The Key Word is Stick

\ Leave a Comment \ by

Every year, it seems, we move just a tiny little bit closer to imposing the terrible ideas to colleges and universities that have been so disastrous in our public schools. We’ve spent three decades or so pretending that standarized tests, in particular, are the best way to improve education. The focus on so-called assessment allows us to ignore the radical class inequities that continue to undermine public education. It’s much easier to test than to redistribute money.

We don’t stop at testing. In K-12 we demoralize teachers and break unions by privatizing schools via charters and voucher programs. Similarly, in universities teachers have been demoralized mostly by the almost complete destruction of the profession in favor of using casual labor and adjuncts. We seem no more willing to address the root problems of higher education than we are wiling to address the inequities which continue to undermine the entire project of public education.

That’s why it’s so depressing to hear more about the Obama administration‘s use of the idea of accountability and assessment to try to shape the development of higher education. Assessment is one of those ideas or words that sound so reasonable, even scientific, but it’s largely a myth when it comes to education. (See this piece for a great example of the myth of assessment and accountability.) Or, rather, the myth is the idea that an education can be “measured” in an objective fashion like, say, average summer temperature.

In Asimov’s Foundation series of novels, a kind of hybrid of sociobiology and mathematics can essentially predict the future. That was the great dream of mid-20th century science. It’s failed again and again. Perhaps most famously, the science of intelligence (if that’s the word) developed first an ‘intelligence quotient’ or IQ test (deeply rooted in racist assumptions) and then a standardized test that was designed to predict the future performance of students at college.

More than seventy years of research has shown that the standardized test simply cannot do what it was designed to do. What’s worse, the often well-intentioned desire to “prove” that a person is educated, or intelligent, has time and time again become both a distraction from real problems as well as a stick used to beat up on teachers. Imagine if the Obama administration tied federal higher education grants to administrative efficiency or to full to part time employment ratios…

Posted in: Union, Writing

Irony and Happenstance

\ Leave a Comment \ by

My students often use the term irony in a very loose, colloquial fashion that simply means funny or odd. What they really mean, most often, isn’t irony technically, it’s happenstance. Irony involves a kind of reversal. It’s ironic, for example, when an organization like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni praises President Obama’s critique of university spending.

The ACTA is nothing but supportive of top-down administrative control, and it’s administrators that have promoted the “spas” and “food courts” that they believe help promote their schools to parents and alumni. It’s administrators that have emphasized the academic star system that allows certain professors to avoid the classroom; it’s administrators that believe they need huge marketing budgets.

When will the ACTA criticize the profligate spending on athletics, especially football and basketball? When hell freezes over. On the other hand, Obama says nothing about the disastrous labor policies common in U.S. higher education, and he neglects to mention the administrative costs– many avoidable– that have helped drive up the costs of education. So perhaps this is just happenstance.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union

Obama and the Teachers

\ Leave a Comment \ by

Whenever I hear someone talking about the need to “get back to the basics” a little part of my brain answers, “Yes, that’s it! Let’s get back to the basics: class sizes need to be smaller and teachers need to be better paid!” That’s not what the phrase means, of course; usually, “the basics” mean simplifying education so that it can be easily measured on a standardized test. Most often, too, that means that writing disappears from the radar. Writing is harder to standardize.

Testing, to paraphrase William Gibson, is a consensual hallucination; if we believe in it, it takes on a semblance of reality. You can test reading comprehension on a test that can be easily mass-produced and administered. It’s nearly impossible to test writing skills that way. Even worse, and perhaps not surprisingly. these standardized tests are used to try to break the power of teachers (read: teachers’ unions) over the schools. It’s not just K-12, either.

Capitalism reflexivity believes in administrative rather than worker control. In the capitalist imagination, administrative control is flexible, rational, and efficient; worker control is rigid, irrational, and inefficient. In the name of the greater good, then, teachers must kept in check. It’s not surprising then, that, the Obama administration’s “Community College Summit” seems so completely out of touch with the realities of adjunct teaching.

This is about the capitalist agenda of administrative control, not learning. The New Faculty Majority is asking teachers to go to the White House blog and vote for posts that emphasize the concerns of adjunct and part-time teachers, which are the majority. it’s an interesting exercise and I hope that we can succeed in changing the administration’s views. That tricky business of power is not going to go away, though. Administrations are organized; we need to be too.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union