Most Improved is, Apparently, Not Good Enough Anymore

Christine Ruffalo, an ESL teacher in Austin, recently wrote an opinion piece for the Austin American-Stateman in which she argues against the standardized assessment of public school students.  She stresses progress over a standard pass-fail assessment of the TAKS test.  While reading it, I had a few thoughts:

• I want to agree with Ruffalo because I don't agree with large-scale standarized testing, but I just cannot bring myself to accept her argument.  The argument against TAKS can (and should) be made, but this is not the way to make it.  Her example of two students, Erik and Bobby is revealing.  Erik comes into 8th grade with a 10th grade reading level and makes no progress during the academic year, but "passes" the TAKS, which tests him on 8th-grade skill sets.  Bobby comes into 8th grade with a 4th grade reading level, but makes huge strides and ends the year reading just over a 6th grade level.  But he "fails" the TAKS because he still cannot read at an 8th-grade level.  I can understand why Bobby would be discouraged by this, but the fact remains that he had not met the minimum requirements to succeed in 8th grade.  I do understand Ruffalo's motivation, but I do not understand the concept of destroying or disregarding developmental milestones because Bobby worked hard and finally got moving in the right direction.  The real solution seems to be a non-age-based assessment program--in which Erik would be working at a 10th-grade level no matter his age and Bobby would be working at a 6th-grade level no matter his age (but that brings along with it its own set of problems).  In my own teaching, I've begun to stress accomplishment: I do not care whether a student "gets" argumentative college writing in Week 2 or Week 9 as long as the student gets it.  Two years out, it won't matter how quickly the student understood things during the term; it matters that she understood things by the time she left the classroom for the last time.
• It is also true that such progress as Bobby made deserves its own kind of recognition.  (It's the "Most Improved" award that they used to use when I was in school.)  Trying hard and making great progress, however, doesn't mean you should get a trophy based on achievement.  I could train very hard and make great strides in my football skills, but it does not follow that I should get to play defensive end for the Ducks next year.  There is a minimum standard to be met to make the team, and I am not (and probably would never be) there.
• Such a philosophy demands one thing that is not now present in education: repeating a grade shouldn't have the stigma attached to it that it currently carries.  Again, it shouldn't matter how many attempts a student needs to meet achievement milestones: it matters that he meets them.  As long as students like Bobby continue to improve, they are more interesting and inspiring than Erik--and they deserve any sort of support we can offer to continue that progress.  Saying that Bobby and Erik are equally important in the education system, however, is not the same thing as saying that Bobby and Erik are equally advanced.  It may well be that Bobby is actually more intelligent than is Erik, but TAKS and the like are not IQ tests.  They are tests of knowledge that the State of Texas has deemed crucial for 8th-graders.  Failing it does not mean that the student or teacher are failures.
• And here is where I agree with Ruffalo.  If we attach funding to the success rates of TAKS tests, then we are doing Bobby and ourselves a disservice.  Bobby's progress may not have been enough to get him to the 9th grade, but it is certainly enough to warrant sustained (if not increased) funding to that school for that student.  To reiterate: Bobby's 4th-grade to 6th-grade reading skills progress should not factor into placement for the next academic year, but it should factor into funding concerns.  If we are looking for results, the that sort of progress is the kind of result we should encourage in our students and our teacher; it does not, however, mean that Bobby gets a pat on the back and a promotion to the next grade (a promotion that would do more harm than good since it would place an under-prepared student in a more advanced context).  As long as the students--the gifted, the average, the remedial--keep moving toward that final assessment goal (the exit-level TAKS) the dollars should flow.  It's when the majority of students--in a particular class, school, or district--don't make yearly progress that a hard, analytical eye should be trained on the students and teachers.

Entitlement is Such an Ugly Word (But an Uglier Attitude)

So.  This proem, "because: a manifesto," has gotten a lot of attention in the last week or so.  I can sympathize with the sentiment because I went through the same process--but I went through it as a first-year Master's student.  I came out of the Master's program at Baylor with my eyes wide open, and I went into the PhD program at UO the same way.  Not everyone gets a trophy, and some people may spend years and years getting that PhD, writing that dissertation, and taking those classes only to find out that there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.    1) There are no pots of gold at the ends of rainbows.  The other areas of work the author talks about?  They can be just as ugly, mean, and unfair.  2) Do not forget that you got to follow a rainbow--and not many people can say that.  If I never get a job in academia (and times being what they are...), I will not complain about "wasting" my time getting my PhD.  I had fun taking classes, talking about Beowulf, going to conferences, writing papers.  If getting a PhD and writing a dissertation is a grind that one feels he must endure before getting a job in academia, he will make a very poor academic--since that, it seems to me, is mostly what academic jobs are about.

No doubt things are tough, and no doubt many grad students are negative on job opportunities for the PhD.  Some are coming up with Plans B-D for non-academic work.  Some even souring on academia in general.  But I still cannot understand the surprise and sense of betrayal I hear from people like the author of this poem (and in the comments in the reprint on IHE).  What did these people think they were getting into?

Things have changed in degree since 2004, 2005 when most of the "oldest" PhD students came into programs, but they have certainly not changed in kind.  We are still (in our estimation) undervalued.  The market for humanities PhDs was not flourishing even then.

Where is the personal responsibility to do research for a major life decision like getting a PhD?

Did these complaining recent-graduates not know that it would be a long, hard slog after the dissertation was over?  (It is not law school, and universities do not troll graduating classes at job fairs for possible hires.)

And if not, why not?  Did any of them talk to faculty members under the age of thirty-five before getting a PhD?  While getting a PhD?  (Older, tenured faculty may not understand how hard it is to get a job, but the younger ones certainly do.)

Did these complainers think that a PhD alone qualified them for a tenure-track job?  (A related question: how many were indeed told how tough the market was but ignored the information because they thought that it surely did not apply to them since they were special snowflakes whose talents would surely be appreciated?)

Did they think that the university was somehow obligated to make sure their life choices were financially viable after graduation?  (If so, then why do we teach critical reasoning in composition departments?  The university can run our lives for us.)

Did these complainers give any thought to the practical aspects of their career before they embarked on it?  (Just because we want to read and write about texts does not mean it is automatically valued; talk to the actor who waits tables during the day or the musician who has to play weddings and bar mitzvahs to make ends meet and you will receive very little sympathy.)

I don't wish to downplay the power of this poem as a dirge, as a way of mourning the loss of a dream and as a way of saying goodbye to academia.  It is the blame that bothers me.  It is not the economy's fault, the system's fault, the university's fault, the department's fault,* the students' fault, your fault, my fault.  It just is.

Samuel Johnson was destitute into his thirties; Virginia Woolf was educated mostly at home; John Keats was trained as a doctor, not a poet; Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist by day.  For the love of God, Kurt Vonnegut once managed a Saab dealership.  I cannot imagine any of these people complaining because their contemporary society did not allow them to write what they wanted when they wanted (well, maybe Keats).  One does not have to retain a shabby little office on a university campus to read and write about the things one loves.


*Perhaps in one area, it is the departments' fault.  I know that our job-preparation sequence here at UO is (and was in the past) taught by some cracker-jack young academics.  What they have forgotten, however, is that while they earned their PhDs from the Texas, Stanford, or Duke, we are graduating from UO.  Is Oregon a bad school?  Not at all.  I have enjoyed my time here.  But it is not Duke or Stanford or Texas, which means most of us will not be competing for the jobs at major universities.  Unfortunately, that is exactly what they prepare us for (because it is all they know).  As far as I know, only one or two UO PhDs in the last few years have gotten on at major universities.  Most have landed at directional schools and community colleges.  So why not prepare us for that?   Let us prepare ourselves for the next step to interviewing for major universities if we want to after we have settled in at Northwestern Iowa State College or wherever.  Prepare us for what we will face instead of pretending that we will all interview at Brown, Ohio State, or Smith.

To Rage Against the Machine or to Fight for Some Time at the Wheel?

Jane Miriam Epperson Brinley has written an interesting piece for the Washington Post on the College Board's decision to reduce the Latin AP exam to just Virgil. No more Catullus. No more Cicero. No more Horace. No more Ovid. As far as the College Board is concerned, Virgil is Latin literature.

She's frustrated, and rightly so. Her career and passion just got kicked in the teeth, was just labeled "unnecessary." As a medievalist, I feel her pain. But her response, her analysis of why this happened is way off. She comments:

In the gap created by our national reluctance to centralize education policy, the College Board, an unelected body, has ended up as the de facto Education Ministry, and when it makes decisions we have no recourse....The College Board's curriculum-setting role goes beyond the AP course itself. Latin courses for elementary schools (a growth area), middle schools and high schools will now change, and textbooks will change along with them....So long as AP exams continue to influence high school curricula and so long as financial, and not educational, imperatives seem to drive College Board decisions, we should be asking who we really want in charge of all our disciplines.

She's lamenting the lack of a centralized "Education Ministry"; leaving my objections to the Euro-centric nomenclature of "Ministry" aside, I'd respond that such an entity is problematic in its own right and isn't the magic bullet she seems to think it is. No Child Left Behind mandates a state-wide standard that all students should meet. This creates at least two unfavorable outcomes: 1) a child in Portland, Oregon will be held to a different standard than a child 10 miles away in Vancouver, Washington. 2) Children in Orange County, Compton, and Berkeley, California all must meet the same standard--even though their resources, skill levels, environments, and perhaps even goals for education will be quite different.

NCLB is a top-down approach that demands teachers "teach to the test" because that is how the so-called progress of each school will be judged. It essentially creates a centralized "Education Ministry" in the form of state bureaucracies that pretend they know what children need to learn. I cannot understand how someone living in Indianapolis, Indiana knows what a child in Tell City needs to learn--but even worse is the presumption of knowing how she needs to learn it.

Alongside the NCLB at the elementary and secondary level we also have magazines like US News & World Report shaping our universities. In 2001, Baylor University adopted what became known as the 2012 Vision which has as its goal "moving Baylor into the upper echelons of higher education." These 12 imperatives follow closely the criteria by which US News & World Report judges the so-called "Best Colleges." In fact, they look like Baylor just imported the criteria wholesale and added "with a Christian identity" to a few of them. So really, Baylor is spending a decade to get a national magazine to like it.

And Baylor hasn't even tried to hide this:

• Larry Lyon, the head of the Graduate School was using the magazine as his benchmark when he said "The universities that are listed as top tier undergraduate universities by US News & World Report have, on average, 40 percent of their students enrolled in graduate education. We average about 12 percent."
• In its pitch for the Bush Presidential Library the PR folks apparently thought the magazine's judgment of the university was a selling point, writing: "Over the years Baylor's academic programs have received national and international recognition through solid rankings in U.S.News and World Report and other respected publications." Baylor didn't get the Bush Presidential Library--even though it probably should have.
  
• And then there is the May 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that flatly states: "Baylor is clear about how it will calibrate its success...its overarching goal is to enter the top tier of institutions, as determined by U.S. News & World Report's college rankings."
  

So a magazine is the entity controlling the long-term direction of a major university (and I'm sure Baylor isn't the only one--which just makes it worse). What is wrong with that picture? I mean, I'd take the College Board over the US News & World Report any day of the week and twice on Sunday. What's more, neither NCLB nor US News & World Report have anything close to the sort of system of appeals that Brinley wants. And I doubt that any larger "Education Ministry" would, either.

Even if it did, it doesn't sound like Brinley could make a compelling case for keeping a more thorough Latin program. Here is her big rationale for the importance of Latin:

Latin, revered by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders -- John Adams declaimed the speeches of Cicero, once even in a toga -- has been placed in the hands of a bunch of administrative functionaries.

I hate to be catty toward someone who's trying to work through some of the things that medievalists are facing at the university level, but this argument is not going to cut it. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams loved Latin? OK...great. What have you done for me lately?

That rationale doesn't even make me want to save Latin, and I love Latin (without strong Latin programs, medieval programs get weaker, too). I say scrap the complaints about the system itself and the financial motivations of the puppet-masters of education (the College Board may be financially driven but it's actually just following the lead of almost every university in the nation). Start telling everyone why you matter, why Latin programs shouldn't be anything past "Latin for Pre-Med" or "Latin for Pre-Law"--what one Latin professor I had at the University of Texas called "Words for Turds."

If you start thinking about that, you'll find that defending reading Ovid's Metamorphoses or Catullus' poems to Lesbia puts you in the same boat as the medievalist who's defending his work on footnotes in Duns Scotus or the cultural anthropologist who's defending her work on Nicaraguan Lesbian Poetry. It seems that if we could just all row in the same direction, we'd have something going.

But we can't seem to. Hell, we can't even seem to agree if we're in the same boat. I guess the real disagreement I have with Brinley is that which animates lots of discussions about what to do. From Marxism (Social Democrats and Communists) to medievalists (Bonnie Wheeler and Eileen Joy at Kalamazoo), it seems to run along the same lines: reformists changing things from within, revolutionaries making radical breaks from without. I don't mean to pick on Brinley, and I don't have a problem with radical breaks (sometimes they're the only option). But issuing a weak-voiced call for resistance to a well-funded, fully-entrenched institution like the College Board in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post doesn't seem like the kind of call to revolution we need. It just seems to me emblematic of a lot of the response from the academic community. We keep appealing to the better angels of the lawmakers' and citizenry's natures, but we're talking to people who largely don't get that allusion. Or what an allusion even is.

Maybe we need to stop complaining and waiting for someone to step in. Maybe we need to stop looking up at our so-called betters and begging Oliver Twist-like for some more. Maybe we should either damn the torpedoes and continue, Roark-style, with our chosen work--perhaps tell everyone else what they need instead of asking if they'd like to hear us now. Or even better we could collectively shrug and unseat the world. Personally, if we're going to do something, I'd prefer the latter. If we did it and the world went on without us, at least we would know where we stand and stop kidding ourselves about our importance. If we did it and it all started sliding downhill, at least for awhile we'd get the respect we deserved.

Thoughts?

Some Weeks are Just Like This...and This is Friday!

A Total Rip-off Post

JJC posted a picture of his desk over at ITM, and I thought--since I've spent the last six hours chained to mine--I put a pic up as well. I am beginning to feel surrounded by work.

Items of note:

• Ever-growing stack of books that I need to get (back) to for the KZoo conference paper (including Sociophobics, Chambers' Beowulf, and Friedman's Monstrous Races).
• Chretien's Arthurian Romances for our UO reading group.
• Computer monitor, proudly showing the ITM comment screen!
  
• The stupid green egg timer that was going to bring discipline to my grading regimen.
• Delicious, delicious Stumptown coffee.
• Aromatherapy.
  
• Student papers on Walker Percy or John Berger than I am pitifully trying to grade.
• Nature.
  
• Ever-growing stack of books that I need to get (back) to for the KZoo conference paper, pt. 2 (including Liuzza's Beowulf, the Norton critical Beowulf (I swear I only have it for the articles!), Klaeber's 3rd edition of Beowulf)
• Even-faster-growing stack of books to which there many reasons I should return (including Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and Fradenberg's Sacrifice Your Love...what a pair!)
• Also, there is a stapler.
  

Required viewing for fans of Foucault's "Panopticism."

Reason # 134 That I am a Giant Dork

Above is one of the best and funniest examples of circular reasoning that I have ever come across. It works really well in the classroom, too, because you can block it out and show how a counterargument forces Peter to come back around and use the premise for his claim as his support, too.

Life is so Much More Interesing if you Know Literary Terms

I was over at The Austinist, a sort of local news/blog/social networking (a social blewg?) out of Austin, TX. Allnychen, the editor over there, wrote about a new, 668-page report from the state of Texas that concludes the state produces far too many reports. Really. Chen notes how "meta" it is (and it is), but there's also a total ignorance of the concept of irony. Anyone who's been in a graduate English seminar or has seen Reality Bites knows that irony is when the actual outcome differs or subverts the expected outcome (yes, I know there are many kinds of irony and that this is technically situational irony, but this general definition will do). Apparently, the state of Texas can't recognize it when it sees it.

Of course, neither can Alanis Morrisette (as her song, "Ironic" shows) or the typical college student. This paper shows that many students can't understand the irony of dowloading and plagiarizing a paper from an online paper-mill (called "echeat.com," no less) that cites an essay called "A Whole Lot of Cheatin' Going On," which is--you guessed it--about cheating on college campuses. That's irony, my friends, and not recognizing it is symptomatic of an inability to look at the larger scope of things, at the life going on around you, at the arc of your own life. Instead, students tend to focus only on the short-term. I don't have time to write the paper, so I'll just download this one. Nevermind that plagiarism can and has ended collegiate and professional careers. Nevermind that it's usually incredibly easy for instructors to spot plagiarism in student writing. No, downloading a paper like this is just illustrating a broad-scale stupidity on the part of the student.

The problem is that we, as a culture, do not think about what we do on a larger scale. I'm not saying that we should be a culture of chess-players (though it wouldn't hurt), but we need to look up every so often. Most of us stumble around--like a cross-country runner trying to finish the race while only staring at her feet. We need to slow down for a moment; we've become so enamored with our ability to create--the product of which is often immediately available for public consumption (like this blog or emails or webcams)--that we don't think things through the way we would if, say, we were using a pen and paper.

Don't misunderstand: I'm no modern-day Luddite, and I'm not trying to the get toothpaste back in the tube by advocating a rejection of electronic technologies. All I want is for us to slow down. Maybe ease off on the quantity demands a bit and focus more on the quality demands. Instead of 4-6 page papers, try 3-5 pagers instead, but increase the standards a bit. Make students actually think about the arguments but also the paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and even words they use. It would take the same about of time but would yield much more thoughtful and well-wrought ideas, texts, and products.