Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Rich
Pyrrhic Victory
It might be surprising, at least to some, to find that as someone who teaches in the proprietary education system, I am generally in favor of more regulations. And while it’s theoretically possible to imagine regulations that go too far and kill the goose that laid the golden egg, that seems unlikely in the extreme in the current political climate. It looks like a loose-loose situation.
In fact, the recent election debacle suggests that the already weak regulations may be weakened even further. I don’t think this is a victory for anyone. On the other hand, I think writers like Allen Singer go too far when they try to paint the for-profit sector with the charter school brush. He also seems to ignore the abuses in the so-called not for profit sector, further undermining his case.
It seems bizarre, for example, to complain about the student debt problem without also mentioning that student debt is a chronic, deeply destructive problem in all of higher education. Clearly the rules about recruitment need to be tightened so that students are not fooled about what they are getting into when they try to get a degree from a proprietary school.
Just as clearly the so-called non profits’ marketing programs deserve further scrutiny. The large football and basketball programs are essentially multti-million dollar corporations run in part on public money. Why should any school that gets federal money– for profit or otherwise– be allowed to waste millions of dollars in administrative salaries, either for coaches or for presidents?
The proposed regulations leave out a wide variety of other issues that need attention in every sector of the higher education system. What about the ratio of full-time to part-time professors and academic freedom of speech? None of these things are mentioned either in Singer’s piece or in the proposed regulations. Neither political party seems willing to add real teeth to the rules.
Slow Learning
The not-so-secret secret behind the standardized test is that it is in effect the fast-food of learning and assessment. Everything from the SAT to the “Race to the Top” tests have their roots in the same economic and social desire to deliver a product as cheaply and efficiently as possible to as many people as possible. In the food industry it can only be called successful if you ignore the resulting obesity epidemic. In education, it can only be called successful if you ignore the deepening social inequities.
One solution to fast food, to keep the metaphor alive, is called the slow food movement. The idea seems simple: try not to do much to your food before you eat it. Don’t cook it too much; don’t raise it too far away. It’s an old-fashioned, almost pre-modern idea: don’t eat too much meat and do eat lots of fruit and vegetables grown nearby. If we had a government willing to pass laws and regulations to encourage it, it would engender a slow revolution in just about every part of our lives.
As it turns out, as at least one high school has shown, writing can be thought of as a kind of slow learning analogous to slow food that can replace the empty calories of the standardized test. The key is to integrate writing thoroughly into the curriculum, using it both as way to tie seeming disparate subjects together and to reinforce knowledge. Just like slow food, the idea is old-fashioned, if not pre-modern. It’s a much more individualized, personal process, a richer, and so more effective non-standardized assessment.
Robert Plant: Angel Dance