Elite paradoxes

 I just don't have the blogging bug these days, for a whole bunch of reasons. But I very much appreciate this article about elite education by Jonny Thakkar at Swarthmore. Some choice quotes:

...Swarthmore educates around 1,600 students per year at a cost of something like $110,000 per student. (I find it hard to believe it could be so expensive, but the figures are what they are and apparently the explanation is just that the facilities and support services are first class, the faculty are well paid, and the student-faculty ratio is extremely low.) By comparison, the annual per-student spending of Southern Connecticut State University is about $13,000. Surely there is no credible theory of social justice, or at least no view that would attract Swarthmore professors, according to which it could count as just to spend so much more on educating our students than on the rest of their cohort. In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.

This makes faculty radicalism at elite colleges largely phantasmagoric. Professors campaigning for something like divestment from fossil fuels typically take themselves to be fighting the man in the form of an inscrutable board of managers — or should that be board of donors? — whom they picture as bourgeois reactionaries. But if a college like Swarthmore is necessarily and essentially complicit in injustice, its faculty members are necessarily and essentially complicit as well, and campaigns to invest our billions more responsibly are mostly window dressing.

Everyone in academia agrees that our paramount task is to dismantle power structures. To that end, we will select administrators committed to dismantling power structures, and promote the career advancement of those committed to ending inequality.

In arguing that faculty radicalism is often illusory, I do not mean to suggest that it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it probably matters more than we generally think, just because elites probably matter more than we generally think. One of the dogmas of contemporary academe is that history gets made from below and that any attempt to argue otherwise robs ordinary people of their agency. But it is true by definition, or near enough, that elites have more power than nonelites. It follows that what elites think and do should be of concern to everybody, and hence that a society should care a great deal about the political education its elites receive.

Much like the Keynes quote about "practical men" being slaves of dead economists and philosophers.

Of course, the committed anti-elitists will never leave their elite schools.  Thakkar offers some good reasons why:

In a funny way, though, I actually agree that conservatism is better represented on campus than is often assumed. Those who argued that the Chamberlain Project was antithetical to the college’s history of peace activism, for example, were clearly offering a conservative reason in the form of an appeal to tradition. And lately I’ve been wondering whether the decision to teach at an elite college doesn’t necessarily commit you to respecting a conservative consideration of a different kind, one emphasized by thinkers as disparate as Michael Oakeshott and G. A. Cohen, namely the thought that we have reason to cherish the value that already exists in the world even if the things that bear that value would not exist in a better world.

...

One characteristic of a desirable elite, it seems to me, is that its members be self-aware. Each needs to recognize that they are the recipient of a golden ticket, not so they can engage in pointless rituals of self-denunciation but so they can reckon with the question of which responsibilities follow from the privilege that has been unfairly bestowed upon them. What is needed, as conservatives such as Helen Andrews and Ross Douthat have rightly argued, is something like the old ethos of noblesse oblige, according to which a golden ticket comes with the unavoidable obligation to make what Christopher Lasch called “a direct and personal contribution to the public good.” The difficulty is knowing how to teach with this in mind, given that career decisions are generally considered private.

However, he makes one assertion which is common but I have lately heard is contested:

But America will not be just any time soon; even its public-education system devotes vastly greater resources to well-off children than to those from poorer backgrounds.

I have no doubt that spending disparities exist, but I have heard knowledge people contest the magnitude of the alleged disparities. I suspect, however, that affluent districts actually operate with less overhead and more spending on in-the-classroom things, like science equipment and smaller classes and sports facilities and whatnot, i.e. stuff that kids actually see and experience directly. Poorer districts probably have more bureaucracies overseeing the efforts to allegedly help poor kids. Because poor kids allegedly need case managers and assessments and whatnot, instead of, you know, science equipment and small classes and sports facilities and all that.

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.

We are so screwed.

The author of this essay "The Promise of Intellectual Joy" was accused of "white supremacist rhetoric" and subsequently fired.  For an essay that cites Hofstadter extensively and proclaims that every child can and should feel the thrill of intellectual challenge.

We are so screwed.

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.  :(

How narratives are formed

One should always take it with a grain of salt when CEOs complain about skill shortages (maybe they'd get more skilled people if they offered more money), but here I'm less interested in the CEOs' claims than in the response to them.

Here's what CEOs said about the challenge of filling jobs:

One executive said in discussions with White House officials that his company has 50 participants in a factory apprenticeship program, but could take 500 if enough were qualified. But he said that in his experience, most students coming out of high school lack the math and English skills to absorb technical manuals.

That certainly accords with my experience.

Here's what the sub-headline says:

Manufacturing leaders urge President Trump to encourage high-tech skills training.

Basic math and English skills are not high-tech.  They're essential to a high-tech job, but they themselves are not high-tech.  And that's the problem: People want the hot and new, not the fundamentals.  CEOs say that they will train people for high-tech manufacturing if they have basic math and reading skills, journalists translate that into high-tech skills, and no doubt some shill in higher ed is busy explaining that this is why we need people with advanced degrees in STEM...because a CEO wants a reasonably competent high school grad who can be trained to work on the production floor.

On the other hand, I find it fascinating that the CEOs are talking about technical manuals.  Normally we assume that it's higher ed that's stodgy and unable to Get With The Times, but here we see business executives saying that they need people who can read manuals while the most progressive kool-aid drinkers in higher ed all say that we need to embrace the post-literate society and de-emphasize books in favor of videos.  I find this amusingly ironic.

Public schools have charters too

With the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education there is now much discussion of charter schools and school choice.  I have no interest in debating the merits or demerits of Betsy DeVos in this venue, and I will not offer a final stance or recommendation on charter schools.  But I will offer an  observation on the wider context:

The most substantial criticism I've seen against charter schools is that they get better results by being selective about their student bodies, filtering out students with weak preparation or behavioral problems.  To the extent that the question is whether the performance of charter schools is truly superior in an apples-to-apples comparison, whether "is" statements regarding their alleged merits are based on scientifically valid comparisons, I think it's an entirely fair point to raise.  I haven't reviewed the data closely enough to know whether it's an empirically valid point, but if we take the claim at face value it is certainly valid.

On the other hand, if the question is whether excellence (by whatever yardstick) can be cultivated when one abandons democratic mandates, I think that the performance of charter schools is telling us something very, very important.  I'm not convinced that the public schools are irredeemable if we speak of the schools as buildings with trained people inside them, people who could accomplish tasks if given resources and leeway.  I am convinced that the demands we make on public schools are impossible to satisfy, and that no amount of Special Programs and bureaucratic infrastructure ladled atop a school can bring about True Democracy in education.

The people invested in the system itself--and its democratic legitimacy--cannot admit this.  Even a person who is of right-wing leanings has to believe that with proper accountability we can somehow get schools to serve all students equally, at least if that person buys into the cross-partisan democratic narratives that Americans have long bought into.  To reject these democratic assumptions you need to either have a dark, naked embrace of inequality, an idea of better and lesser people, or you need to be individualistic and believe that there is no one-size-fits-all and a system can really only serve those who choose to be served. Either way, you have to reject the charter that the public schools labor under.

My favorite teacher in high school said that America could have the best public schools on earth if we struck one word from the laws governing them:  "Compulsory."  The success of charter schools proves that.

Resurfacing

I have been reading fiction lately, and the themes of this blog are much more suited to discussing non-fiction than fiction (unless we count the promises of education reformers as fiction).  But the LA Times has an article on how the Gates Foundation is beginning to acknowledge that silver bullets are in short supply, and that is worth sharing.  I used to be a big fan of the TV show Once Upon A Time, and in Once Upon A Time there are two lines particularly worth quoting in discussions of education reform:

1) "All magic comes at a price."  Said repeatedly by Rumpelstiltskin, the point is that whenever you use magic to solve a problem you might get a a quick and easy way to do something, but you'll pay for it down the road.

2) "That's the problem with this world.  Everybody wants a magical solution to their problems but nobody wants to believe in magic."  Said by the Mad Hatter, one of the few characters in the first season who knows that magic and fairytales are real, he's complaining about people who want something that's as quick and easy as magic, but somehow fits into their (supposedly) rational world-view.  They want things neat and tidy.  He was talking to a character who wanted to believe that there was a way to fix her situation without accepting the reality of other worlds and much bigger things than she had previously contemplated, things that could shatter her world and thrust her into a much bigger drama.

But it could just as easily be applied to technocrats.  They want to believe that with properly-designed studies they will find the tricks that nobody else found before, and use those tricks to solve the problems of education.  They are forgetting a few inconvenient facts.  For starters, scientific discovery is never as clean and linear as the technocrats want to believe.  You don't simply follow a best practice for research and thereby identify a best practice for teaching or social work or whatever.  True insights, let along truly new insights, are dearly bought.  They come at unexpected moments and from unexpected directions.  New knowledge is the most expensive thing imaginable. There's a reason why thousands of years ago the Egyptian scribe Khekheperre-Sonbu, living in a time when so many of today's great innovations were unknown, lamented the difficulty of developing new and meaningful ideas.

Also, they want to think that success is just a matter of telling people to do the right things and then watching it happen.  Just today I was talking to a couple people who found in their research that teaching assistants who were sent to a seminar in which they were told about the (supposedly) best practices for teaching would start out following those practices but would then deviate.  Their belief was that they need to find some way to persuade or train the teaching assistants to stick with the best practices.  Well, first, let me note that maybe some of these practices are only best for particular people in particular settings, and the teaching assistants might not be the right audience for these practices.

But second, getting people to do the right thing is more complicated than telling them to do the right thing.  Perhaps the best way to instill a practice is not with a seminar that meets for a couple hours once per week over a period of 10 weeks, but rather to provide a role model.  Perhaps they need to take a class from an inspiring teacher who uses the (supposedly) newer and better practices.  Perhaps that is a better way to instill something into the brain.  If you want people to believe down to their very bones that a particular method of teaching physics (or whatever subject) is better than any other method, perhaps they need to actually experience the method itself, and actually learn and appreciate physics via that method, and experience enough growth and insight into physics that they will emulate that method as much subconsciously as consciously.  Perhaps role models and meaningful experiences matter more than simply hearing and believing best practices.

Think about how much we emulate our parents, and ask yourselves this:  Do you do what your parents told you to do, or do you do what your parents did?  You probably got some good habits from them, but did you get any bad habits from them?  And did they tell you to adopt those habits, or did your mothers tell their children not to do what they had done? (To quote a great song.)  I'm pretty sure that your parents discouraged you from emulating their worst habits, but that probably didn't stop you from emulating them (probably without consciously intending to do so).  We know from more than a century of research on k-12 education that parents and family background predict educational outcomes better than any practice on the part of teachers.  Why?  Because people spend far more time around parents than around teachers, and (usually) get more attention from parents than teachers.  (If they get more attention from teachers than parents then there's an entirely different set of problems here.)  Likewise, people spend far more time with teachers trying to teach them subject matter than teachers trying to explicitly teach them about teaching.  Perhaps the best way to shape the next generation of teachers is to teach subject matter as well as possible and inspire people to do what you did, not to spend 2 hours per week over 10 weeks telling people about best practices.

Of course, teaching the subject matter as well as possible is slower-impact than a special seminar, even if it is higher-impact.  And we want the fast solution in our society.  We want to believe in the magic without accepting that when the magic actually does happen it happens in a much bigger context.  So I'm quite confident that when Bill Gates has left the stage Mark Zuckerberg or some similar figure will attempt to implement an education reform agenda, convinced that This Time It's Different.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

My apology to the k-12 system

On any given day, when students are staring at a diagram and not getting that when there's a right triangle you need to use trig functions, I might start cursing the k-12 system and proclaim my desire to reanimate Stalin so he can deport all of our mis-educators to Siberia.  When native English speakers from middle-class suburban backgrounds can't get their subjects and verbs to agree, there's a good chance that I'll call for high school English teachers to be sent to North Korea so that they can starve.  But those are emotional responses.  In my more rational moments, I know that teachers have far less influence on students than their families and the wider culture, and that teachers cannot simply fail vast numbers of students without incurring the wrath of school boards and legislators.

I rarely like the NYT Education Section, but this article and the associated charts are priceless.  The charts clearly show that factors contributing to socioeconomic status (including race) are major determinants of student success (or lack thereof).  Schools are limited more by their inputs than their practices.  (And, FYI, in a footnote the article says that socioeconomic status, hereafter abbreviated SES, was measured by "income, the percentage of parents with a college degree, the percentage of single parents, poverty, SNAP and unemployment rates".)

One particularly important thing about this analysis is that it doesn't just compare districts with each other, it also compares racial groups within districts.  In the second chart, black, white, and Hispanic students within the same districts are compared.  (Asians are left out because this is a nationwide analysis and in most districts there are too few of them to make for valid comparisons.)  Besides showing that blacks and Hispanics are disadvantaged, it also shows that they tend to perform at levels comparable to other members of the same SES groups in other districts.  Yes, there are racial gaps even after controlling for other aspects of SES, but the important thing about breaking it down by race is that within a district black, white, and Hispanic students will usually NOT be of the same SES.  If you didn't factor that in, you might wonder whether SES variables were actually telling you something about the schools themselves (via funding and local taxes) rather than the students that those schools receive. But students from different SES groups in the same district perform more similarly to kids in other districts with similar SES rather than kids in the same district but from different strata of society.

Now, the third chart does show that racial gaps persist even within the same SES, and that's an ugly aspect of US history and culture that we need to confront.  But just as measurable non-racial aspects of SES are beyond the ability of schools to single-handedly correct for, so are the sad fruits of America's continuing racial inequities.  I don't claim to know what the full solution is, and I freely recognize that schools can play their part, but it's only a part.

Anyway, this means three things, one of which I can use as an excuse and the others of which I will just have to accept:  On the one hand, my students are the way that they are for reasons that go well beyond any particular failings of their k-12 teachers.  On the other hand, at least it means that nobody can fault me.  But it also means that I am doomed to spend another 30 years shepherding people through the system without seeing them improve as much as I would hope, and without seeing most  of them perform at a particularly high intellectual level.  I am as limited by my inputs as the k-12 system is by its inputs.  On the other hand, it also means that maybe my colleagues are right to focus their attention on "special programs."  Most people will not beat the odds (that's the definition of the odds, after all) so maybe the only source of satisfaction is in focusing on anecdotes.

Finally, as informative as this NYT Education article was, it's still a NYT Education article.  They can't resist the temptation to find The Fix.  They note that This One School District in New Jersey seems to have beaten the odds.  The fact that they only found one, in an analysis of thousands of districts, really ought to tell you that maybe there are not magical solutions, but instead they spend the last few paragraphs going on about how great this school district is and wondering if there's a lesson that can be learned and scaled.  I doubt it, but I pity the k-12 teachers who will get to be subjected to workshops on the Best Practices from This One District.  Just as the NYT helps me finally get over my desire to see k-12 teachers suffer, it also proposes a new way to make them suffer.  Thanks, NYT.  Thanks a lot.