Education

Look, most of us have met a celebrity, burbled something insanely stupid, and lived to regret it.

When I was a teenager, I met Mats Wilander and had the bright idea of giving him my autograph, instead of the other way around. That way he’d remember me. Cringe. Another time, in college, I met Umberto Eco and blurbled away to him about smoking for several minutes until the postgrads he was there to speak to managed to get a word in. Why, only last month, I was introduced to Alastair Darling and asked him if he’d ever been to DC.

Maybe that’s what happened to the girl from Reason.tv. In this video clip (spotted on BoingBoing a couple of days ago) Matt Damon responds to her assertion that he works hard because acting is insecure, therefore teachers would be better if their ‘incentives’ were similar. Coz it’s in their interest to, see?

Asking a man who financially never needs to work again to agree that the fear of not having a job is what motivates him/teachers is head-scratchingly silly.
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About a year ago, Diane Ravitch wrote a piece in The Nation called “Why I Changed My Mind”. The piece was a summary of the main claims of her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She reported that she had changed her mind about “choice” and “accountability” – or at least how these have been interpreted, especially in No Child Left Behind.

About “accountability” she wrote: “the emphasis on accountability for the past eight years has encouraged schools to pay less attention to important subjects and inflate their test scores by hook or by crook.” The most visible example of this – no doubt there are more that are less visible – was the scandal in the Washington D.C. schools that USA Today uncovered this past March.

About “choice” Ravitch wrote: “Now the charter sector sees itself as competition for the public schools. Some are profit-driven; some are power-driven. In some cities, charter chains seek to drive the public schools out of business.” She then noted that some charters have large marketing budgets. This has been the case in Albany, NY, where there has been extensive advertising for the charter schools, and the public schools system has increased its marketing budget in response – needless to say, diverting scarce resources from other goals. Even large advertising budgets need not indicate that they are attempting to harm or to drive the public schools out of business. But from today’s Albany Times-Union:

A group associated with Albany’s charter schools sent out multiple fliers and likely paid for a push poll to kill the Albany school budget.
At least three separate fliers were sent to Albany residents in the last two weeks that encouraged voters to reject the school budget and intentionally exaggerated a tax rate increase to mislead voters. A telephone push poll also asked city residents leading questions including if they were fed up with tax increases and wasteful spending.
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Albany’s charter schools are currently reimbursed about $12,000 per student by the Albany school district. A defeat of the budget would have no effect on the charter schools, which received $30 million in Albany taxpayer money this school year.
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Some of the money for the organization [which paid for the fliers] has come from Albany’s charter schools, which means Albany taxpayers may have supported an entity that has encouraged them to vote down the district’s $206.5 million budget proposal.

The budget passed by a vote of 3,555 to 3,382.

Problems in Missouri, explained here (thanks Emily).

This is a gem:

“There’s nothing to keep our schools from continuing to teach to those standards and assess those standards,” Hoge said. “The fact that they’re not on the state assessment doesn’t preclude your teaching that. We hope that our teaching will always be at the highest level possible.”

and then:

In the Webster Groves School District, some teachers will be glad to spend less time on MAP testing this year because that will mean more instructional time in the classroom, district spokeswoman Cathy Vespereny said. But, Vespereny added, the teachers are not pleased that the writing prompts are being bounced from the tests, because such exercises allow students to exhibit higher-level thinking. “The feeling is that the writing portion is particularly valuable,” she said.

So the districts understand that incentives have effects, and the state, which has been designing the incentives for all these years, doesn’t.

My previous post on the options society should offer 20-year olds got a big and useful response. But unsurprisingly, given the CT roster and readership, it was very university-centric, and, within that, focused on issues around elite institutions. A sentence and footnote about Oxford and Cambridge got as much attention as the rest of the post put together. And the same is true, more subtly, of other points that were raised in repsonse. So, I want to point to some neglected aspects of the post, and ask commenters to focus primarily on the issues as they affect the majority young people who will not go to top-ranked universities, even in a system with greatly expanded access.

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Looking at the debate over UK protests over the tripling of tuition fees, it seems to me that this is an occasion where realistic utopianism (I’m paraphrasing Erik Olin Wright here) is needed, and is currently in short supply. The present ways in which modern societies determine the life choices available to 20 year olds are unsatisfactory and inequitable, and the British system is (or seems from a distance) to be more inequitable than many, perhaps most. So, defending that system against change, even change that will make things worse, is difficult and problematic. Rather than ask what incremental reforms might make things better, it seems like a good idea to ask how we might design a set of institutions from scratch, and then think about the implications for existing systems.

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Well, prompted by the various criticisms of my practice described in this post on 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education I asked my current crop of freshman students what they think. Some answers below the fold (these do not make things easier). Entirely coincidentally I read this amazing paper about reducing the gender achievement gap in science courses, and it made me wonder whether the this issue (addressing professors) has more significance than I have thought.
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I’m sure we’ve had some discussion like this before, bemoaning the bad manners of undergraduates, but I can’t find it. Anyway, the other night I got one of those emails from unknown students which just starts “Hey” and continues with some request (usually to be admitted to one of my oversubscribed classes). My immediate reaction is to ignore (that was my wife’s advice) but this time I just decided to do something different. I wrote back explaining the over-subscription situation, and finished with this “By the way, you might want to address people you haven’t met more formally in future: I don’t find it irritating but many will” (which is a lie, I do find it irritating, but there’s no need to tell her that). My original version had more verbiage in it, but my 14 year old (whose missives to teachers are like business letters) told me to take it out on the grounds that “she’ll never do it again, but she’ll be scared to meet you”.

I was prompted to do this by Andrew Roberts’ book The Thinking Student’s Guide to College: 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education (see tip 53). The central idea of the book is that students need a map of how to get the most out of college, and that lots of them arrive not understanding key things. Why not just make it explicit for her?

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Given the irritation at JQ’s short notice for his zombie talk, I thought I’d give more notice for my own talk at the UW Milwaukee Philosophy Department, on Justice in Higher Education, next Friday (December 3rd)[1]. It’s a more public-oriented talk than I imagine the other talks in their colloquium series (from extremely eminent scholars) have been [2], hence the unusual step of highlighting it here. Like JQ, I like meeting CT readers (even including those in my own field who know me from CT rather than from my scholarly work), and welcome feedback on the ideas I’ll present.

[1] I have been warned that for the past three years the first Friday in December has seen blizzard conditions between Madison and Milwaukee, so bear that in mind when planning…

[2] when I previously gave a talk at UW Milwaukee, thinking that my more mainstream work was more appropriate than my education related work, I gave a paper on democracy, only to be greeted with disappointment that I was not talking about education, which is one of many things I like about the department.

“Laura at 11D”:http://www.apt11d.com/2010/11/iep-meetings.html

bq. Our next IEP is a big one. Every four years, a child must be tested in a variety of ways. We met back in August to discuss which tests would need to be done on Ian. He was tested for speech, IQ, educational levels, and audio-processing. He went through his first battery of tests back when he was four, so it will interesting to see how far he’s progressed. So, why is an IEP a game of chess? Because I want Ian to receive more therapy and the school district wants him to have less. … Every school district assigns a case worker to supervise your child. Their stated mission is to represent the interests of the child. However, the real mission of the case worker is to limit the amount of money that a school district spends on the child.

bq. He needed to be in a specialized school that had experienced teachers and ABA specialists. Instead, he went to a half-day program in our school with a general special ed teacher, who had no idea of how to work with him. The school district wanted to keep him there, because it was cheaper than sending him to a full day program in another district. They knew that he needed extra help. They discouraged me from going to a neurologist, who would have given us that very important diagnosis. When I was in distress about his education, they told me to stop worrying and get a manicure.

bq. We have a superintendent who gets up in public forums and announces that we are one autistic child away from blowing the budget. Town council members have said in public sessions that we can’t build any more houses in our town, because a family might move in with an autistic child and it will cost us $100,000. During our recent town budget crisis, another case manager in our town said that our expenses are so high, because we pay our therapists too much money. There is a witch-hunt atmosphere around special ed students.

bq. … So, I will enter a conference room in the next few weeks with a carefully arranged speech and specific demands. If Ian needs five hours of after school therapy, I’ll ask for ten. Maybe we’ll get three hours, if we’re lucky.

A slightly mischievous piece by one Tim Brighouse makes a suggestion to members of the Browne commission which, I am sure, as members of the big society they will want to take up by making large donations, and to the government which, again, I’m sure they’ll be delighted to adopt as policy: a graduate tax on those of us who got our college education for free at a time when it produced a significant wage premium (oddly enough an age span that begins with my dad and ends with my sister). Here’s a taste:

When I first read the Browne report I was puzzled, as I am sure we all were, by the false logic. The cuts are governed by a general desire not to pass on our current debts to future generations, yet this report is apparently happy to load some of it on prospective young graduates. How can we explain that to our teenagers?

My second response when reading the report was to feel unusually guilty and ashamed. It should have the same effect on anybody aged between 45 and 70, for we are the “charmed generations”, as we often privately admit to one another.

We were showered with all manner of blessings: we missed the Second World War; we didn’t give up two years of our lives to national service; and we enjoyed the benefits of the newly created welfare state. If we own a house, for many years we enjoyed tax relief on mortgage interest payments. And to cap it all we either have or can expect reasonable, and in some cases generous, occupational pensions, which succeeding generations will not.

Most important of all – and this is where the Browne report comes in – the fortunate few in our charmed generations who attended college or university, unlike our successors, enjoyed free tuition and were given grants to live on as undergraduates.

In my case, in 1958 it was £300, which is equivalent to £12,000 today – more than half the starting salary of a teacher. In today’s money that is about £50,000 over the four years it took me to complete my degree and PGCE, and the state paid for the tuition at about the same cost, amounting to £100,000 in all. No wonder some of us felt we owed the state – and future generations – something in return.

Disclosure: in the traditional role of more tech-savvy offspring I found the online calculators that enabled him to do the inflation adjustment. (That I am more tech-savvy than him tells you a lot about how tech-unsavvy he is).

Karl Marx in the Preface to vol. 1 of _Capital_ : “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. ”

Here’s “part of an interview from IHE”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/20/schrecker with Ellen Schrecker, author of _The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University_ :

bq. Reduced support from state legislatures and the federal government’s decision to aid higher education through grants and loans to students rather than through the direct funding of individual institutions forced those institutions to look for other sources of income, while seeking to cut costs. In the process, academic administrators adapted themselves to the neoliberal ethos of the time. They reoriented their institutions toward the market at the expense of those elements of their educational missions that served no immediate economic function.

bq. As they came to rely ever more heavily on tuition payments, they diverted resources to whatever would attract and retain students — elaborate recreational facilities, gourmet dining halls, state-of-the-art computer centers, and winning football teams. At the same time, they slashed library budgets, deferred building maintenance, and – most deleteriously – replaced full-time tenure-track faculty members with part-time and temporary instructors who have no academic freedom and may be too stressed out by their inadequate salaries and poor working conditions to provide their students with the education they deserve. Meanwhile, rising tuitions are making a college degree increasingly unaffordable to the millions of potential students who most need that credential to make it into the middle class.

bq. Unfortunately, the competitive atmosphere produced by the academic community’s long-term obsession with status and its more recent devotion to the market makes it hard for its members to collaborate in solving its problems. Institutions compete for tuition-paying undergraduates and celebrity professors who can boost their institutions’ U.S. News & World Report ratings. Faculty members compete for tenure and research grants. And students compete for grades after having competed for admission to the highly ranked schools that will provide them with the credentials for a position within the American elite.

(Preface: if you, sensibly enough, want to avoid my rambling and get straight to the point, just go and read Richard Rothstein on the Rhee/Klein manifesto now. Update: a nice related post, which will now be followed by interesting discussion, at Laura’s).

I’ve managed to resist seeing Waiting For Superman so far. The trailers promise me that I won’t like it much. My wife gets a free showing on Wednesday, so she can report to me. Ironically, the book on which it is apparently based, Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes, is really not at all bad. It is true that, as a friend of mine said, “He has drunk the Kool-Aid”. But unlike many Kool-Aid drinkers (and there are a lot of them, I gather), he displays pretty clearly all the evidence you need in order to judge its toxicity. His account of the social science around low-end academic achievement is pretty careful, and entirely readable, and the narrative is well paced, and the story informative. For Tough, urban school districts need more Promise Academies and KIPP schools. I tend to be in the, “lets try it and see if it works” camp myself, though with an emphasis on actually trying to figure out whether it really does work. More than any academic study I have seen, Tough’s book makes me sceptical. He makes clear that Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, became obsessed with driving up test scores. Remember “test scores” means “math and reading test scores”. From a low base it is not that difficult to drive them up — simply restrict your attention to driving them up and allow math and reading to be the more or less exclusive focus of the curriculum. This is what he did, with modest effects on reading scores (which are harder to manipulate by teaching to the test) and greater effects on math scores. It really may be that for these kids improving their math skills somewhat and their reading skills slightly is the best thing for them (though, whereas there is a correlation between test scores and later success, we don’t have any evidance that improving children’s test scores improves later outcomes, and we have lots of evidence that these bumps in test scores from grade-specific interventions typically fade pretty quickly). Maybe, maybe not. Whether any child in that school actually learned more, or anything more useful, as a result of this, we have no way of knowing.

Back to the movie.

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Cross-posted from the New Statesman Culture blog (original)

It is hard to escape the worry that the arts, humanities and, almost certainly, many of the social sciences face a bleaker future in British higher education if Lord Browne’s report – “Securing a sustainable future for higher education in England” – is implemented. Browne isn’t explicit about this, but on page 25 of the report we find a chilling sentence: “In our proposals, there will be scope for Government to withdraw public investment through HEFCE from many courses to contribute to wider reductions in public spending; there will remain a vital role for public investment to support priority courses and the wider benefits they create.” The priority courses are listed as medicine, science and engineering. The arts, humanities and social sciences are on their own, and will have to support themselves from student fee income, from research grants and from so-called “QR funding” – allocated by government on the basis of past research performance.
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Over at In Socrates’ Wake (a blog about teaching in philosophy, to which I’ve recently started contributing) we’ve been running a seminar on Martha Nussbaum’s new book Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (UK ). I’ll write a more substantial review here shortly, but it’s well worth reading my ISW colleagues’ takes on it (and the book itself, which I recommend highly — on the back cover no less). Here are the posts so far, in chronological order: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.