Principles

Although Eduwonkette and Sherman Dorn are treating it like news, the case of Art Siebens was actually cited by Leo Casey of the UFT on Edwize back in August. In brief, Siebens is an AP science teacher in the District of Columbia who recently lost his job. Supporters have created a Web site making the case that he's a great teacher and his dismissal was unfair. While Dorn went on to note the much more negative take on Siebens from local parents and offer a generally sober analysis, Eduwonkette sees the firing as "haunting" and a "debacle," declaring that "By all accounts, Michelle Rhee should be carrying Art Siebens around on her shoulders."

Assuming the positive testimonials are true--and there's no reason to believe otherwise--there are two possibilities here:

1) His firing was unjust and attributable to an incompetent or corrupt process. Either somebody was pursuing a personal vendetta or the evaluation process was so shoddy that it failed to properly take into account his many virtues as a teacher. 

2) His firing was just and attributable to factors that have not been made public.

I don't know which is true. But then, neither does anyone else in the edublogosphere. None of us know because the necessary information is being withheld due to privacy provisions inherent to school personnel processes. These are provisions that I assume Casey, Jennings et al endorse. (If not, they should say so.) In this case, "by all accounts" means "according to one side of a two-sided dispute in which the other side is legally prohibited from making its case public." This is like rendering judgment in a trial after only hearing from the defense.  

Eduwonkette bills itself as a blog that presents information seen "through the lens of social science." That's an obvious claim to the legitimacy that properly-conducted social science entails. But a crucial principle of social science is matching the strength of claims to the strength and breadth of evidence. And such principles really only matter when they collide with ideology or larger agendas. We may never know if Art Siebens was justly fired--that's the price of confidentiality in h.r. matters--but his case has at least provided some clarity about other things. 

Trading Professors

I recently visited Penn State's campus, and, much like the college Chad describes below, sometimes it was hard to figure out whether the college existed for academics or athletics--the college stadium was larger than many professional sports arenas I've been to and the statue of the Nittany Lion was the most photographed place on campus (with the statue of Joe Paterno a close second, I'm sure).

But, as USA Today reports, Penn State is trying to shift the focus toward academics, using...trading cards. The glossy cards feature top Penn State researchers in an effort to build awareness of their work. No word on whether the cards include the number of hot peppers each professor received on Rate My Professor.

Uniqueness

After finishing my morning coffee and news routine, I start on the day's slog of research. I'm looking at the website of a Mountain West state's flagship university. Then I click on their "Campus Life" section, and I find the following passage (proper nouns removed):

[University X] students are encouraged to become active members of the campus community and develop their full potential. Superior academic programs, combined with plentiful opportunities for a wide range of cultural activities and outdoor recreation, provide a challenging, healthy, enjoyable lifestyle on campus.

The newly renovated [University] Union is the hub of campus, featuring the University Bookstore, numerous eating establishments, computer workstations, a recreation center, and much more. Steps away from the Union, students can work out at [the] Gym or study at [the] Library.

When students aren’t in class or studying, they can participate in university clubs and attend outstanding cultural programs — including films, concerts, theater performances, comedy acts, and planetarium shows. Or they can head for the outdoors and fantastic recreational activities in the Snowy Range [...] Mountains — including skiing and snowboarding, hiking, camping, backpacking, bicycling, fly-fishing, and rock climbing.

With the abundance of outdoor recreational opportunities at students’ doorsteps, it’s easy to understand why [College Town], home of [University], was recently voted one of America’s top 40 college towns by Outside magazine.

Until it gets to the part about mountains and skiing, this university could be any in the nation. It could be your alma mater.

Both the Chronicle ($) and InsideHigherEd lead today with stories on how the current generation--mine--is the first in modern times not to be more educated than the previous one. That is, up until present day, each generation earned more education credentials than their parents. Data suggests that rise has stalled.

I can't help but connect these stories with my experience on the state university website. I look and look for basic information like how many of its entering students return for their second year and how many graduate on time. I get paid to find these things, and I can't, even though they are collected every year by the federal government. I can't even find how many and what type of students are enrolled there. Instead I see that "Rhinestone Cowboys" is the theme of Homecoming this year and some a cappella group I've never heard of will be performing Friday night. Entertainment but not information, that's what higher education has become.

School Buses

Today's Wall Street Journal looks at school buses as engines (pun intended) of desegregation. The article's a little unsatisfactory along the lines of "rising gas prices are hurting school choice efforts" when really we all know school choice efforts are hurt by... school choice efforts. What's wrong with school bus systems is that the routes look pretty much like they did when my parents took them. Public transportation suffers from the collection and distribution problem--if you don't have a bus stop near your home that drops you off close to your destination, you're going to opt for private transportation. It's just plain common sense.

School bus routes, as currently designed, pretty much weave through a neighborhood and then have one destination: the neighborhood school. But it doesn't have to be like this. They could continue on to other schools, giving kids the option to stay on the bus longer and attend the latter one. Or bus routes could be re-vamped entirely, in an effort to distribute kids across cities to the schools they want to go to. It would be like public transportation but for kids only. There'd be express routes, circular routes, and in-bound and out-bound routes.

In an ideal world my dreams, at least.

Real Money

In addition to the collapse of the global economy and our future days spent selling apples on the street while wearing the barrels they came in as clothes, one of the casualties of the current financial crisis is likely to be our collective sense of proportion. At first numbers like "$700 billion" seemed very big--it did to me at least--but now that it's being repeated ad nauseam on cable TV, the newspapers, etc., it will probably start to seem mundane and establish a floor for monumentality in future catastrophes. That, in turn, will make numbers like $1.3 billion seem like a puny rounding error in comparison--and that happens to be the amount of money that various student lenders looted from the public treasury in recent years by finagling the so called "9.5 percent rule." Which is why it's all the more important that people like New America's Steve Burd are on the case with this new comprehensive break-down of the various industry lies currently being bandied about. 

Ayers et al

I'm sure there's a sensible way for scholars of education to talk about Bill Ayers' decades of work in the field and make the case that it has value and that he's a generally nice guy.  But this isn't it. As near as I can tell they're arguing that "unrepentant terrorist" is unfair because really it should be "unrepentant former terrorist," in that the terrorism happened a long time ago, and really it wasn't so much that he "bombed the Pentagon" as that he "participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans." I'm not sure who should be more insulted: people who care about the clear meaning of words, or the hundreds of thousands of Americans who participated in the civil rights and antiwar movements? There are some ostensibly smart signatories to the statement; I find things like this to be baffling. 

Update: The statement also says "The current attacks appear as part of a pattern of “exposés” and assaults designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue." That's a remarkably self-obsessed view. The current attacks appear a whole lot more like part of a pattern of one candidate saying stuff about another candidate in order to win an election. 

America's Worst Colleges

If you write enough blog posts on a given topic, eventually p.r. people will start emailing you stuff in hopes of getting a mention. So it was a while back when someone from RADAR magazine sent me an advance copy of their annual list of "America's Worst Colleges." It's funny and some of it is probably even true. Topping off the list for the second year is the University of Bridgeport, which appears to provide a uniquely toxic combination of low standards, poor outcomes, high price, terrible environment, and ownership by the Reverand Sun Myung Moon. (Making it the Washington Times of higher education, I suppose.) Here's an excerpt:

Nestled on a husk of yellowing grass in the middle of a blighted urban war zone, UB is remarkable solely for its ability to survive. And, as it happens, the Worst College in America remains open for business only because of an unlikely savior.

On the verge of extinction in the early 1990s, the university was rescued from bankruptcy by an arm of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, which offered up a multimillion-dollar miracle. The Moonies' endowment eventually earned the former head of the church a position as university president, and a head scratch from the academic world. Alumni were horrified to learn that a cult long accused of fraud, high-pressure recruitment tactics, and wrenching troubled kids from their parents had effectively mounted a takeover of their alma mater.

Tragically, new students often discover this the hard way. "Scared for my life. UB run by Moonies. Ghetto-type atmosphere," one panicked freshman wrote on an online message board. Of course, if you think the administration is dicey, try leaving your dorm for a stroll in the quad. "The campus is bordered by high-crime neighborhoods," writes a concerned grad, recalling the "naivete and innocence" of incoming students. "They'd trustingly tour the campus and surrounding area by foot and get mugged or killed." The city's violent crime rate is 60 percent above the national average, and over the past two years it has increased by another 6 percent.

For the past decade, incoming students have been presented with "personal alarm locators," portable panic buttons that summon security in the likely event of an emergency.

Despite all this, the university managed to boost its undergraduate enrollment by 6 percent last year, in large part due to its aggressive recruitment of unwitting international students, who make up a whopping 25 percent of the student body. "If you're a foreign student, UB appears to be a lush resort campus conveniently located along beautiful beachfront property," writes one alum about the school's international marketing efforts. (According to its official literature, UB borders "some of the finest sandy beaches between New York and Cape Cod.") 

Bridgeport charges $39,000 per year and graduates 33 percent of students within four years.

Although RADAR is in the humor business, it raises a legitimate point: There really ought to be a widely noted guide to America's worst colleges. All of the institutions jostling for the top spot on the traditional U.S. News list are, for the most part, perfectly fine. You could probably throw a dart at the Top 50 and get a decent education as long as you put in the work. And the students who attend those institutions have the most access to information and ability to make informed choices. People didn't need U.S. News to tell them to apply to Stanford or M.I.T. before the rankings were founded in 1983. 

The students who really need guidance are those who are in danger of attending a legitimately terrible college or university, someplace that will take tens of thousands of your dollars and provide little or nothing in return. The stakes for those students are a lot higher than for someone choosing between Amherst and Brown.  But since identifying the lowest performers is considered impolite in higher education, these kinds of things get left to satire publications, when really they should be in the hands of guidance counselors and parents across the country so they can steer students clear of places like UB.