Good News Inside the Bad

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I know these threats [pandemics, population, climate change, etc.] sound like science fiction, but they are real and my generation will have to address them. The way to overcome these challenges and ensure the continued long-term existence of our species is through investment in rapid scientific innovation.

To make this second giant leap possible, the culture surrounding science in America must change. Too many have rejected evidence-based science. Nearly 60 percent of American public school biology teachers are not teaching evolution properly and another 13 percent admit to teaching creationism. Almost half of Americans believe that the Earth was formed in the last 10,000 years. Taxpayer funded schools in my home state of Louisiana are teaching that scientists and their scientific work are “sinful.” At least 300 taxpayer funded voucher schools nationwide are teaching creationism. Teachers in public schools in Louisiana and Tennessee are teaching unscientific “alternatives” to evolution, the origin of the Earth, and climate change, and this is allowed by state law. Other states may soon follow suit.

“President Obama, Please Call for a Second Giant Leap for Mankind,” Zack Kopplin

I should be a little embarrassed to admit it but I had not heard of Zack Kopplin before I saw an interview with him on Moyers and Company. (It aired a few days ago but I watched the tape at lunch today.) I won’t say much about Mr. Kopplin– his ideas speak for themselves– except to say that he’s a wonderful breath of fresh air. Not only is he anti-creationist, he sees the connections between the right’s anti-evolution ideology and their fight against public schools. Kopplin shows that critical thinking and resistance is alive and well.

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Online Places, Professional

The Recession Isn’t Over Yet

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Ohio Governor John Kasich, a Republican, has proposed in his budget bill that boards of public colleges and universities be given the ability to unilaterally increase the workloads of faculty members.

The proposed change modifies the state code that governs the function of boards at public institutions. Should the budget pass, the code would state that boards “may choose to modify [colleges’] faculty workload policy” to require all full-time faculty members to teach one additional course in one of the next two academic years. The increased workload then becomes the new minimum for faculty members to maintain. Faculty members at most public colleges and universities are unionized, and have workload provisions in their contracts, but the proposal would permit the boards to ignore those provisions.

“Hours in the Classroom,” Carl Straumsheim

Technically, of course, the recession ended a few years ago, as soon as the economy began to show positive growth in 2009. Politically, though, the recession won’t be over in higher education until administrators stop using their fiscal power to try to undermine what they see as faculty privileges. Why do we never hear of administrative work loads rising?

Never mind that these so-called privileges, such as a course load that allows research, (already much too rare) contributes to the university’s mission as an institution that produces knowledge (and status) as well as teaches. These guys will always try to kill the goose that laid their golden eggs; it’s second-nature to the contemporary U.S. oligarchy.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union

Topsy Turvy Teaching

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New data from a long-term study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College suggest that some of the students most often targeted in online learning’s access mission are less likely than their peers to benefit from — and may in fact be hurt by — digital as opposed to face-to-face instruction.

“Who Benefits From Online Ed?” Doug Lederman

One of the first things I learned about college is that the academic pecking order is upside down. It’s especially dramatic in an English department, where the students who need the most work and help– the college freshman– tend to get the lowest paid teachers, that is, adjuncts and graduate students. The students who need the least help– junior and senior English majors– get the best paid, most experienced tenured professors.

Traditionally, English professors (each a literary specialist) taught freshman, if they did at all, only as a part of a kind of hazing ritual. Once you earned tenure you got the small classes with the (self-selected, experienced) best students. This has changed as Rhetoric and Composition nears a kind of numerical equality with Literary Studies. The more Rhetoric and Composition matures, however, the further it seems to go from those freshman.

Online education has tended to duplicate these patterns in curious ways, by focusing on those very students who seem least likely to do well in an online setting. Here, as elsewhere in academia, those students who most need the sorts of help you can only get in the traditional classroom– and in small classes– seem to be the main target audience for online education. And online education has even fewer full-time tenured professors.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Composition, Professional, Writing

Another Emperor, This One Is Naked Too

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The report, “Understanding and Improving Virtual Schools,” was released by the National Education Policy Center, a nonprofit research organization based in Boulder, Colo., and a frequent sparring partner for K12 Inc. My colleague Ian Quillen has the details on the results from the most recent report focusing on K12 Inc., which shows students in schools managed by the company perform worse and drop out more frequently than students in brick-and-mortar schools.

In a lengthy response to the report posted on its website, K12 Inc. claimed NEPC used selective data that didn’t present the whole academic picture for virtual schools, including the tendency for students to enroll already behind grade level and ignores academic growth.

“K12 Inc. Stock Down After Scathing Report,” Jason Tomassini

I love online education– I feel the need to say it– but I also think that it’s drowning in hyperbole. In recent years, too, it has tended to drive a discussion about education that I think is almost entirely irrelevant. Online education, this rhetoric suggests, is a disruptive technology sure to destroy higher-education-as-we-know-it and replace with a system that is better in every way. Online education is both the problem and the solution.

This new system will be cheaper, more efficient, more democratic; you name it, this new system will be it. (I am not really using hyperbole myself, at least not much. See “Clayton Christensen: in 15 years half of all universities will be bankrupt.“) I think most of this sort of talk has less to do with real-life economics and education and more to do with the very loose rhetoric that’s now become the norm. It’s dramatic and it ignores education’s real problems.

The real problem in U.S. higher education is that it has become a part-time employment system. The problem isn’t the public schools, it’s poverty and gun violence and the lack of a national health care system and 30 years of right-wing propaganda that has made the very idea of pubic funding suspect. It’s an irrational market ideology that attributes a kind of magic to private property and greed. Online education might help but it’s no panacea.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Professional, Writing