Accountability and Community Colleges

As often happens, two stories appeared in the press on Friday that are essentially unrelated, but with contrasting elements that reveal something about our times. In this case, it is about the disparate expectations of accountability among public employees.

Mitt Romney -- though in many ways the least public-minded person in the country -- has been a public-sector worker and is seeking an even higher position as a government worker. Yet the "accountability" he and his ilk insist upon for others is something with which he cannot be bothered. He airily dismisses any questioning of his decision to erase most evidence of electronic communications from his term as Massachusetts Governor, and literally to buy the rest.

Meanwhile, "reformers" continue to push so many "accountability" measures on educators that it becomes increasingly difficult for them to educate. Any negative results, however, are assumed to be the fault of the educators, since the reformers themselves are never asked to account for themselves. Today's second story is about the most recent calls to squeeze even more out of the state's community colleges. Boston Mayor Menino suggests that educators -- whose work he cannot begin to understand -- be "taken to task if they don't perform."

Everyone consulted for the story -- which did not include the educators or even the administrators involved, incidentally -- conceded that the community colleges are underfunded and already do quite a lot with quite a little. Massachusetts, after all, is behind nearly all other states in the funding of public higher education -- some years ranking 50th, some years as high as 48th -- and community colleges have received the worst fiscal beatings. Some of the "reforms" suggested are simply ways to make the community colleges more effective at lobbying the legislature. For a legislative leader to insist on such a necessity is to shift the blame from the perpetrator and toward the victim.

Also mentioned in the article is the fact that community colleges have to accept any high school graduates who come their way. These graduates are a nearly pure sample of MCAS victims. That is to say that college readiness of arriving students continues to diminish as teaching-to-the-test becomes pervasive. It being too difficult to hold the promoters of MCAS accountable for their mistakes (and too costly for those receiving those testing fees), accountability is simply moved downstream, to the professors. Professors, incidentally, who teach ridiculous course loads, again because the governor and legislators are not held accountable for their unconscionable neglect of public higher education.

The same meager funding that lengthens the teaching day beyond what is reasonable also shortens the learning day, as students who pay ever-higher fees must work long hours flipping burgers or waiting tables, rather than focusing on their studies. Educators know that time on task is a crucial variable in achievement, but when time on task is reduced because the public has not supported its young learners, it is inevitably the learners and their teachers who are blamed.

Aside from misplacing accountability, those who would reform community colleges make an even more fundamental mistake by failing to understand the dual mission of community colleges. For certain students in certain circumstances, a community college is a place to get prepared for a particular trade or career. For other students in different circumstances, however, it is a place to get prepared for further learning at a four-year institution. For many students, community colleges serve both functions, one for a near future and one for a farther future.

The Boston Foundation should be aware enough of the dynamism of the world economy to realize that an education that is focused too narrowly on certain vocations is not an education for the future. The governor and legislature could more credibly improve community colleges by unshackling K-12 teachers from the MCAS and fairly funding the community colleges so that the teachers could be freer to teach and the learners freer to learn.

An op-ed published in the Globe on Sunday addresses the shortcomings of the "reform" movement from a different angle. University of California Vice Provost Russell Rumberger describes How College Prep is Killing High School, arguing that the emphasis on academic subjects poorly serves the one-third of future workers who will need other skills that were once taught in high school. He cites Thomas Jefferson, who stated in 1818 that "stated that the purpose of public education included giving citizens information for transacting business, the ability to express ideas in writing, and an understanding of duties to neighbors and country."

Rumberger's complaint is not limited to the amount of emphasis on college preparation; he also complains that the simplistic manner in which this has been done is leading to systemic failures for which the reformers are not being held accountable. High-stakes testing is associated with record low rates of graduation and a measurable decline in so-called soft skills -- a crisis, really, in the availability of even minimally prepared workers.

Moreover, all of this misplaced effort is not even achieving its stated objective: Rumberger confirms what those of us who teach at the college level have been seeing: standardized tests are making students less capable of college-level writing and critical, integrative thinking.

Resisting the Education Oligarchy

NOTE: This is no ordinary blog post. It has two action items, a provocative video, and an uplifting radio piece.

Faced with a national education regime that is increasingly hostile to teachers, students, and learning itself, a growing number of parents are pushing back. Among the recent resisters is Ricardo D. Rosa of New Bedford, Massachusetts, who is opting out of state-mandated testing. His letter to the school committee was published in the Washington Post and reads in part:

Any administrator, school committee member, or school functionary still standing before students, teachers, and families touting the virtues of high-stakes testing should be ashamed. -- Ricardo D. Rosa

He is absolutely right, of course. The "reform" movement is a well-funded, bipartisan movement to centralize public education in the United States to a level that is difficult to believe possible in a democracy.

(Note: at the time I wrote this, I do not think I realized who Dr. Rosa was. I now count him and his brother -- also Dr. Rosa -- among my friends and among the educators I admire most.)

It sounds shrill to blame "corporate interests," but it is the case that Bill Gates, the Waltons (of WalMart fame), and Pearson Publishing are both paying the piper and calling the tune. Contributing generously to media and elected officials of all political persuasions, they are creating an entirely new educational ecosystem. As I have written previously, those calling for accountability for nickels and dimes are not held accountable for millions nor billions.

Critical thinking is being removed from the airwaves as quickly as it is from the classroom.

A puff piece on the Common Core is but the latest in a growing number of examples of what generous donations can buy. Contrast the "reporting" with the responses from educators to see that NPR's usual rigor seems to have gone missing. (Within hours, comments were curtailed at a few dozen.)

An Accountability Challenge 

Fortunately, Dr. Rosa is not alone. The kind of resistance that he exhibits and challenges others to undertake is growing. On the same day that I learned of his challenge, I saw this cartoon ...

... and I learned that some educators are trying to make this teachers' fantasy a reality. In February, Bret Wooten of Lewisville, Texas began a petition to require the governor of Texas and its legislators and education officials to pass the tests that they require of students, and to publicize their scores. His effort grew slowly within Texas for a few weeks, but in the past couple of days, a growing number of petitioners from other states have signed on. If you are reading this, consider adding your name, as I have done (#116).

In Holyoke, Massachusetts, teacher Augusto Morales has recently spoken out against the humiliation and disruption caused by extreme testing in his school. It is no coincidence that the strongest resistance is emerging in low-income, urban areas. The very students who were the purported beneficiaries of No Child Left Behind are the ones most likely to be left behind by high-stakes testing, nonsensical curricula from Pearson, and inappropriate pedagogy from Bill Gates.

I read similar anguish in reports from teachers throughout the United States, many of whom report absurdly intrusive regimes of testing and test preparation. Even the bodily functions of teachers and students are increasingly likely to be regulated by local officials trying to please distant educational bureaucracies.I admire Mr. Morales for bringing that widely-felt pain directly to the attention of some of those responsible.

Higher Education Connections

I teach at the university level and my own daughter has so far attended private schools (in large part because of what NCLB has done to public schools), so I could easily ignore all of this. But I would do so at great peril. For one thing, those who are orchestrating destructive reforms in K12 are working to dis-empower university faculty through various means -- from the elimination or reduction of tenure to cryptofascist accountability regimes.

Moreover, those of us who enjoy teaching at the university level are now confronted with the first wave of students who have never known anything but NCLB levels of testing, and it shows. Just today I had students -- very bright students -- absolutely panicked about a very modest mid-term I am giving them later this week. They expect detailed reviews not only of the content but also of the exact format of the exam -- and the strongest students are fretting just as much as the weaker ones. Sadly, it is warped visions of "college
readiness" that instills approaches to learning that are not at all collegiate.

Finally, many professors are teaching future educators and some of us provide ongoing professional development to in-service teachers. If we care at all about the effectiveness of the work that our students are going to be doing, we cannot ignore policies that will prohibit many of the best practices we teach. It is for this reason that I am grateful to fellow Massachusetts academics who have prepared a detailed critique of the MCAS/PARCC/Pearson regime, and presenting it to the education policymakers in the state. I am proud to join professor Rosa (like me, he is both a father and a professor) and many others in endorsing that statement.

A Better Way

I need to end this post with something positive, and I am fortunate that my favorite librarian -- with whom I discuss these issues often -- today shared this story of a very different kind of higher education. This is eleven minutes of delightful audio about Quest University in Canada. Just listening to this positive report about education is something every teacher should do as a treat to the self. The report is at once an eloquent description of what has gone wrong in education and a glimpse into what happens when teachers and learners are enabled to flourish.

Accountability versus Voter Suppression

Congress has finally gotten around to doing something about sexual harassment by its own members, but true accountability remains elusive. In an unusual act of decency, the usually unprincipled Speaker Paul Ryan named a commission to expose, among other things, the heretofore secretive practice of using public money to settle claims by victims.

The work of the commission soon exposed one of its own members, Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA). It is not clear whether he simply hoped that the commission would not be bright enough to discover his transgressions, or whether he volunteered for the post in an effort to keep covering his tracks.

I first noticed the story because of Adam Peck's reporting on Meehan's convoluted rationalization, which included blaming President Obama's healthcare legislation. One phrase in Peck's report piqued my geographic interest, though. I decided I needed to learn more about his "heavily gerrymandered district to the west of Philadelphia." 

Pennsylvania's 7th District, which NRP reporting describes as "suburban Philadelphia" nearly surrounds the City of Brotherly Love, carefully avoiding its left-leaning neighborhoods. Encompassing carefully selected neighborhoods in five counties and in the direction of the four winds, the district is considered one of the ten most egregiously contrived districts in these United States.

Map: Ballotpedia

This contorted shape of District 7 is the embodiment of what is wrong with extreme gerrymandering, which undermines both the Preamble and Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which was written in a space encircled by -- and excluded from -- this particular district.

The story broke just as Pennsylvania's highest court joined a number of other courts around the United States in rejecting voting districts that have clearly been contrived so that politicians could choose their voters, rather than risk the reverse. As I have written previously, gerrymandering was invented in Massachusetts almost immediately after the Constitution was ratified. It has been employed by politicians of many stripes throughout the history of the Republic, but never with the sophistication that has been brought to bear by malfeasant geographers in recent years.

It is just one part of a multi-pronged approach to voter suppression that journalist Ari Berman writes is being used quite effectively in combination with dark money and voter-ID laws. Only in such an insulated environment would a person of Rep. Meehan's caliber have the audacity to run for re-election.

Lagniappe

Voter suppression efforts are not limited to the drawing of boundaries, of course. In North Carolina, arcane rules about the composition of local election boards were designed to give incumbents an advantage in choosing who would likely show up to vote. The rules did not strictly exclude any particular voters, but a court agreed that they were contrived to push turnout in a predictable direction. The geographic argument here is subtle but persuasive -- see the bar charts in the map below, depicting driving distances to polls under different scenarios.

Image: Daily Kos

Still More...

Some of the worst examples. Maps: Washington Post

In a May 2014 article, journalist Christopher Ingraham wrote about some of America's most gerrymandered districts, and described some of the counterintuitive goals of what he called "crimes against geography." 

Teachers Opting Out

I have always assumed that I would remain a university professor until retirement age, because I absolutely love what I do, and the people with whom I teach and learn every day. But it is no longer a certainty. Twenty percent of K-12 teachers near retirement age are now leaving early, for reasons that are starting to threaten higher education as well.

Carrying the Load of False Accountability Measures
Image: LA Johnson/NPR

I was both saddened and mildly encouraged to hear the story of one such teacher -- Rick Young of Colorado -- on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday this morning. I was saddened, of course, because this educator has been pushed out early, robbing about seven years' worth of students of his passion and expertise.

I was mildly encouraged, though, because NPR bothered to tell his story, and to identify the burden of paperwork as the culprit. The description of this burden was superficial, but it is a start. NPR cannot exercise very rigorous journalism in this area because its funding comes from some of the culprits -- the Walton and Gates family foundations.

These and other "reformers" are applying some of the weakest ideas from the business arena to education at all levels. "You can't manage what you can't measure" is simplistic thinking that serves as a crutch for weak managers, but it is now applied with abandon in education, in the guise of greater "accountability."

Imagine following Picasso, Madonna, or Mick Jagger around with a clipboard, asking them to document the objectives and metrics of each brush stroke or song note. Ludicrous, right? Imagine me demanding that a ballerina describe her performance ahead of time in terms I can understand (knowing little about ballet) and being subjected to my metrics of her performance. This is what is happening in education, as great teachers are asked to explain themselves in ever-greater detail to managers with little or no teaching experience.

Higher education has been insulated from these movements, with university professors hired for their expertise and then being allowed to exercise it. Academic freedom has given us a nation full of top-notch colleges and universities, but this is changing quickly as accreditation bodies start to demand more uniformity, and that more time be spent on fads and measurements than on teaching and learning. And although we are encouraged to teach our students to dream big, we are asked simply to play along.

I remain an optimist -- otherwise I would not be a teacher at all -- but the cynics are better funded and better organized than those of us in the classrooms. So my expertise in Latin American geography might be shifted from developing lectures to locating a retirement community, earlier than expected.

Business Model

Since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann, public education has been a key to the success of the United States. In the generations that followed them, faculty-governed higher education -- both public and private -- became one of the country's greatest strengths. Following World War II, university education in the United States became more widely available to U.S. citizens while also attracting some of the strongest students and scholars from throughout the world.

Since the 1980s, however, two fads have begun to undermine education, especially public education. One has been the steady privatization of public services. At a rhetorical level, this has been justified by the constant assertion that private companies are always more efficient than public agencies. In reality, privatization has extracted a layer of profit from many publicly funded services while reducing or eliminating accountability.

A related trend has been to encourage schools to operate "more like business," without identifying why this would offer any advantages. In K-12 education, this has been manifested in an increasing reliance on high-stakes (and high-profit) testing, without any accountability for the testing regimes themselves. In Massachusetts, for example, some school officials are more likely to listen to local realtors than too experienced educators, when deciding to what extent they should emphasize test preparation.

In higher education, managing "like a business" has meant embracing Eisenhower-era hierarchy rather than Deming-style modern management. It has also meant a desperate fixation on branding trends and a steady erosion of faculty governance.

Readers of my blog will know that these are recurring themes for me. They come to mind today because of an excellent article by Professor Chad Hanson of Casper College in Wyoming. "Why Can't A Firm Be More Like a College?" stands the familiar rhetoric on its head, and helps to explain why tenure has contributed to the success of universities. Although much maligned by those who do not understand its purpose, he argues that tenure could be more effective than the Damoclean approach to management that is common in most for-profit firms (including for-profit "universities.")

His article is available as a one-page summary on page 12 of the current NEA Advocate or as a complete article in NEA Thought & Action.

From Chains to Supply Chains

Thank the Farmers

I love coffee. Most people who know me know this about me.

I have a lot of fun with coffee and the many ways it intersects with geography and popular culture. I am, in fact, enjoying my umpteenth cup of fine coffee of the day, even as I write this.

But as most people who know me realize, my love of coffee is exceeded by my love of the people who produce it and the lands from which the best coffee is grown. I end almost every coffee story with the hashtag #thankthefarmers for that reason.

It is good to remember that however much fun we can have with coffee and however much we can appreciate the social and environmental benefits of coffee that is grown carefully and traded fairly, coffee can also be a very serious matter indeed.

A reminder come from a March 2016 Guardian article that has been sitting on my desktop since someone shared it with me a couple of months ago. For all this time, I have not know quite what to do with Nestlé admits slave labour risk on Brazil coffee plantations, but I knew I could not let it go until I found a way to share it and to connect it with my other work on coffee.

As I look at the title carefully, I notice two small things. Where The Guardian uses "slave labour risk" a U.S.-based paper would use "slave-labor risk." Spelling and punctuation aside, the use of the word "risk" is itself interesting. From the standpoint of a major corporation, the possibility that slavery was involved in its operations is a risk to be managed like any other, such as weather or the fluctuation of currency markets.

The article mentions two of the very biggest such corporations in the $77-billion coffee market, which were known at the time it was published as Nestlé and Jacobs Douwe Egberts. The latter is now known as JAB, which includes those companies as well as Keurig (a little Boston-based company whose convenient brewer was purchased by the erstwhile Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and eventually swallowed Green Mountain and much of the industry). Together they sell about 40 percent of all of the coffee that is sold on the planet. For food companies operating at this scale, the food and the lands and people from which the product comes are such abstractions that even fundamental questions such as slavery and freedom become mere columns in a spreadsheet.

If slavery -- or any other inconvenient truth -- turns out to be contributing to the bottom line, the equivalent of a politician's plausible deniability provides a convenient fig leaf to cover the original sin of greed. In coffee, that fig leaf is in the form of a supply chain that is deliberately blurry in appearance. Someone growing $5,000 worth of coffee in a year cannot bring it to the gates of Nestlé or JAB -- there are in fact no such gates. The small farmer sells to middlemen (always men, and known in Latin America as coyotes) who consolidate purchases for the convenience of large processors ; it turns out that even a large plantation can benefit from selling coffee through brokers who can hide their practices.

Federal auditor investigating claims of human-rights abuses on a coffee farm in Brazil.
Photo: Lilo Clareto/DanWatch via The Guardian

When price is the main competitive factor, the pressure to force prices down will stop at nothing, not even the use of bonded labor. When citizens -- sometimes thought of only as consumers -- push back, the race to the bottom involves deceit, even self-deceit. Kate Hodal's excellent reporting on this complicated matter could be read by some as Nestlé and JAB being victimized by bad actors in a complicated network of suppliers. Stories like this -- which have parallels in the U.S. chicken industry and throughout food systems globally -- can also be read as evidence that more vigilance and accountability is necessary.

Moreover, it is a reminder that education about coffee in particular and food in general should continue to begin and end with considerations of human rights.

Changing Education Paradigms

One of the great privileges of my life has been that for most of my life (so far), I have been surrounded by excellent and even extraordinary educators. One of the great frustrations of recent years -- the past 18-20, really -- has been the ascendancy of non-educators whose "reforms" make good teaching increasingly difficult. In two articles last year -- Accountability and Kids Rule -- I argued that nobody is really measuring the success of "reforms" that aim to measure teacher performance.

The reforms are arrows in the quiver of class warfare, as often punitive measures are advocated for public educators at all levels that would never be tolerated in private schools. Having brooded on these contradictions and hypocrisies for many years, I was glad that a friend shared Sir Ken Robinson's rather elegant explanation (in a form known as an animate) of the divergence between what we say we want out of education and what we put into it.



This is worth taking the time to watch carefully a time or two!

Cleanup: Paying it Backward

Local journalist Sara Cline recently reported on a local environmental case that illustrates an important and little-understood aspect of national environmental policy. The town of West Bridgewater has been asked -- politely but through legal counsel -- to pay $42,000 toward the clean-up of a contaminated property 35 miles to its west, in another state.



More details about the site are available (for now at least) on the Environmental Protection Agency's Peterson/Puritan page. The 500-acre (0.8 square mile) site, located along the historic Blackstone River, contains multiple sources of serious groundwater pollution. As detailed in the site background portion of the page, severe pollution of the sensitive riparian environment resulted from several kinds of manufacturing, combined with at least one major spill, a fire, and the operation of a landfill.

Learn much more about this location from the interactive
community cleanup map.

As is often the case on designated Superfund (or National Priority List) sites, is the landfill that connects the relatively far-away town to the site. The Superfund law that President Carter signed in 1980 is better known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA).

The word "liability" is key. Because school curricula focus much more on distant history (which is important) than recent history (which is equally important) and not at all on geography, it is possible to find many young people who do not know of Love Canal, and the power of that name during the 1970s. It inspired Congress to act boldly (as difficult as that is to imagine in 2018), and to admit that HUGE amounts of money would be needed to clean contaminated sites and compensate innocent victims of pollution from earlier decades or centuries.

The money was to come from three sources: general revenue, special taxes on petroleum and chemicals (which the industry actually favored), and fees paid by parties found to be responsible for contamination. This third part -- liability -- is the smallest portion and the most difficult to identify. MOST responsible parties are unknown, defunct, or both. Still, it was considered important to build some accountability into the program where it could be quantified.

As Cline's reporting indicates, the costs assigned to Potentially Responsible Parties (PRPs) are low relative to the entire cleanup, for several reasons. The use of a low penalty to avoid costly litigation is one, and the inherent difficulty of calculating relative responsibility is perhaps even more important. In the West Bridgewater case, the shear scope of the contaminated site -- which has been undergoing cleanup for well over 30 years -- makes it difficult to collect much from any one party. West Bridgewater is being asked to pay 1/1,000th of the total cleanup cost.

As mentioned above, Love Canal is the antecedent of the entire Superfund program. My Love Canal Recap article describes the original story and its aftermath.

Lagniappe

From 1989 to 1990, I worked for Dames & Moore, which was then a major environmental consulting firm. It was there that I learned the practical importance of CERCLA. Because a company -- or even a town -- can be found liable for long-ago and far-away contamination, it behooves them to search for possible sources of such liability. This often involves painstaking inspections of old maps and directories, combined with current databases. This is ideal work for geographers!

Teaching Mentors of the Future

My recent McSchool post centers on a video that seems like a parody of education "reform" but is actually a serious piece of bragging from the Education-Industrial Complex. Apparently, we are living in an age of  convergence between parody and reality (remember the difficulty of discerning Sarah Palin from Tina Fey a couple years ago), so I will be clear: the following is a parody. It does represent, however, where we seem to be headed, as politicians across our country's narrow political spectrum continue to be taken in by the chimera of "accountability."

Teaching Profession

The focus of this blog is environmental geography, broadly conceived. As a teacher and a teacher of teachers, however, I include occasional observations about the noble but much-maligned profession.

Today's Letters to the Editor in the Boston Globe included an excellent letter from retired teacher David Amirault. I am taking the liberty of including the full text, since letters often disappear from news sites after a while, and I consider this a "keeper." 

I CAN’T imagine any reputable airline asking pilots to help out at the ticket counter or assist in serving drinks. I’ve never heard of a hospital assigning physicians to empty wastebaskets or provide building security between appointments.
Yet every day we see teachers heading out to recess or bus duty, keeping order in the cafeteria, and policing corridors and bathrooms. Maybe this model made sense at one time, but it doesn’t take an honor student to see something wrong with the current picture.
While the movers and shakers of school reform expect ever-increasing student test scores and seem to value linking teacher pay to “merit’’ (whatever that is), then isn’t it time to look seriously at the efficiency of how we use a teacher’s time?
Expectations for teachers in 2011 should include a significant reduction in housekeeping tasks. Planning, conferring, and research during non-instructional time seem more likely to aid teachers in helping kids than having to deal with the daily hassles of nonprofessional duties.
David Amirault Amesbury 

At a time when professional educators are constantly buffeted by self-appointed experts, many of whom seek positions of management over public servants, even though they disdain public service. Small-government zealots insist on "accountability" and then create large-government bureaucracies in vain attempts to measure the unmeasurable.

Some of the online comments are generally supportive and offer a few interesting considerations. For example, in small markets, airline pilots do take on more mundane tasks. Some of the non-classroom duties do also provide teachable moments. As someone who spends a lot of time in schools of all sizes, I think scale matters. In some schools, lunch or bus duty is large-scale, rushed, and chaotic, and should be treated as a specialty of its own. If time and space allow for more leisurely lunches and transition times, classroom teachers may well make constructive use of the time.

The key is to respect both the classroom professionals who need time for preparation, research, reflection, and renewal and the work of people who are sometimes called "paraprofessionals" and whose contributions are equally important to productive learning environments.

The letter also reminds me of other comparisons I make between educators and other professionals. Extreme caution with respect to student privacy, for example, puts professors in the role of physicians who are not given a patient's file. Cavalier administrations that exclude faculty from policy decisions put professors in the role of law partners whose firm has been taken over by an outside agency.

Teachers whose preparation time is not valued are like actors given no time for rehearsal. Jack Nicholson is among Hollywood's most prolific actors (and one of my favorites). His filmography lists "only" 75 credits over a 50-year period, and even when he stars, he is "only" acting about half of the running time of each film. Would anybody seriously argue, though, that Jack works only an hour or two a year?

Teaching What Teachers Make

Like the great rapper Kid Frost, Taylor Mali is a high school teacher whose poetry eventually led him out of the classroom. In Mali's case, though, his post-teaching career is itself a celebration of the great work of fellow teachers. (Nothing against Frost, of course, whose poetry focused on diffusing gang violence among his students and their peers.)

Mali's launch into popular culture was the result of an insult -- a very common one endured by teachers -- that hit him the wrong way but at just the right time. A lawyer (not one of the good ones) sneered that teachers are those who cannot do anything, and therefore do not make anything. Unable to rest after failing to deliver a snappy retort, Mali answered the question, "What do you make?" with biting wit. His slam delivery of the poem is invigorating; but he himself recommends the version below, delivered by fellow teachers.



Soon after learning about his poetry, I found his book What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World. I had a class of future teachers together the day after I bought the book, and was not able to play a video for them (we were on a boat with limited WiFi). So one of these students read the poem to the others, to great effect. I highly recommend that teachers and future teachers read this poem aloud to each other, and I will be making this book a regular part of my pedagogy class.

The small, inspiring volume is both back story and elaboration of the poem itself. One of the many themes he expands upon in the book is the idea that for some people -- such as the lawyer who started all of this -- the fact that teachers are underpaid itself is a reason to dismiss them. And once they are willing to work for less -- because of their passion -- paying them even less is justified. I would not say that this attitude is rampant among highly-paid administrators and trustees in education, but I did once have a provost explain my salary (about 1/4 of her own) in exactly these terms. In times of fiscal austerity, the class divide between professors and administrators can become a real problem if the administrators are not attuned to it --  not only in terms of justice, but in terms of the effectiveness of an institution.

Poet Mali makes clear in his "I'll Fight You for the Library" that he understands as well as I do that the higher ranks of educational hierarchies include some who do not necessarily value teaching. The Peter Principle ensures that some administrators are educators who were "promoted" out of jobs at which they excelled and into jobs for which they had no aptitude, while others ended up in charge of schools by some career accident. His retelling of a true story that involved one of his mentors features one of each kind -- an administrator who remains an educator and understands the purposes of a library, and one who clearly does not.

EarthView at Stoughton

The misnamed "accountability" movement has only served to increase the divide between teaching and administration, perversely punishing the former while rewarding the latter. I have the privilege of bring an educational outreach program to schools on a weekly basis -- a program with a large "wow" factor. I mean that literally -- students of all ages sometimes yell "Wow!" when they see the giant globe we bring to their schools. With increasing frequency, our program is canceled in favor of standardized tests, and with increased rarity do we see school administrators. We have been on the cover of more newspapers -- local and regional -- than I would ever have thought possible, yet MOST school principals cannot find the time to witness even 20 minutes of remarkable student engagement.

Whose Ethics?

A few stories about ethics have emerged in recent days, the juxtaposition of which has me wondering a bit about ethics rules, and who they are really for. To whit:

Dorchester teacher Nicole Bollerman won books for all of her students and $150,000 for herself as a result of a recent essay contest. SHE GAVE ALL OF THE PRIZE MONEY TO THE SCHOOL. Massachusetts is the only planet on which this could have raised any legal concerns, since "gifts" to public employees are limited to a $50. Hearing of the teacher's generosity (it is almost redundant to call a public school teacher "generous" these days, given their generally shabby treatment), comedian Ellen DeGeneres heard about her generosity and gave all the kids in the school another round of supplies, all the teachers gift cards for school supplies, and Bollerman another $25,000. Still, the ethics questions continue, though it is not clear by whom or to what purpose.

The Boston Globe's article about Bollerman makes a few interesting points. First, she gave away the original prize money despite the student loans that most professionals her age now carry, thanks to the refusal of legislatures to continue funding higher education at the levels they had enjoyed. Second, Ellen's $500 gifts to teachers are being questioned, while the common practice of teachers spending that kind of money on school supplies is not.

Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Stoughton, it has recently come to light that superintendent Marguerite Rizzi has been running an education consulting business, along with several of her non-teaching colleagues. Many are questioning how this group of executives has the time to operate a business, but my real concern is that they are so shamelessly profiting from the good work of actual teachers, by extolling their accomplishments as if they were their own. I am also reminded of something I have written about quite a bit in this space -- the absolutely absurd number of absurdly paid upper administrators in Massachusetts schools -- and municipal government generally -- resulting from our refusal to regionalize services.

Another "event" is fictional, but very real to me. One of our guilty pleasures is binge-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose protagonist is a teenager who, well, slays vampires. In the Checkpoint episode from Season 5, the "Watchers" who oversee the work of such slayers all come together to tell Buffy how poorly she is doing according to their metrics and protocols. "Don't mess with the slayer!" we say, as Buffy deftly explains the difference between those who do, and those who manage.

And finally, all of this comes as we learn that a former state official happens to be the most qualified (it seems) to pull down $300,000 a year as the overseer of Boston's bid to secure the 2024 Olympics and we are reminded of the many ways in which the Massachusetts legislature ensures that it can continue to operate in secrecy.

Ethics, oversight, and accountability, it seems, are for the little people.

Lagniappe

This is not a recent story, but one that still grates. At a time when the governor would not bargain in good faith with state-university faculty, Lt. Gov. Jane Swift was "earning" $25,000 to co-teach one course at Suffolk University. That is, she was on the syllabus while a real professor did most of the teaching for a small fraction of that salary.

Finnish Exceptionalism

American Exceptionalism is the increasingly misguided notion that the U.S. is best at everything simply because it is the U.S. It is a tribal instinct that encourages the brusque dismissal of critiques that admit of ways in which life might be better somewhere else. "Love it or leave it," is the refrain of  this peculiar worldview.

Howard Gardner is a U.S. educator who did leave it -- for a professional opportunity -- spent five months in Finland with his family. He can now share his perspective on why Finland has the best schools.

Source: Lonely Planet

No place is actually best at everything of course, but Finland is consistently identified as the very best in education. It should not be surprising that this is accomplished mainly by valuing educators -- holding them in higher regard even than politicians, consultants, and publishers of odious testing regimes.

Another key is a leap of faith -- counterintuitive, perhaps -- by which inattention to frequent testing leads directly to excellent results on annual tests. Who ensures that the students are learning? The same people who took care of this when I was a kid in a very different United States: teachers. Not the accountability industry or ETS: teachers.

Another key: recess outdoors. While many (most?) U.S. children no longer spend 15 minutes a day outside, their Finnish counterparts are outside 15 minutes out of each hour.

In the U.S., parents allowing this sort of behavior (walking to school) could actually be arrested for endangerment, because of television-induced misconceptions about child safety.

How do teachers in Finland avoid being stifled by bureaucrats? According to the article, it is because educational leaders protect children from politicians. In the U.S., children are pawns in games that feature educational leaders feeding teachers to the politicians who set school (and university) budgets. Teachers who should be -- figuratively -- driving the education bus are thrown under it instead.

I actually know a fair number of politicians, and I spend time talking with them about education. Individually, they respect teachers and want the best for children. After all, most of them once were children and many of them have children or grandchildren in school. As individuals, many of them also respect teachers. After all, they are successful people, and all successful people have teachers to thank for at least some of their success.

Collectively, though, something goes awry, and even well-intentioned legislators underfund education while over-regulating it. For us to catch up with Finland, this needs to change.

Lagniappe

Finland's lead in education rings true for me, as I did a bit of work with a Finnish social scientist when I was in graduate school. He was more articulate in English (his second or third language) than most people who speak it as a first language.

Choosing Headlines

A friend recently shared this story about the spending and occasional misspending of welfare benefits, and it got me thinking quite a bit. The report, of course, generated a lot of ire, but some of that is misplaced.

The article -- with the headline Massachusetts Welfare Money Spent on Resorts, Nail Salons -- is a bit of investigative journalism that shows gaps in the accountability for money intended to help people in need. Since benefits are expended electronically, it is possible to track where the money goes, by business name and address. The journalists rightly point out that the agency that should be using this information to hold recipients accountable is not doing so. They report that more than two million dollars in benefits were expended out of state, and they find that some of the money intended for basic needs was spent on luxury items.

The story illustrates something that has gotten too little notice in the post-2001 period, in which surveillance of citizens increases out of all proportion to necessity, and in fact out of proportion to anybody's ability to use the data effectively. The agencies that are in a position to monitor this spending have not done so, raising the question of whether agency has enough staff and training to keep up with the data it collects. Given recent trends in public institutions, and the fact that many Federal "intelligence" agencies cannot keep up with their data collection either, I rather doubt it.

I headlined this piece "Choosing Headlines" because it is clear that the headlines in the original article were chosen more to agitate than to educate. In addition to the main headline that emphasizes a kind of spending that is not shown to be pervasive, a sub-headline mentions a geographic fact: Mass. Welfare Recipients Spent $2.3 Million Out of State. No mention is made of whether this violates any specific conditions of the assistance, but the implication is clear that anybody who can afford to be away from home should not receive assistance.

Deeper in the story, it is revealed that half of the out-of-state spending occurs in  neighboring Rhode Island and New Hampshire. The reporters do not explain their reluctance to account for spending in other neighboring states. It is also admitted that some people might have family connections or obligations that explain the travel to other states, though they could not resist the suggestion that "sunny" states were necessarily luxury travel. (Clearly, the authors have not seen the parts of Florida that I have!)

The reporters also use the phrase "specialty grocery stores" to describe both Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. The implication is that poor people should eat food from "regular" grocery stores or "convenience" grocery stores, even if lower sticker prices belie poor value in terms of nutritional return per dollar spent. The implication is especially misplaced in the case of Trader Joe's, which does offer nice food, but does so at sometimes surprisingly low prices. The reason is that the chain has made a study of the economic geography of grocery stores (which I describe briefly on one of my geography-education blogs). As a result, for example, I buy organic apple sauce at Trader Joe's for less than I would spend on the chemically-enhanced stuff in my local grocery. Why should poor people be berated for doing the same?

Now back to the outrage: of course those who receive public assistance should show their gratitude by earning what they can and spending carefully. Those who received support for food and shelter but spent it on luxury items should be held accountable. Deep in the story, we learn that all of the "suspect" spending amounts to less than one percent of total aid. But the headline "More than 99 Percent of Welfare Spending Not Suspicious" would not adequately tap into current biases against the poor and the government.

Representation for 51 and 52

This week I heard two stories that highlight the need for statehood to provide the full protections of federal representation for U.S. citizens in Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. I was born in the former and have visited the latter just once. Sometimes calls for D.C. statehood are dismissed with "What about Puerto Rico?" and vice-versa. Both are further dismissed as attempts to grab political power -- as if denying statehood were not itself a political hustle.

The first story I heard was about the plight of Robert Davis, whose release from parole in Washington, D.C. was badly mismanaged because local parole cases are managed by a federal commission with no local accountability. The second story was about the ongoing power outages in Puerto Rico, four years after Hurricane Maria.

In both cases, citizenship without representation is equivalent to no citizenship at all. 

Lagniappe

Legislation that would grant statehood to Washington would also change the meaning of "D.C." to Douglass Commonwealth, honoring a champion of freedom rather than an agent of conquest. 

The #legoparkranger version of Frederick Douglass
at his historic site in Washington.

Education Crime Scene

$77,920,000 (2007)

$452,480,000 (2011)

Each month most readers of Harper's turn first to its trademark Harper's Index on page 11 -- a full page of numbers that tell interesting, sometimes disturbing, stories. The most frightening numbers in the June 2012 issue are these, describing an alarming increase in venture capital speculation in education start-ups.

My friend Vernon often quotes Balzak's observation -- from 19th-century France -- that "behind every great fortune is a great crime." (Note: Honoré de Balzac was born on this date in 1799; he was a writer and a coffee fiend of unusual ferocity.) Contemporary sociologist James Petras elaborates, explaining how the growing class of billionaires (fewer than a thousand people with more wealth than three billion of their planet-mates) have manipulated the powers of the state to their own benefit. In a separate article, he explains how the ruling classes often use anti-state language to facilitate their personal use of the state. The adulation of the private sector is shameless, growing even as obvious counter examples mount, such as the examples set this week by Curt Schilling and Jamie Dimon.

Just as Eisenhower warned of the Military Industrial Complex -- which has allowed for billions of dollars of "bombs not bread" spending -- so we now see an emergence of an even more insidious Educational Industrial Complex. Using Orwellian terms like "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top," investors in charter schools and high-stakes testing regimes are quickly moving to bypass educators and to separate taxpayers, students, and teachers from their money.

Even as early ideological supporters such as Diane Ravitch are admitting the flaws in mislabeled "reforms," politicians across the narrow political spectrum are embracing privatization and testing regimes that pretend to hold teachers accountable, while offering no accountability for the reforms themselves. Meanwhile, inside education, an ever-increasing amount of space, time, and decision-making power is given over to private companies and wealthy individuals.

In Massachusetts -- which is dominated by Democrats but not liberals -- higher education has been savaged over the past decade. A state that already lagged behind most of the rest has continued to cut operational funding. (I might sound ungrateful, since I work in a building undergoing a $100,000,000 renovation, but already we are seeing the limitations that tight funding has placed on the actual educational components of that project.)

Some relevant numbers from closer to home were compiled by Dr. Ira Rubenzahl, President of Springfield Technical Community College. On his blog celebrating public higher education, he reports the following trends over the past decade:

State Appropriations for community colleges and state universities - DOWN 11%
Student Charges at State Universities UP 168%
Student Charges at Community Colleges UP 86%
Numbers of graduates at State Universities UP 12%
Number of graduates at Community Colleges UP 21%

Shifting the burden from the current budget to future debtors and from the general public to the current student body is both counter to conservative, pay-as-you-go rhetoric and oblivious of the value of higher education to the entire society. Those who are in school are doing both themselves and their entire communities a service. They should pay a reasonable share of the cost -- as most of who went to college up through the 1980s did -- but they should not be shackled by onerous debt because governors and legislators refuse to recognize the value what they do.

The burden falls particularly heavily on those who wish to pursue careers in K-12 education. Even though administrative and consultative employment is flourishing, the ranks of actual teachers are shrinking while the obstacles grow. And in Massachusetts, future teachers must pay a minimum of $750 to a private testing company for poorly designed trivia tests (a.k.a. MTEL) before they can even enter some education programs.

Today's rant is not just about whining and hand-wringing though. Students, educators, and even some administrators are becoming organized in PHENOM, the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts. Advocacy work in this area is difficult, since student leaders inevitably gradate and many faculty members in Massachusetts are simply worn out by decades of lost battles and empty promises. But in recent years PHENOM has grown in numbers, energy, and sophistication, so it is a group that has the best chance of rewarding effort with some results.

The phenomenal students of PHENOM at
the State House.

BSU Blogfest -- Day 5

Through the course of this BSU Blogfest week, I believe I have pointed to all of the blogs to which I actively contribute: those of myself, my family, my department, and my community. I invite readers to “subscribe” to any of the blogs I mentioned over the course of the week, plus one I neglected to include: The Bridgewaters Project.

The Bridgewaters Project is a life-long blog on which my favorite librarian and I are documenting our explorations – literal and figurative – of every place in the world we can find that bears the name “Bridgewater.” So far, the journey has taken us from  a sleepy college town in Virginia to a microbrewery in Vermont, to one of the most important crime scenes in U.S. history (a mile from our house) and a pivotal location in the history of treating the criminally insane (four miles from our house).

I will finish the week by pointing out that a much larger body of online work has accumulated on my faculty web site – a sprawling entity of hundreds of pages that predates my service at Bridgewater. In the mid-1990s, I was teaching part time at a school known – really – as the University of Texas at Brownsville in Partnership with Texas Southmost College. (A few months ago I blogged about very disconcerting events at my former campus.)

Anyway, I had a day job in McAllen and taught one night each week at UTB-TSC to a group of about 70 students, many of whom walked to class from Mexico (hence the “southmost” designation). I noticed that a lot of my students struggled with the same issues related to writing. Since my home and my day job were about 50 miles away, I did not have a way of spending much time working on it with them. There was a new thing called the World Wide Web, however, and I was learning bare-bones HTML to create something called a web page.

I decided that providing writing tips for my students would be a good use, so I posted that, along with a few links related to the course subject – environmental geography. Eventually the writing tips grew into a whole section, and the links grew and grew. When I came to Bridgewater, I copied the pages to the new web server here, and they gradually grew. A year later, I finished my dissertation on the Brazilian state of Rondonia, and posted the whole thing on the web site. The writing tips grew into something I called the “Not the 13th Grade” pages, which continues to be read by students, parents, and educators throughout the world (120,000 hits and counting).  (And I learned that students everywhere – not just along the border – tend to struggle with a couple dozen common writing problems.)

In fact, because I was fairly early in creating an academic web site (getting a lot of my content online prior to the emergence of Google), searches for many of the key words in the previous paragraph still bring readers to my site, helping to connect with a lot of interesting people. I still maintain and develop the site – particularly the section of about two dozen pages related to coffee – but in many ways I have found blogging to be a better (and usually easier) way to share ideas with my students and broader audiences.

And now for the final question of the Blogfest week.  I thank Cindy Kane for her leadership in organizing this terrific experiment, and I invite readers to explore some of the other excellent blogs that have been part of it!
What do you think BSU will be like in 10 years? 25 years?

One thing I know is that these years will go by more quickly than I can imagine. In some ways, I feel like I just arrived, even though far more than half the faculty have arrived since I started almost 14 years ago! The first answer I have to these questions is that in 10 years I will almost definitely still be working here, though if I am working at BSU (or whatever it is called then) in 25 years, it will likely be on a part-time basis.

Name
I only thought of making a small joke about further possible name changes because of the ongoing attention to our name change last year, but the idea of future name changes actually suggests a serious question. Throughout the United States, public higher education receives an ever smaller proportion of its financial support from the public (that is: students pay more, even though faculty and staff do not make more). Even as politicians increase demands for “accountability,” they also reduce funding. (These are politicians of both major political parties, coast to coast. In fact, in “liberal” Massachusetts, support has been near the bottom and cuts continue apace.) If the political interference continues to increase and the financial support continues to decrease, a name change would eventually be called for, so that state colleges and universities can throw off the shackles of their overseers. In that case, a name like “The University at Bridgewater” would be appropriate, and all the regulatory ties could be cut. This has not yet been seriously proposed in New England yet, but many Midwestern universities are starting to explore such changes. It could happen here.

Languages
Back to something more concrete and realistic: In ten years, BSU will rejoin the ranks of respectable universities by requiring its students to complete at least two years of a foreign language. Our previous requirement of one year was not adequate, but rather than improve it, we eliminated it. By “we,” I refer to the faculty and administration working here at the time the new Core Curriculum (an otherwise excellent model for general education) was instituted. I do not, however, mean “we” in the sense of a change I supported. I was among a vociferous group of professors who tried in vain to combat the skullduggery that brought us to our current, untenable status: a global university that does not require a foreign language. I cannot imagine that this will remain in place for another 10 years. Because we do tremendous work in many languages throughout the world, it is only a matter of time before we restore our good name in terms of a language requirement.

Bureaucracy


On another front, I am not as optimistic, and it is here that I will finally reveal the connection to a Terry Gilliam film at which I have hinted for the past couple of days. The movie is the 1985 farce Brazil, in which the country of Brazil is never mentioned. It is a preposterous dystopia, in which the characters go to absurd lengths to cope with the implausibly picayune demands of a bloated bureaucracy. I had watched the movie a couple of times – searching in vain for some direct reference to Brazil: samba, Rio, anything – before I understood (I think) the point of the film. 

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was produced in 1985, the same year in which Brazil’s military dictatorship collapsed. What had begun as a more conventional military dictatorship in 1964 (which then “hardened” in 1967) eventually became a bureaucratic regime of ever-increasing complexity and – ultimately – paralysis. Whenever someone found a way around a rule, a new rule would be imposed. The result was bureaucratic authoritarianism – a particularly ossified form of bureaucracy. You can look it up – it is  a real, distinct organizational form first identified by Guillermo O’Donnell. Eventually the Brazilian people developed a way of coping. Whenever a rule prevented people from doing what needed to be done, they would find a “jeito” – a way around. The phrase emerged, “Sempre tem jeito” – there is always a way, by which well-intentioned people can agree to work around bureaucratic impediments to what they need to do.  For every jeito there would develop a new rule and for every new rule a new jeito.

As our campus has grown, I have witnessed a proliferation of procedures, each of which has a purpose and a history and a justification, but which collectively create a kind of paralysis. It is a problem that has been recognized, and I have been part of quite a few conversations – and even a task force – aimed at streamlining our procedures and relationships. Many claim that the problem is inevitable given our growing size, but I am too much an optimist to accept that.

I cannot predict the future, but I would suggest that in 10 years, we will either have figured out a cultural change that removes this burden, or we will have become completely paralyzed by a growing set of interlocking rules. Meanwhile, I take every opportunity I can to suggest that my colleagues watch Brazil! Eventually, the Brazilian people triumphed and now live in a vibrant, rapidly improving country, the envy of the world in many respects. We can do the same.