Aaron Barlow considers the implications of Reign of Error for higher education.
After a full decade of the testing mania of No Child Left Behind, professors are seeing students less well prepared for college courses that in the recent past.
After a decade of guessing the right answer to every question, it is not surprising that students are ill-prepared to think about complex issues with more than one answer or which no answer at all.
Barlow writes:
“Though the impact has been strongest on American k-12 schools (No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top), the impact is felt in colleges and universities, too. “Learning outcomes” are one of the results, attempts to quantify just about everything and to justify specific learning activities rather than seeing a student as a whole being and an education as something that prepares students for their own explorations, for development of their own ‘learning outcomes.’ This is the factory model of education and, frankly, it has no place in a democracy, where education is supposed to produce participants in the public square who can examine evidence and make decisions on their own. That this ability also makes for better workers is critical to the success of both education and the United States, but the primary focus is on creating good citizens.
We college professors, with problems enough of our own–with changes in governance heading toward a corporate model of top-down decision making, with academic freedom becoming a narrower and narrower aspect of our lives, with more and more of us living and working as contingent and part-time hires, keeping us barely on the fringes of the middle class (if there at all)–haven’t been paying enough attention, as a group, to what has been happening to the schools that feed students to us. Yes, many of us have noticed that our students (especially at non-elite public institutions) are coming to us less and less prepared for college work each ensuing year, but we haven’t put in the time to really explore why. It is hard enough trying to make up for the lacks our students are coming in with. How, furthermore, can we have the time to advocate for changes in k-12 curricula when our own are under fire?”
He says it is time for college professors to inform themselves and become involved. If they do not, they too will be judged by the rise or fall of their students’ test scores on standardized tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve been waiting for them to get loud!
Amen, because all this stuff is coming your way, too.
First of all, those teaching college need to get organized. Today, 75% are “casual” employees, and many earning less than K-12 teachers. It’s inexcusable.
Second, starting with colleges of education, not just entire programs, teachers will be evaluated by “measurable” outcomes. Some professors already find themselves facing tenure decisions based, in part, on poorly designed student evaluations of teachers and courses.
Last, it’s way past time for college professors to get involved.
Teaching to bubble tests and answering short passages in no way prepares students to tackle extended, difficult texts with no right answers. K-12 teachers know that, but we’re under pressures you will be under soon, too. It’s always easy to blame the teachers who taught the students we get earlier than we do, but we’re all in this mess together.
Diane et al…this is what I write about continually on this blog site. I am dismayed at the lack of interesst among my higher ed colleagues who seem to have become the three mon keys, hear no eveil, see no evil, speak no evil, when it comes to the billionaires and politicians who are working toward making public education a free market industry.
As a public policy specialist who also teaches some economics, it is clear that Broad and his buddies are following the hue and cry of economist Shumpter who believed business cycles were bastd on creative destruction. And I see this investment bubble, as just one more bubble as with the South Seas and other bubbles, that will end in time when the students of today, the created widgets and guinea pigs, enter the work force with little to no ability to think criticallym bu tonly know how to fillout bubble tests and do rote assignments.
In other times of economic bubbles, such as our housing/mortgage bubble bursting in 2008 and our too big to fail banks, the big time winners are always the same…the richest geediest stay ealsily at the top while the rest of the country, all of us, drown in debt.
Where is the populace? When does this complacent populace address those who say “let ‘m eat cake”?
Please excuse all the typos but my ability to edit is stymied due to this software that does not let me read what I am writing.
Hope ‘IT Shawn’ can fix it…it worked for a bit yesterday.
Last sentences should read…
…the richest greediest stay easily at the top while the rest…drown in debt.
And as a last thought, I wonder who will pick up the cudgel and resist…and say, “off with their heads”.
addendum…I am gathering material and beginning a book on all this from the perspective of a female educator and parent who works in higher ed in the field of public policy. It will be more like the work of Bloom over 30 years ago than the excellent books we read today.
I welcome any suggestions you all may have for me for inclusion into the content. You are all my teachers.
Please email at
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
Great post. What I saw while working at a large public state university as a grant writer was the decline of what used to be the stable profession of professor. (I left in 2005)
What it looked like to me at the time was that more and more the university was all about the grant funding dollars the specific colleges were bringing in rather than supporting professors in any truly cutting edge research.
It was a very corporate model of how to run an educational institute. Colleges would have “star” professors who brought in the most money (usually with a team of lowly workers doing the actual work). The job of teaching was pushed off to the teaching assistants as much as possible. Very few professors ever made it to the “star” grant moneymaker position, and if they didn’t they were considered expendable despite any other factors.
Gone were the days when professors had a solid career that didn’t need constant political maneuvering to maintain.
It was sad to see since I knew that many of the older retiring professors had so much more in the way of job security, benefits and support for forward thinking research than the younger professors.
Clearly it’s time for change. Glad to hear of the pushing back.
You hit the nail directly on the head. It is all about grant funding and who can bring in the most money. The univeristy takes about 60% off the top of professors funding. And then, follow the funders. All the big boys we are reading and writing about, starting with Broad, Gates, the Waltons,, are the main funders. So the university does not allow professors to bite the hand that feeds them. It stinks.
” they too will be judged by the rise or fall of their students’ test scores on standardized tests.”
And they need to know that, if they teach a subject that K12 teachers take and will be teaching in lower education, such as English and Math, then they are likely to soon be judged based on the scores of their students’ students, just as what “reformers” have in store for Teacher Educators.
We are going to need a young population of students FROM ALL BACKGROUNDS who have honed their critical thinking skills via education so that they can think about and solve problems at home, in the community and the world at large. College professors are only going to see this “slide” go off the deep end if public school teachers continue to be force fed what and how they are to teach from a mandate created by those seeking profit but not in the know about education. Robert Reich made some wise comments in reflecting on the true issues of this time in US history and it does not put debt ceiling or Obamacare…. front and center! Growing poverty is front and center.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-triumph-of-the-right_b_4144486.html
Finally! We have a better chance of succeeding if we are all in this together.
Agree. We must stand together and do what is best for our students. Any suggestions on how to move forward? Who can help us? Will a massive letter writing campaign be effective? Someone take the lead……
The only way to push back is to form alliances of educators,oarents and progressive members of the community.the key to success will be direct action: active participation in school, community , and local government; attend every school committee meeting and get on the speakers’ list.; provide facts and feelings. Change will come when parents vote out elected officials who are the minions of the corporate and philanthropic power mongerers you will have to throw the rascals out. Communkty organization and struggle , with Communkty control via”participatory democracy”, rather than top down leadership by professionals is both a political and moral imperative..It is futile to attempt to play by the rules of the so called reformers. The valid change agents have to change the rules and do what is necessary to oust those who are samaging,kids, parents, schools and communities
This message needs to be heard by all teachers. I moved from high school to college and can state that NCLB has had a profoundly negative effect. It is not a K-12 problem. It is every one’s problem. The solution lies in removing the foundations and their bought politicians from professional decisions.
I am curios about what negative effect you see in college from NCLB. I certainly think that there are more academically unprepared and unmotivated students now than I saw 20 years ago, but I attribute that to the far higher proportion of students who are now seeking a college degree.
Teacheco….yes, the results are alarming. To get into the U. of C. these days one much have a straight A average, and above. Way too many entering freshmen are in remedial English classes, this includes native English speakers. Also many of those with high GPAs need remedial math. It is obvious to all that the elementary and secondary education has failed them. But still
sorry but this software is still not working for me…
continuing….
But still, others factors enter into this picture. There are sociologic and anthropolic factors to consider. The entire Western culture has dimmed as technology has risen. Entertainment and media are at a low ebb as the forces of the free market cause lower and lower expectations for youth, and the economics of universal education is shocking. To see the US at almost the lowest of the industrial nations in terms of financing public education is telling in the students who are now at college age.
Obama is unrealistic in saying all students must be college-ready, but he has not oiled the wheels of education with rational funding programs, but rather has exacerbated the problems with RttT.
“First they came for others, now they come for me”..or something like that.
Is it possible that articulating learning goals for courses and “justifying” activities by connecting them to those learning goals is actually a valuable faculty development experience that also helps us communicate more clearly with students? Calling faculty-developed learning outcomes “the factory model” dismissive and over-the-top.
Rather than directing blame down towards the K-12 system, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves what we can do with the students we have? College isn’t just about the top 10% of the best prepared students and giving them space to “find themselves” while listening to a great thinker expound under a tree; access to higher ed is increasing, that’s a good thing, and we have a responsibility to scaffold learning so that students can get to that point. Guess what- the ability to create ones own goals is a complex learned skill, and it, too can be a learning goal built on many before it.
Let’s figure out what we can learn from folks like Wiggins, not run from it.