Sherman Dorn

Jim Anderson retrospective, part 2

A few days ago I described the 20th-anniversary Jim Anderson retrospective at AERA. Now it's my turn to address some of the topics raised in that session, in a personal historiography, or my reading of The Education of Blacks in the South, originally published in 1988.

For me, the thesis of the book was not particularly a surprise, for several reasons. First, my undergraduate advisor Paul Jefferson had exposed me to a broad variety of historical arguments from the very first course I took with him, which used Herbert Aptheker's documentary collection, to a seminar course where I wrote an historiographical essay on W.E.B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction. Bryn Mawr College sociologist David Karen had exposed me to both structural-functionalists and radical education critics in a course I took with him when I was a junior (or at least I vaguely recall its being spring 1986). Then in grad school I had Michael Katz as an advisor.

But probably the teacher who lay the groundwork the most for Anderson was Bob Engs, for whom I read C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South. Because Engs and Anderson use the same material to arrive at very different interpretations of the role of foundations in Southern education, it says a great deal about Engs as a teacher that he made Anderson make sense for me even while he was telling me that Anderson's book was polemical. I like both men a great deal, so perhaps a broader explanation is in order.

Engs and Anderson were both pioneers as African American historians in elite majority-white universities in the same time (the early 1970s), Engs at Penn and Anderson at Illinois. I wish I could say they were part of a continuous record going back decades, but in an case they've become part of diverse faculties for the past several.

Engs turned his first research project into a book ten years before Anderson's, with Freedom's First Generation about the Hampton, Virginia, community. Anderson took a decade and a half to write his first book (something Vanessa Siddle Walked called "lingering with an idea," but I thought of as "a darned good example of a leader in my field who didn't write 7 articles a year before tenure"). And they are different books: While Anderson writes only of education, Engs writes a local history, focusing on the contingent conditions that allowed Hampton's African American community to thrive after the Civil War and hang on to wealth in the very late 19th century even while the curtain of segregation and disfranchising was closing in from all sides.

Engs saw the Hampton Institute as one of those contingencies, and Samuel Chapman Armstrong (Hampton's first leader) as a friend of the Hampton African American community. Where Anderson saw a conspiracy to undermine equality, Engs saw irony with Armstrong's showing one face to the white community and another to Hampton's African Americans. Where Engs saw opportunity that some grabbed in the midst of oppression, Anderson saw structural limitations that were covered up by a tamed education system. Let me make clear that their views of the Southern political economy and educational structure are similar; the great interpretive differences lie in the role of the foundations.

Despite those deep differences in the interpretation of late 19th century Southern education, Engs laid the groundwork for my "oh, yes, of course" reading of Anderson in several ways. First, he made me and other graduate students read Willie Lee Rose's Rehearsal for Reconstrution and C. Vann Woodward and Jacqueline Jones and Exodusters and several others in a way that raised important questions about the South's history after the Civil War. I was also his teaching assistant one semester for his Southern postwar history class (that's postwar as in post-Civil War), and apart from his tolerance for the awkward naive grad student I was then, I figured out how he could say the most outlandish things in a lecture and get the southern white male students to recommend that all of their friends take his classes. With a light baritone, he stood at the front of class, uttering outrageous interpretations in a quiet, patient manner, as if they wouldn't ruffle anyone's feathers. The students loved him (and I presume students still love him at Penn).

So in many ways, I bought much of Anderson's argument because of Engs. If it's any comfort, Bob, it's because of Anderson's discussion of communities that I bought your argument, too. Ultimately, the best scholarship in each book is about different levels of action. Anderson effectively demonstrates that white philanthropists did conspire to impose a certain type of education on the South. Yet in his work on community efforts, Anderson bolsters Engs's argument that at the local level, there was a lot more going on. I'm not sure we have to establish the moral worth of Samuel Chapman Armstrong to evaluate either book. (Some years ago, Engs wrote a biography of Armstrong, and it's much more sympathetic than I expect Anderson's version would be.)

I have both learned from Anderson's work and also failed to give it credit in one case. It was because of his book that my own dissertation research on graduation in the 20th century involved looking at the extent of high school availability in the 1950s and 1960s. And like John Rury, I am returning to the scope of high school education in the 20th century South. In Schools as Imagined Communities, Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, Barbara Shircliffe, and I could have enriched the introduction by discussing Anderson's work. Mea culpa.

As those at the AERA panel said, Anderson's book helped open up the history of Southern education after the Civil War, giving the subject the gravitas that it deserves and momentum that has served many other historians well. The rest of us in the field can only hope to leave an intellectual legacy as significant as Jim Anderson's.

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Posted on 04:54 PM (Permalink) | |

You can write a very nice article describing train wrecks

The budget situation for Florida is pitiful and deteriorating. I'm on the Florida Education Association's governance board, and we're meeting this weekend. I think the students in the Florida Student Education Association and the occasional younger teacher were probably among the few who were truly partying last night at the reception. Part of it is addiction: As I told one activist who's on the NEA national board, what the heck were we doing talking shop at 10 pm? But part is being disheartened at the emerging picture in the state.

At one level, it's my emotions that are engaged, in part because I represent over 1700 faculty and professional employees at USF, and the idea of any one of them receiving a layoff notice is upsetting. Someone not being reappointed or failing to make tenure is a different issue; in principle, those should be merit-based decisions. But with a layoff, you're telling someone who's worked hard and met the institution's standards that they're gone. I hate that, and a large part of my time and energies in the last few months has gone towards addressing that.

And yet there's a part of me that knows that a budget crisis is a remarkable opportunity for studying organizations. Almost a quarter century ago, David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elizabeth Hansot wrote Public Schools in Hard Times, looking at how the Depression changed public education. Some in my institution look instead to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which argues that restructuring ideas float out in the political ether, and people who advocate those ideas use crises as opportunities to push dramatic change that would never be considered otherwise. I haven't read Klein, but the representation of her argument strikes me as a more conspiratorial version of John Kingdon.

The world is more complicated, at least with regard to education. Several years ago, Iowa's plan for performance pay got knocked for a loop when a budget crisis led the state to cut those dollars, and given the realities of budgeting in most states, innovative programs funded with discretionary dollars are often the first on the chopping block. That's the dynamic whether the programs represent good, bad, or ugly ideas.

But this is clearly an area where I'm relatively ignorant. Putting school and budget crisis into my favorite academic search hopper gives us a few pieces to examine, including the following ones that look promising:

• Andrew Glassberg, Organizational Responses to Municipal Budget Decreases (JSTOR $)
• Ted Schwinden, School Reorganization in Montana: A Time for Decision? (free)
• Patricia Gumport, The Contested Terrain of Academic Program Reducation (sub, though the link is to Worldcat)
• Steven Sheffrin, State Budget Deficit Dynamics and the California Debacle (JSTOR $)

You can then snowball outward from those first entries by looking for who cites Glassberg and others. These are two of the essential tools of the academic researcher: leveraging one's interest/passion in a topic to begin crafting questions and discovering what others have already written. And I suppose this is all to say that someone else can write some fine articles on what is currently giving me nightmares.

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Posted on 07:10 AM (Permalink) | |

NCLB and where we sit

In my undergraduate social foundations class, I spend some time explaining the politics of accountability. For the last few years, a critical mass of students (either a majority or a vocal minority) have consistently opposed accountability, taking on the mantle of professionalism, and it's my job to rattle their cages and make them see things using at least one other lens.

I usually explain things in words something like the following:

Views of accountability depend dramatically on where you are. At the classroom level, teachers trust what they do and would like to trust parents but aren't exactly sure. Parents may want to trust teachers, if their children's experiences have generally been decent, or may be entirely untrusting if not. Principals generally trust their own judgment and would like to trust teachers but have a supervisory responsibility (and the level of supervision they exercise will depend rather dramatically on a variety of factors).

Once you get above the level of the school, each level tends to want to impose some accountability on the level below it. For NCLB purposes, the key issue is the state/feds split: in a number of states, officials in the state capitol don't trust local districts and feel that it is their responsibility to regulate the districts, while a number of federal officials are skeptical that states will do the right thing unless there is a federal level of accountability.

NCLB forced states to define a variety of measures and set targets for those measures. At the local level, the state plan is often viewed as onerous, unreasonable, and inflexible. But the state plans are inherently compromises, and so various parties in Washington have looked at the state plans with skepticism.

For example, let's take a look at graduation, which states often defined to mean one minus the proportion of high school students identified as dropouts. That too-easily-falsifiable "dropout rate" is very low in many places, for reasons largely unrelated to the actual proportion of teenagers who graduate from high school, and the official graduation rate if defined as the complement will be wildly inflated.

To local residents and some educators, it looks like the state is hiding a sizable dropout rate, which many view as a consequence of out-of-control accountability systems. That's the type of local or educator-centered view many of you have described.

But you also need to look at it from a federal perspective, from those who see state plans and state commitments with enormous skepticism. To them, what would be the logical conclusion drawn about such graduation rates?

Linda McNeil et al.'s recent article on high-stakes accountability in Texas and Charles Barone's entry today, The Games States Play: Graduation Rates, are Exhibits A and B the next time I have this discussion.

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Posted on 09:31 PM (Permalink) | |

On eprints at Harvard and Full Monty open-access

I'm still trying to figure out the consequences of Harvard's Arts and Science faculty voting last week to push open-access publication of faculty work. This is fundamentally different from the occasional individual boycott of subscription-based journals. Harvard's faculty move is closer to Congress's push for a mandate that all grant-funded articles etc. be accessible to the public within a year of original publication. It is from these institutional moves that the publishing world will change. There is a simple, digestible explanation for the open-access moves related to grants (the public pays, so the public should be able to read) and the Harvard A&S faculty (we're established enough not to have to worry about the reputational economy of subscription journals). What flows from that is not necessarily clear, but we can reasonably assume that something will flow.

Reputational economies and the refereeing process

There are two broader issues here that need to be untangled. One is the reputational economy of academe, which is partly tied to the referee process and partly to post-publication reputational measures, such as citations. As physics has shown with arXiv, a discipline can survive quite nicely with a much fuzzier boundary between working paper and publication. But maybe that's because of the established reputation of physics. Similarly, I think history, classics, math, and other disciplines that have relatively high intellectual status (if not in resources) have nothing to fear from loosening up the refereeing process.

But what about other disciplines, including education? Education research already has a number of unrefereed publications that receive a lot of attention, largely because of differential access to publicity. Unlike medicine, where the top-reputed journals have publicists that distribute press releases (and you will see those regularly reported in the press), education has a different distribution of publicity. If you look at the indispensable Fritzwire, you'll see oodles of announcements for think-tank-based research symposia, and the ability to hire publicity folks does have an impact on what gets reported. As one colleague in another institution explained, when I asked why his work received far less attention in his area than the think-tank-based work of X and Y, which I thought was of lower quality, "Sociology departments don't usually hire publicists."

This is not to say that all think-tank-funded research is of poor quality, or that articles in refereed journals is of high quality: you don't know until you read the stuff. Nor am I suggesting that think tanks fire their publicists or stop doing the legwork to get attention. My point is rather that given the existing visibility of nonrefereed work in education, in addition to the status issues in education already, I suspect that faculty in education will be far more reluctant to let go of a peer-refereed model. Even though the notion of peer refereeing is historically and geographically bounded (see Einstein versus the Physical Review for one example), it is wrapped up in status issues. For Harvard's A&S faculty to vote for an open-access preference is one thing. For even Harvard's education faculty to go the same route? We'll see.

Economic models for open access

Since EPAA is described by John Willinsky as a "zero-budget journal," I'm living the tensions involved in open-access.  We don't charge either readers or authors for anything, though I have no compunction about asking authors to review other manuscripts as part of a reviewing ecology, and I've shifted the submission checkoff to alert authors that very long manuscripts or manuscripts with a number of tables may involve some paid preparation of an article post-acceptance. (I haven't yet asked authors to pay for such preparation, but it's a recent move.) Apart from the administrative issues involved, I am not philosophically inclined towards allowing advertising on EPAA. Maybe I should, but I and many editorial board members would be uncomfortable with that. But as a result, the burden of making the journal work is largely on volunteer labor, or labor borrowed from other tasks. Even if I were to accept advertising into EPAA, I suspect that we would not receive much revenue from it, and it may not be worth the headaches involved.

The most visible open-access journal system, the Public Library of Science, relies on publication fees charged to authors, starting right now at $1250. Here is the PLoS explanation of publication fees:

It costs money to produce a peer-reviewed, edited, and formatted article that is ready for online publication, and to host it on a server that is accessible around the clock. Prior to that, a public or private funding agency has already paid a great deal more money for the research to be undertaken in the interest of the public. This real cost of "producing" a paper can be calculated by dividing your laboratory's annual budget by the number of papers published. We ask that-as a small part of the cost of doing the research-the author, institution, or funding agency pays a fee, to help cover the actual cost of the essential final step, the publication. (As it stands, authors now often pay for publication in the form of page or color charges.) Many funding agencies now support this view.

For largely grant-funded disciplines, that's doable. For others? Not possible, either because an institution will not pay publication fees or because an author may be an independent scholar.

Here's the bottom-line concern: For journals in non-grant fields that are currently subscription-based and where there is paid staff who work on the journal, the transition to subscription-free work is fraught with risk, and I suspect that forcing all currently-operating journals to go subscription-free would result in the closure of hundreds of journals. I don't think anyone wants that to happen, but there is no secure economic model for open-access journals right now. We'll see the development of hybrids for some time (such as the Teachers College Record in education research), and that will work to some extent. And my guess is that a number of journals would have no problem with open-access for a substantial number of country-specific domains, to help scholars in countries that do not generally have institutional subscriptions to expensive journals. But that's different from the "Full Monty" open-access journal.

Where to go from here

Of the two issues, my guess is that the reputational-economy question is easier to answer. I suspect citation harvesting will be the basis of future reputation economies in academic publication. Google Scholar is incomplete and inaccurate, but so is ISI's Web of Science, and as long as academics don't treat bibliometrics as carved in stone, things should work out (or at least the problems are of a much lower magnitude than other problems we face). Unlike David Rothman, I do not see online comment forums and rating algorithms working, in part because few researchers can afford the time to invest in such forums or devices. For institutions that care about research, they will still use external reviews at promotion gates, and that will supplement other information.

The economic model of "full Monty open-access" is going to be harder to achieve. Maybe I should state what I would love, as an editor: for someone to figure out how to provide me great copyediting and compositing. Make it so I don't have the headaches of economic administration and post-acceptance detail work, and I'll probably swing towards accepting advertising or a sliding-scale manuscript-processing fee. That's going to be a bit of a challenge, since I have very particular ideas about how an article should look. But a clearinghouse that manages advertising, moderate manuscript-processing and publication fees, copyeditors and compositors, and has a quality-control mechanism for the copyeditors and compositors would do me a huge favor. And if this finicky editor will accept it, and if you can make it work economically, you just might make open-access work on a sustainable basis.

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Posted on 11:05 PM (Permalink) | |

On excuses for unintended consequences

Oh, my: I head out of town for a week, and when I get back there's a trail of tears blogs on curriculum narrowing:

• Charles Barone, January 17
• Robert Pondiscio, January 18
• Eduwonkette, January 18
• Eduwonk, January 17-18
• Eduwonkette, February 4
• Eduwonk, February 6
• Ken DeRosa, February 6
• Robert Pondiscio, February 7
• Joanne Jacobs, February 7
• Eduwonkette, February 8
• Eduwonk, February 8
• Charles Barone, February 12

While there is some question about the extent of curriculum narrowing that followed NCLB (see: no causal language there), the basic argument in these entries is over whether NCLB creates incentives to narrow the curriculum and the extent to which the variation in curriculum narrowing shows that schools don't have to narrow the curriculum to do well on tests.

(...except for Eduwonk's red herring about low bars, which essentially is that because states can set relatively low thresholds for proficiency, that eliminates the incentive to narrow curriculum, stuff test-prep into the kids up the wazoo, etc. No economist or behaviorist would accept an argument of "hey, the marginal change required is low, so that doesn't create an incentive for changed behavior." Either would reply that's a question that should be left to evidence, not speculation. I'm not an economist or a behaviorist, but I don't buy the hand-waving about low bars, either. And, as 'kette points out, isn't NCLB supposed to change behavior? You can't simultaneously say NCLB is changing some behavior you like without acknowledging that it has the potential to provoke behavior we don't like.)

If we agree that thousands of schools are making poor decisions in response to the pressure of test-based accountability, then the operative question is, How do we help schools and educators make better decisions? Charles Barone and others suggest we hold up exemplars and say, "Follow them." That's the effective-schools-literature strategy, and we've paddled that boat since the late 1970s without getting where we want, so we know at least that it's not enough. Robert Pondiscio and other core-knowledge or other-curriculum standards folks would say, "Build the curriculum, and they will follow." That's a step towards regulating input more than outcomes, which I suspect will not be politically viable, but I may be wrong. George Miller, Ted Kennedy, and others propose to increase the number of measures used, with legislative language that assumes that AYP can be finely tuned. I don't buy that argument: test-based accountability is a cudgel, not a scalpel. My instinct is to say, Watch the decision-making, but that's because I distrust black-box handwaving, and I know it's hard to operationalize a procedural standard within a test-prep culture.

The meta-political question is deeper and one that I think most people understand in spots if not generally: you either own reform or you lose the reformer label. If you do not acknowledge problems through implementation and own them, you give up a huge chunk of credibility. Whether I agree with them on an issue or not, I give credit to Ed Trust for occasionally identifying problems with implementation and deciding to own the issue (e.g., growth models). They haven't done that with 100%-proficiency goals or test-prep (yet), but it's a healthy dynamic where they have done it. You could say the same with Fordham and curriculum-narrowing (or Diane Ravitch with the same issue plus test-prep). Or Miller and Kennedy and 100% proficiency (though their concrete ideas on those points are Rube-Goldbergesque).

I haven't seen that nearly as much with Barone, Eduwonk, or some others, and the failure to own problems with NCLB ignores the fundamental fact of post-NCLB politics: Parents of public-school children are far more skeptical of test-based accountability than they were 5 years ago. Own the problems or lose control.

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Posted on 11:38 AM (Permalink) | |

Teaching about what humans do

I've been tagged by Craig Smith, who asks, Why Do You Teach and Why Does It Matter? after reading Dr. Crazy's explanation of why she teaches literature. This comes on the heels of Stanley Fish's boldly hedonistic Epistle to Philistines and the expansion on this, last night's Epistle to Dumb-Ass Colleagues. (Okay, the posts were properly called The Uses of the Humanities, parts 1 and 2, but I agree with Margaret Soltan's reading of Fish Epistles I.) Fish's essays are in his typical eliding style, with just enough of substance to frustrate me when he misses the obvious.

And here is one part of the obvious: an academic education requires the study of a variety of disciplines, including science, math, and also what humans do. Understanding "what humans do" requires behavioral sciences, social sciences, and humanities. While the configuration of disciplines is not carved in stone, a student will get a pretty good education in the culture that humans produce within the humanities. One way to think about the value of any discipline or area is to think about the institutions that leave out the area.

Here is the other part of the obvious: you don't learn how to think in the abstract but in bumping up against ideas in specific contexts. That "bumping up against" phrase is important to me, because you don't learn anything if you are not challenged. Some subjects appear easier to you or me than others, but that perception is about subjects that are under a threshold of difficulty, not the absence of new ideas and challenges. Teachers can make learning easier, but that fact doesn't eliminate the need for challenge. And the specific context matters. As my favorite high school English teacher told us at the beginning of AP English, she taught writing, and she did it in the context of teaching about literature. She also taught us an enormous amount about literature in the course of that year. Even philosophers talk about topics. Care for a casual game of penny-ante Ontology?

In my case, I teach social-science and humanities perspectives on education, with a focus on history and sociology. The majority of my students come to me to fulfill exit requirements or in the midst of pre-professional training that reinforces psychological assumptions, and I have most of them for only one semester. I provide students with an additional set of views, humanities and social-science perspectives to examine schooling. When students leave my classroom, they should be able to explain how people fight over the purposes of schooling and the different models of how schools function as organizations (or don't).

In many ways, I am lucky to be in a field where I get paid for navel-gazing. My neighbors and fellow citizens should want me to teach students who want to teach that the world may not agree with their reasons for teaching or their view of the purpose of schooling; that the world's range of schools includes places that provide a very different education from their own experiences as they grew up; and that the job of teaching involves more than going into a room, shutting the door, and letting the gorgeous lesson plans unfold without interruption or difficulty. That's a fairly practical purpose. There is also the specific example of the argument above: Formal schooling is what humans do today, and studying the social context of formal schooling is a reasonable way to study what humans do.

In addition, when students are in my course, they have to write extensively and coherently about schooling. Over my career, I have taught over 2,000 students. I have taught most of those students at USF, where I have never written a multiple-choice final exam and where I have always required that students write papers. Before my colleagues and I agreed to craft a single paper assignment across all of the undergraduate social-foundations sections, I assigned a "perspectives" paper where I collected sources on two or three recent "hot topics" in education and told my students, "This is not a research paper. I've collected all of the background you should need. Your job is to apply the concepts you have learned in the course to these hot topics." (I gave students the ability to propose a topic of their own choosing, as long as I approved it in the first month of the course. Almost no students took me up on the offer, and as a result, I stopped having students propose topics that focused more on psychology than the topics in my course.) In most cases, the common readings for the course never directly addressed the hot topics, so they couldn't just regurgitate ideas. I was mean! (See the bit about challenges above.)

Some of these assignments were more successful than others. I am still aghast that a few years ago, the majority of students who wrote about the "intelligent-design" controversy in Dover supported teaching it alongside evolution in a science class. I graded them on the merits of the assignment (which is not synonymous with the question of what should be in the curriculum), and then explained my point of view in comments separate from the grading. But I challenge students' beliefs about education, no matter what they carried into the classroom, and I push students to  justify their conclusions with plausible arguments.

And to continue this meme, I tag...

• Margaret Soltan
• Timothy Burke
• Miriam Burstein
• Profgrrrrl
• Kelly in Kansas
• Mark Grimsley
• Jose Vilson

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Posted on 12:16 PM (Permalink) | |

Credentialism, human capital, and ahistoricism

I recently had occasion to review a very small slice of the economic literature on the value of education, and it struck me that while both sociologists and economists struggle with arguments about the value of education in contrast with the value of a credential, they do so almost in mirrored ways. The economic argument about credentialism comes from some conservative economists such as Richard Vedder, who asks,

Can the strictly credentialing function be performed much cheaper through alternative approaches --examinations, IQ tests, etc.?... How much of "learning" in college is the attainment of needed skills (e.g., accounting, engineering skills) that are not readily learned on the job? And how much of it is merely an academic form of some endurance race, where the mere completion of the race denotes certain desirable character traits?

To Vedder and a few others, educational credentials signal employers about the inherent taits of potential employees. Thus, to Vedder, the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) case was horrible because it discouraged employers from using what he thinks is direct evidence of intrinsic personal value (IQ tests) and thus encourages the use of educational credentials as a proxy.

(Even apart from Vedder's misplaced faith in IQ tests, his interpretation of Griggs is a substantial misreading of the case on two important grounds. First, the Supreme Court also struck down the use of educational credentials by Duke at the time (in this case, high school diplomas) because they were not tied to bona fide job requirements. Second, Vedder ignores the important historical context: while the district court and appeals court decided that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated evidence of discriminatory intent of denying opportunities to African-American employees, the use of IQ tests and credential requirements maintained an uneven playing field: "Under the [1964 Civil Rights] Act, practices, procedures, or tests neutral on their face, and even neutral in terms of intent, cannot be maintained if they operate to 'freeze' the status quo of prior discriminatory employment practices.")

Vedder and some other economists are skeptical of the intrinsic value of education, seeing the use of credentials as a poor proxy or signal of some intrinsic values. In this story, people who enroll in and complete college essentially have the same value at the end of college as at the beginning, but the process performs a sorting function on traits that employers find valuable. Because of this argument, mainstream economists exploring the value of a diploma have spent enormous effort trying to disentangle the value of a degree from what they vaguely call ability.

Far to the left of Vedder, a number of sociologists (and some economists and historians of education) have also criticized the argument that education is primarily an investment in human capital. The social-reproduction argument claims that schooling is provided on an unequal basis, and these unequal opportunities essentially have confirmed a preexisting social hierarchy. Thus, for example, Sam Bowles and Herbert Gintis provided evidence that even within young adults with similar ranges of scores on IQ tests, those from wealthier families were far more likely to attend college. The history of tracking provided a wealth of evidence of unequal curriculum opportunities and low expectations for students from poor families, and the conclusion drawn by the mirror image of the conservative credentialists was, don't bother reforming education. To them, we should change the economic system instead.

At a retrospective panel at the Social Science History Association in 2000 or 2001 (I don't remember which year), Herb Gintis said that he saw no conflict between these mirror images. Gintis was referring not to economists but instead to structural-functionalist sociologists such as Robert Dreeben as the mirror of his and Bowles's argument. Yes, he said, his 1970s version of social reproduction was as determinist as Dreeben's argument that schools served primarily to inure students to their largely predetermined place in the social order. Gintis said he and Bowles had just turned Dreeben's argument on its head.*

Some writers on credentialism have used historical trends to make their case. Thus, Richard Freeman's The Overeducated American (1976) and Thomas Green's Predicting the Behavior of the Educational System (1980) wrote about the changing value of educational credentials. The classic sociological treatise on the topic is David Labaree's How To Succeed in School without Really Learning (1997). More recent is Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz's work, such as their recent NBER paper The Race between Education and Technology (2007). To Goldin and Katz, the relative value of educational credentials have changed in different directions over time, and the mid-20th century was the time simultaneously of rapidly increasing high school attainment and of both wage compression (lower wage inequality) and of low relative value to education.

This link between inequality and the growing value of education over the late 20th century should not be treated as a post-WW2 trends, though. At the beginning of the 20th century, Goldin and Katz argue that the relative value of a high school education was quite high. (In some ways, this mirrors Green's analysis, but with fundamentally different mechanisms. Among other matters, Green treats the economic value of a diploma as a credential function, while Goldin and Katz are talking about their estimates of the human-capital value of completing a high school education.)

So how do we treat the credential value vs. the non-instrumental value of education? It is not a simple human-capital issue, but students do learn stuff in school. It is not just credentialism, but there is a "sheepskin effect" to a diploma. Over the past few years, I have explained to my classes that there are different layers to the relationship between schools and the economy. One is human capital. A second is the use of schools as sites for sponsorship, either at the individual level (what James Rosenbaum has talked about as networking) or at the mass level (credentialing). A third is the more mundane, lay understanding of networking: learning about and with others in a way that extends beyond one's own skills. (For a variety of reasons, I am not going to lump this with cultural capital or Coleman's concept of social capital.) A fourth level is at the level of social and political beliefs about opportunity (or the connections that Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick describe between public schooling and the "American dream"). Cutting across these different levels are differences between the use of schooling for private purposes (individual or family competition) and the use of schooling for public purposes.

While this static sketch serves its teaching purpose reasonably well (and it's a lot easier to teach and more satisfying than Bourdieau's notion of cultural capital), it is not satisfying as a template for an historian. How did these different layers and purposes evolve?

And now, dear readers, I'm going to leave you in suspense, for I cannot answer that question to my satisfaction. Or at least not yet. But I'll take suggestions!

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Posted on 12:21 PM (Permalink) | |

What would Nation X do?

Today, my morning paper had a column by Susan Taylor Martin, Finns set teachers free, with enviable results, discussing the secular, largely-standardized-testing-free Finnish schools that have enviable student outcomes by almost any measure.

On the one hand, this argument is extraordinarily tempting: See what the Finns do? We need to do that: provide substantial social welfare, provide higher status for teachers, then leave them to do their jobs without the corrosive testing regime we have in the United States.

But the historian in me says something different: Wait. This argument has been made before: no, not the one about Finland but the one about needing to follow Nation X, whatever that country happened to be in a particular decade. At the end of the 18th century, a strong push inside the new country said, "We're different from Europe ["Old Europe," as Donald Rumsfeld might put it]. This new nation is a fresh start. We need to be as different from Europe as possible." As David W. Noble argued years ago in Historians against History, that was a dominant theme among 19th century amateur history writers.

But there has also been a counter-argument: other countries have model systems of education, and we need to learn from them. (If you want the academic jargon, you can call it mimetic isomorphism when the rhetoric is all about national anxiety and panic and normative isomorphism when the rhetoric is "this is professionally best.") The most famous 19th century argument along those lines was that of Horace Mann, who traveled to Prussia before writing his seventh school report. While he noted the flaws of Prussian schools, he also thought they treated students much better than schools in Massachusetts. You don't have to beat your students to teach them, he argued, and Prussia is the proof. Why Mann went to Prussia to make that case is an interesting question. He should have known that one of the responses would be the reference to American exceptionalism, and he could have found reasonably kind teachers somewhere in North America if maybe not in Boston.

You can find the "we should do what Nation X is doing" argument sprinkled through the rest of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the post-WW2 era, the comparison nation was whoever our military or economic adversary was at the time, from the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s to Japan and Germany in the 1980s. In the last half-century, many of these comparative arguments were projections of adult anxieties onto children. As many have pointed out over the years, most notably David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, schools are carrying the rhetorical water for adult failings. In almost all cases, the comparison is superficial, omitting information about context and structure. So the blithe suggestions for us to copy Japan in the 1980s often failed to mention the juku market (of private cram schools) or the common Japanese parenting repertoire of letting preschools socialize children through group pressures. Even academics fall into this trap: James Rosenbaum et al. wrote in Market and network theories of the transition from high school to work that professional networking between schools and work was great, and they pointed to Japan as a model... right before the Japanese economy dove into a 10-year downturn. Oops.

There are plenty of wonderful comparative education analyses one can make, but the standard rhetoric you see in American political discourse is usually shallow. Caveat lector.

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Posted on 08:19 AM (Permalink) | |

Whose values would be valued in a neoliberal education world: Michelle Rhee's or Marc Dean Millot's?

Marc Dean Millot explains why he's a critic of DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee (hat tip), and here's the key paragraph:

What I see in Chancellor Rhee's approach, abetted, permitted or endorsed by Mayor Fenty, is 1) insensitivity and arrogance towards others, combined with 2) a reliance on fear to control staff, and 3) a considerable willingness not to apply analogous performance criteria and public criticism to themselves. Managers cannot be harder and harsher with others than they are on themselves and expect support from their staff, respect from their board, or trust from the public. And managers without all three cannot succeed in a turn-around.

There are three points here. One is the immediate and obvious one: Humiliation and denigration are not great motivators, nor is "making an example of" a significant proportion of the people you work with. I don't know Rhee, but this is not the first time I've seen reports of her approach to people being problematic. And Millot is right on the general principle.

The second point is that mayoral control of schools is no panacea and often a fig-leaf reform. As Monday's Washington Post story on the matter indicates, politics don't disappear with mayoral control. And that's why I was disappointed to see the brief mention of David Tyack's One Best System in Wong, Shen, Anagnostopolous, and Rutledge's new book, The Education Mayor. Tyack showed how governance reformers in the early 20th century claimed to be "taking politics out of school" in changing ward-based urban school boards to nonpartisan boards often appointed by courts or mayors. Wong et al. seriously misread Tyack in claiming that the historical lesson is that we need to keep politics out of school. Tyack documented how the new boards may have been nonpartisan but were certainly political, elitist, highly connected, and contributors to instead of brakes on bureaucracy. We have seen plenty of the last (continuing bureaucracy) in Chicago and New York City, where mayoral control appears to have changed the address of the bureaucracy instead of the basic facts. Beyond the obscuring of bureaucratic continuation, the arguments in favor of mayoral control contain a romantic view that is all too familiar to historians: change the structure and you can reduce if not eliminate the presumably nasty consequences of education politics. There are at least two fallacies in this romantic view: An unrealistic view of structural change as a panacea, and the blithe assumption that we'd want public education without politics. As long as education is tied to citizenship, politics will inevitably be involved, and that's not a bad thing. (You think Brown v. Board of Education and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 weren't political??)

The third point is obvious in the today but subtler when looking at the long term (or long duree if you're a devotee of the French Annalist school): there is a distinction between policy and approaches to handling people, and you don't know what will win out in the end. You can agree with the policy orientations of people whom you'd never trust (Millot's response to Rhee), and you can see and admire the human qualities of people with whom you have fundamental policy disagreements (me and Mike Huckabee, to take one example; I mean my view of him, not the converse). Often, the historical perspective focuses on the policy issues instead of the person, in part because extant records that focus on personality are often sensationalist instead of subtle. One exception is the record of a few common-school reformers from the early 19th century, whose views on "school management" were an intimate and conscious part of their ouvre. While one or two of the crankier education historians from the 1970s portrayed Horace Mann and his ilk as 19th century Darth Vaders, top-down class-oriented stealers of democracy, the truth that good historians of various stripes recognize is that a number of class-conscious reformers had a serious argument about the need to be kinder to students. One of the arguments for women as teachers was that they'd be more nurturing. (Sexist? Yes. Motivated by some understanding that beating kids isn't great? Absolutely. Ignores the fact that in the 19th century, women as well as men beat students? You bet.) And Mann is famous for pointing out that Massachusetts teachers regularly beat and humiliated students... and his argument that such mistreatment was unnecessary and wrong.

That fact notwithstanding, Mann, Henry Barnard, and others still fit into a broad movement of 19th century social reformers who held a set of overlapping traits, which in retrospect we associate with northern Whig parties, the growth of merchant capitalism, concerns about poverty and social disorder, a belief in the ability of the state to address such concerns, and an environmentalist analysis of social problems. When most educational historiography mentions Michael Katz's The Irony of Early School Reform, it is usually in reference to the vote abolishing the high school in Beverly, Massachusetts, but the Beverly story is only the first of three parts. The other two sections emphasize the rise and fall of environmental thinking in the mid-19th century. By the 1870s and 1880s, the optimistic environmentalism from a few decades before had become overshadowed by Social Darwinism and "scientific charity." Katz argued that the early promises of reformatories and other social reforms overpromised and ignored the corrupting influences of institutions and the expenses of running truly beneficial programs. (Disclosure: I'm a Katz student, or I was in grad school.)

Mann's twelve reports are the most interesting body of common-school reform writing to me, in part because there is so much complexity to them. He wanted teachers to be kinder to kids and to use more effective teaching methods. He certainly fit comfortably into the world of early- and mid-19th century Whig reformers, belonging to a temperance society and key in the creation of a state asylum while in the Massachusetts legislature. That reformist attitude was perfectly consistent with the background fear of social disorder. In a letter to a friend, Mann explained his acceptance of the Board of Education secretary position by saying, "Having found the present generation composed of materials almost unmalleable, I am about transferring my efforts to the next. Men are cast-iron; children are wax." Maybe he was influenced by religious riots in Massachusetts in the prior few years, but in any case that fear lasted until his very last report in 1848, which resonated with the news of revolution Europe and the publication of the Communist Manifesto. We had to have common schooling, Mann said, or else we would have classes bent on mutual conflict:

Now, surely, nothing but Universal Education can counter-work this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called; the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former.

For students of 19th century history, this should be familiar; it is an echo of the developing free-labor ideology in the North. And as Maris Vinovskis has pointed out, Mann had an approach to education that approximated human capital arguments:

But if education be equably diffused, it will draw property after it, by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor. Property and labor, in different classes, are essentially antagonistic; but property and labor, in the same class, are essentially fraternal.

Educate the tykes, and they'll all have some prosperity and a stake in society. But Mann's fear is less about the South than events across the Atlantic:

The people of Massachusetts have, in some degree, appreciated the truth, that the unexampled prosperity of the State,-its comfort, its competence, its general intelligence and virtue,-is attributable to the education, more or less perfect, which all its people have received; but are they sensible of a fact equally important?-namely, that it is to this same education that two thirds of the people are indebted for not being, to-day, the vassals of as severe a tyranny, in the form of capital, as the lower classes of Europe are bound to in the form of brute force.

To Mann, poverty and conflict lurk under the surface of an industrial economy, something that only education can forestall. This was not the naked instrumentalism that Bowles, Gintis, and others claimed in the 1970s, but neither were common-school reformers unconnected to early 19th century industrialization: there were intimately vested in it and saw education's connections to it in multiple ways, including ameliorating social tensions.

In the long run, the more child-friendly views of Mann did not become a part of bureaucratic school culture. As hundreds of my students have pointed out to me over the years, common school reforms were far more successful in changing the structure of schools than in directly affecting the cultural practices inside a classroom. Some things changed, certainly: as other historians (e.g., David Tyack and Larry Cuban) note, chalkboards slowly became institutionalized in school construction, and in the early 1960s, Mann's view of an 'unvarnished' Bible reading instead of sectarian instruction had become the norm. But those were compartmentalized practices, the type of add-on that Larry Cuban has frequently noted is easier for schools to accommodate. (Note: I am dramatically underestimating the issues involved in shifting away from sectarian instruction. Nonetheless, )

One operative question that 1970s and 1980s historians wrestled with is the extent to which the growth of bureaucracy and the decline of early 19th century environmentalism were the consequence of early industrial capitalism. We have a much richer and more complex picture of 19th century school history today, and yet that question remains (or should remain) interesting. The truly large-factory model of education tried in early 19th century cities died as many schools shifted from monitorial schools to smaller, self-contained classes and choral recitation. On the one hand, one could argue that the organization of graded elementary school in many ways mirrored the less-mechanized and smaller factories in the U.S. better than they did some of the much larger factories in England, where monitorial instruction was invented. But that argument that emphasizes the parallel between graded elementary schools and factories overemphasizes the importance of larger cities, when much of early industrialization happened in towns rather than the largest cities.

And that city-town distortion ignores rural places. As Nancy Beadie's recent research uncovers, the building of schools in small towns and rural places may have been as important a part of local economic development in indirect terms as in any human capital effects. The marshaling of local resources for something as simple as church or school buildings required a complex web of economic and social relationships, quasi-private loan networks and reciprocal property relationships that helped incorporate small towns and rural places into a regional economic watershed. ("Watershed" is an unfortunately naturalized metaphor, but I'm not sure there are better alternatives: web and ecology are as inapt.) There's far more to industrialization than building schools, but Beadie's work shows the potential subtlety of schooling's effects and the relationship between economic life and formal education.

And even the subtler views skip some important topics, including the role of mid-19th century higher education, a fuzzily-bordered sector that included institutions called academies, high schools, normal schools, and colleges. And then there's the growth of Sunday schools, and the links between Northern missionary groups and Reconstruction education. So I'm feeling still a bit at sea, wanting a more synthetic interpretive history of 19th century education that wrestles with the bigger economic questions.

What is unquestionable is that Mann's kinder, gentler school didn't survive in the nascent bureaucracy that he helped build. School bureaucracies were easily corrupted into hierarchies that held low expectations for the poorest students. We have the historical example of a structurally-oriented school reformer who still held complex views about what should happen inside the classroom, views that did respect the potential and humanity of children in ways that we should not ignore. Yet his humane vision of schools lost out, at least for most of a century. The structure he imagined did not require humane treatment of its inhabitants.

So today, as we witness another experimental phase in the structure of American education, I read Marc Dean Millot's blogging with both a smile and heartache. Millot writes with passion about treating people with respect. Yet he is in favor of building the same type of structure that Michelle Rhee favors. Whose ways of treating humans would win out in that structure?

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Posted on 09:45 PM (Permalink) | |

A twofer on Delaware student program and social justice, or "Let's not confuse institutional prerogatives with students' propensity to make mistakes"

I normally don't waste bytes just to point to someone else's blog and say, "What (s)he said!" In this case, though, Timothy Burke's engagingly garrulous entry on the University of Delaware student orientation controversy serves double-duty to describe the obvious about the University of Delaware program and also help explain my discomfort with official statements by colleges of education that they want students to foster social justice:

... with the Delaware residential life program, there's nothing wrong per se with asking straights when they first realized their orientation or when they came out as straights. That is, nothing wrong if that's a sly or mischievious aside in a personal conversation about sexuality, or a subversive question directed at a public figure who is intensely anti-gay, or as a way in an intellectual discussion about the history of sexuality to illustrate what the ten-dollar word 'heteronormativity' actually means. Turning the question into a set part of a pseudo-mandatory workshop (there's some confusion at Delaware about how strongly students are encouraged to attend) takes everything valuable out of it. It turns something sly into dogma.

Burke is putting this observation in the context of a nuanced discussion of the institutional context of resident student activists and the role of college as a place where young adults learn by being bold and frequently making mistakes. What makes sense for student activists or activists engaged in civic life often becomes self-parody when oversolemnified in an institutional context.

Such oversolemnification is all too typical in the debate over dispositions and social justice in teacher education. In several contexts, I have heard colleagues in social foundations or my institution upset at the attack on the demand that students display a disposition towards social justice... a term now closely associated with the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Because NCATE referred to social justice in a glossary item that mentioned it as a potential disposition that colleges might assess students on, and because some colleges did some patently stupid things when students expressed dissenting political views, that term became a magnet for critics of college policies that appeared to infringe on students' rights to political expression. Respondents in education have sometimes interpreted that attack as a neoconservative attack on teacher education more broadly.

The truth is that the attack on social justice and dispositions is both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Some of those who have attacked teacher education's and NCATE's move towards dispositions have been social conservatives upset with the nature of teacher education. At a June 2006 hearing in front of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, critics of NCATE included the National Association of Scholars and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. But that's not the entire picture. Critics also have included the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (see FIRE's statement on NCATE and dispositions). FIRE's staff and supporters have included conservatives, but they have also included people from across the political spectrum, a group of those who are reasonably described as academic libertarians.

Academic libertarians focus on campuses as a site of debate, where the job of a university is to encourage a discourse of disputation. In this environment, assessing the alignment of one's thoughts with any template with ideological overtones strikes academic libertarians as obnoxious, an affront to students' freedom of thought. While many defenders of assessing dispositions point to the evaluation of behavior rather than thought and the interplay of that behavior with professional expectations, critics are skeptical, especially when some places (such as LeMoyne College) have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar... or the brains of their students.

The vulnerability of teacher education to such criticism is not just the visibility of a few outrageous idiocies by specific teacher education programs. To some extent, the coalition between social conservatives and academic libertarians has focused criticism in a way that often dissipates when the criticism comes from just one quarter. But the internet is also partly responsible, because that copper or fiber-optic cable is a double-edged sword, bringing visibility in both good and bad measure. In addition, teacher education is more vulnerable because of the historical disrespect for teachers in general and for teacher education within colleges and universities.

But there are a few other issues to consider, issues that schools and colleges of education control. One issue under the control of teacher education programs is the way faculty and administrators address the inherent tensions of trying to stuff a professional preparation program into a relatively short period, at most three or four years in an undergraduate program. We'd like teachers to leave college with a fantastically well-rounded liberal-arts education, professional information about educational psychology, historical and social-science perspectives on education, professional ethics, assessment, teaching the methods of their field, content expertise in their field, something about the practical matters of running a classroom, field experiences while learning everything else, and a capstone experience with a final internship and structured feedback and reflection.

To put the problem bluntly, if you can do all that for all students in undergraduate teacher education, I also want a pony. The telling choice is what you give up in professional programs, more than in almost any other type of education. That's not even considering the newer demands in areas such as special education, where "highly qualified teachers" now have to demonstrate content expertise in every curriculum area. So the curriculum discussions in teacher education inevitably revolve around the desire to somehow stuff more into less. If someone could extract the essence of half of our curriculum and put it in a pill, I know a bunch of education deans who would be very happy.

In the midst of this perennial stretch, teacher education stakeholders and institutions talk about accountability as outcomes. Outcomes? Sure. We'll be responsible for what happens with our teachers. So what does that mean, in an era when tracking graduates is a bit tough? Well, we'll certainly be responsible for the passing rates for graduates on state exams, and their meeting our state standards, and ... hmmn... something else. Someone must have suggested dispositions (the history of that would be a great dissertation topic!), and the idea met multiple needs. Stakeholders in the NCATE orbit were reasonably satisfied that teacher education programs were at least addressing accountability. Within teacher education, dispositions met several needs, and it could be used both to justify keeping some things in and removing others out of the curriculum, depending on how one phrased one's goals and preferred dispositions.

Dispositions have also neatly coincided with a psychological approach to education. Kurt Danziger has explained how the history of psychology is intertwined with the bureaucratization of public schooling in the early 20th century U.S. That psychologization continues, far beyond the knowledge of educational psychology that is the bread and butter of my department colleagues. (As my fellow historian Erwin V. Johanningmeier has noted, there is some considerable irony in the fact that one of the most well-known educational psychologists, David Berliner, has written more about the social conditions of schools in the last 15 years than educational psychology.) I am not sure if any professional field outside education or social services would ever frame their competencies as anything close to dispositions -- do business, legal, medical, engineering, or architecture programs have anything similar? Part of the difference is the much shorter formal apprenticeships that teacher education has, but some is due to the role of psychology within education.

Both the University of Delaware residency program and the existence of dispositions border on a therapeutic approach to education, implying that part of the job of college is the reconstruction of behavior and personality. I am not one to believe in the fairy tale that education only touches the intellect; college is a life-changing experience, no matter the outcome. Yet there are reasons to be very cautious about how we engage in the deliberate process of social engineering that is inherent in education.

To some extent, I am sympathetic with part of the idea of dispositions: it is extraordinarily hard to assess the fit of a student with professional expectations, and at some level one has to find proxies for professional competence while people are still in the program. The notion of assessing dispositions is an attempt to find some proxy for that fit apart from course grades. And given the relative flexibility of dispositions, some colleges of education do a much better job of treating them reasonably than other teacher education programs. But there is a foundation of psychological assumptions behind them, and the same flexibility that allows reasonableness also allows LeMoyne and its ilk.

Given that set of psychological (and almost therapeutic) assumptions, a set of dispositions geared to social justice is an oxymoron. Any definition of social justice I have seen talks about the social context, the broader structures of society. To imagine that one can accomplish social justice by changing the personalities of teachers ignores the theoretical arguments involved in social justice. To change the broader structures of society, you have to change the broader structures of society, and teacher goodwill doesn't really enter into it (though teachers' acting ethically towards their students does matter, just in a different sense). Mandating that students demonstrate a disposition towards social justice is likely to be a sloppy description of an institutional mission at best and an effective generator of cynicism at worst.

There is some other stuff that needs to be said here, about how an ethic of teachers' being at the heart of social justice is a potential form of exploitation. (Brief form: those who think KIPP schools are the solution for education and those who want teacher education programs to revolve around social justice have the same assumption about the broader role of teachers.) But this entry is far too long as it is, and I should just finish with this: I desperately want the world to have more justice, and I work towards that end, but I am a better teacher if I model those beliefs than if I try to get my students to parrot them.

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Posted on 03:04 PM (Permalink) | |

Social annotation for teaching how to read difficult material

A few days ago, I raved about the possibilities of social annotation. What I barely touched were the teaching purposes of social annotation. Let me provide an example from my masters course in social foundations of education. Below is the root to a discussion thread over the past week on the Seattle and Louisville desegregation cases that the Supreme Court ruled on this spring. The following contains my comments to students, links to the opinions that have my annotations (hold your cursor over the underlined passages to see the annotations), and a few starting questions.

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) was as fragmented as the Gratz and Grutter cases. Below are links to the annotated pages of the opinions.

• Syllabus
• Plurality opinion (Roberts)
• Thomas concurrence
• Kennedy concurrence
• Stevens dissent
• Breyer dissent

Roberts's opinion is called a plurality because a majority of justices agreed to the decision but only four agreed (Roberts and three others) agreed on the same reasoning; Kennedy agreed with the decision but for his own reasons. This is a particularly difficult set of opinions to read -- in this case, it is Breyer's dissent that is long-winded (not Thomas's), and then the plurality opinion and the concurrences both refer to the dissent.

A few questions:

• Does this case shut the door on voluntary desegregation? If not, what other options are available?
• Regardless of whether there are options available in the future, the decision will make districts think three or four times before including racial classifications in formal plans to create more diversity in schools. Is that a good or bad outcome?

In my during-semester survey, a few students offered the following comments about Diigo when asked what had helped them learn in the course:

• The Diigo annotation technology has made reading the court cases far more enriching. It as though you are in the room while I am reading the cases.... I wish there were a way you could do the same for all the other readings.
• It really helps to bring clarity to the court cases by reading your comments. I would be confu[s]ed on some judgements or miss important points without the comments. It is the next best thing than [to] sitting in a lecture and discussing interpretations.

Let me be honest: providing this annotation requires a lot of time, and that is time sucked away from other activities (being more proactive on the discussion board, or creating more formal presentations). But I know from prior experience that some readings such as court opinions desperately require some assistance for students, and I was gratified to have my judgment confirmed by students who felt the effort helped them.

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Posted on 12:07 AM (Permalink) | |

Social annotation and the marketplace of ideas

David Rothman has a wonderful idea from the growth of social annotation tools and the development of an open e-book format:

How long until savvy writers pester publishers to let them do interactive e-books? -- where readers' comments can appear in relevant places in the texts or elsewhere in the books. Imagine the possibilities for smart nonfiction writers and those in dream-with-me genres like romance fiction.

I am experimenting this semester with using Diigo to show students in one course my annotations on Supreme Court desegregation opinions. I've been able to provide translations of legal terms (certiorari, de jure, de facto, etc.), tell students where they can skip (e.g., issues of standing, which are tangential to the topics at hand for the course), what passages to read in depth, and some questions to think about specific passages.

There is already BookGlutton's idea for Unbound Reader, based on the epub standard. For those wondering what the One Laptop Per Child initiative is for, imagine an eight-year-old reading a copy of a story and seeing and replying to the comments of other eight-year-olds around the world on the same passage. 

For those who wonder about the monetization of this -- how can anyone make money off free books? -- Rothman has an obvious answer:

A community approach is worthwhile in itself, but along the way would reduce losses to piracy. You're less likely to steal from someone whom you and your friends respect. What's more, forum participation could be among the rewards for those who paid voluntarily for books distributed under Creative Commons licenses.

I suspect that savvy musicians think of mp3-sharing in similar ways, and if we're headed back to the days when vinyl records were the a way to get musicians concert gigs, maybe free books are a way to draw people into other ways to remunerate authors. For those in genre fields (romance, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, etc.), midlist authors might find that approach enormously attractive. And those of us in academe? There are some obvious possibilities that appeal to me to provide access to reading but some possibility for revenues where appropriate, such as books that are free online but that carry a Creative Commons license requiring a "binding license" fee, so anyone can read a book but where publishers or copy shops need to pay to distribute bound copies. This idea adds to that imaginary repertoire.

As Rothman notes, this potential requires a standard for annotation to be folded into the next generation of epub standards.

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Posted on 08:22 AM (Permalink) | |

Poor teaching != indoctrination

The response to the AAUP's statement Freedom in the Classroom (released September 11) has been fascinating, from Peter Wood and Stephen Balch's tendentious attempt to fisk the report (thereby burying the legitimate criticisms) to Erin O'Connor's more focused criticism to Stanley Fish's column this Sunday, where he takes the statement (rightly) to task for an inane example. First, let me quote Fish's distinction between teaching with controversial subjects and indoctrination:

Any subject -- pornography, pedophilia, genocide, scatology -- can be introduced into an academic discussion so long as the perspective from which it is analyzed is academic and not political.

This is Fish's "academicizing" (see the end of an August 2006 article about Kevin Barrett), and apart from the suggestion that properly teaching a subject requires anaesthetizing the student, it is one reasonable slice at the definition of indoctrination.

The AAUP subcommittee made its largest mistake in choosing a horrible example of teaching that should be protected from political scrutiny:

Might not a teacher of nineteenth-century American literature, taking up Moby Dick, a subject having nothing to do with the presidency, ask the class to consider whether any parallel between President George W. Bush and Captain Ahab could be pursued for insight into Melville's novel?

In contrast with Fish, I think that this choice of examples should be protected from claims of indoctrination, because faculty should be allowed and even encouraged to insert passion into the classroom, even when an attempt fails. But a teacher using such an example should not be protected from claims that this is simply an awful instructional choice. One of my college teachers claimed that Dostoevsky's portraits of psychological imbalance predicted Hitler's rise and the Holocaust. I suspect that he was trying to enliven the class, not indoctrinate us (and what would he have been indoctrinating us into, the Cult of Heterodox Dostoevsky Social Criticism?). We stared at him, mouths agape, wondering what he had been smoking. Great books, mediocre class.

So, like Timothy Burke (both in talking about ACTA's "How Many Ward Churchills?" screed and in discussing teaching in general), I am more concerned with inept teaching than indoctrination, in part because I strongly suspect that most students read crass political didacticism as incompetence as well as or rather than indoctrination.

The practical question is what no one (including the AAUP) has addressed. Suppose that a student complains about the Ahab/Bush comparison. What do we do? I agree with Stanley Fish that the comparison is not professional. Does that mean we toss the professor out on his or her ear? The AAUP statement refers vaguely to academic due process:

When that [allegation of improper conduct] happens, sound professional standards of proper classroom conduct should be enforced in ways that are compatible with academic due process. Over the last century the profession has developed an understanding of the nature of these standards. It has also developed methods for enforcing these standards that allow for students to file complaints and that afford accused faculty members the right fully to be heard by a body of their peers.

That's all fine and pretty but while the statement seems to imply that universities have developed ways of addressing improper instruction, such a conclusion is simply unwarranted. We know how to handle allegations of research misconduct (or at least we think we do until politicians get involved), there are reasonable guidelines from the AAUP on extramural utterances and behavior, and I suspect most universities have formal academic grievance procedures (where a student can appeal an academic decision), but we professors don't have a clue how to handle allegations of teaching misconduct except where there are bright-line standards such as showing up to class and not hitting (on) students.

I don't mean that faculty always stand idly by when they observe or discover a peer's teaching behavior that they find troubling in a variety of ways. But in terms of formal investigations -- what warrants special attention apart from annual reviews and how to gather and evaluate evidence -- I suspect most institutions have absolutely no procedural guidelines. And therein lies the problem: without procedures set down somewhere, administrators under pressure will resort to ad-hoc decisions and processes, which will inevitably violate academic freedom and erode institutional integrity.

The first line of defense against ad-hoc-ism is some proactive evaluation of teaching, the type of thoughtful peer observation and probing that Timothy Burke advocates. Yes, that requires some time and resources. Many good things do, and in many places (such as my institution right now, under enormous budget pressures), that ideal is unlikely to evolve quickly. Most institutions have some annual evaluation, which has an indirect evaluation of teaching through student surveys and materials submitted by the faculty member. This is better than nothing from a variety of perspectives and much worse than the ideal.

The second line of defense is a procedure for screening and evaluating allegations of serious teaching misconduct and incompetence. Here is where most institutions are susceptible to pressures. While most institutions have established procedures when students gripe about a grade, no one has thought through all the other grievances and griping. Even the vaunted-by-ACTA University of Missouri-Columbia Ombudsman program has "Under Development" as the entire content for the Grievance Procedures of Academic Units page. The world will have to see if and how such procedures develop or if they remain largely ad-hoc.

The third line of defense is a system to coach students on reasonable assertiveness, how to raise issues in a course that expand discussion and educational opportunity. This coaching is necessary both for the shy and the brash student. I try to give students opportunities every semester to give me early feedback on a course in an anonymous way, and while I provide that structure and generally try not to bite students' heads off, some students will not tell me their concerns until long after they become worried about an issue (whether it is instruction or assignments or grades or something else). Other students are simply brusque, either with me or other students, and while (I hope) I'm fairly easygoing about criticism, some faculty are thin-skinned or may misinterpret student expressions of concern. There are right and wrong ways to point out that a class omitted an important perspective, and we do students a disservice in assuming that they come to college knowing the right way to criticize class.

This need for education starts with the usual front-line "ears" in a university: chairs and the secretarial staff of university presidents. My chairs have always tried to redirect the student back to me and also let me know when a student raised a concern with them. Presidents' secretaries don't often have the professional experience to tell students to go back to the professor, and when the presidential staff sends a "here's a heads-up" message down the line through a provost, dean, and chair back to the faculty member, sometimes carelessness with the wording and inevitable gaps in communication turn an intended "here's a heads-up" message into an assumption that the message is really "you better deal with this or else."

The fourth line of defense is a bright-line standard for when administrators should even be thinking about intervening in the middle of a term, in contrast to gathering evidence about an allegation at the end of a term. Starting an investigation in the middle of a class is a serious step that can interfere with the learning environment as much as many of the practices that students might complain about; think about what would happen if the Proper Instruction Police interview students in a class regularly, asking what they thought of the politics of the instructor and the assignment du jour. I don't think any administrator would ever imagine that could happen, but starting an investigation about classes in the middle of a class always carries the risk of educational iatrogenesis. Here are my suggested standards:

• Investigate when the allegation is of behavior that is dangerous to students.
• Investigate when a prudent and yet reasonably thick-skinned person would agree that a student's right to education is jeopardized by the alleged behavior (e.g., screaming at students, racial discrimination, etc.), if allegations come from several sources that are credible. Thus, if the majority of a class complains that the instructor is swearing a blue streak and failing to teach physiology when the course is a required part of the nursing sequence, someone needs to look into those allegations, but one student's complaint should not trigger a full-blown set of interviews with all students in a course.
• Gather evidence passively during a term if the allegations are serious but the claims come from isolated sources. By passive data collection, I mean planning how to gather evidence at the end of the semester and waiting to see if there are other complaints from other credible sources.
• Refuse to use evidence that is gathered illegally or without provenance. For example, Florida law prohibits audio recordings of people who have a reasonable expectation of privacy without the permission of recorded students--thus, I have been told that surreptitious video on Youtube of Florida classrooms would almost always be illegal unless the faculty member agreed to such guerrilla recording and the student used a shotgun microphone so no fellow student's voice was picked up.
• In all cases, the faculty member must be told promptly of student concerns and, where the administrator has decided no immediate intervention is required, that should be specified (i.e., in the vast majority of cases).

Comments are most welcome on this sketch.

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Posted on 11:58 PM (Permalink) | |

On metaphors and people

A few days ago I commented on an Eduwonk entry about Michelle Rhee's wanting more convenient dismissal options for non-unionized central-office staff... and teachers, in part to give some positive reinforcement for the decision to allow comments and in part because there are some interesting ideas in the entry that I wanted to follow up on. (You'll have to go there to see the comments.)

But I looked back at the entry last night, and upon rereading, the last paragraph stuck in my craw:

In the case of D.C., this debate is actually larger than whether Michelle Rhee will be able to fire some people from the central office and some low-performing teachers. It's a proxy for how hard she (and Mayor Fenty) will push on the schools. If they lose this one it's an enormous setback and the wait them out game will start in earnest. If they win, they might not have to fire so many people anyway because it will be a clear signal that business as usual is over. For Rhee, a lot riding on this. Insert your own metaphor here.

While we may think partly in metaphors, I'd prefer to think of debates over the terms and conditions of work in something other than a metaphorical sense. Maybe this is because I like the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative (the one about not treating people as ends), and if so, I'm a softie for unreadable German philosophers. But I don't think either children or adults are metaphorical vehicles. They're people, and we should talk about them as such.

Beyond that, I think Andy Rotherham is mistaken here about the use of power. I've known plenty of people in academe and the K-12 world who have paid far too much attention to symbols of power, from the all-too-important brush-off in person to stressing the importance of a particular goal for ends far beyond what it can possibly mean in reality. Power is also more subtle than the imposition of one's will through forceful means. The principal who inspires and convinces a school's teachers to work their tails off is more powerful than any petty tyrant who might occupy the same office. The true setback in DC would be if Rhee focuses more on acquiring power than in using it wisely.

Addendum: I realized a fast read of this entry may lead readers to erroneously conclude I think Andy Rotherham is into power games. That's not my argument or assumption at all; I suspect that in his own work environment, Andy pays attention to the interpersonal touch and not to imposition of his will on the people who report to him. Maybe the same should be true in school systems...

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Posted on 08:39 AM (Permalink) | |