Spotted in the wild: The obligatory paragraph

A while ago I blogged about the following comment by Cathy Young:

This is starting to remind me of how every Soviet essay on art or literature had the obligatory graph on Marxism-Leninism & the class struggle

She was commenting on an otherwise fine article that had an aside on how "problematic" the concept of genius is. It reminded her of the requirements placed on writers in the Soviet era.

Well, I found another example. A recent book review in the NYT starts off describing how the book's action grabbed the author, but then segues to this:

But another, different, fear had also crept in as I was reading: I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book. I could never speak to the accuracy of the book’s representation of Mexican culture or the plights of migrants; I have never been Mexican or a migrant. In contemporary literary circles, there is a serious and legitimate sensitivity to people writing about heritages that are not their own because, at its worst, this practice perpetuates the evils of colonization, stealing the stories of oppressed people for the profit of the dominant. I was further sunk into anxiety when I discovered that, although Cummins does have a personal stake in stories of migration, she herself is neither Mexican nor a migrant.

That throat clearing out of the way, the reviewer resumes her examination of the book. It's an interesting review, and I might consider reading the book. But I wish she hadn't included that paragraph. She has every qualification needed to review a literary work: She is a human who was moved by a story.

We are a storytelling species. There's a reason why Jesus deals in parables. There's a reason why children beg their parents and other relatives to re-read the same favorite story fifty million times.  My most cherished possession from childhood is the book that my grandmother used to read to me when I was sitting on her lap. Stories move us. If a story has moved that reviewer, then she is more than qualified to comment on it.

Of course, people in this era talk about "staying in our lanes" and not commenting outside of our experiences. There's a valid point there, particularly in matters of fact, of non-fiction, but stories are about expanding our horizons. Every book ever written is a book about somebody's experiences other than my own. And even if I write a book, unless I write an autobiography free of diversions into the experiences of people whom I've encountered, it will still be a book about somebody's experiences other than my own. And literary works are about experiences that technically didn't even happen. They reflect the deeper truths of story-telling, not the surfaces truths of factual knowledge.

And even if we stop short of the narrowest construal of what stories we can and can't comment on, we can still do great mischief with this notion. What is a homework essay in literature class if not an examination of somebody else's story? Should a white student decline to write an essay on a Ralph Ellison story because that student can't comment on the black experience? Should I refuse to comment on Hamlet because I'm not bipolar? Should I have demurred from commenting on The Farewell because I'm not Chinese, even though the story of a dying grandmother resonated with my own life?

It is sad to live in an era in which the most prestigious outlets feel the need to crowd their literary commentary with these obnoxious disclaimers about identity.

NYT gonna NYT

This article in the NYT a few weeks ago started off so promising, skewering many of the "STEM Shortage" narratives.  But then they started talking about how hot and promising "data science" is.  It used to be that I heard stories of people getting hired into "data science" jobs with no prior training specific to the field, just a decent background from a PhD in some data-heavy science or engineering field.  Then I started hearing of various "boot camps" to prepare data scientists, because employers didn't want to train people.  Lately I've seen ads for "data science" MS programs.  And now a NYT article saying how hot it is.

Data Science is about to be saturated.

Finally, some sanity on privilege, college, and jobs

I'm not predisposed to agree with a professor of work-life law about, well, anything.  However, Joan Williams has a great article in the NYT that practically reads like a synopsis of the things I blog about.  To wit, class matters as much as race:

But something is seriously off when privileged whites dismiss the economic pain of less privileged whites on grounds that those other whites have white privilege. Everyone should have access to good housing and good jobs. That’s the point.

Indeed.

And some sanity on college and the job prospects of people who don't go to college:

The second [step] is for Democrats to advocate an agenda attractive to low-income and working-class Americans of all races: creating good jobs for high school graduates. The college-for-all experiment did not work. Two-thirds of Americans are not college graduates. We need to continue to make college more accessible, but we also need to improve the economic prospects of Americans without college degrees.

Accepted wisdom that decent nonprofessional jobs are gone for good lets elites off the hook. In fact, the United States has a well-documented dearth of workers qualified for middle-skill jobs that pay $40,000 or more a year and require some postsecondary education but not a college degree. A 2014 report by Accenture, Burning Glass Technologies and Harvard Business School found that a lack of adequate middle-skills talent affects the productivity of “47 percent of manufacturing companies, 35 percent of health care and social assistance companies, and 21 percent of retail companies.” Middle-skill jobs are important jobs: radiology technician, electrician, modern robot-heavy factory worker, emergency medical technician, wind turbine technician. In some cities, a construction boom is hobbled by a lack of plumbers. We might ameliorate this problem if we stopped talking about plumber’s butt.

I'm just baffled that something this sensible could be published in an elite outlet like the NYT.

PhD overproduction in the NYT

Every now and then the Education section of the New York Times publishes something sensible.  Today they have an article noting that there are too many STEM PhDs.  I'm pretty sure that my web browser must be broken, because nothing that sensible or that contrary to establishment narratives could possibly appear in that venue.

Who knew?

I normally hate NYT articles that mention This One Program, but here's an article with 3 examples of This One Program, and at least two of them involve financial support and incentives to get students to attend school full-time.  Who knew that focusing full-time on school would lead to greater academic success than dividing your attention between school and a job?

(The only exception to that observation is students who have internships in their fields:   Many of those students do better than students who are only focused on school, but that's a bit different from working a job unrelated to your major.)

NYT gonna NYT

I finished a task early and I foolishly decided to check out the NY Times Education section.  Why? Beats me.  I guess I hate myself.  Anyway, here's the article that leaped out at me:

How Colleges Can Again Be Levelers of Society

The word "Again" carries a lot of assumptions about the past. Education has certainly had a leveling effect, e.g. via mass literacy.  Colleges and universities, on the other hand, have usually not been levelers in US history.  The major exception was from the aftermath of WWII and the GI Bill through the college educations of the Baby Boomers.  This corresponded to three unique circumstances:

1. An influx of young men (and some women, e.g. my grandmother) who had spent several years subject to extraordinary levels of discipline (i.e. people with some pretty unusual preparation and maturity).
2. An era in which the US enjoyed unrivaled advantages in the international marketplace because much of the world had suffered huge infrastructure losses and a lot of places had decided to try the most inefficient economic system ever invented.  This was also the era of extraordinarily good factory jobs.  We were the global leader.  We could be good at anything because we had a unique economic perch. I am less than convinced that we can get back to that era now.
3. An influx of "low-hanging fruit".  When most of your population has not been sending people to college, there's going to be plenty of talent out there to identify and admit.  When a larger proportion of your population is in college, finding the remaining suitable talents is going to be harder.  With such people being thin on the ground, your remaining options are to either lower standards or else commit extraordinary resources to helping the poorly-prepared succeed.  The later one sounds noble, and it gets a lot of praise, but it runs up against such trifling things as the limitations of human ability and the fact that the same people who pay lip service to success also want speedy graduation and minimal costs.  Extraordinary assistant means extraordinary resources.

Naturally, being an NYT Education article, they gloss over that.

They do lament that it's hard to get colleges to admit and support students who can't pay full tuition, because such students are expensive to support:

Colleges that enroll the highest percentage of low-income students are need-blind, which means they make admissions decisions without considering ability to pay. They offer enough financial aid to completely close the gap between the cost of college and what a student’s family can pay. And they actively recruit low-income students. 

Stephen Burd, a senior policy analyst at New America, a public policy institute, said that between 20 and 25 private schools and many public colleges do all three things, among them many Ivies, Stanford and small colleges like Pomona, Wellesley and Amherst (another leader in educating low-income students). 

The vast majority of colleges don’t. Enrolling poor students is costly, especially because each scholarship student will take the place of someone who could pay in full. The financial crisis of 2008 sliced into endowments. States are cutting public schools’ budgets. 

In addition, the money colleges do have increasingly goes to students who don’t need it. Private colleges engage in bidding wars for talented wealthy students. Burd writes that the same thing is happening at public colleges, where tuition is higher for out-of-state students, and bidding wars for them gobble up a growing percentage of aid. While this crowds out low-income students, and many colleges say they would like to stop, they do not because their competitors are still doing it.

Well, yes.  Offering financial aid means spending money.  That's how it works.  There's no magical unicorn who will shit gold bricks out its behind.  Fortunately, the NYT has identified a way to get around this problem!

“Every incentive these days is to not get low-income students,” said Burd. “It takes a huge personal commitment from a leader. The only thing driving it is their conscience.”

Oh, so that's all it takes:  A triumph of the will!

Now, this prescription was offered after profiling efforts to broaden admissions and access at Vassar.  According to a NYT article from two years ago, Vassar has an endowment of $340,000 per student. If we assumed a 4% return, to be a bit modest, that's $13,600 per student per year.  With a full cost of attendance estimated at $65,000/year, they could give a full ride to 20% of their student body.  Not every college can say the same.

I eagerly await the day that the NYT tries to make a point about higher education without restricting its attention to elite places with hefty endowments.

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.

Gritty sand in the gears of "reform"

Every so often the New York Times Education section publishes something interesting.  Most recently, they published an op-ed by Angela Lee Duckworth, in which she argued that "grit" (a psychological concept that she has been a leader in studying) should not be measured in the classroom with the goal of attaching high stakes.  As soon as something goes from the lab to the world of high stakes, all sorts of other behaviors come into play.  Kudos to her for recognizing this.  She's making the same point that I made in my responses to Lani Guinier's Tyranny of the Meritocracy:  As soon as you go beyond This One Special Situation to a world of competition and financial incentives, people will try to game your lovely research construct.

What is measured improves, but nothing else does

Oh, good!

A recent update to federal education law requires states to include at least one nonacademic measure in judging school performance. So other states are watching these districts as a potential model. But the race to test for so-called social-emotional skills has raised alarms even among the biggest proponents of teaching them, who warn that the definitions are unclear and the tests faulty.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the tests but in the stakes.  Go ahead and create the world's most perfect, reliable, valid, accurate, and all-around good measure of grit, or growth mindset, or whatever.  Administer it in a setting where nobody has been primed to answer disingenuously and nobody has any real reason to deceive.  You'll get results that tell you something meaningful.  Now attach stakes to it.  And watch as the teachers start feeding students slogans about grit and growth mindset, and students start giving answers that sound good rather than answers that accurately tell you something about their actions outside of the testing situation.

Fortunately, a few of the people interviewed in the article agree:

In their paper published in May, Dr. Duckworth and David Yeager argued that even if students do not fake their answers, the tests provide incentive for “superficial parroting” rather than real changes in mind-set. 

“You think test scores are easy to game?” said Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is working with the districts in California. “They’re relatively hard to game when you compare them to a self-report survey.”

I actually don't fault the entire idea of measuring non-academic things.  The very fact that people will try to game measures is actually an argument for measuring more things rather than fewer.  The more things you measure the harder it is to game all of them at once.  Still, it's better to make more of those measures be about things that are harder to game.  As opposed to this.

This concludes our monthly feature titled "Something actually interesting in the NYT education section."

And behold! On this day, in the twilight days of the year of our Lord 2015, the NYT dared print something truthful about education!

Once per month the NYT dares to print something insightful about education, something that doesn't flatter centrist sensibilities.  This month the NYT dares to notice that producing more high school graduates is not the same thing as producing more college-ready graduates.  One might dare to hope that next month the NYT will notice that simply following "best practices" is insufficient to guarantee that they will succeed in college.

The interplay of technocratic and quasi-religious language

Last month I made an exception to my general policy of hating NYT articles on higher education.  This month's exception is for Ross Douthat, whose comments on student protests happen to touch on an issue in how people in higher education talk about their work and mission.  It actually starts off rather unpromising, with a first paragraph that tries to summarize more than a century of change in higher education, and paints with a too-broad brush.  However, we'll temporarily set aside that Hofstadter's history of higher education is a fixation of this blog, and move to the next few paragraphs, which build toward something interesting:

At which point the student radicalism of the 1960s entered the picture. The radicals moved quickly to dismantle the vestiges of moral conservatism on campus — the in loco parentis rules that still governed undergraduate life, for instance. But their real mission was actually a kind of remoralization, a renewal of the university as a place of almost-religious purpose, where students would be educated about certain great truths and then sent forth to live them out. 

It was just that these truths were modern instead of ancient: The truths of the antiwar and civil rights movements, and later of feminism and environmentalism and LBGTQ activism and a long list of social justice causes. 

With time, the university ceded just enough ground to co-opt and tame these radicals. It adopted their buzzwords as a kind of post-religious moral vocabulary; it granted them the liberal arts as an ideological fiefdom (but not the sciences or the business school!); it used their vision of sexual liberation as a selling point for applicants looking for a John Belushi-esque good time. 

The result, by the time I arrived at college late in the 1990s, was a campus landscape where left-wing pieties dominated official discourse, but the university’s deeper spirit remained technocratic, careerist and basically amoral. And many students seemed content with that settlement.

(Emphasis added)

As I blogged about yesterday, I would take issue with his statement that radicals were granted the liberal arts as their own fiefdom.  Certainly they do not have unchecked control over the liberal arts.  However, I would agree that the radicals were granted a home within the wider realm of humanities and social sciences.  More interesting, though, is the contrast that Douthat identifies between a moral vocabulary and a deeper technocratic and amoral spirit.  What he describes is the flip side of what I observe in discussions of pedagogical philosophy.  The superficial language is amoral (in the sense of eschewing value judgments) and technocratic, focused entirely on measured learning gains and performance data, something that no scholar ought to dismiss.  Below the surface, though, are implicit value judgments (e.g. why do physics education researchers largely focus on "conceptual" understanding over calculation?) and heavy parcels of cultural baggage (why do people speak so excitedly of being "transformed"?).  People re-enact the Great Awakening in workshops, even while insisting that they are just following the data.

Perhaps the faculty are going through the same turmoil as the students.  The revival of student protests as a feature of campus political life shows a desire by students to grapple with moral questions (whether you, I, Douthat, or any other individual might agree with them is a separate issue for now) rather than give in to the technocratic spirit of institutions where business is often the largest major and STEM is the most-discussed family of majors.  Likewise, the faculty talk their game about "STEM!  STEM!  STEM!  STEM!" and technocratic approaches to learning, but there are clearly deeper moral, cultural, and psychological needs that are being met in pedagogy reform.

My own suspicion is that if we want a healthy, sustainable academy, rather than one where faculty lurch from fad to fad while students lurch back and forth between apathy and ill-informed protest, we need both a technocratic side and an open acknowledgement that Big Questions and cultural considerations matter.  We also need to read our history, lest we keep repeating it again and again.

What I've been saying for a while

I've been saying for a while that current educational fashions are at least as much about cultural resonance as they are about studies showing learning gains of X percentage at whatever level of statistical significance.  Well, this op-ed by a history professor says the same thing.

When educational trends are being criticized in an op-ed in the New York Times of all places you know that something very strange is happening.  What's next?  Human sacrifice?  Dogs and cats living together?  Mass hysteria?