Category Archives: Writing

Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance.

Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

SAM DILLON, Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers. January 22, 2009

I think this study might be some of the best news coming out of the new administration yet. We will have to see if the “Obama-effect” can be reproduced in other studies, of course. It almost sounds too good to be true. But it’s a part of an entire series of small, undramatic changes that might just add up to a very dramatic shift in higher education.

We could have a Secretary of Labor that thinks about working people, and a National Labor Relations Board that isn’t trying to stop graduate students from organizing. “Obama will not fix academic labor’s problems from above,” Marc Bousquet writes, “but he will ensure that labor has the chance to exercise workplace rights.”

What’s really good for education is that we have a president who looks and sounds like someone who reads and writes. The Bush debacle did all sorts of harm, but it might have does the most damage in its brash disregard for learning. Bush seemed to like epitomizing a kind of “ugly student” not like the “ugly American.” I won’t miss that frat-boy con artist.

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community’s top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call — including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG — were urged to persuade their clients to send “large contributions” to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.

Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill

Anyone who thinks about politics and economic and political systems has a problem with conspiracies. Capital, for example, almost always fights efforts to create independent labor organizing. Do the powerful industrialists gather once a year to plan out their anti-union strategies? Apparently, sometimes they do.

Aside from scratching that conspiratorial itch the recordings in the article give us a good feel for what might be called the collective unconscious of capital, that profound, almost instinctive anxiety, if not hatred, for any power that might oppose them. Marcus honestly seems to believe that making organizing campaigns easier signals “the end of civilization” as we know it.

Meanwhile, Obama has begun to unwind the twisted knot of anti-labor regulations put in place by the Bush administration, starting with a series of executive orders and a new law that would help women sue for equal pay. And there is some evidence, from workers in the oil industry, that people are beginning to remember they can fight back.

I don’t know the details of the oil strike well enough to decide if I feel that they did the right thing by agreeing not to strike. I hope, though, that they will not let the oil corporations use the threat of the recession against them. In a crisis all sorts of things that once seemed solid can begin to shift. Pushing back now makes a lot of sense.

SEATTLE — Is it time to move beyond grades? That was the question considered — largely in the affirmative — at a workshop Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It may seem counterintuitive to think that this is a time for colleges to consider giving up grades. Many college administrators feel that accreditors are breathing down their necks, demanding more and more evidence of student learning. With the economy falling apart, parents want to be assured that their children are learning something. And the vast majority of colleges award grades.

But when organizers of the workshop had audience members describe their experiences with grading, the closest they came to a fan was an associate provost who admitted that he saw grade inflation as completely out of control and said that for more students at his and similar institutions, the grade-point average range is around 3.4 to 3.8. It seemed that everyone else in the room had been motivated to attend by their sense that the system isn’t working: Other academic administrators who said grades had become meaningless. A registrar who said that she was struggling to understand the apparent inconsistencies in faculty members’ grades. A professor who tells his students that “grades are the death of composition.” Another said: “Grades create a facade of coherence.”

Inside Higher Ed, “Imagining College Without Grades,” Scott Jaschik

I am always fascinated by discussions about grades because they are often laced with revelatory contradictions. There’s a certain sort of academic (who probably is simply saying out loud what most think) that will tell students, “grades don’t matter; what matters is learning.” Interestingly, these same academics often protest the loudest about grade inflation and are the most resistant to new assessment methodologies. Grade matter because they have exchange value.

You can use them for all sorts of things from getting out of going to school (in High School) to getting into a good college. They are a form of cultural capital that can often be directly converted into financial capital in the form of scholarships, grants, and loans. Like everything else that has exchange value in our culture, grades can benefit anyone but in practice they benefit the already privileged most.

Grades help to limit and shape access to educational resources of all kinds; like all forms of capital, the more you have, the easier it is to accumulate. Eliminating grades, then, could potentially open up these resources to more people. It’s not hard to imagine a college admissions system, for example, without standardized tests and grades, in which schools would try to create the most heterogeneous and so productive learning community possible.

You can be sure that the community would include students who once would have been excluded because they got bad grades. If qualitative assessments– portfolios, essentially, in one form or the other– were ubiquitous enough and ‘fine-grained’ they could be used to create classes in which a variety of learning styles and achievements reinforced and amplified each other. It sounds Utopian, but I don’t think that makes it impossible.