Selective attention to fact

Political bias and perception often are based on our selective attention to factual information rather to actual "fake news." Today (August 11, 2018) I noticed that several of my right-leaning friends on Facebook were sharing the first of the two stories below, while my left-leaning friends were sharing the second story. Both stories are accurate and factual, both were reported in more than one media source although here I chose to use two stories from one source. There was little bias in the mainstream media, only factual reporting on data reported by government agencies responsible for tracking economic trends. The first story pre-dates the second by 10 days because of differences in the release of data by different government agencies.

Headline: U.S. Workers Get Biggest Pay Increase in Nearly a Decade.
Basic information: Employment cost index, which measures wages and benefits, grew 2.8% in the 12 months to last month June 30, 2018. Reported on July 31, 2018.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-employment-costs-rose-in-the-second-quarter-1533040473

Headline: Rising U.S. Consumer Prices Are Eroding Wage Gains.
Basic information: Inflation is at 2.9% over the past 12 months ending June 30, 2018, a gain that was last exceeded in late 2011. Reported August 10, 2018.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-consumer-prices-rose-0-2-in-july-1533904402

Both articles share important pieces of information: 1) wage increases were higher in the last year than in the previous decade and 2) those wage increases were more than offset by increases inflation that was higher than in the previous decade - so people's standards of living did not increase.

Sociology courses can be an important vehicle for educating people about data sources, how to access them directly, what information those sources include and do not include, and how to evaluate them.

For example, the Employment Cost Index reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics looks at what employers have to pay in both cash wages and in benefits costs.  It is entirely possible (and has happened quite a few times), that much of the increase in the Employment Cost Index comes from employers having to pay more for benefits such as health insurance or retirement payments, than because they are putting more cash in employees pockets through wages. That was not the case in the year ending in June 2018 - both direct wages and employers costs for benefits increased by 2.8%. But this distinction between the cost to employers and the wages received by employees is important for people looking at this type of data to understand and look at how the data source breaks down the Employment Cost Index into its component parts.

Another lesson to learn about data sources is that many types of data including both the Employment Cost Index and the Consumer Price Index (the measure of inflation also provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) lump together information from millions of sources into a single index number.  With the Employment Cost Index wage and benefit, data is collected from thousands of employers covering millions of workers, and is an average of all the data collected. That means that some workers may have had wage increase far exceeding 2.8% and other workers had no wage increase or may have even taken wage cuts. A rise of 2.9% in the consumer price index does not mean that everyone across the nation saw all of their costs rise by 2.9%.  Some costs (such as higher education tuition and books) rose by more than 2.9%, other costs rose very little and even some products (such as some electronics) may have come down in cost. Moreover, prices for many things (such as rent and mortgage) vary considerably from one geographic area to another. Some elements of the consumer price index like food prices affect everyone, but others like prices of automobiles only affect those who are purchasing an auto.

Helping people understand the data that affects their lives is an important role sociology can and should play.

Why Assessment of General Education Competencies is Entirely Different from Grading

I have been aware for many years that the college where I teach has been doing a poor job with assessing general education. At times over the years I've tried talking to the people in positions of responsibility about the inadequacies of our assessment, but no one has listened. Finally I gave up and just made sure that I did things the right way even if no one else did. 

Ultimately the day of reckoning - re-accreditation - has arrived, and despite our having been slapped on the hand for our inadequate general education assessment and asked to address those deficiencies, those in decision-making positions are still not listening to me. Or rather they heard me and said you're right, but we'll deal with that sometime in the future.  Right now we're just going to do a whole lot more of the wrong thing and overwhelm them with reams of bad assessment data - done up in a pretty new chart that someone at the top thinks makes everything okay. Of course they didn't actually say that, but that seems to be the course we are taking. 

So I've been charged with collating and synthesizing these reams of bad data into some coherent whole (not really possible but I'm trying), and that is what I'm spending my "vacation" doing. As I review all of the assessment reports of all of our faculty, I am aghast at how bad things actually are - far worse than I had imagined.  I would like to be able to put all these people in a room somewhere and explain some things to them, but that is never going to happen.  For one thing, by the time the chickens come home fully to rest and the awfulness of our assessment is fully understood, I will have retired and it will be "not my circus, not my monkeys." 

So instead I'm going to deliver part of my "lecture" here, because I've got to let it out somewhere. Maybe somebody somewhere will benefit from my little rant. 

My college, as well as all other colleges in our system and most colleges in our state, has adopted a general education plan the "Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) Initiative" developed by hundreds of college faculty through the auspices of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU). The LEAP initiative includes 12 essential learning outcomes for a liberal education, including communication skills, quantitative reasoning, information literacy, critical thinking, life long learning, teamwork and problem solving, and several others (https://www.aacu.org/leap/essential-learning-outcomes). To assist colleges and faculty determine whether or not they are achieving these general educational goals, the AACU developed Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education rubrics or VALUE rubrics (Source: https://www.aacu.org/value).  Having spent many years now reading the literature around the LEAP initiative and the VALUE rubrics, it is clear that the students' entire educational career should contribute to the development of these essential skills, and that proficiency in them is something that accumulates over the student entire academic career.  This means that most first semester freshmen taking their first college level courses would not be expected to be fully proficient at most of the learning outcomes, but that one would expect the majority of last semester senior students to be proficient.  

The biggest mistake that most of our faculty have made is to assume that assessment is simply an extension of grading. Having made that assumption, the majority of my colleagues then assume that they can simply use the grade from some test, paper, exercise, project or even the course as a whole, as THE measure of assessment - for a whole host of different general education areas from "inquiry and analysis," "critical and creative thinking," to "life-long learning skills," and "integrative and applied learning." As a result I am seeing faculty with first semester freshman in the first English writing course reporting that because 95% of their students got a C+ or better therefore 95% of their students are fully proficient in written communication. If that is so, then why on earth do we then require them to take a second semester of writing? Because one semester of college writing does not make most people proficient at written communication. Proficiency in writing takes lots of practice in writing, and writing different types of content (history essays, sociology journals, science term papers, etc.). Assessment is not the same as grading.

A grade is a measurement of the student's performance in a particular course. How well did the student complete all the requirements of that course? That's what a grade indicates. Perhaps the easiest way to understand the difference between grading and assessment is to use some thing that most people can understand: studying languages.  A person who wishes to study French will begin with an introductory French course. That individual may study very hard in introductory French and do all of the required work at a high level of skill - for that course - and be rewarded for their efforts with an A.  That's grading.  But then we ask, is that person who has completed a one semester course in French with an A now proficient in the speaking, writing and communicating in French. Of course not. That is assessment. Assessment is about a larger life skill that accrues over time and practice. Moreover, it is entirely possible for a person to take four semesters of French, and get an A in every single class, and still not be particularly proficient in speaking and writing French. However, if that is so, then there's probably good reason to go back and review how the courses were taught since the ultimate goal of the courses is to develop proficiency. Nonetheless we would still not expect proficiency to be the outcome of the first, or even second course, but rather some mile stone measure along the way. 

In most courses at a community college (the first two years of college), such as where I teach, we should not be looking for proficiency in most courses, but rather from evidence that students have started along the way to a particular skill or ability - for milestones.  While the development of such skills and abilities should be part of grading, they are often not the most important element in the grade even on a single assignment or activity. So grades often are poor indicators of the development of general education skills.  Assessment requires a separate set of judgments about where a student lies in the development of a body of knowledge or a set of skills.   That separate assessment could be included within the grading criteria as a percentage of a score or grade, but is unlikely to encompass all of the things that go into the grade. 

A good example is developing the skills of life long learning. Reading the AACU's material and VALUE rubric on life long learning, some years ago, I realized that a project that I always have my Social Problems students do was something that could - if tweaked just a little - contribute to developing life long learning skills. The actual grade that I give students for this project (identifying a social problem specific to their home community, and following through with research, contact with others addressing the problem, and thinking about solutions for their community) depends on many different factors, such as how well they have learnt and used the terminology of sociology, how well they write, and only a small percentage of the grade is related to life-long learning skills.  A student could get an A (low A) on the project without having exhibited higher levels of life-long learning skills.  The Life Long Learning Value rubric has five dimensions. One of those dimensions is initiative, and the lowest level (scored as "1") on the rubric for initiative is "completes required work." The second level (scored "2") is "Completes required work and identifies opportunities to expand knowledge, skills, and abilities;" and the third level (scored "3") is "Completes required work, identifies and pursues opportunities to expand knowledge, skills, and abilities." 

I set up the project in such a way to create a climate where students are encouraged to identify and pursue opportunities to expand knowledge.  I use extensive feedback in the early stages of the project, making many suggestions to students about additional information sources, and avenues they might explore. Students who do so rank high on the Life-Long Skills rubric that is used for assessment. But students who do not, have still "completed required work," which is the primary basis for the grade on the project. 

Faculty often bemoan the students for whom the grade is the end-all and be-all of college. But sometimes we get blinded by same type of narrow minded thinking - grades are not always the best measure of learning. 

Zombie America - Installment 6

Four years ago, while thinking about conditions in the U.S., the phrase "zombie America" popped into my head. What is a zombie? The original use of the word is for a dead body, devoid of real life and soul, that is reanimated and caused to walk around by witchcraft or dark magic. In the ever popular science fiction of recent years, the concept of zombie has evolved to mean a person who has as the result of infection or exposure to unspecified substances been robbed of their humanity - of their personality, intelligence, soul and will - and transformed to a monster that kills and feeds on uninfected humans (especially their brains). Those that are not killed are also infected and become zombies themselves.

Zombies are variously referred to as the "undead" and the "walking dead," phrases that I think can be applied to American economy, politics and society at large. The nation is still lurching and weaving about, animated but no longer truly alive, dead (or dying) but because still animated, so that many observers still imagine it to have life. 

New evidence that American society is "walking dead" is constantly presenting itself. Through out the month of August 2015 stories about teacher shortages have popped up almost daily as many states struggle to put teachers in front of classes with the beginning of a new school year (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/us/teacher-shortages-spur-a-nationwide-hiring-scramble-credentials-optional.html ). Thousands of veteran teachers are leaving the classroom every year and no where near enough new teachers are coming up through the pipeline to replace them.  Veteran teachers are deserting the profession due to low pay, lack of classroom resources, schools obsessions with testing, proliferation of regulations and paper work, and lack of real instruction time in the classroom.  This is just one of the ways in which the American educational system is being hollowed out. 

The former center of automotive manufacturing in America in Western Michigan has become the canary in the coal mine for the rest of American society.  Flint, Michigan has recently (December 14, 2015) declared a formal state of emergency as the result of a wholly man-made disaster: the dramatic increase in lead in the cities water supply. Substantially increased levels of lead are showing up in blood tests of the cities children.  The increase in lead poisoning came when the city switched to the Flint River as a water source. Lead exposure in children is irreversible and impacts intelligence and general mental functioning, creating long term educational issues for communities with declining educational resources, not to mention the human tragedy involved. 

an unholy alliance

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education posted an interesting story Is "Wal-Mart U." a Good Bargain for Students?, about a deal made between the Walmart corporation and American Public University, a for-profit institution that specializes in on-line instruction.

Here are some excerpts from the story:

A closer look at the deal announced this month shows how American Public slashed its prices and adapted its curriculum to snare a corporate client that could transform its business. It also raises one basic question: Is this a good bargain for students?

Adult-learning leaders praise Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, for investing in education. But some of those same experts wonder how low-paid workers will be able to afford the cost of a degree from the private Web-based university the company selected as a partner, and why Wal-Mart chose American Public when community-college options might be cheaper. They also question how easily workers will be able to transfer APU credits to other colleges, given that the university plans to count significant amounts of Wal-Mart job training and experience as academic credit toward its degrees.

For example, cashiers with one year's experience could get six credits for an American Public class called "Customer Relations," provided they received an "on target" or "above target" on their last performance evaluation, said Deisha Galberth, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. A department manager's training and experience could be worth 24 credit hours toward courses like retail ethics, organizational fundamentals, or human-resource fundamentals, she said.

Altogether, employees could earn up to 45 percent of the credit for an associate or bachelor's degree at APU "based on what they have learned in their career at Wal-Mart," according to the retailer's Web site.

Janet K. Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium, points out that this arrangement could saddle Wal-Mart employees with a "nontransferable coupon," as one blogger has described it.

"I now see where the 'trick' is—if a person gets credit for Wal-Mart courses and Wal-Mart work, they aren't likely to be able to transfer those to much of anyplace else," Ms. Poley wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. Transferability could be important, given the high turnover rate in the retail industry.

The cynic in me wonders if the lack of transferability of the credits may be exactly the point for Walmart. As the last paragraph above points out, there is very high worker turnover in the retail industry. Walmart expends time and money training workers, only to have them leave. The ones most likely to leave are those who obtain a college degree and move on to new careers. What better way to gain more stability in their labor market -- provide workers with something they crave -- access to a college degree that will give them huge amounts of credit just for working at Walmart, and they'll discover that the degree is only good for advancing within Walmart.

My experience college teaching in the past thirty years has shown me that college students from lower and working class families, and even many from middle class families, are extraordinarily naive about the different values that employers put on degrees from different institutions. They also actively resist knowing how different the content of education differs between colleges. My students refuse to acknowledge any difference between the content of their college courses and those at four year colleges and universities. Yet they find ways not to read the forty or fifty pages a week assigned in my class, and will not listen to the facts, that students at four year school are expected to read and comprehend, two and three times the amount of content.

The reality is, I could assign as much reading as I thought was necessary and test students on that reading, but then my course failure rate would be unacceptably high, and my teaching evaluations unacceptably low. So slowly as years have gone by, I've bowed the quiet, subtle pressure NOT to "dumb" down the class, but to cover less material, and to cover it differently (like not getting into esoteric discussions about the deeper meaning and implication of materials).

Community college faculty are constantly commanded to accommodate students who are married, with children and full-time jobs. These students cannot read three full books a week (as I often had to do in my own undergraduate career at an elite four year college) -- heck they cannot even seem to find the time to read three full books a semester.

The depth and breadth of knowledge acquired by community college students simply pales compared to that acquired at more demanding four year colleges and universities. This fact is well understood by colleges, graduate schools, professional programs, and employers. Which is why graduates from elite schools have different doors open to them than do community college students.

So an educational institution that is willing to say, oh sure we'll give students up to 45 percent of their academic credit for just doing their Walmart job, is reducing the content of education even lower. Students will be able to get "degrees without all that troublesome knowledge" (my husband's favorite saying) even easier than they already can with this alliance between Walmart and American Public U.

college students today....

College professors have always complained about college students. The complaints usually starts with the phrase "the trouble with college students today..." and usually also contains the phrase "when I was a student..."

The fact is that college students today are different from the past, in a whole host of ways. Let's look at the demographics: in 1966 the total number of undergraduate college students of all ages was 6,085,000 which represented 3% of the total U.S. population, in 2008 the total number of undergraduate college students of all ages was 14,955,000, which represented 5% of the total U.S. population ; in 1966 39% of college students were 18-19 years old, 15% were age 25 or older, 94% were white and 5 percent were black, 38% were women and 62% were male; in 2008 22% were 18-19 years old, 37% were age 25 or older, 77% were white and 13 percent were black, 55% were women and 45% were male. In the year 1970 (first year for which the government collected data on this) the percent of all undergraduate students attending community colleges was 27%, in 2008 that had risen to 36%.

As discussed this past week in the Chronicle of Higher Education most of the increasing numbers of college students in the last couple of decades have gone into the community colleges, and to a lesser extent into less selective four year colleges (public and private). More selective colleges and universities have used the increased numbers of students applying to become more selective, more choosy.

Family income which impacts college choices due to rising costs, also has a strong positive correlation with standardized test scores and to a more moderate correlation with high school grade point average. Other aspects of social class, such as parental educational levels influence students' selection of or assignment to courses of study in high school. [The college educated parent is more likely to know that taking algebra in summer school before high school can put their child on a fast track to advance math classes in high school making him or her more attractive to selective colleges and universities.]

As a result of the confluence of increased selectiveness and rising costs, social class and income stratification between colleges has increased steadily over the past twenty years. Students from poor and working class families are becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of elite, selective colleges and universities, while community colleges become the primary educational institutions for poor, working class, and even lower middle class families.

The flood of new college students into community colleges and less selective four year colleges, is made up primarily of poorer, working class and lower middle class students who are the first in their family to go to college. Educational pundits have pointed out the impact of this on the level of college preparation -- a large percentage of these new students were shunted by their high school advisers into non-college preparatory tracks or classes. They did not take the mathematics, science or even English, history, etc. usually taken by college bound secondary students. Pundits have also made much about the lack of monetary resources of these students, and the high percentage of them that have jobs (all of these things have been discussed extensively in The Chronicle of Higher Education in recent weeks and over the last few years).

One thing that has not been discussed at all, that is painfully obvious among our poorer and working class student body at my Kentucky community college, is the impact of poor health and health care problems on students. Our students themselves have a very high level of health problems, including diabetes and its complications, heart disease, other obesity related conditions, back problems, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and a frighteningly high level of cancer for a relatively young population. As many health problems as my students have, their families -- spouses, parents, grandparents, mothers- and fathers-in-law, siblings, aunts and uncles, have even more. Because in lower income communities, people are highly dependent on family and kin for aid during crises, students often are primary care-takers for ill family members, providing emotional support, transportation, and nursing care at home or in the hospital. [These days with nursing staffs stretched so thinly -- especially in poor rural areas like this -- some one needs to be present in the hospital with a patient to insure proper nursing care.]

This semester I had one student providing physical, household, medical/nursing, and emotional support for her mother with cancer and her mother-in-law with congestive heart failure (the mother-in-law died just before the end of term). An other student spent weeks in the nearest research hospital (3 hours away from her home) providing support for her long term partner who was dying, and then came home to her own diagnosis of heart disease and need for heart surgery. At least a dozen other students in my classes (I only teach about 75 students a semester) had serious health issues for themselves or family members this term, and this was not an unusual semester.

All these forms of illness have a higher incidence among lower income and working class populations. On top of that, are the burdens imposed by lack of good health coverage. Many of them have the additional struggle of having to worry about mounting medical bills that they may never be able to pay off. If they have assistance from Medicaid or from the local public health department, they often have very little control over the times of appointments and have to invest more time than some one with insurance would have to invest.

Just this week as I was getting my mammogram I overheard the following situation -- a woman with a suspicious lump had been referred by the public health department to a private physician to order a diagnostic mammogram and had authorized payment for that mammogram. The physician however, had decided that an ultrasound would provide him with more information and wrote an order for an ultrasound. The woman showed up at the radiography department for her appointment, only to be told that she would have to return to the public health department, so that they could write a new authorization for payment for the ultrasound, and then go back to the physicians office for a new order to go with it, and have to reschedule the mammogram for a day later in the week. It was obvious from the conversation that her husband who accompanied her, had taken off from work and was losing pay, and would have to take off yet another day later in the week to accompany her for the second go-round.

Poor health and poor health care are huge obstacles to successful college completion for lower income and working class students.

electronic textbooks and textbook costs

College textbook costs have been skyrocketing in the past decade. As a professor who has worked diligently to find the lowest cost books possible, often forgoing textbooks to use quality trade books (at $14 and $15 dollars a piece) in upper level courses, I had not really understood why students were complaining so much about textbook prices. Then I had to foot the bill for my husband's textbooks this semester -- $600 for two classes (anatomy and developmental psychology). No wonder students are complaining, that's simply outrageous.

Textbook companies have been trying to encourage the use of electronic texts, touting them as a solution to the rising cost of textbooks. The use of electronic versions of textbooks in on-line classes has caught on rapidly, and many colleges, such as Northwest Missouri, are experimenting with the use of portable electronic text readers such as Kindle (from Amazon.com) and the Sony PRS-505 e-reader.

There are a number of good arguments in favor of electronic texts (such as the "save the trees" argument), and a number of good arguments against electronic texts (they don't really fit the way students study - jumping from one page to another 20 pages away and back again). But the primary argument in favor of electronic texts -- that they will save students money -- just does not hold water.

Let's begin with the cost of the readers. The Kindle DX (the larger format Kindle suitable for use in reading large format college textbooks like anatomy and development psychology) is $489 plus tax and shipping. Smaller Kindle readers are $279, while the Sony PRS-505 e-reader (same dimensions as the smaller Kindle reader) are $299.

Second there is the terms and conditions under which students rent textbooks -- yes, RENT not buy. My husband's hardback traditional copy of Anatomy and Physiology, 5th Edition by Saladin cost $200 from the college bookstore. It would cost $98.50 from CourseSmart.com (one of the lower cost etextbook sellers). However, for this fifty percent cost reduction, the student only rents the book for 360 days. That's not even a full year. Many e-textbooks rental period is for 180 days or less. At the end of the rental period the textbook becomes inaccessible.

Most of the students taking Anatomy and Physiology (like my husband), are planning to take the second part of the course which uses the same book. If they can fit the two parts of the course into two sequential semesters, the 360 day subscription might be sufficient to get them through two semesters. But should something interfere with taking the classes sequentially, they would have to re-purchase the electronic text to have it available for the second semester. That means they have to pay $98.50 TWICE to rent the same book. Now there is no price advantage to the electronic version at all.

At our college, most students taking Anatomy and Physiology are also doing so as preliminary to entering an allied health field (nursing, respiratory therapy, radiography, and physical therapy are the fields at my college). Students going into these fields frequently keep their anatomy textbooks to use for reference while pursing their career courses. Electronic textbooks cannot be "kept" -- they expire in 360 (or 180) days.

Those students who do not keep their texts for reference almost always sell them. While the payback on selling textbooks is not 50 percent of the cost, it still does lessen the overall cost. eTextbooks cannot easily or readily be sold to others. Electronic texts on readers like Kindle and the Sony PRS-505 e-reader cannot be transferred from the device. Electronic text that are purchased on-line can be viewed from many machines, but what student with any sense would want to purchase a rental agreement that could make the book inaccessible before the course is over (or even before the course has barely begun).

This last fact (the inability to sell your electronic book) leads inexorably to the most important way in which a shift to electronic textbooks would negatively impact the overall cost of college textbooks -- the entire supply of used textbooks, that many students depend upon purchasing to reduce their costs, would dry up. All students would have to buy "new" in an all electronic textbook world.

Since all students would be buying "new" textbooks, textbook publishers would no longer have an incentive to come out with new editions every two years. This practice is almost entirely driven by the desire to limit the sales of used books which cut into textbook publishers profits.

Textbook publishers will have a steadier, more reliable stream of revenue (no competition from the used book sellers), and substantially lower costs. Publishers won't have to pay faculty to write new editions as often, they will eliminate many resource costs (paper, ink, presses) and transportation costs. While this may prevent textbook costs from rising quite as quickly, chances are, businesses being what businesses are, most of the publishers' savings will become publishers' profits rather than student savings.

Without all that troublesome knowledge

It is the end of the semester, the final day, final deadline for all written work. One of my students, handed me an entire semesters worth of work -- six essays on topics from as long ago as August -- today. Unlike some faculty, I do accept late work, but I do penalize it, on the earliest essays she will lose at least 50 percent of the points as a late penalty. This isn't particularly unusual. Every semester I have a few students who do this, wait until the last few days of the semester and turn in a pile of essays.

This student's essays were well written, no problems with grammar, sentence structure, spelling or punctuation. They were neat (although hand written which is unusual in this day and age). They were original, no plagiarism -- for which I was deeply grateful. All too often the student who waits until the last day to turn in the semesters work, hopes to slide past you with egregiously plagiarized work, copied in large part (or in whole) from some Internet site. [Somehow they never seem to realize that if they could find the information, so can I]. What disturbed me about these essays, was something, unfortunately, not unique to this student -- there was no evidence in the essays that she had even opened, much less read, any of the assigned readings, or learned anything at all from the course materials. Instead she held forth on her personal opinions about American society, opinions that she'd held before she entered my classroom, and which were no more informed today, after 16 weeks by the facts and research, than they had been when she started the class.

One of the problems with our college students (and one that is fairly wide spread today) is that a larger and larger percentage of the students attending community and lower level state colleges do not actually want a college education (and are not prepared for it in any case). What they want is a good job that will pay a living wage. They have no interest in learning, no thirst for knowledge. In fact, many of them actively resist learning anything new, especially things that might challenge their most precious prejudices and preconceptions. But they have been told (over and over from many sources) that if they want to decent job they have to get a college degree.

So they do want credit for classes and they'd prefer A's over B's and B's over C's -- although they don't want to have to learn anything to get those grades, they want me to give them a grade for spouting back what they already knew when they walked into the classroom. [Note math teachers and sciences teachers do not have this particular problem, because students realize they don't know anything about math and science when they walk into the class -- the problem math and science teachers face is students who want good grades for "trying" regardless of whether or not they actually learn anything.

The source of the problem lies in our economic system which bit by bit has stripped away most of the jobs (manufacturing, basic materials fabrication) that used to exist that would provide a decent, living wage for someone with a high school diploma (or less). We've sent those jobs to other countries (where a living wage is a lot less, and therefore profits are higher), or we've replaced live workers altogether with robots and computerized, programmable technology.

My students are right; to get a decent job that will pay a living wage today, generally does require at least a two year degree, if not a bachelor's degree or more. They just want to get the degrees, as my husband likes to say "without all that troublesome knowledge."

roots of anti-intellectualism in recent years

In the wake of this November's election of Barack Obama, dozens of media commentators have heralded this as a welcome respite in the anti-intellectualism that has dominated American society and American politics for the past thirty years.

One media pundit (sorry I can't remember who) has said that Obama, unlike other presidents of the last forty years is "openly intellectual." Sure Clinton was a scholar during his college years, but he down played his scholarly background behind a folksy southern persona, leading voters to think that he just might be a "red-neck." [By the way, if Jeff Foxworthy is right, I too just might be a red-neck, since the instructions on how to reach my house include "and then you turn off the paved road" and my house originally came with wheels].

It is tempting to say that the roots of anti-intellectualism in American politics come from the simple lack of brainpower of the common man (or woman). They aren't so smart so they mistrust anyone who is openly interested in the life of the mind and intellectual ideas. Given that Obama, "openly intellectual" as he is, garnered the largest percentage and larger number of the popular vote in recent history, suggests that such a simple explanation is not sufficient. Perhaps that is the motivation of a few individuals here and there, but it doesn't help to account for the way in which anti-intellectualism is structured into our society, especially into our educational system. Also it doesn't explain why Republicans candidates and voters are more likely to exude contempt of intellectual accomplishment even more than Democrats do.

The key to understanding anti-intellectualism is found in our economic system and its current troubles. It is clear, beyond doubt, that our economy depends upon people buying things. When consumer confidence goes down, and people cut back on their purchases, our economy tanks. Regardless of all the sanctimonious sermons about people spending more than they earn, and going into credit card debt, the reality is, that our economy has been built on people spending beyond their means.

In troubled times like these, the rational choice for individuals is to save their money and not spend it, but what makes sense for individuals is exactly opposite what is needed to recharge the economy. Certainly there are economic systems that do exist and have existed that do not rest on consumerism and credit, but ours is not one of them.

When the health of the economy depends upon ordinary people spending and consuming larger and larger quantities of material goods, society must provide incentives to make people desire to spend beyond their means. One important tool in doing this is to attach cultural and social values to material things. Advertising is one means of doing this. Through advertising values of family, success, achievement, sexiness, love, and many others, are attached to material products.

More than a hundred years ago, Thorsten Veblen coined the term "conspicuous consumption" to describe the role of consumption in establishing status. The only thing that has changed since Veblen's time is that the use of consumption of luxury goods has been pushed further and further down the income scale. As a result, even low income teenagers will pay $36-$46 dollars for an Abercrombie & Fitch logo t-shirt, rather than $4-$6 for a similar quality blank t-shirt at Walmart. Where the wealthy rely on their peers knowledge of designers style (if you couldn't recognize a Chanel suit, a Lily Pulitzer frock, or an Dior gown, on sight your opinion hardly mattered), lower middle class and working class young people rely on large graphics of "high class" names spread across their chests, backs and down their arms.

When consumption is the bedrock of the economy, and appeals to status are crucial to encouraging continual consumption, there is little room to tolerate alternative, non-consumption based sources of status. Intellectual, creative and artistic pursuits -- except to the degree that they represent monetary exchange -- need to be actively discouraged since they can distract people away from consumption.

Degrees are fine, especially if they come from expensive schools, its knowledge and thinking that are viewed as bothersome. About fourteen years ago, the commencement speaker at the public four year college where I was then employed was a politically appointed state bureaucrat in a Republican administration. He congratulated the graduates on receiving their degrees, and then offered himself as an example of someone who had managed to get a college degree "without letting college change" him, or his beliefs and opinions in any way. This young Republican bureaucrat was proud of the fact that he had come through four years of college unscared by any troublesome knowledge that would undermine in any way the prejudices and attitudes with which he had entered college.

Similarly, art that commands high sale prices is fine, but art for art's sake is not. Negative attitudes toward the National Endowment for the Arts, and the artists that it supports demonstrate this latter view. Conservatives consider the only good art is that which has commercial value. The only artistic value is the value of the market place.

The ordinary individual who expresses distrust, fear and contempt for intellectualism or artistic creativity, is not thinking about promoting consumerism, but there are those in positions of leadership and influence, in government and the media, who are consciously undermining non-commercial sources of status and life satisfaction such as intellectual and artistic endeavor.

restructuring the economy

Current U.S. Department of Labor figures show that in July 2008, the number of involuntary part-time workers (in jobs formerly full-time but cut to part time due to "Slack work or business conditions") was 4,174,000 compared to only 2,693,000 one year ago (July 2007). While the change from 2007 to 2008 was unusually large, it is part of a longer historical trend to a greater reliance on part-time and temporary workers across the economy.

The trend to greater reliance on part-time workers is one for which high education has unfortunately been in the forefront. Universities, colleges and community colleges have shifted more and more of their teaching responsibilities to adjunct faculty, who teach part-time, have few if any benefits, who frequently are given no office space and who have little contact with students other than in the classroom. Community College's in particular have grown more and more dependent on part-time adjunct faculty. Research by Grace Banachowski shows the trend:

According to Lombardi (1992), part-time faculty constituted 38.5% of the instructors in 698 junior colleges in 1962. This number increased moderately to 40% in 1971, and three years later grew to nearly 50%. By 1980, nearly 60% of the faculty in two-year colleges were employed part-time, and 65% in 1993 (National Center for Education Statistics in American Association of Community Colleges, 1995).

As community colleges deal more and more often with under prepared students needed extensive developmental (or as they used to be called remedial) course work to be ready for college work, the trend towards relying on adjunct faculty is troubling.

Yesterday (August 7) was the annual first meeting of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) Faculty Senate. Representatives from the 13 college districts around Kentucky gathered at the KCTCS offices in Versailles, Kentucky. At the end of the morning general sessions there was an unscheduled appearance by the KCTCS president Michael McCall. McCall offered general remarks of encouragement and optimism for the upcoming academic year, then opened the floor for questions.

The first question from the assembled faculty and academic deans dealt with the rising percentage of instruction being done at KCTCS college's by part-time adjunct instructors. The speaker raised concerns about the impact this was having on the quality of instruction. McCall's response was vague and general, full of platitudes about serving students and maintaining quality. McCall ended his response with a suggestion that individual colleges within the system would need to "examine" the balance between full-time and part-time instruction. [Notice this says nothing about changing the balance, or reversing the trends, only "examining" the balance.]

The next question Dr. McCall fielded was about on-line instruction and the new KCTCS Virtual Learning Initiative (VLI). The VLI is working to translate several KCTCS degree programs into a format in which all courses are offered in self-guided modules. Each course would be divided into smaller units, that could be taken in a week or two. Entry into modules would be 7 days a week, 365 days of the year, on demand from students. Because courses in the VLI program are detached from the traditional semester structure, and offered for fractional credit, all instruction for the program will be done by part-time instructors. Even full-time faculty who decide to participate as instructors will do so as overloads to their normal loads, but the plan is that most of the staffing will be done by new, part-time instructors, who will be paid on a per student per credit basis.

McCall's response to the question made it clear that he believes that this new model of on-demand education should replace all other forms of education in the KCTCS system. While he noted that we would have to wait to see how successful it the Virtual Learning Initiative was, he expressed the belief that it would be successful and that this model was preferable to the traditional model based on semesters.

Given McCall's response to this second question on the Virtual Learning Initiative, it is likely that when he said that KCTCS college's should "examine" the balance of full-time to part-time instruction, he really meant that they should be thinking in terms of moving entirely to part-time instruction!

LeapFrog gone wrong

This should be filed under "did they really do that?" category. I'm not sure what bothers me most about LeapFrog's latest television advertisement for their TAG reading system: the ad itself or the possibility that there are actually parents out there who would be swayed by the commercial.

The commercial shows an adult standing next to a child sized table with two books and a line of children waiting to have access to one of the books. The adult attempts to interest the first child in line, a boy, about 7 years old in one of the books, a beautifully illustrated book on nature. The most prominent illustration is a gorgeous, realistic, detailed painting of a frog. The book is clearly a book about nature and animals. The child contemptuously turns his back on that book, in preference for the second book, illustrated with the crude, primary colored Sponge Bob characters because this book comes with the "magic" TAG stylus that will read the words in the book out loud to the child. The thrust of the advertisement is to convince parents to buy the "magic" book and stylus (the TAG system) for their kids.

I find this commercial disturbing. First, I am disturbed that anyone would wish to encourage children to prefer a simplistic book with crude illustrations of a commercial cartoon characters over a beautiful, artistic, realistically illustrated and scientifically informative book. Second, the more I think about what the TAG system does, the more I suspect that it discourages learning to read on ones own.

I don't doubt that the TAG system and other technology like it helps children with word recognition. The child can see the word and hear it pronounced. There are also interactive games in many of the books, in which an adult voice asks the child to touch a specific word, and thus promote word recognition. But the development of reading skill is involves far more than word recognition.

The TAG system is marketed for the age range from 4 years to 8 years. While perhaps appropriate for 4 year old, the TAG system seems woefully out of touch with what 8 year old should be doing with reading -- devouring entire books on their own. The television commercial features children at the upper end of this age range, rather than the lower end of the range.

I think about how I became interested in reading and developed proficiency. My parents, especially my mother, selected books from the library to read out loud. Some of the books I remember her choosing include Beverly Cleary's Henry, Ramona and Beezus stories, Travers' Mary Poppins series, Heinlein's Red Planet, Baum's Oz books (our favorites were the less familiar books, like Ozma of Oz), and many others. My mother would read only one or two chapters each night. While this was fine when I was 4 or 5, as I got older, I became impatient to know more. My mother neither blocked nor encouraged me, but simply had the books available in the house, where I could find them on my own during the daytime, to read ahead. By the time I was 8 years old, I was consuming entire books on my own, regardless of whether they were "age appropriate" or not. For example, I read the entirety of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women the summer between second and third grade, when I was 8 years old. This was followed in short order by The Five Little Peppers and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm as well as other young people's classics.

The parent who reads to the child a book that is interesting, but just at the upper edge of the child's reading ability, encourages a curiosity and models the skill of reading. By failing to satisfy fully the child's desire to hear more of the story, and being unavailable to read out loud every time the child is interested, parents create a situation in which children must must stretch themselves to satisfy their craving for more story.

So I wonder what happens, when the child can satisfy that desire to hear more of the story read to them at any time? If they don't have to wait for mom or dad to sit down and read to them, but can use their TAG stylus, what impetus is there for them to read on their own. Moreover, the library of books developed for use with TAG are, at this point, focused on popular cartoon characters with simplistic vocabulary and stories. Books that feature Sponge Bob, Disney's Little Mermaid, the Cars from the animated feature film, Kung Fu and Diego from TV dominate the book line up. There is one classic story (the Little Engine Who Could). I must admit that Walter the Farting dog is quite entertaining, and what child (or adult) could resist being able to produce fart noises from a book! But none of these picture books provide the challenge to stretch and learn for an eight year old.

Most of my community college students can read a sentence, or a short paragraph, and they can look for answers to question that are specific, factual, and phrased in exactly the same vocabulary as the text. But few can generalize or summarize from readings longer than a page or two, and are likely to give you a blank stare if you ask them "what is the book about?" I can't help but fear that technologies like LeapFrog's TAG will produce more rather than fewer poor readers.

playing with numbers

I teach statistics. I'm a sociologist, but I'm also sort of a math geek -- always have been. That's not what people expect when they think about social scientists.

The other day when I was trying to find something to do to avoid working on fixing all the dates in my on-line class (the most truly boring aspect of teaching on-line), I thought of something I've been meaning to do for years: getting data on electricity use and temperature for my classes to learn about the difference between an association between two variables and a correlation between them.

What I wanted was a spreadsheet with a column for how many kilowatt hours we have used every month for the past few years and a column for the average temperature for our region for each month for the same period. The kilowatt hours used is easy -- the utility company prints the last 12 months of actual kilowatt usage on each bill. So I just had to locate the bills for January in the past several years. Getting the average monthly temperature was a little trickier. But the College of Agriculture at the University of Kentucky has growing season data that provides monthly averages. Some months the information is more detailed and actually breaks down the data by climate zone, but since that was only available half the time (and because I saw little difference between the overall averages for Kentucky and this region) I went with the mean temperature for the state of Kentucky.

I actually took two days to gather the temperature data, since I had to read through separate narrative descriptions for each year and each month to ferret out the relevant data. Once I had all data for the past three years, I created a scatter plot of the points. It didn't look right. There was slight, about r = -.40 linear relationship between the two data sets, where there should have been a strong curvilinear relationship. Then, duh, it hit me. The temperatures were for the correct month, but the electricity usage was off by one month -- one gets the bill for May usage in June not May. So I moved the entire column of figures up by one month, and viola! Here's what the scatter plot looks like:

Exactly as one would expect. Because we don't have whole house air conditioning (only in two rooms, and we only use fans at night) the upturn for warmer months is much less than one would expect in a home with a heat pump.

Now I have great data for my statistics class to play with -- only trouble no one is enrolled for statistics this fall. Enrollments in all our classes are way down, probably due to issues with the economy. Gas prices are up here as elsewhere, as are food prices, and tuition prices are up, too; but unlike elsewhere in the nation, employment in the coal industry is up. Coal companies are hiring, therefore so are other types of businesses in the region. Young people faced with rising costs and better employment opportunities. They choose work over school, and the wives of working husbands, stay home from school to reduce gas costs. Bad news for community colleges.

Ideas worth spreading

Thanks to a post by John Hodgman, I was introduced yesterday to TED.com. TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an organization that focuses on finding new, inspiring, cutting edge ideas in science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world, as well as technology, entertainment and design and once found spreading those ideas freely as widely as possible. So there are many videos on this site, that are free for download. This is a great resource for educators.

How should sociology be taught?

I feel as if I have spent the last few days being battered from all sides by the "nattering nabobs of negativity" (credit to William Safire for the quote -- uttered publicly by Spiro T. Agnew).

I don't really have any idea what a nabob is. N.A.B.O.B. is the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters; another definition I found on-line is "nabob -- a wealthy man (especially one who made his fortune in the Orient)." Certainly ole Spiro T. didn't mean either of these; if memory serves he was complaining about the "liberal" media who was criticizing the Nixon administration.

Actually I can't really say that the folks nattering negatively at me these last few days are "nabobs" in any sense -- what they are is sociologists, and as sociologists they have valid concerns about plans by the Kentucky Community and Technical College system to carve up Introductory Sociology into "bite sized" modules of academic content.

David Nickell, sociologist at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, said:

"as a teacher who has spent years trying to get students to think in terms of larger social systems and structures, I’m very concerned about trying to treat the subject matter as a collection of discrete and isolatable [sic] parts. For instance, how can you really get at the concepts of stratification, inequality, deviance—or any of those core components—without first having an understanding of the role culture plays in shaping our social landscape? How can you cover culture without addressing socialization? Or socialization without stratification, inequality and deviance?
So, my question is how the fractionalization can be handled without losing the sense that the fractions are components within a larger whole. How do you take pieces from a hermeneutic system and not lose their essence?"

Leon Lane Jr., sociologist at Bluegrass Community and Technical College, followed up David's comment with the following:

"Introduction to Sociology is about helping students see the connections between social institutions and how this impacts their life. As such it should be taught as a single unit so they can see that human social life is about individuals, living in societies consisting of interrelated social institutions, made possible and governed by culture they learned through the process of socialization. If you separate it out into components then you lose the most important learning outcome of this class."

While I share David and Leon's view that sociology is at it's heart about the inter-connectivity of all social life, about the hermeneutic between individual, social group and society; I think those are principles that can be learned (or taught) in small pieces, as well as large chunks. David and Leon talk about the necessity of a "whole" course in Introductory Sociology to make the point of these interconnections. But what is a "whole" introductory sociology course?

I don't know any two sociologists who include all the same topics in their introductory course, or include them in the same order, or with the same emphasis. I have a whole unit on "the family," my husband John, also a sociologist does not (of course he talks about the family in other ways). Some sociologists have a special unit on deviance and crime, I don't; although deviance and crime are important themes in several other topics that I do cover (such as culture, socialization, and inequality). I always devote a day or two just to the topic of poverty; for other sociologist, this is a minor topic within the discussion of inequality in general. Some sociologists devote entire units to religion, medicine, and sport, others leave integrate some elements of those topics into others, or leave them out entirely.

There is no authority in sociology that dictates absolutely what must go into an introductory sociology class. Sociology lacks a single unifying paradigm, but is rather a multi-paradigmatic discipline. And those that teach sociology are quite adamant that they do not want some one else telling them what should and should not be included in their introductory sociology course.

And what's so magical about a 15 week (or 16 or 14 week) semester in teaching introductory sociology? I know at least one 4 year liberal arts college (Oberlin) where for many years "introduction to sociology" was a two credit course for half a semester, paired with a second two credit course of the student's choosing on one of the areas of specialization within sociology. On the other hand, the Virginia Community College system considers "introduction to sociology" to be two 3-credit courses that cover two semesters. As sociologists we should recognize that the semester and the "introductory sociology" course that we are accustomed to teaching are cultural products of a particular moment/place in human history, cultural products which apparently have become reified, or some might say "calcified."

Taking a traditional semester long sociology course, and breaking it into smaller learning units, does not automatically undermine the goals of helping students understand "the complex and perspectival nature of human situatedness." [That's my husband John's favorite quote from some post-modern theorist in religious studies.]

One of the very best introductory sociology "texts," that does everything an introductory course in sociology ought to, was a tiny little book (5" X 8" and only 160 pages) called The Forest For the Trees by Allan Johnson. Unfortunately it has long been out of print (because it didn't have the big profit margin that 500 page glossy textbooks do). I have yet to find any other source, of any length that did as good a job of getting across the "holism" and "connectedness" of sociology. It was a book that students could read in one week, and really grasp what sociology was truly about. It didn't cover everything in sociology, but it got key points across, far better than any traditional textbook. If one 160 page small paperback book can do all that, why can't two or three week units of sociology do the same thing -- if they are crafted with care and understanding?

You see, I am stuck with the task of creating a modular version of introductory sociology. It's not a task I asked for, it's not a task I particularly relish. I didn't sign a contract, but I agreed to do it and I think a person's word ought to mean something. I agreed to do it as a favor to my college's president, and because I care deeply about the same issues that David and Leon care about. I want to make sure that any sociology course offered by Kentucky Community and Technical Colleges provides students with a quality opportunity to learn about sociology.

plague of plagiarism

I just put an 8 week on-line sociology class to rest; entered the grades and said farewell. I was, up until the very last moment, about to have an all time record for on-line classes. For the first time since I began teaching on-line classes in 2000, I was about to have a class in which everyone who had not officially withdrawn actually completed the entire course with a passing grade. Some of those grades were going to be D's, but they were still going to pass. Normally there are several students who neither complete the course nor take the time to formally withdraw and thus end up with failing grades -- an "E" in our system.

Unfortunately, when I got to the very last student (both alphabetically and because she had waited until the last day of class to turn all her papers for the whole eight weeks), all the work she turned in was plagiarized. Some were papers taken in their entirety from one of the free on-line paper mills, other she apparantly did the work of hunting down paragraphs to copy from the internet herself. Plagiarism is always upsetting and disruptive, but this coming as it did at the last minute to ruin what would otherwise have been a class for the record book, was crushing.

I have less plagiarism in my classes since I got seriously tough on it, and created ways of getting the message across to students at the beginning of the class (borrowed some great "For Better For Worse" cartoon strips from Lynn Johnston -- with references of course) that drive home the point. But even with all the warnings, students still do it. I don't remember have these problems when I first began teaching 30 years ago.

As a sociologist I have to wonder, is plagiarism more common today or is it just easier for teachers to check for it? If it is more common (which I suspect but cannot prove) why is it?

For a time I thought that what I perceived as an increased incidence of plagiarism was only because the types of students that I taught had changed. I began teaching at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and then moved on to the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, now I teach at a community college, in a poor, rural area. Was the increase plagiarism due to my students having poorer preparation and poorer college skills? Since discovering the Rate Your Students blog, I realize that the problem of plagiarism goes well beyond my little corner of academia.

So if, as I believe (but cannot prove), plagiarism has increased, the question is why? I know lots of people who would jump to "declining values" as their first response. That answer reminds me of a quote from sociologist Abraham Kaplan "We do not explain why there is a lion in the garden by pointing out that in fact there are two of them in there." If values have changed what caused them to change? Values are a cultural phenomenon, they are the result of social processes, and do not float down from the ether. For there to have been widespread changes in values, there have to be widespread changes in society that produce those value changes.

What has changed? One thing that has changed is opportunity. The technology of computers and the Internet has certainly made plagiarism far easier than it was in my college days. I would liken it to changing the channel on the TV -- from the time I was 5 until I was 34, when I wanted to change the channel on the TV I got up, walked across the room and turned a nob to change the channel. I didn't change channels often, and used the TV Guide to look up what I might watch before changing channels. Then I got a remote control, and overnight I became a channel surfer, and changed my viewing habits just like that. My values and attitudes about television viewing changed after the fact, as a result of access to a new technology.

Something else that has changed is that a much higher percentage of high school students (and the population in general) are going to college, than did when I went to college. While the increased access to college has benefited many people who want to go to college who might have been left out forty or fifty years ago, it has also meant that many people who aren't really interested in what colleges offer (academic learning) are nonetheless attending college. They are attending college because that is what the job market demands. As a society we have lost alternative career paths -- even though there are shortages in fields that don't really need college (electricians, plumbers, construction, repair work). When economic necessity is forcing you to get a diploma, but you don't care for the activities that are required to get that diploma, short cuts become appealing.

These are just two ideas I've had about the sources of plagiarism. I think that there are more things, and I'd like to hear other people's thoughts.

How tech savvy are today's college students?

When I go to pedagogically oriented conferences or workshops, or participate in some of my community college system's work groups I frequently hear claims that today's young people are technologically savvy, and that it is necessary for us (teachers) to engage them through technology or lose their attention. I read (in on-line sources) how today's college students spend all their time developing their "Face Book" or "My Space" pages and instant message with friends, and play computer games.

Yet when I get in the classroom, I find that many of my students (even the young ones) sit blankly in front of the computer, unable to negotiate key government websites (Census Bureau, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics) to find the answers to relatively simple factual questions. When I deal with my on-line students, I find that many of them have no clue (even with detailed instructions) how to navigate through the course, and move from one activity to another. [My classes have been repeatedly vetted for clarity of instructions and navigation, even netting me a statewide award for excellence in on-line instruction].

Most of my students have heard of "Face Book" but have never used it, and prefer their cell phones to instant messaging, being far more comfortable with verbal over written communication. All the cute abbreviations of instant messaging and texting seem to bewilder many of them; when some of them post to discussion boards their writing degenerates into broken English, not computer speak. When using the computer for class work, they prefer to learn the bare minimum necessary to use the computer as a tool, and have no interest in exploring short cuts and new techniques. When they run into new situations or problems they give up rather than problem solve. Teach them to use one version of a piece of software, and then give them a slightly newer version, and many of them freeze up.

So today's Chronicle of Higher Education had a blog entry The Myth of the Techno-Wizard Freshman really caught my eye. I thought perhaps some one had finally documented my experience. The article, while interesting, dealt with something different than technological savvy -- it dealt with information processing skills. The research is very interesting [follow the links in the article above] demonstrating that a high percentage of today's college freshman do not know how to evaluate the quality of information, determine the relevance of information, or how to define or narrow a search for information. These are indeed important skills that they should have, but they are not really "tech" skills, but rather old fashioned intellectual skills. Yes the computer is the tool being used, but the same skills were necessary when I was in college looking for information in magazines, newspapers, books, and journals, using printed indexes and reference sources.

I'd really like to see some one do a real survey of technical skills, to find out if our college freshman really are as technically savvy as pundits believe, and to see if such skills exhibit the social class divide that I strongly suspect given my experiences at a community college.

Shortage of Rheumatologists

In December 2006, just before New Years, my primary care physician ordered up some blood tests for me. I seemed to be in pain all the time, all my joints hurt, and I was exhausted everyday. I'd get home from work at 6:00 PM and just sit in the car for another twenty minutes trying to summon up the energy to walk into the house. Right after New Years she called me with the results. The tests indicated the possibility of rheumatoid arthritis. Since the blood tests for RA are not definitive, I would need to see a rheumatologist for a history and physical exam. That's when I learned that the closest rheumatologist was a 1 hour drive away (the closest!!) and that no matter how far I was willing to drive it would take at least three months before I could get an appointment. In fact, it turned out to be four months. Whenever I talked to anyone about it, I would joke that there must be a shortage of rheumatologists, and that if they knew anyone in medical school they ought to pass on the word.

I finally got my appointment -- in April -- and was diagnosed as being in the early stages of rheumatoid arthritis, and began medication. This past week I had my second follow-up visit, and while I was waiting in the waiting room (so aptly named), I picked up a copy of Arthritis Today Magazine put out by the Arthritis Foundation. The issue was only a few months old, and the cover story was "The Rheumatologist Shortage". It was one of those "ah-ha!" moments when I find the data to support one of my gut feelings or pet theories.

The story of the rheumatologist shortage, places in bold relief some of the problems inherent in our patchwork private/public/profit/non-profit medical care system in the United States.

Rheumatology is a specialty whose number of practicianers are steadily declining, and whose number of patients are steadily increasing. According to the article: "Currently, 46 million people have had a doctor tell them they have a form of arthritis, such as osteoarthritis (OA) or RA, or a related condition, such as lupus, gout or fibromyalgia. Within 25 years, as the over-60 population peaks, that number is expected to reach 67 million." On the supply side, the article states: "The ACR [American College of Rheumatology] Workforce Study estimates about half of practicing rheumatologists will retire within just eight years, and that by 2025 there will be a shortage of 2,600 rheumatologists in the U.S."

There have been enormous strides in the development of new medicines for rheumatoid arthritis -- you've probably seen the ads on television for Humira or Enebrel or Remicade. The problem, there are not enough rheumatologists available to get these drugs to the people who need them. It doesn't matter how wonderful the treatments are, if there is no one available qualified to prescribe the treatment.

So why is there this shortage? You'd think with such high demand, there'd be people clamouring to go into the field. There are several interacting causes, discussed in "The Rheumatologist Shortage". After completing medical school, the physician aspiring to the field of rheumatology must spend three years as an internal medicine resident and then another two or three years completing a fellowship in the sub specialty of rheumatology. This is a some what longer period of training that some other specialties, although there are others that are more popular that take more years. The biggest catch is the fellowship requirement. First there has to be a full-time faculty member in that specialty to supervise the fellowship, and with declining numbers of rheumatologists these are harder to find. Second, there has to be funding for the fellowship, funding that pays for the salary and benefits of the fellow -- who after all has to have something to live on while he or she is working. There's a shortage of funding for rheumatology fellowships. Arthritis after all does not have the cachet of some other diseases, and has not attracted as much attention or fund raising.

"According to the 2005-2006 ACR study, 395 fellowships were available, but only 366 were filled." Some of the unfilled fellowship slots remained unfilled because there was no money to pay the fellows. Some remained unfilled for the lack of a qualified supervising faculty member. And some remained unfilled because rheumatology, despite its slightly longer training period, is lower paying that other internal medicine specialties. Annual salaries for rheumatologists are about 60 percent of the salaries of specialists in such fields as gastroenterology and general cardiology. When the average physician is burdened with more than $150,000 of debt for his/her education, significant salary differences can be influential in choosing specialties.

In our current medical care system long-term chronic conditions (which require careful monitoring by a physician, but no surgical procedures or other types of treatments other than medication) receive much lower reimbursements from private insurance companies and federal government programs. When the course of rheumatoid arthritis does require surgical intervention (as it often does) a surgeon (not the rheumatologist) reaps the reward of the higher insurance payout. The perversity of this system is that a good job by a rheumatologists in early diagnosis, careful monitoring and supervised drug therapy can make surgery (and its high cost to insurance companies and government) unnecessary.

The shortage of rheumatologists is merely an inconvenience today, it is likely to become a crisis within twenty years, unless something changes in the funding and availability of fellowships and the relative pay for rheumatology practitioners.

What Purpose Do Grades Serve?

What is the purpose or function of grades in college? By extension, what is the purpose of college?

Only those hiding out in a cave in some very remote place, without television, radio, newspaper, or Internet for the last decade have not heard about "grade inflation." Indeed discussion of grade inflation at public colleges and universities has been floating about for more than twenty years. However, in the last five years, concerns about grade inflation have begun to surface at elite institutions.

Princeton University, concerned about grade inflation because between 2001-2004 47 percent of undergraduate grades were A's, issued a policy establishing "a common grading standard" and limiting "the proportion of A grades (including A+, A, and A-) to 35 percent in every undergraduate course." (The Chronicle of Higher Education's News Blog September 18, 2007).

As an academic I have been listening to the discussion about grade inflation for as long it has been occurring. However, it was not until I read the comments to today's Chronicle News Blog that it dawned on me that the debate had far more to do with different views about the purpose of grading, than it had to do with the toughness or strictness of grading standards.

Those people in academia, and in society at large, who express concern about grade inflation, and applaud efforts like Princeton's to reign in the number of A's, view grades as a sorting mechanism by which those who are most meritorious will be separated from those who are less meritorious. Grades are relational attributes. Grades function to determine who will have the opportunity for access to scarce resources (graduate school slots, top positions in corporations, government appointments). Since the number of top positions in society is limited, the number of A's must be limited, so that it is clear who does and who does not deserve access to those top spots. The good instructor is the one who is best able to differentiate the very best and brightest from the rest of the students.

The other camp in academia, and in society, who are less concerned about grade inflation, and who are opposed to the type of quota system employed by Princeton, view grades as a measure of the acquisition of specified knowledge or mastery of subject matter or skills. Grades to this camps are absolute attributes, determined by levels of performance against an objective scale. Grades function to determine who has mastered the knowledge or skills to entered into a particular occupational field or field of study. The number of persons obtaining mastery is not determined by the number of slots available in the occupational world. The good instructor is the one who is can assist the largest number of students to attain mastery.

But don't take my word for it. Here are portions of some comment posts from The Chronicle's News Blog that clearly illustrate my point.

Supporting Princeton's quota:

"If more than 35% of your students are getting A’s, your standards are too low. In a typical class, perhaps 10-15% of students should get A’s. In an exceptional class, that number may double, but it should never be more than one-third of the class. The primary purpose of grades is to separate students out by performance, and that cannot be done if everyone gets the same grade. [emphasis added]" M. Sundermann

"I’d be suspicious of any instructor or class where the 35% level was consistently exceeded. One would like to assume that an “A” at Princeton is different from / better than and “A” at a less prestigious and less costly university. But that assumes professors take the job of evaluation and assessment of undergraduate performance seriously..." Mike L.

Opposing Princeton's quota:

"What a crock. Princeton students peg the meter on their SAT scores, but evidently the quality of instruction there is so substandard that their faculty can only get 35% of these brilliant young scholars up to the A level. As a parent, I’ll send my kids to a university where they will be inspired to perform at their highest level, and will be graded accordingly, where faculty are not required to punish high achievers because of an artificial percentage." Mike A.

"What do students have to say who were told at the beginning of the course what the “standards” were? It’s my suspicion that the standards are not that precise. Therefore, Princeton has decided on norm-based grading—back to the old curve. So much for mastery learning or competency-based education. [emphasis added] I certainly would not recommend this school to anyone." P. DeWitt

The folks on the side that worry about grade inflation, and push for "higher standards" view discussions of mastery and competence with suspicion. As evidenced by this comment:

"I once talked with and Ed School instructor who was giving virtually all of his students a grad [sic] of A or A-. His justification was “If they master the material, they should get the grade.” Out of politeness I didn’t say the obvious: “If almost everyone can meet the standards, then the standards are a joke.” “Mastery learning” or “Competency-based education” is EdSpeak for low expectations. It is no wonder that grades in Ed Schools are typically a joke." Sven

Setting aside for the moment the possibility that the education faculty member of Sven's acquaintance may have indeed had low expectations, it does not seem implausible to me, as it does to Sven, that the overwhelming majority of college students after more than 12 or 13 years of personal experience in the educational system, are capable of mastering an undergraduate course on the educational system. There are some fields of knowledge and instruction that only a small minority of students could reasonably be expected to attain mastery -- advanced mathematics, neurosurgery, art restoration, cabinet making, are a few that come to mind. But others, such as composition, sociology (my own subject), education, religion, office practices, plumbing, are probably masterable by the majority of those with any interest. [Please no offense is meant to the practicianers of any of these fields!]

However, even in those fields where only a minority might achieve mastery, we often find that access limited to an even smaller number. For example, there is substantial evidence to demonstrate that far more people are capable of success in medical school than are allowed into medical school. The sorting and ranking functions of undergraduate education are very important to limiting access to medical education. Of course, limiting access to training, means a limited supply of physicians, which keeps competition under control and the economic benefits of medical practice high.

So what purpose do grades serve? What purpose should grades serve? Should grades be used to sort and rank people with only a specified number of top positions, preparing people to enter a highly unequal society and economic system in which there are a limited number of top positions? Or should grades be used to acknowledge the acquisition of specified levels of knowledge, skill and competency?

At present in U.S. education, how one answers those questions often reflects where one is in the educational system (and the social stratification system). Community and technical college faculty who are preparing people for skilled working class and technical middle class positions tend to emphasize mastery and competence of objectively defined knowledge and skill levels. Faculty at elite private institutions tend to emphasize the sorting and ranking by comparative merit.

Hijacking the language

David Horowitz, who has made it his life's mission to root out all vestiges of liberalism from American universities, posted an article in FrontPageMagazine.com today. His attack is focused on the University of California at Santa Cruz, for vioilating the “Standing Orders of the Regents,” (passed in September 2005) which states that "political indoctrination and partisan interest" are outside the purview of college curriculum. Horowitz primary evidence that UC Santa Cruz is in violation of this policy is the following statement: “The UCSC faculty offers courses related to social justice -- including broad structural and social changes and community based organizing...”

Silly me, I thought that "social justice" was one of the most broadly based American concept imaginable, with roots in the Declaration of Independence ["all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness"] and the Constitution of the United States ["We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,"]. Seems to me that both of these documents (specifically the passages above) indicate that the concern of our founding fathers was in justice within our social life, or social justice.

I think David Horowitz's article says far more about the partisan, conservative political agenda that he wishes to promote, than it does about partisan politics as USSC.

The future of education?

In one of my on-line classes this semester, one of my students introduced herself (as required) and added the following comment:

I am anxious to get all this behind me and finish my education so that I can be an elementary teacher.

My response?

welcome to the beginning of your education! As some one who will be living in the society that the children you teach make (as workers and citizens) I certainly hope that this is the beginning of your education, even if it is the end of your formal "schooling." First of all, if you are good teacher, you will learn things from your students. Secondly we all hope, for the sake of our future, that you will continue to read and expand your knowledge of our society, economy, politics and culture, so that you can become a wiser and more knowledgeable teacher.

This student's attitude, is by no means unique. I have come in contact with many young people preparing to be elementary school teachers over the past 18 years in central Appalachia, and I would say this attitude typifies at least a third of those that I have met.

I had just finished reading an op-ed piece from yesterday's Lexington Herald-Leader by teacher Roger Guffey (obviously a life-long learner) when I read this student's comment. Guffy has some very sensible things to say about the future of education. Including the not very popular, but quite accurate point, that not all people belong in college, and those that are not interested should not be pushed in that direction. He quite accurately notes the social stigma of blue collar work, desipite society's continuing need for many blue colalr occupations, and the good pay of many of them.

However, as good as all of Guffy's recommendation are, until we can develop elementary school teachers who truly care about life-long learning and education, and do not see it as a burden to be gotten through as quickly and painlessly as possible, we haven't a snow ball's chance in...our world come 2100!!

Education and Economic Justice

My first reaction to Thursday (June 28, 2007) Supreme Court decision on race and education was dismay. It seemed, to a life long leftie like me, to be a horrendous step backward. But over the past few days, as I read articles from various papers around the nation, it occurs to me that this is instead a tremendous opportunity to turn the focus where it really should be -- on issues of social class.

The Christian Science Monitor today noted that many of those concerned about issues of equity in education feel "it would be more practical for districts to shift toward balancing school populations on the basis of factors such as income level."

Cited in the CS Monitor article:

"The socioeconomic approach offers two advantages," says Richard Kahlenberg, author of a new report detailing such plans and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive policy group in Washington. First, districts that have done it most successfully give families a choice of magnet schools with special programs, "so there are incentives for middle-class people to buy into socioeconomic integration," says Mr. Kahlenberg. Second, "as a legal matter, it's clearly fine to use income to distinguish people."

If we are honest about it, the only reason for anyone to be concerned about inequities in education is because education has consequences for the material and economic conditions in which people live. Concerns about racial segregation were never about an abstract access to "knowledge," but rather about practical access to power (political and economic) and the pathways to full economic opportunity.

It is time now to focus on making sure that our schools are integrated by social class, and use things like income, home value, and neighborhood residence to create diversity in the schools. If we have social class diversity, then racial and ethnic diversity will happen as a matter of course.