Category Archives: Education / Youth

Test Results?

‘Tis the season.’ Classes are over for this semester, final exams are concluding, and college professors are drowning in piles of term papers to grade.

And griping.

Yesterday, I was talking to some of my colleagues about the disappointing performance of my students this semester. Although they’ve been reasonably diligent, this cohort has been stubbornly “stuck” at a superficial level. They can regurgitate material from the text or lectures, but they seem unable to get beneath the surface; for that matter, I’m not sure they know there is anything beneath the surface. They seem unaware of complexity or nuance. They skate along the surface, seemingly unaware of the big questions, or the deeper implications of the material–they just focus on finding out what I want on the tests and then giving it to me.

My experience has been shared by others, and not just in SPEA, where I teach. One of my colleagues has an intriguing–if disquieting–theory about the root of the problem: she thinks it is a result of the educational emphasis on high-stakes testing.

It’s now been several years since the education reform movement began its love-affair with constant testing. Students who have grown up in the resulting environment, students whose educational experience has consisted of sitting in a classroom where the instructor is “teaching to the test” are just now entering college. They come to us expecting to be evaluated in much the same way–that is to say, on the basis of their ability to absorb and recite back an assigned body of material.

And that isn’t education. It shouldn’t be what college is all about. College should be a time for probing, for questioning, for discovering–for considering the pros and cons and complexities of issues. Skill acquisition is part of that, but by no means the most important part. Skills can quickly become obsolete; the ability to think critically and analytically will never be outdated.

I don’t know whether my colleague’s theory that we are seeing the end result of teaching to the test is correct. Maybe next semester’s students will display intellectual curiosity, ask the hard questions and disprove the generalization. But I think she may be on to something, and if she is, then the critics of the current methods of “teacher accountability” will have been proven right.

I’m no defender of the status quo in K-12 education. I was once a high-school English teacher, and I am a firm believer in the importance of evaluation. But (as I try to explain to those uninterested students), how we do something is frequently more important than whether we do it. Unintended consequences are the bane of the policy process.

Maybe we should re-introduce elementary and high school students to art and music, test them a little less often and challenge them to think a little bit more.

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Preliminary Questions

There has been a growing debate about the value of a college education. That debate takes two basic forms. The most prominent is an argument that the rising costs of higher education are making college years less cost-effective–that what you get really isn’t worth what you pay. There is also a growing “movement” of young people who decide to drop out to pursue more “creative” endeavors, who want to emulate folks like Bill Gates and other wildly successful internet entrepreneurs who made their billions without dilly-dallying around a college campus for four long years. (Yesterday’s New York Times had an article about several of them.)

The young people who are impatient to be the next Big Thing have always been around. The truly gifted among them will be successful; the others will find jobs or return to school or do whatever it is that such young folks have always done.  College affordability, on the other hand, is a genuine issue, and requires our attention (and probably some unwelcome-to-college-administrators interventions).

I don’t claim to know what measures to take to make higher education more affordable. But I do know that we need to preface that discussion with one that addresses what trial lawyers like to call “a preliminary question.”

Preliminary questions are those we need to answer before we can make sense of the answers to subsequent questions. And mine are deceptively simple: what is education? What is it for? How does it differ from job training?

This question is as applicable to elementary and high schools as it is to college, and the answers will have clear policy implications. If–as many parents seem to believe–K-12 education is a consumer good, something one gives ones children in order to advantage them in the marketplace , then sending Junior to a private “academy” may make sense–at least, so long as that private institution provides accurate science and history lessons. If, however, education also has a public dimension, if it includes an emphasis on citizenship and the forging of a unified polity from a diverse population, it may need to be delivered by a public institution.

When we get to the question of university education, differentiating between job training and education becomes much more important, because those are two very different missions, and the conflation of them is in large part responsible for the current woes of academia. In my (admittedly jaundiced) view, there are far too many students on university campuses who really belong at a job-training institution. They have been told that their employment prospects require a diploma, and they are on campus to acquire that credential. They have zero interest in what great minds have pondered in the past, what history might teach us, what we have learned about human interaction and all the other intellectual goods acquisition of which was once the purpose of the university.

Faculty spend far too much time in campus meetings assessing whether the courses we offer will lead to employment and far too little time considering whether those same courses will lead to enlightenment.

If we separated out the institutions offering a credential from the ones offering an education, it would be much easier to assess cost-effectiveness of the former, and it would send a clear message to students considering attendance at the latter.

Mission clarity is an important element of assessment–if you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish, it’s hard to determine whether you’ve accomplished it. Until our institutions of higher education can answer those preliminary questions—until they decide whether they want to be vocational schools or educational venues–arguments about cost and efficacy will continue.

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Vouchers and Education

While the constitutional challenge to Indiana’s much-hyped voucher program is pending in our Supreme Court, it might be instructive to look to Louisiana, where Bobby Jindal’s equally-hyped version has just been declared unconstitutional. The legal issues are very different–both challenges were based upon state constitutional provisions, and Indiana’s constitution doesn’t contain the provision that was fatal to the Louisiana program. So there’s no legal equivalence.

Instead, what we can learn from Louisiana falls under the old adage that “there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.”

Even the most well-meaning privatization efforts tend to founder on the shoals of accountability. When the effort involves education, those problems multiply. Despite lots of rhetoric, most academic studies of school voucher programs find that the only area of improvement is in parent satisfaction. Even in well-run programs, student performance remains where one would expect based upon a variety of sociological factors. Reports about rising test scores tend, upon further inquiry, to be based on the ability of private schools to eject students who aren’t making the grade.

Those results come from well-run programs. Louisiana is a poster child for the programs where ideology trumps accountability and basic common sense.

A report from Louisiana Progress, a good-government business group, is instructive. The group petitioned the Board of Education to set at least minimal standards for schools receiving vouchers–evidence that the schools have adequate physical facilities, that they not dramatically increase either tuition or enrollment in order to benefit financially from the program, etc. Calling the program “poorly thought out and poorly implemented,” the report noted that schools selected to participate were not chosen on the basis of educational quality. Most were religious, and many of those quite fundamentalist: the New Living Word School had been approved to increase its enrollment from 122 to 315 students, despite lacking physical facilities for that number; increased its tuition from 200/month to 8500/year, and has a basketball team but no library. Students “spend most of the day watching TV. ..Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses bible verses with subjects like chemistry or composition.”

Another voucher school, the Upperroom Bible Church Academy, operates in “a bunker-like building with no windows or playground.”

There are 120 private schools authorized to receive vouchers in Louisiana. A significant percentage are “Bible-based” institutions with what have been characterized as “extreme anti-science and anti-history curriculums” that champion creationism. (One is run by a former state legislator who refers to himself as a “prophet or apostle.” Wouldn’t that encourage you to enroll your child??) A number use textbooks produced by Bob Jones University.

Mother Jones has a list of 14 favorite lessons being taught by Louisiana’s voucher schools. Among them: dinosaurs and people hung out together; gays have no more claims to ‘special rights’ than child molesters and rapists.

Your tax dollars at work.

Louisiana Progress pointed out–reasonably–that since the reason for the voucher program was that Louisiana’s public schools were not meeting educational accountability standards, it makes no sense to spend tax dollars on private/parochial schools that aren’t even being asked to meet those same standards.

We Americans have a love affair with easy answers. We also tend to believe that–whatever the task–private enterprises will outperform governmental ones. And we have a well-documented belief that change equals improvement. Unfortunately, solving real-world problems requires analysis. Sometimes, there is an easy answer; sometimes, a private entity is better suited to solve a certain problem. Sometimes, change is warranted–and positive.

Sometimes, not so much.

If we want to improve education, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions. We might start with: what is the content of a good education? How can we determine whether schools are providing that content? What can we do to improve the prospects that children who enter our schools without the necessary background and tools will actually learn?

Louisiana and many other states–including our own–don’t want to grapple with those questions. They want an easy way out.

Even Adam’s pet dinosaur knew better.

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Adverse Childhood Experiences

David Brooks’ New York Times column this morning was depressing.

Brooks was discussing academic research that traced a variety of adult anti-social behaviors and failures to cope back to certain “adverse” childhood experiences, including abuse, incarceration of a parent and similar destabilizing experiences.

The link between childhood trauma and adult outcomes was striking. People with an ACE score of 4 were seven times more likely to be alcoholics as adults than people with an ACE score of 0. They were six times more likely to have had sex before age 15, twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer, four times as likely to suffer emphysema. People with an ACE score above 6 were 30 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

Later research suggested that only 3 percent of students with an ACE score of 0 had learning or behavioral problems in school. Among students with an ACE score of 4 or higher, 51 percent had those problems.

There’s more–all linking troubled childhoods to adult dysfunctions, both behavioral and medical.

This is depressing because our ability to intervene productively in an individual’s psyche–the ability of professionals or parents to “kiss it and make it well” is still in its infancy. If the conclusions being drawn from this research are accurate–if the problems reported by the adults are actually caused by the identified childhood traumas, and not just correlated with them–social service agencies and psychologists have a very limited ability to help.

It’s also depressing because–despite all the pious political concern expressed about “families” and the sanctity of each life–our public policies are anything but family-friendly. Forcing women to bear unwanted children raises the odds of unhappy childhoods. (Not to mention the studies–admittedly contested–that have tied easing of the access to abortion to lower crime rates twenty years later.) Punitive welfare policies all but ensure familial stress. Our insane approach to drug prohibition deprives thousands of children of their fathers without any corresponding benefit to society. Demonizing homosexuality torments the childhood of GLBT youngsters, disproportionate numbers of whom commit suicide.

As someone recently said, too many people who claim the label “pro life” are really only “pro birth.” Once the child has emerged from the womb, they lose both  interest and compassion.

We may not be able to cure the effects of “adverse childhood experiences,” but rational public policies could help ameliorate those effects. If we really cared about children and families, a lot of our priorities would change.

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How Not to Solve Real Problems

In a column about the GOP Convention, E.J.Dionne referred to Chris Christie’s speech,which he dubbed “Rousing, if deceptive.”

Dionne noted Christie’s admiration for his dad. “After returning from Army service,” Christie recounted, “he worked at the Breyers Ice Cream plant in the 1950s. With that job and the GI Bill he put himself through Rutgers University at night to become the first in his family to earn a college degree.”

“Good for his dad. But Christie somehow slid over the fact that it was government — through the GI Bill and by financing New Jersey’s fine state university — that gave the elder Christie his chance to rise. Are we to “sacrifice” the next generation by cutting student loans and even arguing, as is becoming fashionable, that some Americans shouldn’t get the opportunity to go to college?”

This convention’s delusional theme–its insistence that successful people “do it themselves”–has been properly debunked by numerous people; for that matter, it’s self-evidently false to anyone who bothers to spend five minutes thinking about it. As a friend remarked, “Do these self-congratulatory types really believe that people in, say, Bangladesh, are less motivated and entrepreneurial human beings? Do they not understand that you can’t sell goods to other people if those others are impoverished? Do they just not notice their own ‘dependence’ on an educated workforce, public safety and functioning infrastructure–none of which would exist without the government?”

True enough, and evident to anyone who hasn’t totally succumbed to ideological BS or irrational hatred of government. But that shouldn’t be our biggest concern with this particular alternate reality.

The problem with this failure to understand our social interdependence and the extent of the role government plays in our lives is that this particular form of blindness prevents us from fixing things that are broken.

I teach college. A college education is a time-honored tool of social mobility (it certainly helped Chris Christie’s father). When that education is successful, it also opens intellectual doors for students who would not otherwise pass through them. A genuine education that goes beyond mere job training enriches lives and enables human progress.

But the cost of a college education is rapidly escalating; it is becoming increasingly unaffordable, leaving millions of students with massive debt that takes decades to pay off. This is a problem we need to address. But like so many other current problems, we aren’t addressing it, because our energies are being consumed by arguments over the nature of reality.

The problem of rapidly escalating college costs is not going to be solved by cutting the programs that help students pay those costs. As another friend of mine likes to say, “you can’t cure a disease unless you diagnose it properly.”

People who don’t understand the problems–or who see problems that don’t exist rather than the ones that do–can’t solve them. They are not the people who move America forward.