Getting There From Here

As regular readers know, I’m not above using the blog to fish for helpful hints.  (Readers under 40 can replace that with “helpful hacks” if it clarifies.)  This is the latest effort at idea fishing.

I’m a fan of Open Educational Resources (OER).  They’re free, usually electronic alternatives to commercial textbooks.  They offer the rare win-win-win: students save money, so they win; students show up to class having “bought” the book, so faculty win; students are likelier to complete, so everyone wins.  A few big publishers lose, but I’m okay with that.  I can see a clear goal: get entire programs to adopt OER, like Tidewater Community College did in its Business program.  We could save students thousands of dollars apiece, we could market the hell out of it, and we could level the playing field to some degree for low-income students.  It’s a fine and worthy goal, if I do say so myself.

At Holyoke, I was able to direct some grant dollars to stipends for individual faculty to investigate, adopt, and report back on the success or failure of OER in their own classes.  A fair number participated, and the feedback was generally positive.  But a couple of years later, OER remained largely on the fringes.  Some folks jumped in with both feet, and some more used it to reduce the overall reliance on paid books, but most continue(d) to use commercial texts.  A smallish exploratory project led to positive, but still smallish, adoption.  

The culture of Brookdale, as of Holyoke, effectively forbids mandates, so adoption has to be voluntary.  I can hope to convince, but I can’t command.  I’m okay with that, too.

I’d love to see a viral transmission model, in which faculty who have good results with OER tell their colleagues, and momentum builds naturally. (“Nobody put off buying the book!” is a pretty enticing argument…) After a while, students might seek out OER sections to save money -- voting with their feet -- and thereby create enrollment pressure on those who still force purchases.  Ideally, eventually the commercial publishers start producing better value for the money out of sheer market pressure, so even non-adopters win through a sort of coattail effect.

The part I’m struggling with is getting there from here.  

I’m happy to support some early explorers, but the resources don’t exist to stipend everybody.  And I don’t want early stipends to have an unintended chilling effect on later participation, by inadvertently encouraging people to wait for payouts before moving forward.  (At a previous college, an earlier wave of retirement incentives seemed to have taught people to wait for the next wave.  The pipeline got pretty jammed while people waited for checks that weren’t coming.  The effect is real.)    

Here’s where I hope that my wise and worldly readers have seen something I haven’t.  For those who’ve seen a successful large-scale transition, how did it happen?  For those in the midst of it, what’s working?  Any hints/hacks you could share would be appreciated.

Security and The Mission

There are some things about security that I cannot, and will not, discuss.

That said, it’s no secret that campuses are more focused on security now than in recent memory.  The shooting at Umpqua Community College was so horrific, and so unpredictable, that it made any remaining denial impossible.  

Colleges are difficult places to secure, by design.  Most community colleges were built to be open.  Other than some tightly landlocked urban campuses, most don’t have entry gates.  Suburban and rural campuses are often relatively sprawling.  With thousands of people coming and going every day, and relatively high turnover among students, there’s nothing weird about seeing people you don’t know on campus.  I see people I don’t know every single day.  To the extent that typical shooters are young men, well, we have thousands of young men on campus, the overwhelming majority of whom mean no harm.  

As a quirk of history, roughly half of the community colleges in America were built in the 1960’s.  Security simply was not a central design principle.  Openness was.

Colleges are built on a sort of willful naivete, and community colleges doubly so.  They’re premised on the assumption that people can stretch to become better than they were when they arrived. They’re built on assuming the best of everyone. They’re built to enable certain kinds of risk-taking.  Colleges put certain kinds of stress on students -- the old joke that there will be prayer in school as long as there are math tests endures for a reason -- but those stresses are there to prod the students to better themselves.  Community colleges in particular have a certain idealism baked into their structure.  It’s usually called “the mission,” as in “we would do that, but it’s inconsistent with the mission.”  Belief in the mission is part of what motivates very intelligent and highly trained people to work for less money than they could earn elsewhere.  

The mission includes serving people nobody else will serve.  Within the sector, “open-door” admissions policies are considered a feature, not a bug.  Community colleges serve high achievers, average achievers, and folks who haven’t found their niche yet.  More so than selective colleges, community colleges are built to provide second chances.  

The wave of violence on campuses over the last few years raises several sets of fears.  The obvious one is of physical danger.  All I’ll say to that is that every college I know of is reviewing its protocols and resources.  There’s no such thing as absolute safety, but nobody wants to get the news that something awful could have been minimized if they had been more conscientious.  

The more subtle fears are about losing that culture of openness.  That culture is based on institutional practices, but also on the ways that individual people interact.  The mission encourages employees to treat every student as an opportunity, not a threat.  To the extent that a culture of fear replaces a culture of openness, the mission itself is at risk.  And distrust can become self-fulfilling.

I’ve been at this long enough to remember when the only time we thought about security was when we had fire drills.  That’s not true anymore.  To a degree, that’s a good thing; prudent security measures can prevent some awful outcomes.  But some risk is simply baked into the cake.  Deal with the public, and you take risks.  Gather thousands of young people, and you take risks.  I hope we never lose the willingness to take those risks.  They’re what community colleges are for.

Academic Freedom for Format, Not Just Content

If I could ask the Education Department one question, it would be this:

If you’re so willing to explore alternatives to credit-hour based education, why are you clamping down on the definition of the credit hour?

It’s almost as if people there don’t talk to each other.

The Education Department has announced a pilot program to make coding boot camps and similar short-term job training programs eligible for financial aid.  Although some of my colleagues may disagree with me, I actually think it’s a good idea.  How it’s implemented will matter a great deal, of course; too little specificity could lead to a resurgence of the kinds of abuses that many for-profits committed, and too much could stifle innovation.  But if it’s done well, it could open the door to other ways of educating students.  

After the initial wave of MOOC hype receded and reality set in, many providers shifted from competing with community colleges on freshman classes to something closer to a corporate training model.  Restricting your student body to people who already have undergraduate degrees and who have ten or twenty thousand dollars to plunk down while going unpaid for a few months takes certain issues off the table.  You can leave general education behind, assuming that someone else has taken care of it, and focus exclusively on the specific training that defines your market niche.   The major flaw is that it leaves you wide open to charges of elitism.  (Between the lines, some techies consider that a feature, not a bug, but that’s another discussion.)  

Opening up the boot camps to students who would need financial aid to attend them could, at least theoretically, allow folks with more talent and drive than money to have a shot.  And to the extent that those camps eschew the credit hour in favor of some other measure of learning, the Feds could learn to tie financial aid to actual learning, rather than seat time.  As they get better at that, I would hope that other providers -- such as community colleges -- could start to explore similar avenues.  As a side benefit, we could also establish more sensible rules for financial aid for people who already have a bachelor’s degree.  That’s a growing demographic in community colleges, as students who want to change careers come back to pick up a different set of skills.  If boot camps motivate the Feds to revisit how to treat those students, then more power to them.

At the same time that the Feds are looking closely at alternative formats, though, they’re becoming much more exacting in enforcing the existing ones.  It’s a fascinating study in mixed messaging.

The common denominator, I think, is fear of abuse.  But the real solution to that isn’t to tighten the screws on a format that even its partisans admit has nothing to do with student learning.  It’s to focus intently on developing measures that show whether students are learning.  If they do, I say, let a thousand methods bloom.  Apply “academic freedom” not only to content, but to format; as long as students get what they need, why count minutes?

Coaching The Girl

The Girl, who is eleven, has her first debate tournament on Saturday.

I’m as excited as she is.

I was never any kind of athlete.  The only sport I understand in any significant way is baseball, and even there, my understanding is more from a spectator’s perspective than a player’s.  For years, The Boy and The Girl have played sports coached by other kids’ parents.  I feel guilty every single time there’s a call for coaches and I don’t answer, but I never felt like I could.  

Finally, with debate, there’s something I understand.  This, I can do.

Helping a child learn debate is harder, in some ways, for the lack of role models. The Republican presidential debates were closer to performance art than to anything resembling an exchange of ideas.  The Democratic one was less embarrassing, but still offered little in the way of substantive disagreement.  Compare that to baseball, where televised games are usually played at a high level.  I’ve watched games with TB and pointed out when a pickoff move was particularly good, or where a fielder positioned himself to anticipate a ball.  But I’ve kept TG away from televised debates, to prevent her having to unlearn some pretty awful habits.

TG has been given four topics, but she won’t know which side she’s supposed to argue until fifteen minutes before each match.  That means preparing arguments for both sides.  For an eleven-year-old, the concept of arguing the side you don’t believe is a bit abstract.  I suggested that she think of it like chess: your moves are more effective when you anticipate your opponent’s moves.  If you can jump between sides of a chess board in your head, you can do the same with positions in an argument.  She remained skeptical.  

“But how can I say something if I don’t believe it?”

“Well, that’s how it’s like a game.”

“But I don’t want the bad side to win!”

Clearly, a different approach was in order.

“Think of it like acting.  The guy who plays Voldemort isn’t really a villain, but if he didn’t play the villain, there’d be no story.  And the scarier he is, the better the story. If you’re on the wrong side, you’re playing Voldemort.”

She liked that better.  But the discussion of acting led quickly to a discussion of stage fright.

“You’ve given speeches before.  Don’t you get nervous?”

“Of course!  But with practice, it gets easier to manage.”

“I’ve heard it helps if you picture the audience in their underwear.  Do you do that?”

(laugh) “No.  It would be distracting, and kind of rude.”

“So what do you do?”

“I just think of it as talking to myself in front of people.  They just happen to be there.  That way I don’t get overwhelmed.”

“That works?”

“It works for me.  And I’ve heard you talk to yourself sometimes.  You get some good rants going.  Just do it out loud in front of people.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much.”

She brightened up at that.  It seemed doable.

I don’t care much about whether she wins, but I’m hoping she keeps her composure and makes the points she wants to make.  Debate may be out of fashion, but the ability to see both sides of a question, to keep your composure in front of an audience, and to use evidence and reasoning to make a point will serve her well.  There are worse things.

Saturday morning.  This must be how basketball Dads feel...

A Lesson for My Colleagues

As longtime readers could probably guess, my taste in movies tends to run towards comedies.  I can do different styles of comedy -- dark satire (Brain Candy, Heathers), classic physical (Chaplin, Buster Keaton), or contemporary stupid (Will Ferrell).  Recently, in a discussion with a colleague about Leslie Nielsen’s oeuvre, I was asked whether I prefered the Naked Gun movies or the Airplane movies.

To a comedy nerd, that’s sort of like asking which child you like better.  The pre-credit sequence in Naked Gun 2 ½ is close to perfection.  But for sentimental reasons, I have to go with Airplane II, which I saw in a theater with my Dad when it came out.  At one point in the movie, Robert Hays approaches a door labeled “Danger: Vacuum.”  With ominous music building up, he opens the door, only to be attacked by the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. My Dad laughed harder than I had ever heard him laugh.  So for strictly personal reasons, I have to go with Airplane II.

I was reminded of “Danger: Vacuum” in reading Lee Skallerup Bessette’s thoughtful piece about the dangers of unorthodox teaching styles.  The key moment:

“ I was told by a supportive friend not to let any of the senior faculty know what I was doing in my classroom because they would have put a stop to it.”

She believed her colleague, and suffered a chilling effect.  Whether her colleague was correct or not -- and she may well have been -- the assertion of knowledge of a truth was enough.

Information vacuums are dangerous.  People will fill them with their own fears.

That’s part of the reason that personnel decisions usually cause the most anxiety.  Personnel issues are confidential, so sometimes decisions happen for reasons that can’t be shared.  Some people will know, or be able to figure out, the reasons, but most won’t.  Administrative respect for confidentiality will come off to some as stonewalling, which they’ll take as confirmation that something sinister is going on.  Into the vacuum will rush all sorts of explanations.  I’ve seen this myself a few times over the years, and it’s always awful.  For instance, I had a professor once with a serious medical condition that he didn’t want to be common knowledge, but that required some scheduling accommodations.  After a couple of semesters, word started to spread on the grapevine that his accommodations were the result of something sinister.  I had to ask some people whose trust I had earned over the years to take my word that if they knew what I knew, they’d make the same decision.  But I couldn’t tell them what I knew.

Outside of personnel decisions, though, it’s often possible to fill -- or at least reduce the scope of -- the vacuum.  Give people context for what you’re doing, share data when you can, and let them know what you’re trying to do.  (Blogging five days a week may be overkill, but it works for me.....)  Some will resort to knee-jerk cynicism, but if the walk and the talk match over time, most folks will be glad to keep the conversation at a constructive level.  At that point, it’s possible to harness the incredible resource that a collection of very smart people can be.  If you’re secure enough in your own ego to take constructive criticism productively -- admittedly, not always a given -- you can engage smart people in making your plans better.  

I don’t know whether Prof. Bessette’s colleague was correct in her estimation of how a non-traditional teaching style would be received.  Maybe she was, but maybe she wasn’t.  I fault the leadership for not making its expectations clear.  For those of us in administration, it’s worth noticing that failing to provide context meant that the most sinister and destructive explanation won, leading ultimately to the loss of a good professor.  That could have been prevented.  Vacuums suck, and so do their effects.  Better to provide context, and to keep the evil vacuum trapped in its closet.

A New Product Line

Over the last couple of decades, many of us in higher ed -- myself included -- have fallen into a bad habit.  We referred to “for-profits” or “for-profit colleges” as if the category were simply profit-making analogues of traditional colleges.  

For a while, that didn’t matter much; the larger ones seemed to be shifting in the direction of tradition, and the smaller ones were too small to be of much concern.  Some of the larger ones attained regional accreditation to offer degrees; others bought campuses that carried accreditations with them, like taxi medallions.  

Over the last few years, of course, the degree-granting versions of for-profits have fallen on hard times.  But that doesn’t mean the sector is going away; it just means that it’s moving to a new niche.

Welcome to five-figure short-term boot camps.  

The short-term boot camp model more closely resembles corporate training than traditional undergraduate education, which means that it can charge quite a bit without raising eyebrows.  And it can dispense with general education, student life, and the traditional campus.  If a given provider wants to, it can contract with an existing accredited college to get credits through some variation on prior learning assessment, as in this story about General Assembly and Lynn University.  But if that’s more trouble than it’s worth, they can cater entirely to the graduate market.  By dodging accreditation, they can cherry-pick their students and their markets.  

I’ve suggested for years that for-profits would be better off competing on the high end of the market than the low end.  On the low end, they’re competing with community and state colleges, which have the considerable advantages of being subsidized and untaxed.  But I have to admit falling prey to the trap of thinking mostly in terms of degrees, which left open the objection that the upscale degree market is largely defined by historical wealth, which is pronounced “prestige.”  The boot camp model plays a different game.  It leaves general education and difficult students to the publics, and instead selects the graduates most likely to succeed.  It charges more, and offers a more customized product.  It’s FedEx, as opposed to first-class mail.  And it can specialize in whatever skill is hot at the moment, effectively ceding prestige in favor of good timing.

The new for-profit model raises different questions.  The old one raised questions of the maintenance of academic standards, given the pressure to produce graduates no matter what.  The new one raises questions of access, given the high sticker price and (usually) the lack of financial aid.  Boutique stores don’t compete on access; if anything, they strive to convey a sense of exclusivity, whether warranted or not.  If that means that only the usually-advantaged can gain the latest skills, well, so be it.  They’re not running charities.

Honestly, I see this version as having legs that the previous version didn’t have.  In this version, they don’t have to try to compete with community colleges on price or access, or with elite universities on prestige.  Instead, they can sell speed and employer relevance.  There’s a market for that.

To the extent that the rest of us care about both employer relevance and access, we should watch the boot camps closely and take good notes.  Highly employable short term programs at community colleges -- whether in IT or something else -- offer a similar good at a much lower price.  And it can do so in an institutional setting in which folks who need support can get it.  If the for-profits are willing to establish the public awareness of this niche that we can subsequently fill, I say, go for it.  And in the meantime, the rest of us should probably rethink what we mean when we refer to for-profits.  

Holidays

In my perfect world, K-12 districts and community and state colleges would agree on which holidays to observe.  When they disagree, both students and employees with children are put in a tough spot.

The sectors already agree on a few greatest hits.  Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day are pretty much inviolate.  The Fourth of July is easy, since it’s off-peak for both.  They even both observe New Year’s Day, which has always struck me as a bit contrived, but it sticks.  The beauty of the greatest hits is that everyone knows they’re coming, so everyone makes other plans.  They reduce stress.

Some places have distinctly regional holidays.  Massachusetts has one called “Evacuation Day” that I don’t think anyone else observes, and another called “Patriot’s Day” that’s similar.  When I moved there I asked folks the origin stories for each, but nobody knew.  

Patriot’s Day caused issues at the college, since most K-12 districts planned their Spring Break around it.  (There, the standard for K-12 was a week in February and a week in April. The standard for higher ed was a week in March.  Yes, it created family issues.)  When a significant chunk of the student body has childcare responsibilities, and the days don’t align, you get increased absenteeism.  It made for some difficult scheduling, especially around lab sciences, where setup and takedown take time and resources.  Mismatches add stress.

Here, the mismatches are many and striking.  Many of the local K-12 schools close for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; the college doesn’t.  They close for Columbus Day; the college doesn’t.  And they have an astonishing number of “professional development” half-days at random intervals.  TB and TG are in their sixth week of school; five of the six have been short, and that’s without a single weather event.  (This week is short due to Columbus Day.)  The district has a good reputation, and it seems great, when it’s open.  But it’s closed for a surprising amount of time.  When parents count on school for de facto childcare -- which they do -- each new mismatch is a fresh crisis.  When the mismatches come on a weekly basis, it’s hard not to ascribe motive.  They’re assuming the existence of stay-at-home Moms, and making life difficult for families without a stay-at-home parent.  Absent that, such staccato rhythms are hard to plan around.

You’d think that making decisions about holidays would be easy, but it isn’t.  When holidays cluster on Mondays, you get into issues of assuring equal time for Monday classes.  (Labor Day and Columbus Day are always on Mondays, for instance, as is Martin Luther King day.)  If you observe Christian holidays but nobody else’s, you send a message that people who observe other holidays will notice.  If you try to widen the net, you get into “if x, why not y?” discussions for which there’s no great answer.  “Floating holidays” or personal days are more elegant on the employer side, but they don’t do anything for students who have kids.  They also don’t bring the same level of peace as fully-observed holidays do, since even if you take a day, the college is still running.  Work is still building up for your return.  The great gift of shared holidays is that everyone stops at the same time.

That’s why I’d like to see more widespread agreement on which days to take.  We don’t run into these conflicts on the days that everyone takes.  Nobody expects schools or colleges to be open on Labor Day, so people make other plans for that day.  

In calling for agreement, I’m trying to separate the issue of which days to take.  For example, I’d have no issue with saying “let’s observe days for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but then stop observing Columbus Day to help make up for it.”  That would strike me as reasonable.  But that’s really a second-order discussion.  The first issue is just acknowledging that there’s something to be gained by seeking agreement.  Right now, with different sectors going in drastically different directions, the burden of filling in the gaps falls on parents, whether as employees or as students.  I don’t recall ever voting on that, or even having that conversation.  

As I keep waiting for the kids to have their second full week of school, I’m thinking maybe it’s time to have that conversation.

Friday Fragments

Yesterday's staff meeting was small -- five of us in the room -- but it started with a moment of silence in memory of the people killed at Umpqua Community College.

It was a little awkward, and a little weird, and kind of a strange way to start a staff meeting.  I hope that moments like that never feel normal.  

--

Zappos’  experiment in "holacracy" -- basically, a top-down form of syndicalism -- is doomed to catastrophic failure.  I say that in part as a political theorist, in part as someone who read Lord of the Flies, and in part as someone who understands the concept of legal challenges.

In a setting without titles, roles, rules, or bosses, if someone claims discrimination, who's on the hook?  Leaving aside the larger claims about human nature -- color me skeptical -- I can't imagine trying to get through a deposition.  “What’s your usual hiring process?”  “Well, we don’t really have one…” “How are salaries determined?” “Well, we have a system of badges…” “What are the criteria for those badges?” “We don’t really have any…”  It’s a monster payout waiting to happen.

Bureaucracy is easy to attack, heaven knows, but some level of it serves a purpose.  It can bring regularity and responsibility to decision-making.  When nobody knows what the rules are, they tend to devolve to whichever clique has the most clout.  Say what you will about HR departments, for example, but they enforce some level of basic consistency in the ways people are treated.

I had to roll my eyes at Zappos' habit of calling meetings for ten o'clock on Sunday nights.   Their idea of work-life balance is sacrificing life to work.  If the price of work-life balance is putting up with some clunky HR rules, I'm willing to pay it.

--

For-profit colleges that go non-profit are actually cheating the system and enriching their owners?

I'm shocked.  Shocked, I say.

Honestly, some things are predictable.  Last year when the news broke about ECMC buying colleges and turning them non-profit, I did a post in which I tried, unsuccessfully, to suss out a motive.  Was it securing sinecures?  Getting data on students?

Nope.  It was flat-out cheating.  

Sigh.

--

"I have my backpack, my purse, my sheet music, my chromebook, and my sombrero.  I'm ready!"

So sayeth The Girl Thursday morning, getting ready for school.

I don't think I'd ever heard the words "chromebook" and "sombrero" in the same sentence before...

Ask the Administrator: Retooling to Teach Chemistry

A new correspondent writes:

I have been thinking of going back to school for and Ed.D to teach college in a teacher education program or maybe a MS in chemistry to teach at a community college.  I'm trying to decide what to do and what would be best for me.

Background: I got my biology degree and worked for a biotech company for (more than ten) years, then I taught high school biology for (more than ten) years and 2 years of chemistry as well during that time.  A year ago we moved across the country and now I'm wondering what to do.  I don't want to teach high school anymore. I have always wanted to get another degree but don't have money to do it. Is there any way to get a scholarship or TA to be able to pay for it?

(In a subsequent email, she clarified that the biology degree was a bachelor’s, that she got a teaching certification in bio and chemistry, and that she later got a master’s in education.)

My first thought would be to decide whether you’d prefer to teach chemistry or teacher ed.  If it’s the latter, you already have the basic qualifications for a community college.  (Most cc teacher ed programs that I’ve seen only offer a few courses in the area, leaving most of it to the upper division institution.)  With a background in science teaching, you could be a hot commodity, since science teachers are always in high demand.  In my observation, most of the students who take teacher ed programs cluster in the English and Early Childhood areas, making the ones in STEM that much more desirable.

If you’d rather teach chemistry or biology at a community college, in most cases, you’ll need at least a master’s.  The good news is that with your industry and educational background, a master’s should be enough to attract serious interest.  With graduate degrees in both chemistry and education, you could sell yourself not just as a dedicated scientist and teacher, but as an expert in both fields.  Many candidates are strong in one field or the other, but relatively few are strong in both.

If you choose the chemistry route, then the funding question becomes relevant.  Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I went to grad school, the rule of thumb was that most fellowship or t.a. funding went to doctoral students, rather than to master’s students.  Many graduate schools seem to treat master’s programs as cash cows, so they prefer to have students pay their own way.  That said, some doctoral programs hand out master’s degrees as consolation prizes if you don’t finish the doctorate, so it’s at least conceptually possible to get funded as a doctoral student to get your master’s, and then drop out.

Not that anybody would ever do such a thing.

Alternately, some community colleges will fund graduate tuition for full-time faculty.  If you find a cc that does that, and get hired on in a teacher ed program, you may be able to swing at least partial funding from the cc for your master’s in chemistry.  You may have to show relevance, but depending on what you’re hired to do, that might not be a deal-breaker.

All of that said, though, I’m not terribly conversant in the current state of master’s degree funding for STEM students, so I’ll throw it to my wise and worldly readers.  Folks out there who know the STEM graduate world well: how can a returning adult get help getting a master’s in chemistry?

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers, would you offer any corrections or additions?  Is there a better way?

Have a question?  Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Everybody Knows…

In response to the piece about a “few, big, dumb questions” approach to assessment earlier this week, an exasperated professor from another state wrote to mention his frustration at the time that assessment takes, and at the unwillingness to act on the consistent finding that one professor’s students underperform everyone else’s.

The point about time and effort is well-worn.  It’s valid when it’s true.  But the point about the colleague that everyone knows is underperforming struck me as much more complicated.

What can, or should, a department do when it knows one of its own isn’t getting it done?

That question can go in lots of different directions, so I’ll narrow it down.  Let’s say that the underperformance isn’t about failing to show up, or showing up drunk, or any sort of egregious misconduct.  And for the sake of argument, let’s say that there’s enough factual backup for what “everyone knows” that they can’t duck the question by pleading ignorance.  In this case, let’s say that someone who routinely shows up for work and doesn’t do anything spectacularly awful just doesn’t do a good job of teaching.  The students consistently fail to learn what they’re supposed to.

The easiest response is to do nothing, and/or to wait for the administration to take care of it.  But that’s often unrealistic.  If assessment is being done the way it should be done, the administration won’t use it to single out faculty.  In part, that’s because the point of assessment is to look at curriculum and structure, rather than personnel.  And in part, it’s because for it to work at all, faculty need to be candid.  If they believe that anything they say can and will be used against them, they won’t be candid, and the whole enterprise will become pointless.

Yes, there are formal performance evaluations, but once people have tenure, evaluations typically happen only once every x years.  (I’ve seen cycles as long as five years.)  And even then, the burden of proof to lower the boom on someone with tenure is so high that I wouldn’t count on it.

Ideally, the low performer will know, at some level, that something is wrong, and will be open to discussing suggestions for improvement.  Sometimes that happens.  Over the years, I’ve seen a few variations work.  One is targeted professional development -- help the struggling professor get back on track through direct intervention.  Another -- my personal fave -- is to have the struggling one pick a senior colleague he respects, and to have her observe a class without telling the administration what she saw.  The point of the observation is to give useful feedback to the struggling instructor, in a setting in which the recipient’s defenses are sufficiently down to actually hear the feedback.  It’s easy to slip into self-defeating habits from time to time, and having a sympathetic and respected figure point out where you’re doing it can break the pattern.  I’ve seen that method succeed several times over the years.  Admittedly, it requires an administration that’s willing to back off and let the observation stay private, but some of us are enlightened enough to do that.

But that method only works when the struggling professor is willing to hear it and able to change what he’s doing.  Those aren’t always givens.  

I’ve seen departments try to minimize the issue through scheduling and course assignments.  If Professor X is truly weak, they might try to give him the low-enrolled sections, or put him in the classes in which he will do the least harm.  But that can amount to rewarding bad performance, which tends to leave a bad taste for the better performers.  It also doesn’t really solve the problem.  It amounts to moving the pile of dirty laundry from one side of the room to the other.  And depending on how severe the scheduling curlicues are, students can wind up suffering in multiple ways.

Some departments will even try to steer the low performer into any quasi-administrative roles that come with course releases, just to minimize the damage.  If the person has a talent for paperwork, that can be a tolerable solution, but in practice it tends to backfire.  I’d argue that kicking a problem upstairs tends not to end well for anyone involved.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen effective ways for departments to deal with one of their own who just wasn’t getting it done?

Collision Mix

Collision mix!

In my radio days, a “collision mix” happened when two songs played back to back that had no business playing back to back.  Sometimes the mismatch was lyrical, sometimes musical, but the effect was jarring.  (My fave was segueing “Baroque and Blue” into the opening seconds of John Zorn’s “film noir” album.  Good times, good times…) DJ’s took pride in collision mixes that shouldn’t have worked, but somehow did.

Monday featured a collision mix of two very different visions for the future of higher ed.  I’ll flaunt some erstwhile DJ pride and suggest that even though the mix shouldn’t work, it sort of does.

The first, by Terrell Halaska, is an argument for an Uber for higher education.  The idea is that some sort of aggregator app would allow students to build custom degree programs from among the thousands of institutions that offer online courses.  The article has a few unintended howlers -- for instance, it suggests that getting a cab while in bed is somehow new, apparently unaware that people have been able to call cabs for decades now.  But beyond that, it’s a fairly standard “disaggregation” argument of the sort that was popular around 2012.

It bears the flaws of its genre.  It’s based on a profound ignorance of, or indifference to, the functions of institutions.  It never mentions accreditation, for example, or the economic underpinnings of the provision of those various course providers.  Paying a la carte for classes sounds fine, until you realize that most students need financial aid, and “consortium” arrangements for financial aid are hard enough between two colleges.  Good luck navigating one with, say, a half dozen.  It completely ignores the reputational payoff of degrees, the reality of “residency” requirements, or the likely unwillingness of donors to help fund disembodied course providers.  (Philanthropy is becoming a more-important source of funding in every sector.)  It also elides entirely what we know about student behavior in navigating institutions.  

Uber works because it relies on temp labor, and you don’t need to assemble a string of Uber rides into a coherent journey.  Education requires far more than that.  This model might work tolerably well for corporate training, but as a replacement for college, it’s a bust.  

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s piece in Dissent, by contrast, understands not only the real need for improved educational access, but the economic, political, and behavioral underpinnings of that need.  She argues in favor of free community college -- which she extends to free HBCU’s as well -- rather than in favor of free disembodied courses.  Economists teach us that institutions exist to reduce transaction costs.  When institutions are scattered to the winds, and people have to assemble programs a la carte, they have to bear those transaction costs themselves.  Those costs are proportionately -- and sometimes absolutely -- higher for people without significant capital, whether monetary or social.  Strengthening institutions means sparing the weak those costs.

Cottom is honest enough to note that any proposal for free college is imperfect.  Not everyone wants to go, some folks would have gone anyway, and higher ed has shown itself eerily good at producing and reproducing status hierarchies even while speaking the language of access.  But she -- and I -- can accept those costs in the name of restoring recognition of higher education as a public good.  The point is to get away from the hyper-individualized vision of an Uber for higher ed, and to move towards a vision of higher ed as part of the fabric of a society that is concerned for everyone.  In that light, her distinction between “one hundred new Universities of Phoenix” and public institutions makes sense.  Institutions matter, and their missions matter.  Public institutions are meant to protect the weak against the strong.  That’s why movements of the weak have always -- always -- clamored for institutions for support.  And that’s why the powerful favor “privatization.”  In the absence of institutions, the strong prey upon the weak.  Institutions have their flaws, heaven knows, but without them, it’s a feeding frenzy.

The world Cottom envisions isn’t perfect, but it’s built on an ethical foundation.  The world Halaka offers may have a whiz-bang appeal, but it’s essentially predatory.  Reading the two next to each other makes the contrast plain.  I’ll side with an ethical future, thanks.

Assessment and the Value of Big, Dumb Questions

How do you know if a curriculum is working?

In the absence of some sort of assessment, too often, the answer was “because the people teaching it say so.”  One would think that the conflict of interest there would be obvious; for anyone outside the given department, it usually was.  But the existence of motive and opportunity does not, in itself, prove a crime, so curriculum committees fell back on a sort of mutual non-aggression pact by default.  You don’t attack my program, I don’t attack yours, and we’ll trust that it will all come out in the wash.  As long as nobody else comes sniffing around, that sort of mutual convenience -- usually couched in a huffy rhetoric about “professionalism” -- can protect sinecures for a while.

I bring that up because it’s impossible to understand the assessment movement without understanding what it was responding to.  

At its best -- and I’m not arguing for one minute that it’s always at its best -- it serves as a reality check.  If a nursing department claims that it’s the best in the country, yet the majority of its graduates fails the NCLEX, well, that raises a credibility issue.  If the students who transfer from a particular community college consistently and significantly underperform other transfers and native students at a four-year school, I’d raise some questions about that community college.  

Although faculty in many liberal arts programs think that assessment is new, it isn’t.  It has been the coin of the realm in fields with certifications for decades.  In the world of community colleges, for example, nursing programs are typically leaders in assessment, simply because they’ve done it from the outset.  Fields with external accreditations -- allied health, IT, engineering, teacher education, even culinary -- have done outcomes assessment for a long time.  It came later to the liberal arts, where many people responded with shock to the brazen newness of what was actually a longstanding practice.

Tim Burke’s piece on assessment and the curse of incremental improvement is well worth reading, because it acknowledges both the flaws in popular assessment protocols, and the need for some sort of reality check.  I’m of similar mind, and would draw a distinction between assessment as it’s often done or used, and assessment as it could be done or used.  Context matters -- a bachelor’s-granting college with mostly traditional-age students has a far easier time tracking students than an associate’s-granting college with a majority of part-time students.  But while the implementation mechanisms will differ, the basic idea is the same.  Students deserve efforts at improvement.

My issue with much of the outcomes assessment that’s actually practiced is that it falls prey to false precision.  I’ve seen too many reporting forms with subcategories that have subcategories.  When every subunit of a curriculum has to respond to the same global questions that entire curricula do, a certain measurement error has been baked into the cake.  Thoughtful assessment requires time and labor, both of which are at premiums when budgets are tight.  And when measures rely on students’ willingness to do tasks that don’t “count,” such as taking pre-tests and post-tests, I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical.

Instead, I’m a fan of the “few, big, dumb questions” approach.  At the end of a program, can students do what they’re supposed to be able to do?  How do you know?  Where they’re falling short, what are you planning to do about it?  Notice that the unit of analysis is the program.  For assessment to work, it can’t be another way of doing personnel evaluations.  And it can’t rely on faculty self-reporting.  The temptation to game the system is too powerful; over time, those who cheat would be rewarded and those who tell the truth would be punished.  That’s a recipe for entropy.  Instead, rely on third-party assessment.  The recent multi-state collaborative project on assessment is a good example of how to do this well: it uses third-party readers to look at graded student work taken from final-semester courses.  Even better, it uses publicly-available criteria, developed by faculty across the country.  In other words, it keeps the key faculty role and respect for subject matter expertise, but it gets around the conflict of interest.  

(For that matter, I’m a fan of third-party grading on campus, too.  If Professors Smith and Jones are teaching sections of the same course, and they swap papers for grading purposes and let students know that’s what they’re doing, they can immediately recast the student-professor relationship.  Suddenly, I’m not both helper and judge; I’m the helper, and that so-and-so over there is the judge.  It’s you and me against him.  Someday, I hope to try this at scale…)

When I’ve had conflicts with the folks who do assessment, it has largely been around the specificity of goals.  Here, too, Burke and I are on common ground.  In liberal arts fields in particular, assuming that the whole equals the sum of its parts can be a mistake.  The serious study of, say, history, is partly about learning techniques and facts, but partly about developing a way of thinking.  That latter goal takes time to manifest.  (There’s a famous line that the gift of historical study is a sense for the ways things don’t happen.  This is where many techno-utopians come to grief.)  The “tolerance for ambiguity” that many employers find lacking in new grads is exactly the sort of thing that the study of history, or sociology, or political science can foster.  But almost by definition, it’s hard to pin that down, especially early.  

Too-assiduous obedience to a grid can cut down the future to the size of the present.  If we only measure what we anticipated, we miss moments of discovery.  Excited minds can go in unanticipated directions; I’d argue that’s often a sign of spectacular success.  To the extent that assessment grids become like Procrustes’ bed, cutting off guests’ legs to make them fit, they should be consigned to the flames.  But they don’t have to be used that way.  

To the extent that local assessment offices have fallen into these traps, I can understand suspicion and resentment.  But I can’t understand the position that some people are so special, so far above the rest of us, that they’re simply immune to scrutiny.  Nobody is special.  Nobody is immune.  The task shouldn’t be to try to turn back the clock to 1970; the task should be to adapt the tools of assessment to serve its best purpose.  The more time we waste on the former, the longer we wait for the latter.