Constructing Class

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Americans like to believe that we are the most mobile society– upward, we hope– in the world. In fact, we have a real problem with mobility in part becuase wages are so stagnant, unions have lost power, and higher education is so expensive. Add to that the pervasive anti-intellectualism of the culture in general and the right in particular and you have a recipe for an caste system.

I think one of the measures of the rigidity of existing caste system is the difficulty we have both in admitting the existence of poverty– the lowest caste are the “invisibles” as much as the “untouchables“– and in understanding the difficulties faced by people making the transition from one caste to the other. That’s what makes, “A New Model Community College,” so fascinating.

The articles describes the Ivy Bridge College, a partnership between a for-profit school, Altius Education, and Tiffin University, a private college. The program tries to address one of the dirty little secrets of U.S. education. As the article puts it, “the national average three-year graduation rate for community colleges is about 25 percent. ” Three quarters don’t make it, in other words.

As Diane Ravitch (among many others) puts it, the real problem in education is poverty. Her point is relevant to higher education as well as public schools. The accumulation of social and cultural capital needed for college takes time and energy; if you don’t begin early, it can be difficult to make it up quickly later. It seems like a simple, common sense idea.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Sweet and Sour

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I heard a movie reviewer–talking about “The Social Network” — describe the filmmaker as so soured that he was unable to see his characters as anything but one-dimensionally cynical. It’s alienation and greed and petty self revenge all the way down. Given that this movie– and Facebook– had its origins in the darkest days of the Bush administration, perhaps a dour perspective is to be expected, particularly from the man who created “The West Wing.”

I worry that my own perspective is soured too; I criticize while only rarely pointing to what might done to end the quagmire of education in the U.S. (The final chapter of my book does offer solutions.) I don’t like grades, but I don’t talk about portfolios often enough; I think administrations are much too large, over paid, and have too much power, but I don’t discuss unions and democratic reform of university administration in enough detail.

We need the sweet as much as the sour. I think that the overall goal of pedagogical change, for example, ought to be nurturing intellectualism and science. The Chronicle of Higher Education has provided a nice example of what could be done here. The main goal is to reintroduce students to the aims and goals of intellectual work by re-integrating the practical and the theoretical. (The technical term is praxis.)

Dump the standardized tests, organize the teachers, cut administrative budgets in half, reduce tuition, and take our ideas into the wild. Elementary schools can focus on scientific investigations and on nutrition and physical health, while in later grades students can move out into the community and then the world. Education becomes, in a specific tangible sense, both a way to understand people and society and to ameliorate suffering.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Another Brick in the Wall

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Just the other day I spent a few minutes talking with my niece– a college senior– while she took a multiple choice test in an online interim Political Science course. One tiny part of my brain was concerned with ethics– is this cheating?– but the teacher in me was more concerned with trying to help her ‘talk out’ the answers. I was never good at these tests and so I was not always sure of the answers myself, even though I am very familiar with the subject.

Many questions were designed, it seemed, to fool you into going in one direction when the answer lay in another. Perhaps the purpose is to get students to to think twice before they answer. These tests, though, help to explain why learning is so undervalued in our culture. (I would add to that dynamic the cynicism that pays administrators million dollar salaries while expanding the use of adjuncts.) It’s not about learning; it’s about winning the education game.

It’s difficult, in these tests, to keep your mind on the subject; your mind keeps trying to decipher the game the teacher is playing, rather than the content. This is why these ‘how to study’ courses can be so helpful. It’s not simply that some students have problems with authority; these tests really are manipulative. I think that the only reason we don’t see more open resentment is that so many students learn to be good, or to at least accept, these games.

School, then, becomes a contest against the teacher. Is it any surprise that cheating is so common? Standardized tests are an archaic, anti-learning technology that should be phased out. We need new strategies. Instead, though, schools are too often pursuing a kinds of arms race, struggling to beat the cheaters at the testing game (Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology). It’s a kind of decadence that has to end before any progress can be made.

Posted in: Professional, Writing

It’s Broke, and It Can’t Be Fixed

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If you took a picture of a classroom at the time of the War of 1812, a professor once pointed out to me, it would look roughly the same as a classroom today: teacher in front, a blackboard, students in chairs. Maybe our classrooms have white boards, or some sort of electronic board; perhaps there’s a computer on the podium and a screen that drops down. In any case, the modern classroom has changed far less than, say, transportation over the last two centuries.

Then as now we had grades, yet we know that grades are not good ways to guide learning. Most grades– even if derived from multiple choice testing– are unreliable. Still we continue to have this pre-modern urge to rank and sort in simple, easy to comprehend ways. Grades can be cruel too, which is why we have grade inflation as well as the perennial complaints about grade inflation.
An authentic assessment of learning is a complex portrait not a letter or number.

‘“It’s generally recognized that an A by itself is not very meaningful,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “Giving statistical context to assist recipients of a transcript in understanding the grades is definitely helpful.’” (A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean) Context is necessary but not sufficient. Grades are old, worn out technology; they need to be replaced.

Posted in: Composition, Professional