Higher Education – Page 10 – College Ready Writing 1.0

The Failure of American Higher Education

Really? More standardized tests? Because those have made students entering college that much more college ready. I’m being sarcastic. Students are taught to the test at the expense of content. Do we really want higher ed to be that way? The basic skills that you talk about SHOULD have been learned in high school (summarizing? grammar? averages? Really? That’s what higher ed’s job has become?). And, these are students who are the result of the testing bonanza that is No Child Left Behind.

I just wrote collegereadywriting.blogspot.comm) about the difference between college professors and high school teachers. If anything, teachers need more content training in order to make the skills they are trying to teach more relevant to the students. But you seem to imply that content is irrelevant (A history major? Don’t need history to do the job. I want SKILLS!). Then lets just get rid of all liberal arts programs, keep the skilled degrees (medicine, engineering, etc), and we’ll all get degrees in tech and “critical thinking.” Never mind that we’ll have no idea how to apply them.

University is fundamentally about creating knowledge, not skill transfer. The skills you need to create knowledge used to come before higher ed, not during. And more testing is not the right solution.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Teachers vs Professors

Dear #edchat participants:

Yesterday we chatted about “How can K-12 and higher ed work together to promote positive change in education?” Well, you chatted, I listened while trying to do four other things. I’m sorry that I missed it, because I’m pretty sure the K-12 teachers involved in the chat outnumbered their higher ed counterparts by a large margin.

There were a lot of criticisms leveled at higher ed professors, that we are poor teachers and are stuck in a stone ages when it comes to ed tech. But, while most universities (as it was pointed out) claim evaluate their professors on teaching, research and community service, they actually spend a serious amount of time judging a professor’s research output while just making sure they have taught and done something that remotely resembles community service. Research in your field is king. You get a PhD in your subject area, be it biology, literature, nursing or music.

Because we are not rewarded for improving our teaching, we don’t do it. Our time is spent on administrative duties, our research and, yes, teaching. But we have been told, you need to do research to get tenure. So we make research our priority. Our PD? Going to conferences in our field, to learn about the latest research and findings. We are expected to stay on top of what’s going on in the field we teach. Ed tech? What’s that? Will it help me get tenure? No? No, thanks!

So I admit and agree that most university professors could learn a thing or two from the K-12 teachers who participate in #edchat on twitter. But, please give us credit for being experts in our fields. When professors complain about unprepared students coming into their classes, they are usually talking about two areas: not having what we would consider the basic knowledge/skills in that area and not knowing how to be independent learners (“good students”). Facing a room full of disinterested and unprepared students just makes us mad. We think we spend too much time teaching the students what they should have learned in high school and not enough time teaching what we are passionate about. That passion? It shines through, tech or no tech.

Professors are all good students: independent learners, highly motivated self-starters and passionate. If we weren’t, then that dissertation would never have been written. Trust me. You choose grad school in part because of a passion you have for a subject and the right skill set (enjoy reading/writing/doing experiments). We know our area, we love our area, and we want to share that knowledge. When we think of ed reform, we don’t think about HOW you teach, we think about WHAT you teach. Because we love WHAT we teach. How we teach it is really a secondary concern.

I ask you, K-12 teachers, do you consider yourself experts in pedagogy or experts in your field ? Which do you think is more important? Is your PD exclusively in the latest ped or ed tech? Or do you brush up on deepening your knowledge and understanding of a subject area? If you teach English, have you ever done a grad class, not in ed, not in teaching English, but English literature or writing?

There is a division of labor that needs to be overcome. Yes, university professors need to work to be better teachers. But can K-12 become better at the subjects they are teaching? You can ace all of your education classes, but if you don’t do well in the subject area classes, should you be allowed to teach that subject? I agree with all of the suggestions about exposing K-12 students to the wonderful work and research professors are doing, to inspire them. But that should also extend to the teachers, so that they can remain current in not only how they teach, but what they teach.

The Difference Between Traditional and For-Profit Higher Ed?

Basically, nothing.

I was following the recent Senate hearing on for-profit institutions (#4profit) and joined in with my own Twitter rant, to go along with the Twitter rants of many supporters of for-profit education. Notice I say supporters and not apologists. I am not so naive as to think that for-profits are all rosy and above-board, but what really makes me mad is that some of the same accusations that are laid at the feet of for-profits can and should be laid that the feet of traditional institutions of higher ed. Let’s go through the list, shall we?

CEO Pay:

The Chronicle of Higher Education provides wonderful information about BOTH traditional (both private and public) and for-profit earnings of their CEOs and Presidents. Notice anything? OK, there are some SERIOUS earners in for-profit education. But what the information provided by the Chronicle fails to really calculate is the external benefits that presidents often earn, even after they retire. Presidents often get homes, cars, trips, domestics, etc, all paid for by the university, and all “external” to their reported earnings for much of it.

It makes me sick that a CEO in education get paid about a thousand times more than I do, but is this all about the greater-good? Or is it jealousy? And, I ask those Senators who it is they made their fortune in order to be able to afford to run for Senate. I bet most of them would have earned it in the for-profit world.

Bad Management/Accreditation

While I am sure that there are poorly managed and dishonest for-profit schools, if traditional schools were so above-the-board, then we wouldn’t need the regional accreditation boards that we have. I invite you to read Kevin Carey’s excellent analysis of a traditional college gone bad. Students left with debt and a worthless degree. Accreditation boards taking a laissez-faire approach because of the non-traditional students the school served. Sound familiar?

As for the accusation that for-profit accreditation is meaningless because it is done by peers, who do you think does the accreditation for traditional schools? Peers. Peers who pay money. Discuss. Or, does one bad apple spoil the whole bunch in for-profit, but not traditional higher ed?

Credit Transfer

It’s unclear, the claim goes, what your credits from a for-profit really represents. I point you to another essay by Mr. Carey describing his undergraduate experience at SUNY Binghampton: after receiving 24 credits for his high school AP courses (six courses, four credits per course), he also discovered that unlike other SUNY campuses, “awards four credits for classes that require only three faculty-contact hours per week.” He continues:

I also talked to the provost, who insisted that Binghamton’s four credits are more substantive than, say, the State University of New York at Stony Brook’s three. But there are no external studies or standards to verify that. Speaking as someone whose housemate once entered slacker Valhalla by skipping the entire months of October and November while still earning 16 credits for a full four-course semester, I am, to say the least, unconvinced.

This is just one example, but if credit transfer were so simple for traditional higher ed, then why are many calling for an American version of the Bologna Process, Europe’s plan to effectively standardize higher ed? (I’m not saying we should, just raising the question)

Job Placement

Ah, can we repay our loans. The Senate hearings brought out a student who got a degree from a program that wasn’t accredited and now has obscene loans that she can’t pay. Her advice, don’t go to for-profit.

I’d like to point you to a piece in the New York Times, profiling an NYU grad who is effectively unemployed and unable to repay her loans. Her advice? Actually, the advice is to think long and hard about going to NYU.

I have a lot of sympathy for both these women, as someone who has an obscene amount of debt, lots of degrees and no job (if they really want to investigate, try grad school for selling us a false bill of goods with no idea how to market ourselves and get another job). What is interesting to me is the idea that somehow the for-profit school is more guilty for claiming high job placements while schools like NYU just strongly imply it. Read the mother’s comments about sending her daughter to NYU: “All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part.”

Recruitment

This rankles me a lot. For-profits get dragged in front of Senate hearings for recruiting at McDonalds, while traditional schools get Federal grants for their efforts to diversify/attract non-traditional students. For-profit schools are overwhelming non-traditional students in every sense: they are older (Stop calling them kids, Senator! was a tweet I read frequently), usually minority and usually first-generation college students. If traditional higher ed was doing such a great job diversifying and educating all, then there would no market for the for-profits, would there?

No, wait, higher learning loves their rankings and rankings do not reward things like admitting underprepared students (Must. Be. Highly. Selective!)

For-Profit

This is, for me, the ultimate hypocrisy of this whole dog-and-pony show. We don’t like it/trust it because it is for-profit, with shareholders and CEO’s, etc…And we love traditional universities because it’s not about the money, it’s about education. Except when it isn’t (cough, Harvard, cough). Because using (cheap) adjuncts to teach up to 70% of courses on campus while building new million-dollar football stadiums and basketball training facilities isn’t about the money. It might not be “profit,” but it’s greed.

Perhaps I am defensive as well because I am now, technically, in the for-profit education business. I care deeply about education. The system, at large, that we have now is broken, on all sides. The for-profits are exposing many of the cracks and chasms that exist. We can attack or we could take the time to look at why so many students are spending their (and the government’s) money at these institutions. We also need to look at all the ways all of higher ed can improve. I want to be part of that change. And get paid doing it.

Dr. Jane Can’t Network, Either

Johnny Can’t (Net)Work, but neither can Dr. Jane.

As academics (especially in the humanities), we are trained to network as academics, in order to be academics. Conferences are spent meeting other academics, creating valuable links that will either lead to jobs or academic collaborations (which lead to jobs). We shouldn’t waste or time meeting people outside of academia, heck, outside of our field, because what good would that serve?

We work (as pointed out by a recent article http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/05/24/krebs) as teachers or researchers inside our discipline and sometimes even more narrowly in our specialty. Why work outside of what we are training to do?

But most importantly, we use social networking as an extension of the first two “networking” opportunities: to promote and connect our narrow research (and thus career) interests. How many articles about looking for academic work remind newly-minted PhDs that talking about kids or hobbies on facebook is a no-no, lest a hiring committee think you aren’t dedicated to your research 100% or, once you are hired, wasting your time on frivolous activities like family or your health? Facebook and Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Linkedin and Adademia.edu) have become another non-networking opportunity, another chance for graduate students and PhDs to show how narrowly focused and single-mindedly dedicated they are to their research.

So how is Dr. Jane supposed to advise Johnny how to network to his benefit? Johnny needs flexible skills, adaptable to a variety of different jobs and demands, and the ability to connect and communicate with a variety of people. Dr. Jane knows how to narrowly present herself to a unique audience of like-minded individuals. Is it any surprise that students aren’t well-equipped for our present economy?

(Cross-posted at UVenus)

Non-Academic Mentors

This post first appeared on the UVenus blog at http://uvenus.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/non-academic-mentors/.

There are three women, all with PhDs, who are probably the most important to my development as an academic and now as a mother and entrepreneur. The first is my dissertation supervisor. She was the first (and only) person to get excited about my dissertation research topic and guided me through my research, without dictating how the work should look (unlike others who tried to steer me in a direction I wasn’t interested in going). She had an unconventional path to her job as a professor; after getting her PhD in French, she followed her (now ex) husband, did a law degree and a masters in law, then became a French professor. She has held just about every administrative role that doesn’t require a special hiring committee (assistant dean, associate provost, special assistant to the president, senator, etc). When I announced I was going to run (uncontested) for Graduate Students’ Association President, she laughed and wished me luck. For that year I was GSA President, during our meetings about my dissertation (I defended my dissertation proposal while President), we would trade war stories about university politics and meetings from hell. She supported me in all of my work, and continues to do so.

In hindsight, I should have gone with someone who would have pushed me towards an approach that was more “marketable” rather than just simply what I wanted to do. I should have had a supervisor who would have discouraged me from getting involved with university politics. Instead, I went with the person who allowed me to explore all of my strengths as an academic, learning valuable skills along the way; skills that I never expected would help me in my new life, my new role.

The two other women aren’t professors. One of the women, I met while I was GSA President and selected to sit on our university’s hiring committee for a new president. We hired a search firm, founded by a PhD in history who 15 years earlier couldn’t find a job in academia. She now is CEO of the largest and most successful higher ed search firms in Canada. I didn’t know it at the time, but her example, her success outside of academia provided part of the inspiration I needed to be able to break out on my own.

The other woman is also not a professor. She is a mother, translator, writing, teacher, editor, publisher, award-winner, change agent and all-around inspiring woman. She got her PhD from the same school when I did my undergraduate and masters degree. When we first met, she was the first person I had ever met who had a PhD and wasn’t a professor. She had carved a life for herself doing what she loved, and it didn’t involve full-time employment with tenure. I looked at her life, on the brink of starting my own PhD and was at once inspired and terrified. I was about to embark on the path to being a professor, and here was someone who had done something different. A reminder that life could be different. I wasn’t, at that point, interested in being different.

It’s hard when you’re a PhD; you only meet other PhDs who (mostly) want to do the same things you want (your fellow students) or PhDs who have achieved the dream (your professors). We never meet PhDs who have done something else with their degree. We have been taught that these people are failures. As a woman, at least for me, there seemed to be an added pressure of becoming a professor, in the name of women and equality.

But the three women with PhDs I mention here represent something else, and allowed me to become who I am today, just by being who they are. Wonderful, smart, caring, respected and successful women in whatever they chose to do. Now, I aspire to be the same, in my own way.

Who will be our future teachers?

There has been (quite rightfully) a lot of discussion about how the new Reach for the Top competition has placed too much emphasis on test scores and thus limits a student’s creative potential, not to mention undermines possibility of success in vocational fields. Many of the critiques have come from teachers themselves (in fact, all of the articles I have linked to are from educators). But one question that remains (at least, in what I have come across) unasked is, what does this mean for the teaching profession? And I’m not talking about those who are currently teaching (they have made their position perfectly clear). More specifically, who are going to the teachers of the future?

As a college English instructor “specializing” in Freshman/Intro gen. ed. courses, I have taught students from all majors, including education. And, unfortunately, education students have tended to be the weakest. They were always very conscientious, very nice, came to my office hours, and seemed to try hard. They usually did very well on tests. But when it came to essays…Perhaps they stood out in my mind because it scared me so much that these were the people who were going to be (possibly) educating my children.

It’s a question we’ve all asked, who becomes a teacher, and why? We have all heard the cynical/derogatory theories (couldn’t cut it anywhere else, wanted a job for life, no ambition, etc). But upon reflection, I’ve come up with a theory that those who tend towards education are those who did well in school and for the most part, enjoyed it. Those who did well on tests. Those who were able to sit still and listen. And this might represent the largest obstacle to true school reform: many teachers chose teaching in order to recreate the system that was successful for them.

Because, let’s face it, if traditional schooling doesn’t reward creative and innovative students, it certainly doesn’t reward overly creative and innovative teachers either. How do you “get ahead”? Get a higher degree. Taught by professors who are rewarded (granted tenure) for not being particularly innovative, either (publish articles, present papers at conferences).

This observation struck me as I sat at a conference, listening to a professor read a paper while I prepared to do the same, except I glanced at my twitter feed to read about web 2.0 teaching tools. The person presenting was talking about a long-lost memoir dealing with the Haitian rebellion; he has one of two copies of the original French text. I saw parallels between the text and a book I am currently reading. He was very proprietary about the manuscript. Why? This was his golden ticket. He could find a way to put it online in order for scholars to access an important historical and literary text. But, because of the requirements of tenure and promotion, he is saving it for an academic press. And I don’t blame him.

This is how higher ed (for the most part) rewards professors: be innovative (long-lost text!) in your research but completely archaic (academic press, scholarly article, conference presentation) in terms of delivery methods. Rewards professors in any discipline, including education. So, we have professors (locked in their own system) teaching teachers, locked in another. But this is how we have decided to reward teachers. Not for improving or innovating, but by getting a masters.

As many articles have pointed out, smart students don’t actually like school all that much because they’re bored. I was really good at school, but I didn’t particularly like it. I could sit still well enough, but I never really paid too much attention in class. I suspect many of my teachers hated me because I so clearly did little to no work, didn’t take notes, etc, and yet still did very well. But I loved university. The freedom. The challenge. The professors. My classmates. So, I stayed with what I loved. The university.

And while the university has not proven to fulfill its promise, I can’t imagine going back to a) do another degree in education and b) teach in high school. After spending all this time trying to undo the “teaching for the test” learning that students have been fed throughout high school, how could I willingly go forward to teach just that?

Do I want to work in an area where teachers are unable to do the obvious? Do I want to go into a profession where leaders and innovators have to basically opt out of the system and start charter or private schools? Where if I have a poor coworker, it is practically impossible to do anything about it (yeah, I know, the university is no better)? Where I am scapegoated by politicians?

The LAUSD recently opened up bidding for new schools to anyone who was interested. The result? Groups of teachers put together bids that beat out more established charter schools. As put by A.J. Duffy, it represents “put up or shut up” time for the teachers: “it gives us what we’ve been asking for: control over the schools, along with other stakeholders. Let us create the curriculum; let us create the professional development and decide how to use the money. We get blamed for everything, but we’ve never been in control.”

I am a good teacher – I have the student and peer evaluations to back me up. But none of that matters. I know I am supposed to be a teacher. But how much am I willing to give up in order to be a teacher? How much is anyone willing to give up?

Remediation and College Success

There has been a lot of buzz online about college completion. This is a shift away from college accessibility; as put in a recent editorial, “Access Without Success Is An Empty Promise,” with less than 50% of students who start higher ed ever get their four-year degree. While far from the only issue, the need for remediation plays a significant role in predicting college success. According to a 2006 study (pdf), a student who requires a remedial reading course is 41% more likely to drop out.

This has not escaped the notice of some powerful (and rich) organizations: both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation are funding a Developmental Education Initiative which focuses primarily on community colleges. Those of us who have taught/are teaching at the university level know that community colleges aren’t alone in dealing with underprepared students. Both Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle featured articles today that look at the issue of remediation and college completion.

Some of their conclusions? Personalized and targeted services. Small, short (and cheaper) remediation courses that focus on specific weaknesses. This is not new; an (expensive) online seminar on serving underprepared students talks about evaluating students early to assess their level of readiness, getting to know their unique situation and intervening as quickly as possible.

Who is supposed to be doing this intervention? Overworked adjuncts? A whole new class of university administrators? How much intervention are we supposed to provide? And, finally, where in this do we get the students to actually care?

The most interesting information and provocative questions most often come from the comments. One instructor commenting on Inside Higher Ed asks how she is supposed to get her students to understand that they need to be able to read and summarize, write and organize, etc. Another asks why higher ed keeps having to make up for the shortcomings of the K-12 system.

But the comment that is near and dear to my heart is from Martha J.: “If colleges would stand firm on entrance standards, private preparatory systems would quickly emerge to provide remediation – and the very existence of such systems would help put pressure back on the high schools, where it belongs.” Hi, Martha, I’d like to introduce you to collegereadywriting.com. I think it useless to wait for the colleges to lead the way at this point. The private preparatory systems are coming for you! Putting pressure on all forms of education since, well, right this second.

Edupunk vs. Edupreneur

I’ve been inspired in my new business venture by the writings of Anya Kamenetz whose book, DIY U, analyses the new movements in liberating higher education. A recent article focuses on Edupunks, those who are seeking to overthrow tradition higher education, mainly through providing free (or nearly free) content and classes. The article is well worth the read as a resource for free (or nearly free) courses, content and degrees available online. I’m a big fan of free content on the Internet; many of my lectures have been informed by free videos of lectures, podcasts, online discussion boards and course notes.

The part of this particular aspect of the movement is, much like online newspaper content, is still relying on the old institutions (the university) in order to provide content. The professors who are providing this content are paid by the university. Why not allows students to access their lectures? They are still pulling in their salary, there are still students paying tuition and putting their butts in the seats, and chances are, they have tenure and thus almost absolute job security. How many adjuncts have the time, resources or academic freedom to be able to do the same things?

How many of them want to?

At the end of the day, my small project needs to make money or else it will cease to be. I am providing a service that I would love to give away to non-traditional and minority students in order to help them succeed, however they want to. But I also have a family to help support, student loans and other debt to pay off, rent to pay, food to buy, etc… In discussions I have been having on Twitter with others who are passionate about education reform, some have said that real change will come from below. DIY U seems to imply that the changes are coming from the top. I can assure you that change will not come from the middle.

At the bottom, there is nothing left, really, to lose. There is nowhere to go but up. At the top, there is the security, the connections, the money to be able to take a chance. In the middle, there is nothing but fear and necessity. Fear of falling farther behind and the necessity of taking care of your family above all else.

Perhaps there are those in the middle who are braver than I. But for the moment, I have to settle for scrapping something together for myself and for others with the hope that I can make at least a small change, nurture it until it grows into something larger.

What can we do outside of higher ed – That’s still ed?

President Obama’s plan for schools includes “college and career readiness.” But as I have written elsewhere in the blog, anyone on the front lines of freshman education knows that many, many of the students coming into college are not ready for college-level work, let along career-level work. There is also a over-abundance of underemployed PhD’s who have extensive experience with what students are lacking in terms of college readiness. The solution? A PhD (or more!) for every school, whose sole purpose is to ensure college readiness in the students, to assist teachers in teaching the skills that will be needed in college, and to equip as many students as possible to be successful in college.

But, if I wanted to be a high school teacher, I wouldn’t have done a PhD! Fine, but what did you do your PhD for? A tenure-track job. In which you would teach. Yes, and do research. But, really, how much research are you doing running from one school to another, preparing courses, correcting a mountain of papers, worrying about how you are going to pay your bills? Teach grad classes? How many of those have your taught lately? What would you really be giving up if you were to get a job like this?

You could live where you wanted to, have a regular-paying job, and still have the opportunity to shape and change lives.

Ed degree? Well, it hasn’t guaranteed the ability to teach college readiness. Why not try something different? This could – no, would!- change lives, students’ lives who may not have even considered college when they are taught or exposed to a “real” college-level teacher. Students benefit, underemployed PhDs would benefit, schools would benefit, and higher ed would ultimately benefit.

And they would benefit in more ways than one. Suddenly, a whole lot of that cheap, contingent labor they’ve been relying on will be gone. What will they do then? How will they retain their best teachers and researchers when schools are drawing them away? Hey, try offering us tenure-track jobs.

See, everyone wins.

A Woman’s Work in Higher Ed.

A recent blog post on http://educationceo.wordpress.com/ was provocatively titled “Women Have No Place in Education.” The writer is a dedicated and tireless advocate for school choice, and is putting her proverbial money where her mouth is by starting a charter school for underprivileged kids. But what she write, I think, applies to women in higher ed:

“Women really do have a place in education, but I can’t help but wonder if working as a classroom teacher in some ways limits our opportunities to assume leadership roles, e.g., administration, superintendency, charter school developer, etc. Now I know there are some very dedicated, qualified, and damned good classroom teachers who have absolutely no desire to transition into a leadership role. I can and do respect that. But what about those who do? At what cost? What must she/they exchange in order to exercise their dynamic and visionary leadership skills and leading their staff in transforming a school that ensures the success of every child.”

Now, this isn’t exactly the same as the situation in higher ed, but the majority of adjunct teachers (contingent, underpaid, responsible for the majority of the foundational courses in the humanities) are women. We are essentially hitting a “glass ceiling” in higher ed. It is impossible to transition to leadership roles without that ever-elusive tenure-track job. So women are limited in their career development, deprived of their chance to choose to shape the direction of higher education.

But what other options are there? This is the way we have allowed ourselves to be limited, the way higher ed has convinced us to limit ourselves: We believe that if we have a PhD, we are a failure unless we get that tenure-track position. So we scratch and claw and keep coming back, keep putting off having families, paying off debt, buying a house, getting married, etc. And we keep complaining (quietly, as rocking the boat too much is career suicide) but we can’t see our way out of it.

So what do we have to sacrifice in order to take matters into our own hands and take charge of our careers but also to work to improve conditions for students and other teachers? How can we change the university when we aren’t allowed in?

From without.

We need to start using the skills we have acquired over the years, not in unrelated areas, but in the name of education. Use our research skills to grow our knowledge and power in the name of ourselves and our careers as we chose to define them. Use our teaching skills to teach other in new ways. What are we sacrificing? The dream of the tenure-track job and all that that includes. What might we gain? Independence, power and a voice to change higher ed for the better. And to change lives.

My next blog, someplace to start.