Reinventing the Box

\ Leave a Comment \ by

Standardized testing is, by definition, a product of large scale education, just as automobile is the product of mass production. The only way to produce a good car cheaply enough to be accessible to everyone, it was said, was to cut out all of the irregularities of the production process. You can only maximize profits if every McDonald’s fry is the same, every time, everywhere in the world.

We paid a certain cost in the qualities of our work lives for these profits, of course; all of those inconsistencies in the production process reflected the people making the cars or the fries. People always find small and large ways to put their individuality back into the process, but the push-back against alienation can only go so far before capital reasserts itself. Profit first, people second.

In education, people have pushing against the factory standardization model from the very start and in higher education, just as we seem on the verge of some sort of final victory against the S.A.T. and the A.C.T. and their ilk, capital is once again asserting itself. The new standardized test, according to a recent opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed, will be called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA).

Why do we need a new standardized test? The profit motive is obvious; standardized testing is a huge industry. By definition, too, it cannot be decentralized. The non-standardized alternative, roughly speaking, is a portfolio system which is by definition tailored to individual students. There’s some profit in these portfolios, but nothing approaching the money made in a standardized mass-market.

It’s no surprise that two co-authors of the piece are executives of the company selling the CLA. The aims of the CLA, assessing students on so-called real world competencies, seems fine, but we don’t need another illusory attempt to put learning into an objective box. The logical fallacy here, is an old one that equates learning with consumer products, but students aren’t fries or cars.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Rare Complaint

\ Leave a Comment \ by

Here’s a piece so rare that I almost can’t believe I just read it: an academic- an administrator, no less- demanding that the education mass media and the education community address biases in class both in journalistic and financial priorities. It’s a response to a spate of stories of how elite institutions are handling the budget crisis precipitated by the recension. Drew A. Bennett (chancellor of Missouri State University-West Plains) says things have to change.

First, Bennett says, the media need to “stop drawing attention to the alleged sacrifice of doing without cookies [at Harvard] and ask what’s wrong with a system where some institutions have that much money in the first place.” This is a fact of life in education that’s almost never discussed. Yet, as Bennett notes, while ” a million-dollar gift to an institution like Harvard or Princeton is a drop in the bucket, while the same gift to a two-year, rural college is a tsunami.” As always, the poor and working people take the hits most often.

What’s so interesting is that so few people either feel the outrage that Bennett so nicely dramatizes or so few feel free to openly discuss these class discrepancies in higher education. Yet he’s only scratched the surface of these inequities. Material privileges of this sort are hidden right out in the open and so naturalized that they almost never generate critical examination. It’s as if at some level we believe that the well-off, in education and elsewhere, are well off for good reason. Who are we to question what they have?

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

The Limits of Irony

\ Leave a Comment \ by

In the 1980s we used to joke about people that we called “politically correct.” My favorite example was people who felt they had to try to precisely mimic the pronunciation of Spanish words– never mind that most of the words they were mimicking had been a part of English for at least 300 hundreds years. They never did this with French, or German, or any other langauge, just Spanish.

It was an odd over-earnest attempt to show respect for Hispanic culture, of course, and we joked about it not because it was wrong but because it seemed exaggerated. “Politically correct” was ironic because it both recognized the important of showing respect for other people while trying to deflate a kind of pretentiousness. It was a gentle prod among friends.

Through some mysterious Orwellian process the U.S. right wing took up the notion of political correctness, carefully removed the irony, and used the crude remaining idea to bludgeon anyone they didn’t like. (In a similar way the right seems to miss the humor of the term “Tea Bagger”). Amazingly, “political correctness” has now been taken up by people who should know better.

One of these “you should know better groups” is the ACTA. (Always a favorite for anyone who watches the right wing academic cadres.) A recent post “Reforming the politically correct university,” seems typically disingenuous. David Azerrad begins by noting the obvious: “Some argue there is no such thing, while others point to case after case demonstrably proving that PC is very real indeed.”

He quickly dismisses the ambiguity. “After all, the endpoint is not to show that PC exists — but to find ways to restore free inquiry, robust debate, and intellectual fairness at our colleges and universities.” In other words, there’s no reason to try to figure out if in fact political correctness exists; we can simply assume that it does and move on to what can be done about it.

This is not to say that “bad things never happen” on campus; many of the incidents cited were misguided at best. But the real question is whether or not these incidents add up to a pattern of stiffing intellectual debate. The symbolic code of the right is important to note here. Azzerad is not defending all intellectual debate; he’s saying that right wing ideas are suppressed.

That’s why this post-ironic notion of political correctness is so deceptive, even though career have been founded on it. There’s always been a very vigorous right wing on campus, from the pro-business economics departments to the union-busting administrators to the traditional defenders of the cannon in the English department. Reaction, I guess, isn’t supposed to be rational.

Posted in: Writing

Moral Recession

\ Leave a Comment \ by

The logic of American capitalism is always at bottom profoundly a-moral if not immoral and it’s never more obvious than in a recession. You’d think that with so many people out of work we’d be all the more likely to embrace national health care. Why kick people when they are already down, right? But it seems to have the opposite effect, creating a kind of moral circling of the wagons.

I have mine, and I’m willing to protect it, but I won’t share a thing. That’s the message of our current down-turn. Education is no different. In tough times, you’d think the impulse would be to protect the programs that help the folks that need the most help. After all, in hard economic times the poor and the illiterate and the old need education more than ever.

But as this story (“Sophie’s Choice for Two Year Colleges” ) in Inside Higher Ed suggests, exactly the opposite is happening; schools are cutting programs that serve immigrants, the old, and those who need the most help in reading and writing. “What will go?” Scott Jaschik, writers, “A lot of remedial education.” Economics is brutal.

If this recession is doing nothing else it is is consolidating the power of those already in power, shifting resources away from those most in need, reinforcing privilege of all sorts. Meanwhile, of course, on the other end of the spectrum, executives get multi-million dollar bonuses. That makes sense, but a reading class for someone old and perhaps miles from any family is too much to ask.

Addendum: I just saw this interview with the economist James Galbraith, (Rein in entitlements? No. Increase them, says James Galbraith) who holds a contrary view of how we should respond to the recession:

As Galbraith elaborated in an article in a recent issue of the Washington Monthly, “The entitlement reformers have it backward; instead of cutting Social Security benefits, we should increase them, especially for those at the bottom of the benefit scale. Indeed, in this crisis, precisely because it is universal and efficient, Social Security is an economic recovery ace in the hole. Increasing benefits is a simple, direct, progressive, and highly efficient way to prevent poverty and sustain purchasing power for this vulnerable population.”

Posted in: Writing