This is NOT a test! I repeat: This is NOT a test!

The University of California, possibly in collaboration with the California State University, as well as anyone else who would like some roasted unicorn with a side order of rainbows and fairies, is going to devise its own admissions tests.  These tests will be totally better than the SAT/ACT, will do a better job of predicting college performance, and will NOT perpetuate inequities, because they will only test what REALLY matters.  So all groups will score equally well and all of our problems will be solved.

These tests will be made from scratch and available by 2025 (really, 2024 if they want to admit freshmen freshpersons people of freshness with it in the fall of 2025). Whereas so many other educational measures reflect disparities in American society, these tests will not show disparities, and so they will be much fairer than the SAT/ACT, and will get buy-in from all ethnic groups.  (Except for Asian Americans, who are doing great on the SAT/ACT and will lose spots from this.  But I'm told that Asians aren't diverse, so I guess that's OK.)

Look, if it is true that a test of what REALLY matters for academic performance is blind to all of the disparities and inequities in our k-12 system (not to mention the wider societal context in which k-12 students are reared and prepared) then those equities don't actually matter.  Years of under-preparation?  Irrelevant! None of it mattered.  The preparation that other kids got wasn't an advantage, and the preparation that some were denied was not a disadvantage.  Everything is the same for all people in all context so who cares about anything? Inequality of opportunity is just a lie. (And, well, yes, it springs from falsehoods, but falsehoods can do real harm.) If we accept these premises, then everyone is off the hook for the first 18 years of life, and all responsibility now rests on the shoulders of college professors.

Sadly, under-preparation is real.  Some of it can be remedied, because people are (to some extent) adaptable.  Some of it can't be, because what happens early in life is (to some extent) of lasting consequence.  But pretending that it's irrelevant, and everyone can just be admitted to the same programs that start from the same place and proceed at the same pace, that's insanity.

Let us not talk falsely now.  Everybody knows what this is about. Everybody knows what they want.  So let's do it.  Let's replace the admissions tests with neural nets that infer race.  It's what they want.  It's illegal under Prop. 209, but it's nonetheless ethically defensible (at least from certain premises), so do it, and let the righteous battle be joined.  Fight for principles and premises that you believe in, rather than demanding that we all tell lies about preparation and tests. My 100% sincere opinion about affirmative action is that it is far more honest than anything else we do in higher ed, and I hate lying more than anything else. So let's do it.

Article published in Inside Higher Ed

I have an opinion piece on the problems with land acknowledgments (opening a presentation by acknowledging that the event is happening on land that used to belong to Native Americans) at academic events at Inside Higher Ed today.

The problem of ASSessment

This column at Inside Higher Ed elegantly summarizes the problem with assessment:

The faculty already have a language about teaching and learning. If you ask a math professor what students will learn in calculus, she may point you to the table of contents in the textbook, where dozens of topics are enumerated. If you ask how the class is going, you might hear that “they were fine with the derivative rules, but related rates problems are killing them.” This language is an integral part of teaching. 

The assessment bureaucracy -- those periodic checkboxy reports -- can only be justified if the formal learning outcome statements and their standardized assessments are superior to the native ways faculty know their students. Otherwise we could just ask faculty how the students are doing and use course registrations and grades for data. We could look at the table of contents to find the learning outcomes. 

These two worlds -- the report writing and the lived experience -- coexist, but not easily. While the assessment office depends on the informal channels of faculty knowledge to do meaningful work, in most regions of the country each program requires a formal report. These “cookie-cutter” reports fail miserably at generating new knowledge (something you couldn’t learn by just asking faculty members what they think) because they are based on faith in the special meaningfulness of the learning blurbs.

Exactly.  We already know how to talk to each other, and some of us also know how to talk to the people who hire our students.  What we don't know how to do is talk to people who need boxes checked so that they can justify their phoney baloney jobs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2oaTxPufOg

A couple quick links

I agree with the woman whose profile leads in this IHE article:  Many people want to read diversity statements that address delicate social issues in exactly the right jargon.  They are ideological filters.

Also, I echo this Areo article.  The public makes so many contradictory demands on k-12 that it makes no sense to speak of reforming k-12 until we figure out what we want from k-12.  As for me, I want two simple things from k-12:  I want them to send me students who can do high school algebra and write grammatically correct sentences.

Article in IHE

Yesterday I had an opinion piece published at Inside Higher Ed on the topic of diversity questions in faculty job interviews.  In short, I think that these essays are some mix of useless, counter-productive, and (as with most useless and counter-productive things) well-intentioned.

Article on Assessment

I have an article at Inside Higher Ed titled "Some Questions for Assessophiles."  The comments are not entirely favorable, as you might expect.  I have since been pointed to this most interesting blog critiquing assessment, and this most interesting interview with Molly Worthen.

On fluff

I like this John Warner piece at Inside Higher Ed:

I read these edu-inspirations, and think about the ways concepts like learning styles, the marshmallow test, growth mindset, grit, and personalized learning take off and become policy and how an uncritical embrace of these “pseudo-ideas” makes the ground fertile for such behaviors.

They are no better than fads, the Pet Rock and Rubik’s Cube of education (or worse), and I see a link between our (very much including myself) willingness to embrace platitudes as long as they’re agreeable and suggest teaching and learning is something knowable, solvable, rather than an ongoing battle.

Yep.  People want the quick fix rather than the ongoing battle.

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.

STEAM punks

Still not a lot of time for in-depth commentary, but today's Inside Higher Ed has an article on the issue of whether to classify economics as a STEM field.  I didn't realize how high the stakes are:  Normally an international student graduating from a US university only gets one year to work in the US before they need to either leave or get a work visa.  But now I have learned that if they get a STEM degree they get 3 years, and the more quantitative economics programs count.  Needless to say, all economics programs are now trying to get classified as STEM.

This adds some context to the recent buzz around "STEAM" as a replacement for STEM.

Lies, damned lies, and education research

As profiled today in Inside Higher Ed, the Center for Community College Student Engagement (a research center at UT Austin) released a study which shows that students who take full loads at least some semesters (preferably early on) are more likely to graduate than students who are always/mostly part-time. There are at least three plausible reasons why this might be true:
1) The more units you take the closer you are to finishing.
2) Attending full-time produces benefits beyond the accumulated credits, e.g. more interaction with faculty and classmates.  They provide data in support of that.
3) People who attend full-time have the advantage of some amount of financial security and stability in their personal lives, so they can focus on school.

 It appears that they did indeed ask students if they received Pell grants, i.e. they did ask about personal financial situations, but the summary that they provide says nothing about the analysis of that data, and simply says that everyone should attend full-time as much as possible.  When the summary and recommendations say nothing about the analysis of financial information, it's hard to know whether they controlled for the third possibility, so it's hard to know if full-time attendance for all is a good recommendation or not.  But they don't dwell on that.  They just tell everyone to go as much as possible.

Sadly, this is par for the course in much of educational research.

Myths about learning styles and digital natives

Inside Higher Ed has a nice essay on the helplessness of students, the most extreme example being a student who emailed a professor to ask for the name of the author of a book.  (The student had a copy of the book, and the author's name was on the front cover.)  In the comments section we got to talking about how this helplessness contrasts with the myth of the "Digital Native", the information-savvy student who doesn't need anything traditional in education because they have the world's information at their fingertips.  One commenter pointed me to an article titled Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education.

I don't have time to give a detailed response to the many excellent points in that article, but I will note that it is basically a literature survey that debunks the myth that today's students are information-savvy, great at multi-tasking, and attuned to their own unique learning styles.  I particularly appreciated this cynical observation:

Thousands of articles and books have been written on learning styles and their application in education. Furthermore, a lucrative commercial industry has been set up around (a) selling measurement instruments meant to help teachers diagnose their students’ learning styles and (b) holding workshops and conferences meant to provide information and training to teachers on how to align their teaching to the learning styles of their students. Yet there are fundamental problems with regard to both the diagnosis of learning styles and the alignment of instruction to these styles.

Yep.  The more hype and enthusiasm you see around something in education, the more likely that there's a vendor or workshop presenter hunting for cash.

Interestingly, one of the authors of this article (Kirschner) is also an author on a lovely piece of heresy from the previous decade.

More sages on the pages

The Atlantic has an article defending the college lecture, written by Christine Gross-Loh.  It is interesting to see this; they are hardly a counter-establishment venue, but they do tend to publish a certain amount of commentary deemed to be within the range of safe contrarianism.

I learned of this article from a piece by Joshua Kim at Inside Higher Ed.  Kim argues that most people in instructional design hold opinions on lecturing that are more nuanced than those that the Atlantic article is responding to.  That may be true, but the currents that Gross-Loh highlights are nonetheless real.  I've submitted a comment saying that; I won't regurgitate it here because it's nothing I haven't said a million times before and it will show up soon enough at IHE.

Sisyphusian

This morning's Inside Higher Ed has an essay on the challenges of using higher ed as a path to class mobility and reduced economic inequality.  Most of what's argued in the essay is completely standard, e.g. rising college costs reduce the potential of higher ed to drive class mobility. On the other hand, an excellent point is made by Barbara Piper  in the comments:

The use of higher education to change social class standing in the post-WWII period was a historical anomaly; college (and education in general) had always been part of the reproduction of social class in the U.S. and elsewhere, not a part of any change in social class. The possibility that expanded opportunities for a college education have not produced quite the changes in social class standing that social engineers may have expected is not at all surprising, and might be one more example of the fallacy of assuming that education alone is the determinant of everything about an individual's life.

Indeed.  The US was not only the industrial leader of the world at the end of WWII, but was also the overwhelming industrial leader, because large portions of the world were devastated.  All sorts of things could work well for us then because we didn't face the economic competition that we now face.  Moreover, while educating the population has certainly played  its part in pushing America ahead of the rest of the world, when you educate everyone in the country then everyone benefits, which doesn't necessarily equalize people if they start from different points, and especially doesn't equalize people if the degree to which they are positioned to benefit depends on the advantages that they already have. The last point is related to Kentaro Toyama's basic argument in Geek Heresy.

Education is an important thing, but at some point you will reach a point of diminishing economic returns on educational expansion, and that's the sign that improving the economy will improve education more than improving education will improve the economy.