Category: education

New troubles for college-bound British students

August 17, 2020 • 9:00 am

Matthew informed me of the mess in England about school exams, which is causing huge difficulties there and leaving a lot of students at their wit’s end.  I asked him to tell us a bit about it, as reading online only confused me. So here’s Matthew’s explanation.

by Matthew Cobb

The future of a generation of English school-leavers is being blighted by the pandemic and by government incompetence. Their end-of-school exams—A-levels—did not take place, so the government devised an algorithm to determine their marks (used for university entry, but also by future employers). The algorithm took into account the teachers’ predictions of the grades (teachers do this every year for the weird UK university entrance system, whereby students are made offers partly on the basis of these predictions), but then moderated them on the basis of the school’s bad performance. They checked the algorithm against last year’s results, and found that it made mistakes in over 2/3 of cases, and that state school pupils were systematically downgraded while private school pupils were not, but they went ahead with it anyway.

As you might expect, there has been a massive outcry and a huge sense of injustice as many teenagers have been deemed to fail exams they did not even take, and promised university futures have evaporated through no fault of the students. A new slogan has emerged on demonstrations that we will undoubtedly hear more of as the 21st century progresses: ‘Fuck the algorithm’. The government said students would be able to appeal against the grading, starting today, but over the weekend that option was removed without explanation. The grisly details of all this—in particular the incompetent and unqualified cronies who are in charge of various decisions—are even more grisly than I have set out here, but maybe UK-based readers would like to add to this in the comments.

Later this week the malfunctioning algorithm will be used to determine the marks of 16 year olds, for their GCSE exams. Already Northern Ireland (which has control over its education system) has said it will ignore the algorithm and will simply use teacher’s predicted grades for the GSCEs. Exactly the same thing happened in Scotland (which has an entirely separate education system and local control over it) a couple of weeks ago with their Highers. Faced with massive protest, the Scottish government had to backtrack and use teacher’s predictions. It seems probable that the English government will do the same, but slacker Johnson is on holiday, and anyway isn’t interested in anything resembling responsibility. For the moment, the algorithm results stand.

[EDIT: As expected, the English government has backed down and agreed that students in England will have their exam results based on their teachers’ predictions (‘centre assessment grades’). Ofqual, the body in charge of this utter fiasco, has said:

We understand this has been a distressing time for students, who were awarded exam results last week for exams they never took. The pandemic has created circumstances no one could have ever imagined or wished for. We want to now take steps to remove as much stress and uncertainty for young people as possible – and to free up heads and teachers to work towards the important task of getting all schools open in two weeks. After reflection, we have decided that the best way to do this is to award grades on the basis of what teachers submitted. The switch to centre assessment grades will apply to both AS and A-levels and to the GCSE results which students will receive later this week.

Good. Now comes a few more days of chaos as students, schools and universities try to sort out the mess and, in some cases, find places for all the extra students who they will now have to take on board.]

 

Today in collegiate dystopia: ex-governor to take over the University of Wisconsin

June 20, 2020 • 1:00 pm

by Greg Mayer

The University of Wisconsin has been having a bad time for more than a decade. The latest episode is an utterly incompetent and unsuccessful search for a new President of the UW System. The search for the President, who oversees all 13 campuses (flagship Madison, runner-up Milwaukee, and 11 comprehensives), was shambolic from the start. The Board of Regents, handpicked by former Governor Scott Walker, had changed the rules so that faculty, staff, and students were excluded from having any meaningful input into the search process—the search committee consisted solely of a handful of Regents and administrators. This was billed as a way of overcoming the sloth and inefficiency of committees with a broadly representative membership. Things would get done fast with a committee controlled by prosperous businessmen (i.e., Regents), because prosperous businessmen know how to get things done.

But as Theodore Roosevelt so astutely observed about prosperous businessmen,

It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own business.

Choosing to forge ahead during the pandemic, and laboring in secret, the committee, with the assistance of a search firm charging $200k plus expenses, brought forth a single candidate for the full Board of Regents, rather than the 3-5 candidates expected from such a search. For anybody else in academia this would be considered a failed search, but the Regents pushed on in the face of widespread criticism. Just hours before the search committee was to finalize the choice of its only candidate, the candidate, James Johnsen, president of the University of Alaska, withdrew from consideration. In a brief statement, even he realized that things were not right:

[I]t’s clear they [the search committee] have important process issues to work out.

In addition to the process issues, there were substantive concerns about Johnsen. He’d been the recipient of no confidence votes by both faculty and students in Alaska, and had no evident experience in the actual work of universities, having apparently been an administrator for his entire career. (I don’t know why regents and trustees seem to think someone with no experience in teaching or research would be good at running a university. The captain of an aircraft carrier is always a naval aviator, not someone who is good at refurbishing the flight deck or organizing meals for 5000. Although an aircraft carrier needs such people, they are not in command.)

Johnsen’s withdrawal was a bright day for the University of Wisconsin, but the question then became: who would be the president now that the search failed? The current president, Ray Cross, who is retiring at the end of the month, had been chosen for his fealty to the leadership of the state Republican party. Over the years he had proven to be powerless—doing whatever he was ordered to do; clueless—unaware of what his masters wanted until they ordered him to do it; but effective— slashing budgets, instituting top down command, merging the two-year campuses into the four-years. (The latter was to insure that campus chancellors, rather than the Regents or the Legislature, would take the blame when the struggling two-years took their hits.) His latest exploit was using the pandemic as motivation for a grandiose plan to change the mission of the university. (It’s not yet clear whether he was strategically using the crisis, Rahm Emmanuel-style, or just panicking. The latter is indicated by his backtracking, and simultaneous advocacy of moving online and maintaining in person classes in the fall of 2020.) Would Cross be asked to stay on?

On Friday, the Regents announced that they had selected former Republican Governor Tommy Thompson as interim President, and, furthermore, that they did not intend to conduct a search for a permanent President anytime soon. This was a surprising choice, and has drawn mixed reactions. My own view is that he might not be a disaster. I’m not optimistic, but it’s not clear the sky is falling. A little explanation is in order.

As governor from 1987-2001, Thompson worked tirelessly for his personal vision for the state: a series of supermax prisons connected by broad, straight, highways. Frank Rich accurately described him “as a Chamber of Commerce glad-hander who doesn’t know his pants are on fire” during his brief tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services. So why am I not gloomy? In those days, the Wisconsin Republican Party had a pro-business wing and a know-nothing wing, and the pro-business wing, which Thompson led, was ascendant. Thompson’s wing of the party saw the University of Wisconsin as useful—in mostly a neoliberal, transactional, sort of way, but even tinged with a touch of genuine affection, since they had all gone to school there. Because the legislature was controlled, at least in part, by Democrats for most of Thompson’s tenure as governor, the two parties actually worked together to do good things for the University.

This modest bipartisanship ended when Democrat Jim Doyle became governor. The Democrats thought they could rely on the votes of most University supporters, and the know-nothing wing became ascendant in the Republican Party. The latter reached its apotheosis under Governor Scott Walker, and this wing is deeply opposed to the University on ideological grounds—disdaining both the notion of education as a public good, and the leftist ideology they see as infesting colleges. (At a meeting with a few Regents several years ago, I was saddened by one Regent—a successful Republican politician of the old school—relating how current, know-nothing, legislators mocked her for her support of the University.)

Tommy Thompson thus comes on to the scene as, what one online wag called him, the last “normal Republican”. A former supporter of the University, but a dyed in the wool Republican, it is an open question as to what he will do as UW System President. Equally important is the question of whether the legislature (gerrymandered into an almost unbeatable Republican majority) or the Regents will allow him the latitude to do anything other than what they want. (If the Regents want Thompson to do their bidding, they must act quickly, because in less than a year a majority of the Board’s members will have been appointed by Democratic Governor Tony Evers.)

Does Thompson still support the University of Wisconsin? I don’t know. But at least he’s not a known enemy, and he may have sufficient residual heft to oppose those who are its enemies.

JAC: Here’s a picture of Bascom Hall, the flagship building of the flagship campus at Madison:

Bascom Hall, the main administrative building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Bill Martens/WPR

Today in collegiate dystopia: gazing into the crystal ball

April 28, 2020 • 10:00 am

by Greg Mayer

A writer in The New York Times has taken a rather optimistic view of the implications for higher education of the current shift to remote teaching and learning. It’s not that he thinks things are going well this semester– they’re not. Rather, he thinks that colleges will be able to reopen without that much change in the fall (or whenever things return to normal).

His thesis:
As for predictions that it will trigger a permanent exodus from brick-and-mortar campuses to virtual classrooms, all indications are that it probably won’t.
I think he’s too optimistic. While the experience with remote education has not been good, many colleges outside the top tier see remote education as a lifeline to survival, and administrators at these colleges are eager to embrace the tuition-paying students, and cost savings, that remote education brings. To see this, just spend a little time perusing the house organs of education administrators, Inside Higher Ed (open access) and the Chronicle of Higher Education (much of it paywalled).

For years now, the only thing that has mattered to administrators is institutional success. Institutional success means the continued existence of the institution; success in the acquisition of funds from funding sources; and good publicity. For awhile they thought that recruitment (enrolling as many students as possible) and retention (making sure every student who enrolls keeps coming back every semester) were the keys to success. In all of a college’s activities, attracting new students was the point—finding and enrolling these new students was all that mattered.

More recently, administrators (to a great extent under pressure created by the neoliberal initiatives of the U.S. Department of Education) have come to believe that graduating students is more important than getting students. This might seem a laudable redirection, but, in a textbook exemplification of Campbell’s Law, this meant that the entire aim of higher education could be re-imagined—credentialing became the goal.

So, many colleges now seek to recruit, and then rush through to credentialing, as many students as possible. Many new programs have been created in pursuit of this goal. And much of the work of creating and running such programs can be outsourced to companies that, in exchange for a cut of the tuition, promise to find the students. (It’s remote education, so the students can come from anywhere.) Recently, however, one such company, Academic Partners LLC, has run into some difficulty; the president of the University of Texas, Arlington, was forced to resign because of his allegedly shady dealings with the company. But I fear this is just a speed bump on a rush to change the nature and mission of higher education.

Offended 9 year old girl objects to math question about weight

October 17, 2019 • 11:45 am

This is one of those issues where I can sort of see a point, but in general think it’s also overblown. In fact, it was the subject of an NBC Today show post and tv segment. It turns out that a nine year old Utah girl named Rhythm Pacheco was asked to answer a math question in which the weights of various students (females) were compared. In particular, as you see below, it was a simple subtraction question, one that Rhythm answered but then expressed anger, saying she “wont right this its rood” (committing four errors in five words). Here’s her answer.

In the NBC video on the site, the hosts get all upset and see the question as sexist (or otherwise offensive).

Now Rhythm wrote a nice note to her teacher, and the teacher responded nicely (and corrected Rhythm’s writing in brown ink!:

Here’s a television report from a local station, featuring Rhythm’s mother Naomi. You can see where Rhythm gets her ideology:

This is one of the issues where I’m torn. I do see that the comparison of bodies among women has been harmful, leading to things like anorexia and making a lot of women feel bad about themselves because they don’t or can’t look like skinny runway models. I also understand that a lot of this attitude comes from men’s ranking of women that includes weight. But would the question have been okay if they compared boys’ weights?

Nevertheless, this looks like overkill to me, with the mom being overly sensitive and inculcating her daughter with that attitude. Yet at the same time I’m proud of the girl for standing up for herself and having the moxie to write the teacher.

What do you think? Women’s voices would be especially appreciated in the comments.

Today in collegiate dystopia: “It’s an endless process of dealing with students who haven’t been able to buy the grade they wanted.”

September 5, 2019 • 8:45 am

by Greg Mayer

Harry Lambert has a very interesting article at New Statesman America on “The great university con: how the British degree lost its value.”  I’m saddened but not surprised to find that the rot in American higher education extends across the Atlantic. The causes and manifestations, show much in common on both sides of the Pond. At its heart is the reconceptualization of higher education not as an institution for the increase and diffusion of knowledge, but as an industry that provides services to private individuals and corporations. This is the essence of the neoliberal consensus on higher education.

Some excerpts from Lambert’s piece:

Over the past 30 years, successive governments, from Thatcher to Blair, to Cameron and May, have imposed a set of perverse incentives on universities. Their effect has been to degrade and devalue the quality of British degrees. Academic standards have collapsed. In many institutions, it is the students who now educate the universities, in what grades they will tolerate and how much work they are willing to do. “We have got to protect ourselves from complaints,” says Natalie Fenton, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. “It’s an endless process of dealing with students who haven’t been able to buy the grade they wanted.”

In 1985, the Thatcher government published the Jarratt Report, which stressed that “universities are first and foremost corporate enterprises”. The problem, the report argued, was “the tradition of vice-chancellors being scholars first and acting as a chairman of [an academic] senate carrying out its will”, rather than “leading it strongly”. Scholars should not run universities – business leaders must.

Note that, though begun under Tory Thatcher, Labor’s Blair continued the trend—that is why I refer to the current socially dominant view of higher education as a “consensus”—it is adopted by both left and right. We also see Campbell’s Law rearing its ugly head– the “perverse incentives” that distort the function of the universities. In response to those incentives, universities have been pumping out ever increasing numbers of apparently highly qualified graduates. But how did this “miracle” occur:

This supposed university miracle can only have happened in one of three ways. The first is that schools [in the US, high schools] have, over the past 30 years, supplied universities with students of a far higher calibre than in the recent past. This would be a notable achievement, as the university students of the past were the select few – in the 1970s and 1980s between 8 and 19 per cent of young British adults went on to higher education, whereas 50 per cent now do. The second is that universities have taken historically indifferent students and turned them into unusually capable graduates. And the third is the reality: the university miracle is a mirage.

The chief theoretical debate within the neoliberal consensus is whether higher education is best seen as a provider of credentials to individuals, or as providing a workforce to corporations. Under the first view, students are customers; under the second, students are the product. Both can be seen in what Lambert reports. For student customers, they are paying for credentials, and academic considerations are a barrier to obtaining what they have paid for: grades that insure the granting of credentials.

Grade inflation is the inevitable outcome of the system universities operate under. There is little reason to suspect that the system is about to change, or is even understood. “The logical conclusion of the current drift is that by 2061, 100 per cent of people [will] get Firsts,” says Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. In fact, if the next 20 years are like the past 20, it won’t take half that time.

The whole is well worth a read; here’s Lambert’s parting excerpt:

Universities are governed by a set of incentives, laid down by successive governments. What they are neither incentivised nor mandated to provide is a baseline of quality education. While a handful of universities demand quality, and some students choose to work hard, the system is not designed to ensure either. As many academics report, statistics suggest and students widely know, it is possible to sail through university with a 2:1 or First without working or learning very much at all.

This is precisely what the government implicitly encourages. It is the rational outcome of the system under which universities operate. Call it the self-perpetuating spiral of shattering standards. It starts with the academic. They are faced with an inadequate student: why do they give them a 2:1? Because they are being pressured to by university management. That pressure is typically implicit; occasionally it is explicit.

h/t Brian Leiter

Today in collegiate dystopia: “Has College Gotten Too Easy?”

July 25, 2019 • 9:00 am

by Greg Mayer

The title of this second post in what I hope will be a continuing series comes from the title of a new article in The Atlantic by Joe Pinsker. In the article he discusses an unpublished paper by Jeffrey Denning and colleagues at Brigham Young University. It highlights one of the chief ills of American higher education: that the goal of the system is not education. As noted in my first post in this series, the neoliberal consensus in higher education holds that the goal of higher education is maximization of monetary value. For businesses and legislators, this means colleges should train workers that industry needs in order to maximize profits; for labor advocates, it means training workers for jobs that pay well.

Though it might seem that achievement of this goal can be measured in dollars earned (by businesses or workers), such economic data can be difficult to gather, and suffer from the fact that it can take many years for the payoff of an investment to be evident. In lieu of this, some measure of success in reaching this goal must be agreed upon, and businessmen, legislators, bureaucrats, and educational think tanks, with the ready assent of college administrators, have settled upon graduation rate as the metric by which to measure the results of higher education.

It is to these rates, and how and why they are changing, that Denning et al. address themselves. Noting that graduation rates have gone up recently, but that there are no demographic or academic reasons to readily explain this, they consider that maybe it’s just easier to graduate. Money quote from Pinsker:

If grades are improving but there’s no reason to think that students have become better students, an interesting possibility is raised: The unassuming, academic way Denning puts it in a recent paper (co-authored with his BYU colleague Eric Eide and Merrill Warnick, an incoming Stanford doctoral student) is that “standards for degree receipt” may have changed. A less measured way of saying what that implies: College may have gotten easier… altering what’s necessary to get a degree is “the lowest cost way to increase graduation rates.”

Now, on the face of it, a high graduation rate would seem to be a good thing, and it is; but when you make a metric the goal, then the metric can be gamed, which is what Denning et al. suggest is being done by colleges. This is a well known phenomenon, nicely summarized by Abhishek Chakraborty:

It has been established that when you measure effectiveness solely based on quantitative indicators, people involved have a high incentive to demonstrate less ethical behaviour, and most likely less effective results as well. This is called Campbell’s Law. [emphasis added]

Donald Campbell was an academic psychologist, who expressed his law this way:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. [paywalled]

Frederick Hess gives a nice example:

The first time I heard of Campbell’s Law was in a college class in public policy. The professor asked, “Can data ever cause problems? Can it ever hurt?” It seemed like a trick question. Pretty much in unison, the class uncertainly mumbled a version of, “I don’t think so.”

The professor then asked, “What if a police department decides to evaluate officers based on the number of traffic tickets they write? Could anything go wrong?” Someone observed that cops would try to write lots of tickets—including for people who might not deserve them.

The professor asked, “Okay, so what if they flip it? What if they reward cops who issue fewer tickets?” Well, duh. Police might turn a blind eye to real problems.

The instructor smiled and said, “See, you can think of lots of ways where data might hurt.”

Another term for essentially the same phenomenon is Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

It seems to me that much of what passes for “reform” in higher education is an instantiation of Campbell’s and Goodhart’s Laws. Under pressure to show results responsive to the neoliberal consensus, measures, which might even have merit, are turned into the purpose of the system, and almost any method may be resorted to to achieve it. It is ironic that use of this measure may pervert even the neoliberal goal: if graduates are required to learn less and have fewer skills, will they really be able to maximize business’s profits, or their own salaries?

Today in collegiate dystopia: “workforce needs”

May 31, 2019 • 2:30 pm

by Greg Mayer

There’s a lot wrong with higher education in the United States (and perhaps the world), but I know of few, if any, public figures who are pointing out the problems and discussing potential solutions. The problem is that all “sides” to the “debate”, whether right or left, agree on the central premises: they all embrace the neoliberal consensus that the goal of the educational system is maximization of lifetime earnings, and that educational attainment and quality can be measured most simply and clearly by dollars earned. The “debate”, such as it is, is about the split of those earnings between workers and business owners– some want more for the workers (the “left”), some want more for the owners (“the right”). (Even casting the debate in terms of class, as I have done here would be anathema to both sides.)

I was moved to begin what I hope to make an occasional series on this subject by yesterday’s front page in the local paper, the Kenosha News.

In the article, the leaders of all three local colleges– a technical college, a 4-year public, and a 4-year private– announce their fealty to the neoliberal dream: efficient production of workers for industry. Among the strategies that they believe will lead to “educational value” are “reducing credits” and “compressing classes”– I don’t even know what they intend these to mean.

My view of education is quite different. I accept the contention of Robert Hutchins in The University of Utopia that

The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens.

And, institutions of higher education must be institutions, as James Smithson put it, “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge“. I would regard these principles as axiomatic, but it is all too clear that many, especially in educational leadership, do not.

Lord knows we need responsible citizenship, both among the general populace, and as much, if not more so, among our leaders. A cowering obeisance to mammon is not what we need.