.

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I was lucky enough to attend part of the Kidbrooke School celebrations in July, though mainly in order to have my children see my dad speak while he is in his prime. Now BBC Radio 4 has come up with what promises to be a brilliant history of the Comprehensive School. Highlights from the first, rivetting, show include the story of how London County Council officials were impressed by comprehensive schooling in the States (see, European leftists do learn things from the US), the story of Stewart Mason’s experiment in Tory Leicestershire (he had the sneaky idea of calling all the comprehensive schools Grammar Schools, though his reform had the undesirable side-effect of inventing the middle school) and an exemplary media performance by my esteemed former colleague David Crook. They get the history just about right, but more impressively the show really gives the texture of the debates and the experience of people whose lives were affected by the reforms. Radio at its best. Future episodes promise interviews with Kenneth Baker, Roy Hattersley, John O Farrell and one Tim Brighouse (wonder what he’ll say).

The September Project was launched last year to encourage libraries to engage citizens in discussions related to freedom and democracy on September 11th. This year the project continues its mission and has already attracted hundreds of libraries from 20 countries to participate. The organizers are hoping to attract even more. This map shows participating libraries in the US (e.g. the entire Chicago Public Library system has signed up), this one shows international venues (e.g. libraries in Cuba, India, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand, etc.). Any CT readers in the vicinity of Universidad Cienfuegos? I’d be curious to hear a report from that discussion.

The site offers a description of the events that occured at libraries on 9/11 last year. The Project has a blog where people can follow updates.

Mike Baker (who declares an interest) explains the incredibly complex new University tuition fee system. I think he gets it exactly right (but am not sure because…it is so complicated). His final paragraph:

So it is somewhat ironic that the greatest concern over the new fees system has been on behalf of students from the poorest homes.
This is a Robin Hood-style, redistributive scheme: taking from the better-off graduate in order to give to the student from a poor home. Government ministers have always been nervous of spelling this out for fear of sounding like socialists. Yet, this obfuscation, like the terminology of “variable fees” rather than “graduate taxes”, could threaten the success of the scheme if it deters the very people it is meant to help.

The government has a big explaining job to do.

Robert KC Johnson “claims”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/13987.html that the New York State legislature’s creation of a commission to examine curricula and textbooks to see whether they properly reflect the African-American experience demonstrates the convergence of the far left and far right.

bq. Whoa. Isn’t that exactly what the Kansas board of Education is doing with intelligent design? Where is the AAUP, or the CUNY faculty union, denouncing the threat to academic freedom inherent in a politically-appointed board making “suggestions for revisions to the curricula and textbooks”? I’m not holding my breath waiting for either group to act.

Tripe and nonsense. It very obviously _isn’t_ what the Kansas board of Education is doing. What’s at issue in Kansas is whether or not a pseudo-scientific set of rhetorical claims that were consciously designed to create a “wedge”:http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/wedge.html in the heart of science are given equal standing to a well established and tested scientific theory. What’s at issue here is whether or not school curricula and textbooks should reflect the historic experience of a particular group. Now you can criticize the latter on its own terms (as Tim Burke has “done”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=40 with regard to a similar proposal in Pennsylvania), but it clearly isn’t even the same _type_ of issue as trying to steamroller Intelligent Design into the curriculum. It’s a question of the kind of collective understanding of history that schools should be teaching, which is a very different, and much fuzzier thing.

(Nor, as an aside, do curriculum committees of this sort necessarily produce the kinds of one-dimensional history that Tim rightly fears. A friend of mine was heavily involved in another committee which was mandated by the Albany legislature a few years ago to include the Irish famine on the state’s Human Rights Curriculum. It’s probably safe to guess that the Irish-American legislators who came up with this initiative anticipated schoolkids being fed wrap-the-green-flag-round-me nationalism, the wickedness of perfidious Albion etc etc. The committee’s final curriculum “didn’t do this”:http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FKX/is_2002_Spring-Summer/ai_87915679/pg_3 – instead it used the Famine and the Irish emigrant experience to ask more general questions about the relationship between politics, economics and hunger, to draw the connections with contemporary politics, and to talk bluntly about some of the nastier aspects of the Irish-American experience, such as racism and the Draft Riots).

My son, going into Year 12 next year, is really happy about this. I agree with him that teaching “Theory” derived from the kind of third-hand postmodernism that was, until recently, dominant in Australian humanities departments is a waste of time, and an unreasonable imposition on students who are conscripted into this course on the assumption that they are going to learn about English (the language, not the academic specialisation of the same name).

On the other hand, I don’t look back to the Golden Age of courses on (how to write essays about) Shakespeare and the Canon with any great enthusiasm either. What I’d like for my kids to get out of high school English is an ability to write well in a variety of modes and (if possible) a love of literature. I don’t think courses in literary criticism (traditional, modern or postmodern) do much for either goal. As far as love of literature goes, they’re usually counterproductive.

More on this from Mark Bahnisch

The Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton has launched a new initiative to make available audio and video recordings of academic lectures and events. For now, the University Channel is focusing on public and international affairs, because, as the site claims, “this is an area which lends itself most naturally to a many-sided discussion”. Perhaps the idea is to have people link to the material on the site and then host discussions on their own blogs or classrooms as I do not see a place for the suggested “many-sided discussion” on the UC site itself. The scope of materials that will be included seems quite broad judging from what is already available (IT, religion, politics, etc.).

It is certainly nice to have one central repository of such materials. If the project succeeds in getting lots of places on board and hosting material from all over then it has the potential to be a great service. In fact, the collaborators it already has lined up are already a good sign of its potential. (Then again, some people have suggested [see first comment] that “text is the only useful information on the Internet”.;)

Over on my other site, a further installment in the series “Everything I Know, I Learned in MBA School At Great Expense And My God Are You Lot Going To Suffer For It”. In this episode, I discuss what the theory of risk management and process control can tell us about the desirability or otherwise of shooting suspected suicide bombers.

I’ve been doing some looking around to find out what the evidence is on grade inflation, specifically in higher education in the US. I’m surprised by two things. First, that there doesn’t seem to be firm evidence of it. (It is interesting that Valen Johnson’s excellent book Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, for example, is not about grade inflation at all, but about grade variation and student evaluations of teaching). Second, that so many people think that there is firm evidence of it. Certainly, it appears that if you ask people — faculty and students — whether there is grade inflation, they believe there is. But that is poor evidence, because the students don’t know anything abut what happened in the past, and the faculty have faulty memories. When you look at grades, it certainly seems that mean grades have been increasing within institutions over the past 25-35 years. The most frequently referred to site is Stuart Rojstaczer’s gradeinflation.com, which surveys a small number of institutions and finds increases in the mean grade in all of them over both a ten year and a 30 year period (much bigger in the private than in the public institutions). This is what people take to be firm evidence of grade inflation. But it isn’t, and I’m surprised that anyone thinks it is. Here’s why; within the institutions surveyed the students might have been gaining in achievement. Grade inflation consists in higher grades being given for similar quality work, not just higher grades being given. And no-one seems to have any data on the quality of the work being produced now or in the past.

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The arrival of Andrew Adonis in government has so far gone uncommented upon here, so I feel entitled to say something, however belatedly. Adonis’s presence at #10 made the Education portfolio a poisoned chalice for at least the whole of the second term. Because Number 10 was always interfering in policymaking, no Education Secretary (even Charles Clarke) could pursue his or her own agenda with confidence. Not only were they constantly being second-guessed and scrutinized, but even when they put forward their own initiatives no-one affected could be sure whose they were, or whether, if they truly belonged to the Secretary, they would reach fruition. It seemed to me that Estelle Morris (who was Secretary of State most of the time I lived in the UK) was always in an untenable position. The portion of the Queens Speech on Education has Adonis’s name written all over it.

Ruth Kelly should be delighted, therefore, to have Adonis in her team.

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Talking of higher education and athletics, I want to recommend to people that they read Leveling the Playing Field. It’s is a terrific book, and a wonderful model of how to do applied normative philosophy. It pursues hard and interesting normative questions in the context of detailed and careful empirical analysis of the situation in higher education. The philosophy guides, but does not get in the way of, the empirical exploration; it is also obvious that the authors are steeped in the empirical evidence and institutional detail of the area they are investigating. In the areas where I know the empirical literature in detail they consistently introduced me to new, and more up-to-date findings than I had to hand.

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I’ve been doing some sums following a conversation last week with Daniel and John Band. Tesco, as is well know have just announced “their fantabulous corporate profits”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4435339.stm . They have “639 stores in the UK”:http://www.ethibel.org/profile/uk/tesco_en.html (OK that figure is a couple of years old), and a UK turnover of £29.5 billion. This gives us turnover per store of just over £46 million. UK higher education has, according to “HESA”:http://www.hesa.ac.uk/ , a turnover of about £15.5 billion and 171 “outlets”, giving us a turnover per store of just over £91 million. Chelsea football club — expected to win this year’s premier league — has “a turnover of £92.6 million”:http://www.givemefootball.com/display.cfm?article=4009&type=1&month=8&year=2004 . All of this gives us the useful equation of

1 average university = 1 top football club = two branches of the leading supermarket.

Make of that what you will.

The Times Higher Education Supplement “is leading with the story”:http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2020705 that the British government — having recently introduced student fees of £3000 pa but having promised (as a sop to the opposition) to keep them capped until 2010 — has been pushing senior figures in the sector to campaign for the abolition of the cap. Not that they’ll need much persuading to do that, of course. Whether or not you agree with the principle of fees, a government that pursues its secret policy by galvanising opposition to its publicly declared policy might be thought to be acting a little unethically.