Sunday Radical Roundup: Back to Skool Edition

Is Michelle Rhee Going Down? Kendra Marr at Politico.com reviews what everyone in education reform, that eclectic field that contains many political positions (most of which revolve around high-stakes testing rather than education or reform) was talking about last week: Washington D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty's primary loss may mean that Michelle Rhee is out of a job. Fenty, courageously in the minds of many, tied his career to the fate of the District's schools -- and lost, in a resounding smack down for Rhee's take-no-prisoners approach. "Fenty’s defeat this week — due in no small part to community and teachers union resistance to his education push," Marr writes, "is emerging as a cautionary tale for education reformers, who fear that it could cause others to back away from aggressive reform programs swept into the mainstream by President Barack Obama’s `Race to the Top.'” Teachers unions in Georgia and New York also played an important role in defeating primary candidates whose position on education reform relies primarily on "teacher accountability and tough standards."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: while there is no industry, particularly a struggling one, where firing people is not critical to renewal, if keeping your job is the only incentive for good teaching your "reform" has nothing to do with re-thinking education. Threatening teachers with being replaced by as-yet unskilled B.A.'s from top colleges has nothing to do with how students learn, and neither does the mind-numbing testing agenda. Asking students to memorize reams of facts, not to mention "firing" them from school when they can't recite on command like little robots, has nothing to do with education. Rhee and Fenty needed buy-in from the teachers union, and their inability to achieve that should have caused them to create grounds for cooperation, not to dig trenches around the notion that "high standards" is the only thing a school needs to succeed.

And by the way? Voting black parents in D.C., the vast majority of whom are not teachers, also don't seem so happy with free market education models that close schools, many of which have anchored communities for decades as white folks floated off to the 'burbs. Funny how busing white kids into the city is a reprehensible idea, but busing black kids around the city for hours is school reform.

Please take note: on principle, I hate to see Obama go down on any policy matter. But Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is uncreative and has done absolutely nothing, except to find a way to selectively restore some of the cuts in public education in language that conservatives adore, and repeatedly refusing federal dollars to places like Connecticut where racial segregation and economic inequality between districts has produced a crisis in public education. Obama administration policies do nothing for children in the neediest school districts, and he should have appointed Linda Darling-Hammond in the first place. Can we say "Bye-bye Arne?"

Or You Could Just Fire The Department of Education: Halimah Abdullah of the Miami Herald has an interesting take on the desire of Rand Paul and other fringey Republican candidates to disband this federal agency established by Jimmy Carter. Among other things, he points to the testing mandate under No Child Left Behind which bloated the department to $150 billion budget. Much of this money is funneled into private testing companies, and for-profit education companies that districts are forced to hire to replace schools where children can't pass the tests. The DOE underwent unprecedented expansion under President George W. Bush, revealing three things: how much small government conservative agendas can conflict with conservative privatization ideology; how much the conservative emphasis on localism conflicts with the nationalizing imperatives of the conservative voices in the culture wars who want state intervention against local progressive reform agendas; and how much the Democratic party has embraced conservative agendas -- like testing and the benefits of privatization.

Defenders of the DOE include the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which consistently supports reforms and policies crafted by Secretary Duncan and faults Congress for not giving him more power to restructure the nation's schools.

The Mad Men Approach to College Admissions: Those of us who work in higher ed have watched the selling of our campuses unfold over the last decade. We all have glossy brochures, catch phrases and themes that gin up ginormous pools of applicants -- who then make us oh-so-much-more "selective" when we send most of them away. We can all talk knowingly about "three in a tree" (the images that would suggest that selective schools are at least half, if not two-thirds students of color); millions sunk into football teams to "masculinize" campuses desperate for male applicants; and the Glee-style video produced by Yale admissions last year that united queer and straight alums in mutual horror. Well, Drake University of Des Moines, IA, seems to have hit the wall with a campaign revolving around a big D+ that is intended as a novel attention grabber. According to Eric Gorski of the Associated Press, it is intended to advertise the "Drake Advantage" (or Drake Plus, I guess), but cleverly doubles as -- well, the grade hardly anyone gives any more.

Applications and campus visits are way up, while alumni/ae, faculty and students are embarrassed, and wondering about why the university has hired a marketing firm at all at a moment of scarce resources. Indeed, has the business of "crafting classes" from ever-larger applicant pools gone too far? It certainly isn't about racial diversity, since I doubt that any majority white private college has seen its percentage of minority students expand since the 1970s -- and when it does, it is usually through recruiting foreign students. Are they trying to recruit smarter students? Why not just try to make the students who apply smarter by -- er, educating them? And what do marketing programs, or "branding," actually have to do with the university that students actually enter?

"Is That A Kennedy Dog?" And Other Portuguese Water Dog Trivia

"Is that a Kennedy dog?" someone shouted across the park the other day.

"Naw," I shouted back, to the delight of a number of neighborhood children circling me and my Portuguese Water Dog Breezy on their bikes. "She's an Obama dog!"

It's spring in Shoreline --very much so, and the park is filled with elderly people sitting and feeling the breeze, children playing, families having a pizza picnic dinner and canoodlers canoodling. Breezy and I were taking a healthful evening stroll over to the liquor store for supplies that might get yours truly through the rest of the school year, and at least one of us was keeping a sharp eye out for abandoned pizza crusts. Since I can barely bring myself to get in my car in the morning, writing about the academy and it's various problems is not in the cards this evening. I can, however, meditate just briefly on my life since Bo came home to the White House, an event memorialized by perhaps the cutest New Yorker cover ever.

Here's the deal: Breezy, whose hair is extremely long right now and who is as a result doubly fetching because of the black and white ringlets that cascade off her body, cannot walk down the street without her public noticing her. People who, last month, would have said, "Do you know what kind of mix that is?" now say hesitatingly -- "Is that a dog like -- Bo?!?"

"Yes," I say graciously. "Would you like to pat her?" And they do. Relentlessly. Walks take twice as long as they used to do. I would have to say, since at least three of Breezy's best friends are Labradoodles, and we recently attended a Labradoodle birthday party with cupcakes and everything where Breezy kind of stole the show from the birthday girl (who didn't care, as she was eating paper cupcake wrappers that had dropped to the ground) that the Labradoodle people are trying to be generous. But they are mildly bent out of shape at this turn of events, since they came within a curl of laying claim to the title of National Dog too.

Fame does have it's price, however: I am beginning to feel like Brangelina.

Breezy has always been popular at Zenith, but now she is an institutional asset, something I mean to inform (Not So) New President of at the earliest opportunity, since there may be some way that Breezy can help us with our diminished endowment. But she is, on her own initiative, already playing a critical role in recruiting new students. Now is the season when those who have been admitted visit, large clumps of them moving about the campus along with tours of so-called college-bound juniors and their parents. Breezy has always seen it as one of her jobs to catapult herself into these groups at every opportunity. When she sees one coming, she looks at me, and I say, "Do you want to go see the TOUR?" and she hurtles off in an uncollected gallop, to thrust herself upon strangers. It used to be they just patted her and laughed. Now I hear parents murmuring to each other approvingly, "You see that Vicki? Zenith's got a water dog?"

If we have a particularly high yield from our admitted students this year, you now know why.

Radical To The University of Connecticut: Cookies, Milk and A Social Worker, Please

This morning's Connecticut section of the New York Times featured this story about Colin Carlson, who has been taking college level courses since he was eight and now, at the ripe old age of 12, is enrolled at the University of Connecticut's main campus at Storrs. You can see a picture of him, talking to one of his profs, at left.

My first response? Oh yuck, not another one.

Apparently Colin applied to a number of liberal arts colleges, among them my beloved Zenith. Our admissions officers, according to the reporter, "suggested a few years at a prep school" rather than admitting Colin as a freshman in the class of 2012 and assigning him to the Naked Dorm. Of course, not everyone is lucky enough to end up in the Naked Dorm. And not everyone can afford to add another six years of what are essentially college tuition fees onto four years of college fees. I know this because every once in a while I scan the private school web pages in the area on behalf of my beloved and brilliant nephews, and realize reluctantly that -- aside from what I think are all the civic reasons why choosing public school is good -- it would take a lot of crazy bookkeeping in a large family to send even one of them to an area prep school. So don't think I am not sympathetic with Mrs. Carlson's frustration about the public schools: all you need to hear from a twelve year-old is that he does his homework in the hall between classes and suddenly you start wondering how you could rearrange your busy professional life around home schooling.

And yet, I would not want Colin in my classroom, no matter how special he is: thank you, Zenith admissions. I want to make this point because the colleges who show ambitious Moms like Mrs. Carlson the gate are always portrayed as the Grinch in this kind of story. It is one thing to have a young person taking a few college classes, but it is another to entirely lift this person out of a setting defined by age peers and put him in an educational setting where he will be socially isolated, except for his math and science professors (right? Because we know Mom doesn't think he's a genius because she caught him too many times reading Lacan or Joan Scott under the covers after lights out.)

Twelve year-old kids no more belong in a college setting (I don't care how smart you say he is) than they belong in the military or working in a factory. I'm not even going to comment on the rest of the piece, in which reporter Lary Bloom seems to have bought the story told by the University of Connecticut's public relations representative, and by Colin's mother, hook, line and sinker. Colin, we learn, is driven to achieve not just by his brilliance but by his social mission, which is to stop global warming.

Well, thank heaven someone is finally paying attention to global warming, that's all I can say.

We also learn that although Colin looks like Woody Allen (terrible thing to say about a kid) he has "better social skills." I would certainly hope so, although comparing this young man's social acumen with that of a guy who, in late middle age, had a love affair with and then married his eighteen year-old adopted daughter, is not much of a compliment.

But let's get back to some objective reasons why kids do not belong in college, shall we?

School is a social experience as well as an educational experience. Perhaps one of the most social aspects of school are the ways in which young people deal with emotional issues -- how to say "I'm sorry," how to cope with jealousy, how to compete and lose -- in an atmosphere in which other people are learning the same things and making the same mistakes. Those lessons usually have to be learned over and over, more or less throughout life. Furthermore, by college, whether a young person lives at home or in a dormitory, students are gradually introduced to aspects of growing up that are not only inappropriate for prepubescent children, but either unsafe or legally and practically inaccessible to them. For example, how to live semi-independently before you have to learn to live independently. How to budget your living expenses and pay bills, how to have a well-organized school life and get your laundry done, how to make a schedule without Mom there to help, how to organize their own transportation -- all without Mommy and Daddy's help. In fact, I would argue that learning these things from age peers is a particularly effective learning experience that cannot be replicated in your parents' house.

College teachers mostly do not know how to teach children, and there is nothing in their training that will ever lead them to learning how. I should think this would be self-evident, but it isn't to those who subscribe to the commodity transfer theory of teaching. It shows the most profound contempt for both college teachers and seventh grade teachers to imagine that they could just do each others' jobs. Is a college teacher going to notice that Colin is down in the dumps and call Mom to find out if he's ok? No. It's illegal, actually, under the Buckley amendment. When little Colin starts mouthing off in class, and the college students around him start acting like he is a freak, is the professor trained to handle a situation in which the object of discomfort and amusement is a young boy? No.

Learning is not a contract in which a set of facts, or critical thinking tools, are simply handed off the the student from the teacher. In the humanities and social sciences, college students bring a life experience to their courses that is expanding, perhaps more rapidly than it ever will. How can you teach Milton's Paradise Lost to someone who has never known or observed the anguish and rage of being cast away from a beloved person or place? How can you teach the history of the domestic Cold War to someone who may or may not actually know what a homosexual really is? How can you convey theories of deviance to someone whose only experience of being in the world is a keen sense of his own uniqueness?

I don't want to romanticize childhood or college by saying that they are incompatible, although what always sticks out about these stories is that the child is inevitably objectified. If you want to see the graphic evidence of this in Colin's case, look at the second to last paragraph of the story, which reveal as something so private that even the Radical's blogger ethic -- that allows for printing things that are already printed elsewhere -- does not permit this page to reprint it, so evocative it is of some uneasy revelation about the nature of Colin's genius. But it is also something that no twelve year-old boy I have known would want their friends to talk about.

Assuming, that is, that such a boy had any awareness of what a twelve year-old social circle was like.

Who's On First? College Ranking Systems

The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities otherwise known as NAICU -- is that pronounced "Nay-koo" or "Nay-soo?" -- has rolled out a sample template that, when filled in with real data from real colleges, will allow potential students and their parents to compare institutions: the curious will be able to click on various parts of the webpages, and go to data bases kept by the colleges themselves that give more detailed information. You can read about this innovation in making the process of choosing a college even more time-consuming and hideous than it already is at the Chronicle of Higher Education: click here. This is part of a growing effort, I think, to topple the supremacy of the U.S. News and World Report rankings, and sell colleges in ways that they wish to be sold rather than forcing them to meet criteria set by (yecch!) journalists.

You know, I think the way to really make the Tenured Radical 2.0 blog fly to a general audience would be to develop the Radical Ranking System for Colleges and Universities. Because I just have to ask -- why do we need to rank colleges and universities in the first place? Who profits from this? And will it be so much better for each college or university to hire more institutional research people to assemble the data for NAICU than it is to have the little research bunnies over at US News and World Report tabulate the questionnaires? And under what circumstances might such a ranking really need to include, as the Chronicle so gracefully put it, "results from specific assessments of student-learning outcomes?" NAICU, by the way, is resisting this, because they claim that you can't put all institutions in the same box, something I think pretty much everyone thinks is one major flaw of the current ranking system. Public universities apparently feel otherwise, since they have been bullied by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings into providing some kind of assessment of learning outcomes, because of ominous news that the Bush Administration was discussing a No Child Left Behind Act for public higher education as well.

Sometimes I almost think we should be grateful the administration is kept so busy screwing up the Middle East for decades to come. Imagine what they might accomplish if they had time on their hands.

I would like to make one point here which should illuminate the philosophical source of my sarcasm on the question of assessment and the question of ranking. It is not so much that it is dumb to put all colleges and universities in the same box: it's dumb to put all students in the same box. What is wrong with "specific assessments of student-learning outcomes" is a) the point of education at all levels is for students to learn to assess themselves and figure out what they need to know; and b) the phrase "student-learning outcomes" is utterly meaningless.

Ranking and assessment assume that a college or a university is good when it can promise, in four years, to turn out a student who is a certain kind of well-functioning product. But students are not products: they are people who are evolving into citizens, workers and neighbors. Thus, students and their parents should not be comparing schools to each other. The correct comparison is to match up what the school offers with what the student herself thinks she wants. In less enlightened families, that will mean matching the school to what the parents want or will pay for. The NAICU plan will probably come closer to meeting this ideal, although personally I think people should just visit and talk to the students that are already on campus. They know, better than anyone, what is or is not happening in the classroom and the dorms.

At Zenith, folks are constantly having fits about some feature of the U.S. News and World Report rankings, and I am sure there will be some movement in the fall to join these other SLACs in NAICU and secede from them. It is said that the Board of Trustees loves them and keeps pushing for a higher ranking, but I have hung out with a lot of trustees, and none of them has ever said such a thing to me, although perhaps this is out of fear that I will detonate myself if they do. I dunno. But I would say the chief detraction of the damn rankings is that every time there is some kind of policy change regarding class size or advising or whatnot, the assumption on the part of many of my colleagues is not that it is intended to help us do our job better, but that it is intended to elevate our rank, which usually hovers between 10 and 12. The good news is that nothing we have done has ever moved us more than a point in either direction, which allows everyone to sit in the faculty meeting where the ranking is announced and smirk happily.

There was, I would like to note, great dismay all around one year when Smith somehow managed to dunk on us. "A GIRLS' SCHOOL!! AAAAAAAAH!!!!!" (Full disclosure: I have one family member who attended Smith and liked it very much, thank you.)

A Zenith student once wrote in a comment to this blog that s/he liked the rankings because, growing up in New Jersey, s/he had never heard of Zenith, and s/he discovered it through the national rankings. This caused me to wonder whether this student had grown up in the Pine Barrens or something, since everywhere you turn at Zenith there is a kid from New Jersey, but it was a good point all the same. The rankings advertise one's presence; they make one known in places like New Jersey and Nebraska. But I also had another response, since it reminded me of that thing some people say when they are explaining why they are against abortion: "If my Mom had had an abortion when she was pregnant with me, I might never have been born!" to which my response is always -- "So?" I mean, if I had never known about you, I wouldn't have known to be sad that you weren't here, right? And if you hadn't known about Zenith, you might be playing tennis at Rollins getting a big tan in February, happy as a clam, and probably not saying all day, "I wish I were at Zenith where it's really cold and icy all winter."

You really would not. So I appreciate the inherent Kismet of this student having discovered Zenith, but that's not why I like the rankings: I like them because I don't have to do anything to make them happen, I am not responsible for them, and nothing that the rankings do or don't do affects me in the least, for good or ill. They are one of the things in my life that I put in the win-win column. And given how hard I work on my teaching, scholarship and institutional labor, that is a fabulous thing indeed.

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Update: regular and sane readers need to know that I am temporarily exercising my God-given right to delete comments, since the trolls (or a single troll under several names) are once more spamming me with pointless ones. Those who wish to trade remarks with others who have contempt for me can exercise their freedom of speech here. If my blogger ethic is not clear enough, let me remind everyone that I take down comments that are unrelated to the blog post and/or have no purpose other than to insult me or someone else. As an example, I just took down a comment that insulted Pat Robertson by asserting that he was a friend of the Radical's. I don't know why someone would want to hurt Pat Robertson this way, but I'm not going to stand here and do nothing while they do.

College in Credit Card Nation

Having just made it through one college admission season in Credit Card Nation, I am bracing for the next. One of the down sides of being involved in the Higher Ed Biz is that people with college-age children believe or hope that we who are on The Job can give some kind of useful advice about how to get into a great school. This often leaves the Radical in a tough spot. For example, I honestly don't know why people do or do not get into Zenith, since I imagine, like everything else, it changes from year to year and I haven't seen a first-year file for four years. And even if I had, I still couldn't tell you. Different applicants fill different instutional desires, and those desires are not always predictable. My students exhibit a range of talents and abilities about which I cannot generalize in any useful way, or translate into a "good" application. Some write well; others write poorly. Some are good at managing school; others might be better off renting a loft and creating art full-time. Some seem like unusually original thinkers, others are as conventional, and as successful, as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But I have no idea *why* any of them got in. Or why other talented students whose heart's desire was to climb Zenith's heights did not.

And of course there is that nice lady at MIT who could get other people into college, but didn't go herself. Maybe that's the ticket: work your way to the top instead of going to college, like Horatio Alger.

But I digress. This summer, the aspirants will begin to descend again: the children of friends; or the children of friends of friends; or the children of colleagues at Big Research Institutions, people who would never want to work at anything but an R-I school but who are clear that their children will get a better shot at a good education at a small school. And at least half of those who actually come to Zenith will be paying the bill with borrowed money, something they will try not to think about now.

I will admit that I do know some things about the choices available in higher education: for example, why you would choose a place *like* Zenith rather than an equally selective big university. I can also offer my view on, specifically, what the specific strengths and weaknesses of Zenith are at this moment in time. But honestly, much as I do think we offer an excellent education, I don't know why anyone would choose a private school over a public school nowadays, when the bill for a student entering Zenith and its peer institutions in the fall will be close to $200K for four years. And when they are going to pay up to 9% interest on at least half that money for several decades.

Note: this is one reason why some of us don't have children. If I had that much money, I would want to spend it on myself. And now that I have seen Julie Christie do the mental dissolve in front of her husband's eyes in "Away From Her" I also know I wouldn't spend that money on assisted living either.

I'm thinking Paris. Or early retirement. Or early retirement in Paris.

Anyway, back to colleges. Thanks to the muck-raking Andrew Cuomo and the string he pulled in New York state that is unravelling the national sweater, I would advise everyone who is sending a child to college to shop for a student loan like they would shop for a gas grill or a car. How about those Republican bastards, having cleaned out the elderly, the sick and the poor, going after students too? The latest bunch of criminals to fall into the net are Sallie Mae and JP Morgan. Of course, the name Morgan should all make us think "robber baron" anyway, so who's surprised? And Sallie Mae, in addition to making loans to captive audiences that will never make a nickel without a B.A., also issues a credit card, which should cause people to smell a rat. Presumably, you can also charge your books and airline tickets at up to 30% interest, now the highest legal commercial lending rate permitted by -- you guessed it, a Republican Congress that repeatedly raised the ceiling on interest rates.

Come to think of it, why have we made student loans a for-profit industry at all? Sorry, I forgot. The free market. An end to government supporting the weak, the poor and the oppressed. Better to be Credit Card Nation than Wimp Nation.

Well wait -- back off the cynicism a minute, Radical. I guess we *were* surprised that the colleges and universities themselves, non-profit institutions all, were actually getting paid to allow education lenders to rip off college and graduate students. Who knew?

Surprise! As it turns out, the Department of Education in a Republican Administration knew at least four years ago, although this is a story that has not been particularly well covered except on National Public Radio, where you can listen to part of the hearings. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings who, like everybody else in the Bush cabinet now spends her time either testifying before a congressional committee or preparing to do so, was unable to respond adequately last Thursday when George Miller (D-California) asked her why the Department knew about the "gifts" (aka, graft, or kickbacks) given to financial aid officers and did nothing to stop it. You can also read about it here, thanks to a link to the Guardian's story from Anya Kamenetz's excellent blog Generation Debt (methinks there is a book too, but start with the blog.)

You will be glad to know the Democratic Congress has just passed legislation to stop this gift-giving, although they have not yet taken action to end the gifts they and their re-election campaigns receive. Another day, perhaps.

You will also be glad to know that, luckily for the students who are already saddled with these loans, there is a built-in way to pay them back in less than twenty or thirty years. You can join the military and earn from partial to full repayment of your loans by getting parts of your body shot off in Iraq or Afghanistan.