The restlessness

In response to a recent Kevin Drum post on how reading scores are up but nobody wants to talk about it, the bloggers at West Coast Stat Views have a theory:

My opinion: because there is a lot of money in  education and it won't be possible to "disrupt" education and redirect this money if the current system is doing well.  Notice how there is always a lot of money in being a disruptive company, at least for the top management (see Uber -- it is clear that it pays better to run Uber than it does to run a traditional Taxi service).  

It also moves the goalposts.  If everything is falling apart then it isn't such a crisis if the disrupted industry has teething issues once they strip cash out of it to pay for the heroes who are reinventing the system.   

But if current educational systems are doing well, and slowly improving through incremental change, then it is a lot harder to argue that there is a crisis in education, isn't it?

I think that the shilling is definitely half of it.  Failures in the status quo can justify more money for something else.  But the other half of it is a restlessness, a refusal to accept that there are limits to what education can do.  We don't just want schools to produce some good results, we want them to fix all of the problems in the world.  And they can't. No educational innovation will fix that, so eventually people ask educational institutions to shed the pretenses and openly become much more. Look at this post by Dean Dad, asking for community colleges to effectively become full-scale social welfare programs in order to plug achievement gaps.  The moral case for providing for the poor is quite straightforward, but nobody asks the local free clinic to teach college composition.

Anyway, if this were only about marketing disruption, the teachers' unions would be saying very loudly that their results are more than good enough.  Some do, but it's always tempered by lamentation over how much more needs to be done.  And some of that is, of course, a call for more resources for themselves--failure can justify more resources for you as easily as it can justify more resources for your replacement.  Some of it is also a heartfelt conviction that schools need to do more.  The right and left both want the impossible from schools--the left wants to provide people with free schooling on how to catch a fish, the right wants to make sure that nobody can say "I was never taught how to catch a fish" as an excuse for not having anything to eat.

Inequality in the trenches

I don't have a lot of time for detailed analysis, but this blog post by the Dean Dad is on to something, yet might also miss something:  Competition for top colleges is simultaneously getting more fierce, and students seem to be getting worse (as measured by need for remediation and similar things).  He analyzes it in terms of inequality hollowing out the middle so that the worst get worse while the best get better, but I'm not sure he's right.  I'm sure he's right about economic inequality driving the competition at the top, but it could easily be the case that students are simultaneously piling up more tokens of high achievement (fancier resumes and whatnot) AND are getting dumber.

The tokens of achievement are not themselves achievements.  I've seen too many students who took AP calculus AND tested into low-level math.  The institutions place an emphasis on producing students with the word "proficient" stamped on paperwork.  In 9th grade the students take a test written at whatever level and/or graded with sufficiently generous partial credit so that everyone can be deemed to have passed math.  The same happens in 10th and 11th grades, and by 12th grade they are in a class with the label "AP Calculus" stamped on it.  Now, that doesn't mean that anybody actually LEARNS calculus, but it means that just as Soviet factory managers would lie about meeting quotas, so too the educational bureaucrats can produce paperwork saying that amazing numbers of kids are taking calculus so #STEMPIPELINE!!!!  Now, of course, when they take the AP test they do terribly, but we're assured that that means they just need a calculus refresher.  Well, then they fail the remedial math placement test because there are deficits that were never plugged years earlier.

So I see no inherent contradiction between evidence of stiffer competition and evidence of less learning.  In fact, I've argued before that students might actually learn more (and you might learn more about them) if they are given the option of low achievement.

Also, they say that nowadays there are kids at top schools who basically started their own non-profits in high school, in order to build a resume for a top school.  One of them famously/infamously got into Stanford that simply consisted of the three words "Black lives matter" repeated over and over.  Even the most truthful slogan is still just a slogan, but he repeated it and got in because people liked it.  If you look at the non-profit he started, it's not clear what they actually do besides publish articles on social media.  It's not clear how many people they help.  Maybe on some level that shouldn't matter:  The kid is clearly a hard worker who knows how to communicate and network.  On that level, maybe he shouldn't have to go to college at all.  Maybe he should be deemed ready for white collar work.  I mean that quite sincerely.  On another level, maybe it means he's ready for advanced study because he can clearly excel at things that require lots of time and lots of writing and persuasion.  However, what he's really demonstrated is a set of skills for the workplace rather than real achievements that help others, because it isn't clear what he's actually done to help anyone.  That's fine, but the institutions clearly want to persuade themselves that they're admitting the kid because of his humanitarianism rather than his career skills.

And nowhere in here is any evidence that anyone cares about deep scholarship and learning.  :(

Bias, Madison, and Human Perfectability

Today's blog post by Dean Dad is a good one:  He responds to a recent article in the Chronicle, by a hiring consultant talking about the importance of raising awareness of our implicit biases.  Dean Dad makes the point that this smacks of trying to re-educate people and cleanse their thoughts.  There's plenty of bad history behind such efforts, and it is ironically at odds with the idea of diversity:  The goal is less to get everyone on the same page and more to bring together a bunch of different perspectives and let people check and balance each other.  (Hence James Madison.)  I like the way of looking at it.  If our implicit biases are deep-seated, persistent, and always acting then the very utility of awareness is questionable.  OTOH, bringing together different people with different viewpoints and giving them equal voting power in a consensus-oriented process might actually mitigate some of the effects of our biases.

It's also worth noting that the author of that piece in the Chronicle would be delighted if you wished to hire her firm to help you run a search process that will minimize the effects of bias...

Two tidbits

First, I like this bit from Dean Dad about comparing American higher ed with Norwegian higher ed.  After extolling the virtues of Norwegian higher ed and safety nets and all the things that well-educated, right-thinking liberal-minded Americans know to extol, he then extols something that we try to leave out of our right-thinking discourse because it's harder to fix:

Second, though -- and to me, this is the smoking gun -- in Norway, it’s still relatively easy to make a decent living in a blue-collar occupation. College is free, yes, but it’s also truly optional.

If we want to talk intelligently about higher education, we can’t separate it from the larger political economy. If we do, we’ll miss the point.

Centrist-minded educated professionals would rather not ask certain questions about our "service economy" and the policy decisions that got us there, so we decree that all class mobility problems will be handed off to higher education.  Well, higher education can't fix all of these problems, but nobody wants to hear that.  People want to hear that there are quick fixes, and that one way or another we will hand everyone a diploma and ask no questions about the inflationary consequences.

Second, I am nostalgic for the music of an earlier era, so I give you this song about quick fixes:

Now I know there are no secret tricks,
No correct politics,
Just liars and lunatics.