When Bill Gates spoke to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards a few weeks ago, he explained the Common Core standards by referring to the value of the electric plug in standardizing appliances across the nation. Bear in mind that children are not appliances and that learning is not an electric plug. Otherwise…I am not sure what he was talking about other than the beauty of standardization per se.
Now, in defending the Obama administration’s plans to rate every college and university, Jamienne Studley of the U.S. Department of Education says it is no different than rating an electric blender.
Think of it. In what way is an electric blender like or unlike a university?
Aaron Barlow of Academe Blog takes a stab at explaining why this is not a good analogy.
Can you think of a better analogy? Is a university like a toaster? like a microwave? like a late-model automobile? Or what?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Universities are like dish soap, pastry brushes, a Vitamix, and lemon Pledge.
So are people.
We and education are just one big consumer product waiting for free market choice to determine if we are purchased or put in the clearance aisle.
And speaking of clearance sales, I would not bother to put Obama and company onto the mark-down table.
I’d just as soon toss him where he and so many others belong.
In the trash.
Trashy vessels for trashy people.
Make room for his stinky ignorant wife as well. In fact, just use a dunpster and get rid of 90% of congressional representatives and Senators in D.C. and nearly all your governors. Sort through your state and county legislatures and see which ones you want to donate to charity, which ones to put in the shredder, and which ones to keep.
Let’s do some spring cleaning and start almost new.
Bernie Sanders for president in 2016 . . . . .
LikeLike
Can we please be respectful of others and remember that “name calling” and “put downs” are “bullying” behaviors. Let’s focus on the person’s “behavior” that disappoints or displeases us rather then the person.
…just trying to be helpful 🙂
LikeLike
Joyce, while I appreciate your sentiments, I can understand Robert’s frustration. As educators, we have been courteous while the EduBullies, including President Obama, twist the knives in our back.
LikeLike
You should just ignore the trolls!
LikeLike
Thank you, Eleanor.
You said what I as thinking but am too furious to articulate.
Joyce is right in that one must stick to persuasive argumentation, but Obama and cronies are bullies through and through.
Joyce, this is class warfare.
There’s a gunless war out there . . . . .
LikeLike
No trolling here, Mike.
Just a lot of justified anger at what this administration is doing to public education and the middle class . . . .
Yes, we are a lot better than the governments of Uganda and Nigeria. . . . But we are not as good as we used to be, and we ar not as good as our Western and European counterparts.
Obama and his network of reformers are pure trash.
LikeLike
Misguided, wrong-headed, pompous even but no one is trash.
LikeLike
No, Obama is deceitful, opportunistic, angry, and greedy.
But he is no different than so very many of his predecessors and most folkd up on the hill.
I respect deeply your adjectives. . . . I am comfortable in my metaphors.
By no means do I think we can pin everything on one president and his wife, but they do set a tone. This situation is complex and very calculated.
I hated (sorry, Joyce: i “intensely disliked”) Bush as much, as I do Ryan and Mitney, but at least what you see is what you get.
Bush and Obama and so many others have thrown public education and poverty under the bus, blame teachers and principals, and have launched a hideous propaganda machine against those of us who educate children.
As an NBCT and veteran teacher of low income children for 20 years, I can vouch that this reform movement is catastrophic. . . worse than trash, which we can just put down the chute or compost.
RttT is virulent and cannot be put in the trash. It is educational e-bola, and it must be isolated and eliminated with a vaccine . . . . . .
My words are unpleasant and maybe evoke some shock; my sentiments towards the government’s reform movement and its willful ignorance of poverty speaks for millions of people, especially educators in the trenches and parents.
LikeLike
Correction:
” . . . . speak for millions . . . . “
LikeLike
Michelle Obama is “stinky”?
LikeLike
Correct.
Stinks. Stank. Stunk.
LikeLike
President Obama continues to be willfully deceitful to those whom he promised hope and change. Research his reversals (lies, broken promises, whatever you wish to label them) on warrantless spying, net neutrality, and public education to name a few issues. Let’s not forget his red-hot desire to cement the TPP trade agreement (NAFTA on steroids). The TPP will suck out even more decent-paying jobs out of the USA. Perhaps President Obama has calculated that it’s not worth educating American children to be critical thinkers and problem solvers, when the future he has planned for them is to be reduced to being third-world paupers, while he Michelle, Malia and Sasha enjoy the privileged lives of the 1 percent,
LikeLike
You’re right, that’s not an appropriate characterization. Here’s a better one:
You’re a mean one, Mrs. Grinch
You really are a heel,
You’re as cuddly as a cactus, you’re as charming as an eel, Mrs. Grinch,
You’re a bad banana with a greasy black peel!
You’re a monster, Mrs. Grinch,
Your heart’s an empty hole,
Your brain is full of spiders, you have garlic in your soul, Mrs. Grinch,
I wouldn’t touch you with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole!
You’re a foul one, Mrs. Grinch,
You have termites in your smile,
You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile, Mrs. Grinch,
Given a choice between the two of you’d take the seasick crocodile!
You’re a rotter, Mrs. Grinch,
You’re the king of sinful sots,
Your heart’s a dead tomato splotched with moldy purple spots, Mrs. Grinch,
You’re a three decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce!
You nauseate me, Mrs. Grinch,
With a nauseous super “naus”!,
You’re a crooked dirty jockey and you drive a crooked hoss, Mrs. Grinch,
Your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful
assortment of rubbish imaginable mangled up in tangled up knots!
You’re a foul one, Mrs. Grinch,
You’re a nasty wasty skunk,
Your heart is full of unwashed socks, your soul is full of gunk, Mrs. Grinch,
The three words that best describe you are as follows, and I quote,
“Stink, stank, stunk”!
LikeLike
Dienne,
This was so appropriate. It can apply to all the people in D.C. that I mentioned. It made me think and laugh.
LikeLike
This post is offensive and degrading. Please take it down, it has poisoned the discourse on an important subject. I’m logging off now because
#YesAllWomen are routinely subjected to degradation, disrespect and threats online, but I didn’t expect it here.
LikeLike
+10.
LikeLike
Dear Ally Chemtechr,
The very trolling you have accused others in the past is surfacing now in your own post.
I hate to sound like a skills review course, but you really need to review my post for its only and “main” idea, and that is that this president, his wife, most of his education cabintery, and most politicians are anti-teacher, anti-public education, and anti-union.
You are aware of that, aren’t you? Certainly, from your other posts, I sense you are.
Why you are focusing on the degradation of women, as you did not do a (sorry to refer to David Coleman here) close read of the post, is something of a rorshach test that revelas your own m.o., and that’s perfectly okay for you to be you.
But please don’t mischaracterize me being me.
I don’t believe in the degradation of women, and I staunchly uphold women’s rights. I am appalled that 50% of our federal congress and senatorship are not women. The United States is still an egregiously sexist and chauvinistic nation in all too many ways.
Have you not noticed that?
I criticized this vapid president and first lady as well as most politicians in Washington. Is one to assume that women who make the subset of that very body of people are being targeted and put down?
The fact that you would focus on the women mentioned in my post and not the men shows a potential gender bias on your own behalf.
IF you have been burned or hurt in life by gender injustices – personal, political, whatever they might be – then I feel empathy and sympaty for you and wish there were somehting I could directly do for you.
But let’s not let your radar – however appropriate it may be for you – misinterpret a post and shut down the conversation.
I will say it again: Barack and Michelle Obama and most politicians in Washington D.C. are trash. They stink to high heaven, and they want wipe the floor with the middle class.
I make not one molecule of an apology for my sentiments.
I still consider you an ally because your politics about teachers is very much aligned with the vast majority according to my close readings of many of your posts.
Personally, I would never insist that your post be removed just because it portrayed mine in a false light. Conflict and sorting out conflict as well as confrontation and even a some verbal aggression towards these reformers is very good for the soul, if not the pushback movement.
We public educators are being slammed and bullied . . . . .
LikeLike
Here’s a one-man reader survey that you can take or leave: When I read your comment above, with its reference to Michelle Obama as “stinky,” I did not understand that reference to to be a metaphor for any characteristic of hers that would be relevant a critique of her on ideological, political, or policy grounds. The same goes for my understanding of your references to speech impediments and speech therapy in your posts about Arne Duncan. They come across as purely personal insults that are tossed on top of a rhetorical heap for good measure. But hey, that’s just me.
LikeLike
FLERP,
I do not apologize for being unkind to Arner Duncan, and if your lens is on my harshness instead of his, all I can say is that I don’t have time for such ancillary focus and political correctness.
I have a reform movement to fight . . . . . .
LikeLike
I cannot help it, Robert. When I hear someone refer to speech impediments in a mocking tone, I want to punch their teeth in. It’s not political correctness, and it’s not about being unkind to Arne Duncan. It’s a hair-trigger emotional reaction to what I perceive as thoughtless cruelty that affects children. If you told me that you weren’t being intentionally mean-spirited, I could accept that. But you told me you’re not not sorry, that you don’t have time to care about it, because yours is the path of righteousness.
The insult is gratuitous. It’s unnecessary. You use it not because the reform movement requires you to, but because you want to and because you like to. You can stop it whenever you want. So please take this into consideration.
LikeLike
FLERP,
What path of righteousness?
I don’t like Arne Duncan.
He is a moron.
He is anti-intellectual, anti-labor, anti-union, and an elitist whose elitism has no scientific or robust, researched basis. He is a career politician, cut off from the ordinary person.
And yes, I am smearing him, as he has smeared and colluded with others to smear teachers and administrators.
For someone who is the secretary of education, he is not very articulate both in his choice of words and what he puts out as his own idiolect. He referred to low income children as “the poverty kids” in a major press conference. This is a command of the language?
My comment had NOTHING to do with children receiving speech therapy or people with articulation/processing issues, for whom I continue to relentlessly advocate for.
But an eye for and eye, a tooth for a tooth. Arne Duncan deserves not one molecule of respect, and his own projections of his own image speak – or mispeak – for themselves. They are part and parcel of an overall package that is rotten and smelly and degrading to any civilized democracy. His boss is no better. Look at the damage they have done.
The propganda campaign against teachers and principals and unions had been aggressive, unkind, insulting, and virulent. I have no issues doing to same to the enemies and bullies who have done this to educators, of whom I am one.
Arne Duncan is rotten to the core, and his speeches coupled with his speech mannerisms don’t portray him as someone credible, eloquent, articulate, and equipped with policy acumen. He could still seek speech therapy and work on his diction. He is a major public figure, and if people with similar issues who work hard with intense speech therapy produce better diction – which they do – then so too should the secretary of education. I think he insults those who advocate for speech therapists in schools, many of whom are filled with twice the caseloads because of the same budget cuts he, Obama, Congress, and state legislatures have implmented. I see hardly any of them advocating for cuts to our military, taxing the uber-wealthy, cutting loopholes for big corporations, and eliminating off shore tax havens.
You can hang your hat on your mis-interpretation of my post, but as I said, I am more interested in putting my energy to fighting this war, and it is indeed a war . . . . not only against children and families, but against the middle class.
I understand your frustrations, and I may have insulted the secretary of education and the first lady, but I have never conjured up the imagery or even suggestion of a realistic agression or assault and battery as mentioned in your last note.
Never.
You might consider connecting all the dots instead of zooming in inaccurately on one of them . . . . .
LikeLike
Again, it’s not about Duncan, it’s about the words you use and the effect they have on people. You don’t make references to Duncan needing “speech therapy” to point out that he’s not articulate. You do it to insult, to exploit what you perceive as a weakness, and you want a larger group to approve and join in. It’s not good, and you don’t need to do it.
LikeLike
IF that is the reference to the hastag viralized by the recent tragedy in California, then I cringe at the analogy to my post and how inaccurate and bizarre the analogy is.
I have criticized politicians here and of both genders. They stink.
Seek professional help.
LikeLike
Let’s see if I get this right. We’re going to have politicians…who have trouble getting a 15% or higher rating…rating colleges and universities. What a beautiful thing that will be. Every day the USDOE comes up with some new plan to save the planet. PLEASE!!! Where does Obama find these people? Does he even have a clue? What a disappointment for all of us in the educational community that supported him.
LikeLike
Obama is far, far worse for education than Bush was. An utter disaster
LikeLike
I know people here will disagree with me, but I’m less worried about the Gates/Duncan/Bush plan for higher ed.
At least people who go to college are (technically!) adults. They had 18 years where they weren’t wholly commercialized and treated as either consumers or products.
At least it didn’t begin in kindergarten, which is where we’re headed now.
LikeLike
Both are extremely dangerous. I hope to God that the USDE will run into enormous resistance from college professors. But a lot of them are now cowed by administrators who come from the business community rather than from academia.
LikeLike
Bob Shepherd, don’t expect resistance from college professors. 70% are adjuncts.
LikeLike
I know. I have an acquaintance who works for a union as an organizer of adjunct faculty. It’s an uphill battle, but there are starting to be some victories.
LikeLike
I looked up this number and found that the Chronicle of Higher Education states that 70% of college professors are off tenure track, not that 70% are part time adjuncts. The 70% off tenure track includes people like me and friends I have who earn in the low six figures as full time lecturers. Dr. Ravitch might want to head over to the Stern School of Business to see how well their “adjuncts” are paid.
Here is the Chronicle article: http://chronicle.com/article/Adjuncts-Build-Strength-in/135520/
LikeLike
Let’s take the Gates plan to its logical conclusion.
We need only ONE professor for Econ 101. We can tape that person’s lectures, and every kid, from then on, can listen to those and then take the standardized test. And that will be Econ 101. We can save a LOT of money, there, on Economics professors, tenure track and non-tenure track. Hell, we don’t even have to pay the $2987 per course that we pay to adjuncts. Pearson/Gates, Inc. can do a work-for-hire with one person, once, at a flat fee. Think of the savings!!! We can eliminate MILLIONS of positions.
And, of course, we can carefully vet everything that anyone is ever taught.
LikeLike
Robert,
I teach between 250 and 500 students in a single class. How different would it be for most students if I were pre-recorded? They might loose something, but what if it dropped tuition down to $10 a credit hour. Would that be a good bargain?
Again, the point is not to use as many resources to produce a good or service as we can, but as few as possible. I was thinking about this the other day as I watched a skilled operator tear out a large chunk of sidewalk at a construction site. That one person and his machine likely replaced at least a dozen workers with sledgehammers, enabling the eleven others to go off and do something else instead of breaking up concrete.
LikeLike
The figure that I remember is that 70 percent of CLASSES are taught by adjunct faculty. But I am having a difficult time finding a source. I wonder whether there has been a good study of this. Yes, it is true that about 70 percent of instructors are non-tenure track. But I am interested in that other number. If anyone has a source on percentage of classes taught by adjuncts, I would like to see it.
LikeLike
Looking through the Stern Business School Directory, It does appear to be filled with adjuncts, each contributing to the 70% figure.
Here is an interesting one: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/cynthia-franklin
The entire list of faculty, including all the adjunct faculty, can be found here:
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/search_name_form
LikeLike
Robert,
At my institution most of the student credit hours are taught by non-tenure track, full time instructors. We count as adjuncts if by that you mean non-tenure track faculty.
LikeLike
My ex taught as an adjunct at five different colleges in Massachusetts and Florida. In each of these, she was given a limited number of classes because if she had more, she would have been considered full time, and the school would have had to pay her benefits.
LikeLike
I have a comment with a link to the Stern Business School faculty directory in moderation right now. It might change some perceptions about adjuncts.
You might think about why it is that institutions did not want to employ your spouse as a full time employee. Was it because that status would involve a number of extra commitments that your spouse was not particularly interested in getting and the institution was unwilling to give? It reminds me of the time where I tried to hire a masters student in another department as an economics teaching assistant. He had been an undergraduate teaching assistant in the department and was eager to continue in that position at his old pay rate while he worked on his masters degree. The administration would not allow the department to pay him his old rate because he now had an undergraduate degree. The department was unwilling to pay him at the same rate as our Ph.D. students (though would have been happy to pay him his old rate). The net result is that he was not hired even though hiring him would have made both him and the department happy. Perhaps something similar occurs with the switch to full time.
LikeLike
TE. she would have gladly been full time. But the law would have required these schools to pay benefits to her if she were a full-time employee. This is COMMON today. Surely you know that it is.
LikeLike
Would she have gladly been full time without benefits? Would the institution have been willing to employ her full time without benefits?
LikeLike
The answers to those questions are yes and, of course, no. Do your questions indicate that you believe the problem to be with laws that require that employers provide benefits to full-time employees?
LikeLike
The problem lies in the connection between employment and health insurance. That is why the ACA is important. There should not be a discontinuous jump in the cost of employing a person for more hours. That is why organizations choose not to employ for full time hours as you well know.
LikeLike
She was told, TE, many times, “Sorry, we can’t give you another class because then you would be full time.” And after a while, she didn’t have to ask the question any more because she knew the answer to it.
In other words, then they would have had to pay benefits to her.
But surely you know that this is quite general around the country, TE. Aren’t you being just a bit disingenuous here?
I read, a couple months ago, a story about an adjunct at one state school who go evicted from her apartment because she couldn’t afford to pay the rent on what she earned from teach two 3-credit classes. She took to sleeping in the carrel that the university provided and to showering in the phys ed building. The university discovered this and, of course, fired her.
LikeLike
TE –
Comparing teaching college students to breaking up concrete is about as good a metaphor as comparing universities to blenders.
LikeLike
I am using that story to illustrate my point that the goal is not to use as many resources as possible in an endeavor, no matter how worthwhile, but as few as we need.
I have little doubt that Henry Scott obtained one of the best economics educations possible at the time, but it was expense that only a Duke of Buccleuch might be able to pay. If we want education at a reasonable cost, we need to economize on inputs to get the greatest value for money.
LikeLike
TE
“Again, the point is not to use as many resources to produce a good or service as we can, but as few as possible…If we want education at a reasonable cost, we need to economize on inputs to get the greatest value for money.”
Students aren’t concrete, education isn’t a product and professors aren’t inputs. We disagree.
LikeLike
I am an input. Without teachers, would not there be much less education?
LikeLike
Well, I guess, then, TE, that we can bring a few professors together, once, for a recording session, then we can fire them all, nationwide. Or, as you put it, they will be “enabled” to go off and do something else. Perhaps they can wait tables at David Coleman’s club.
LikeLike
Perhaps they could wait tables. At least that would be socially necessary labor rather then a make work sort of thing.
LikeLike
By all means. Let’s use as few resources as possible in this edubusiness.
Let’s have Pearson/Gates, Inc., send a video crew into a university one semester to videotape all the classes, after, of course, making professors sign a contract allowing for their classes to be videotaped and to become the intellectual property of the university, to be licensed to Pearson/Gates, Inc.
Then, we can “enable” all the professors in the country to go find other jobs.
Think of all the redundant use of of inputs we can eliminate by this simple means!!!
Teaching, there’s an app for that!
And, of course, then we can vet all the classes and make sure that they contain no controversial material. Those intellectuals were always a troublesome lot, what with their “ideas” and all.
Just think of it: no more Bertrand Russells and Jean-Paul Sartres and and Noam Chomskys, ever.
LikeLike
Robert,
The very first app for teaching was the printed book. Lets eliminate that and go back to the oral tradition. Makes sense, right?
LikeLike
TE, I EMPHATICALLY did not suggest such a thing. Books were not a replacement for teachers. NEITHER ARE VIDEOS and teaching software. That is precisely my point. You are much too bright to make a comment like that.
LikeLike
I am a fan of videotaped instruction. I have OFTEN defended, on this blog, the work done by Khan Academy. I am deeply moved by the prospect of any child in any place having access to learning materials via the Internet. I think that the world could become a very different place if every kid in every village in the developing world could have a $100 laptop, access to electricity via some sort of generator, and Internet access. I want, very much, for the world community to work toward that–toward the universal access that that brings. But I have heard far, far, far too many talks by Mr. Gates about cutting the costs of college by using technology to REPLACE teachers.
Education is FUNDAMENTALLY an act of transmission by human beings to other human beings that which matters to them. A book or a video is a wonderful thing when there is no teacher available. A book and a video AND a teacher is exponentially better. The very idea of replacing the human interaction that is teaching with a one-way push technology is just appalling to me. It’s as appalling as Skinner’s PATHOLOGICAL as was Skinner’s dream of mothers and fathers with Skinner boxes. I do not look forward to a future in which education has become a matter of kids consuming push materials vetted by a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, one in which a thousand kids meet in a room and do worksheets on a screen while a low-paid aide walks around making sure that their tablets are working and answering questions.
LikeLike
When my nephew was three, his grandmother died. He asked me why everyone was crying and I told him it was because Mimi had died, which meant we wouldn’t see her anymore. He asked why couldn’t we go to the store and just get another Mimi. I explained that people aren’t like things, there was only one Mimi and we could never get another one to take her place. He burst into tears.
People matter. The interactions between teacher (at any level) and student are most important. Reducing that relationship to videos to be inputed may be something, but it ain’t education. And it isn’t something to be valued much.
LikeLike
No doubt people matter, but the oral tradition is being revived with the advent of inexpensive video recording technology. It is the era of the book that represents the least human interaction between teacher and student, don’t you think?
LikeLike
See the movie “La lengua de la mariposa”. In English it is called “Butterfly” Or “Veronico Cruz”.
LikeLike
I write about Skinner and his boxes and Gates and his desire to replace teachers with teaching machines and I get so upset that I can’t even type straight.
One thing is certain. Bill Gates’s children won’t be going to schools where they spend their days doing worksheets on a screen and hooked up to monitors of their galvanic skin response to make certain that they are being continuously gritful in their application to whatever canned garbage the STATE pushes at them.
Nope. That’s for other people’s children. And there is a great deal of money to be made from turning the training (one cannot use the word “education” for this) of other people’s children into that.
LikeLike
I see, TE. Teaching, when there is an app that could do it, is a “make work sort of thing.” Much better to have those professors wait tables while our children are taught by machines whatever Lord Coleman and the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat decides the proles need to know.
LikeLike
University professors have been replaced by day laborers.
Dr. Ravitch, based on her pre-2008 views and employment history, would be hired, at an oligarch-funded and directed university (which includes public universities). Based on her current views, she wouldn’t be reappointed and not, hired.
We can measure the impact of day laborers, by number of classes, ratio of tenure to non-tenure, full-time to part-time, dice it up by type of institution, or describe it, with anecdotes of outlier pay. The issue is academic freedom and respect for the institutions’ graduates and research.
The media and public have learned that university research is manipulated in the same way, that think tank research, is. The journalists at SABEW learned the lesson, as a result of the manufactured pension crisis, that rolled out a team of professors and “philanthropic” foundations.
Yesterday, the website, Truthout, corrected the distortions of the pension crisis data.
Policies and reputations, based on skewed data, abound. As Diane has pointed out, paraphrasing, that the issue of believability, rests with the answer to,
” Does the 1% gain?”
LikeLike
Linda, your assumption that I would be hired by a university because of my connections (the first Bush administration) are definitely not true. In fact, I was asked to leave Teachers College, Columbia University, because I worked in the first Bush administration.
LikeLike
Wow.
LikeLike
This is why tenure matters.
LikeLike
Re: My prior comment about hiring at oligarch universities
Plutocrats involved themselves in ed., to get rid of the perceived left-wing bias that stood in the way of their profit motives. The climate change “debate” illustrates research bias, introduced by the 1%. Academicians with the Hoover institute have credibility with the 1%, who demand unfettered free markets. As an example, the seminal work in the pension “crisis”, Biblically-titled, “Day of Reckoning”, is from one of their researchers. It is not a leap to extrapolate from the hiring and reappointment practices at FSU and other Koch course -funding, that consistency of curriculum and faculty, with the Lewis Powell memo, is required.
LikeLike
Linda,
Do you think Dr. Ravitch was appointed to the faculty at NYU because of her connections to the Hoover Institute?
LikeLike
University faculty appointments
Applicable to the scenario, does NYU, allow donors direct involvement in faculty hiring and reappointments?
Does NYU, agree to accept funding, conditionally, for
(a) specific research objectives e.g. an Education Reform Dept.?
(b) courses with specified curriculum?
If so, I would conclude that faculty hire decisions, are affected.
te, in a prior post, you wrote, the university could just say “no”, to donors. Did you mean the deans or presidents, who are hired and rewarded for their fund-raising abilities?
Greed does not need to be taught. If a university’s dogma is in err, it’s preferable that it should be, while pursuing the greater good.
The fact that Piketty’s research germinated and evolved overseas is an indictment of the bias of American economists.
LikeLike
Linda,
I do not know what NYU’s policy is, but in general hiring does not work that way. Hiring for a position typically starts with a department creating an ordered wish list of positions based on areas of specialization. These all go to the dean, and the dean authorizes a search or not. If a search is authorized, the department performs the search and constructs an ordered list of candidates (the dean must generally approve them as well, but there is usually is no worry there), and the department works it’s way down the list until someone says yes, though there is usually some bargaining over salary and other aspects of the job.
If the person is to be hired at a rank above assistant professor, there are additional hurdles to cross. If the person is to be hired with tenure, the tenured members of the department must approve the candidate separately from the department as a whole. A college committee must than approve the candidate and in large institutions like mine a university committee must than approve the candidate. If the candidate is to be hired as a distinguished professor, a separate committee of all the distinguished professors at the university must approve the candidate as well.
If there is an endowed position that has restrictions on the nature of the candidates to hold the position, it must still go through the steps above. In the case of my department, we decided that the restrictions were so tight that we would not likely find a person acceptable to both the department and the donor, so we turned it down. Our administrators were fine with that.
LikeLike
I just ran across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about USC electing a non-tenure track faculty member as President of the Faculty Senate. In the comments section, one person notes that the last two chairs of the faculty senate at West Virginia University were also non-tenure track faculty.
Here is the link: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/non-tenure-track-professor-will-lead-southern-cal-s-academic-senate/78825?cid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
LikeLike
te,
The process of faculty selection, that you describe, can be attributed to the legacy of the AAUP red book.
With further reductions in tenure positions, democratic traditions of governance will not survive.
As illustration, the process for hiring adjuncts differs substantially.
You can’t be this obtuse.
LikeLike
No doubt you think me very obtuse, but I do see the process happening every year, both for tenure stream faculty (the sort that would fill the endowed positions you are worried about, by the way) and for non-tenure stream faculty.
What is your practical experience with post secondary hiring practices?
LikeLike
I am not sure why DOE wants to waste money and time rating colleges. There are dozens of books that rate colleges already. Princeton Review, Fiske, US News and World Report, etc. There’s a whole section of the library filled with books like this.
LikeLike
sarah55865 .. I think the answer to your question involves companies moving in wishfully on an”education monopoly… aka Pearson wanting the lion’s share of the profits. Ye who controls the system for rating and ranking also controls the profits.
LikeLike
It wants the official STATE rating. Centralization. Command. Control.
LikeLike
What continually amazes me is how NARROW this debate is. This is the NYTimes conference on the future of …..everything, or whatever.
I give you “education”:
2:30 – 3 p.m.
“What Should We Be Learning? What Should Our Colleges Be Teaching?
David Coleman, president and C.E.O. of the College Board; Stefanie Sanford, chief of Global Policy; and Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education, talk with Thomas L. Friedman about how we prepare the next generation of students to succeed in this new world.”
http://www.nytfriedmanforum.com/agenda.aspx
LikeLike
After his call for the Iraq invasion – because it was the right thing to do – does anyone really expect any better calls from Friedman.
LikeLike
Jb2, at the time, the invasion of Iraq made sense. Eleven years and hundreds of billions of dollars and many thousands of lives later, are you still sure that it was the right thing to do?
LikeLike
No, jb2 and Diane, the illegal war of aggression that was, and is, the invasion of Iraq did not make sense at that time. Afghanistan did not make sense unless you agree with the neo-cons of the Project for a New American Century vision of the world put forth in a letter to Clinton in the last months of his presidency.
LikeLike
The invasion in Iraq made sense?
Really?
To whom and for what and in what way?
That war never made sense except to those who wanted to fatten military contracts and had their eye on Iraqi oil reserves.
Bush, Rice, and Cheney are criminals and should be tried.
LikeLike
How in the world did anyone successfully complete their K-12 public education, graduate college, develop a professional career, and contribute to society in a positive manner before the genius of the “edu-reformers”?
Think about it.
LikeLike
By smokin mirrors!
LikeLike
Good morning, class, I am roboteacher model 374.ELA.12v3. We are about to begin our lesson on CCSS.Literacy.ELA.8.4b. You will practice, today, your technology-enhanced evidence-based constructed response to CCSS.Literacy.ELA.8.4b skills. Initiate procedure.
LikeLike
Now you’re getting the idea. It’s only a matter of time. They can actually watch the lectures in their basements. There is no need for a physical university either. I imagine that there will be large warehouse to stick the younger kids though. You don’t want them roaming the streets. You can hire the former teachers to be guards with tasers to elicit compliance in the receiving objects.
LikeLike
That does not seem likely to be effective but perhaps it will. After all, I would not have expected to see self driving cars and trucks in my lifetime, but that is looking increasingly likely.
LikeLike
I think that the university is like a university.
Profound, no?
LikeLike
🙂
LikeLike
Sometimes a cigar is just cigar.:)
LikeLike
one of my all time favorites, that one!
LikeLike
Of course they want to rate colleges; this will be a way to match students to colleges and courses. The public school children will be rated and matched with county colleges and technical schools, or be sent off to clerk at walmart, et al.
The charter school graduates will be mostly good enough to attend state college; or be relegated to walmart, et al. Except for the token scholarship winner who has more “choice.”
The private school kids, be they smart or dumb, can go to Harvard, Princeton, Yale. Several of them will have families who can buy their ways in. I know a fella whose kid is absolutely stupid, and he pulled strings to get him into a decent college, and bought him a “scholarship” this summer as an intern for a think tank. He will be a future republican, tho these days with Pres. O, it seems that the dems suck big time too. Smack my head, indeed.
Then, we have the athletes from all avenues, who may wind up on scholarship, whether they are smart or not, passing or not….who will be drafted into the sports colleges…or, will they have gutted sports from the public schools so only private and charter kids get to participate?
Lord only knows where our plumbers, electricians, automobile mechanics, hairdressers and the like will come from. Got to have the kids college ready, or work ready. Have they gutted all of the technical programs yet? Certainly, they will destroy all of the “teacher colleges” because you know, only the Ivy League grads, with 5 weeks training, do a decent job. Oh, and by the way, when they are done raiding public education, all that will be left are the online K-12s with 4 clerks (not teachers) overseeing 300 kids, and private schools. The haves will go to brick and mortar private schools, perhaps they will call them something else, maybe learning country clubs, and the rest of the schlubs will attend online, because who cares about them anyhow? They are the futures servants to the 1%ers.
Either this, or besides the government student loans, they have already found a way to make county and state colleges “free” with tax dollars going to the private market yet again. You have to think backwards to figure it out.
As stupid and tongue in cheek as it may sound, could anyone have predicted the current state of affairs?
LikeLike
Orwell predicted it. He was just off by a few years.
LikeLike
You would think someone like Gates would have heard this quote from Einstein:
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture. . . . ”
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929″
Mike Barrett
LikeLike
Thank you! The total lack of understanding of developmental growth in children, is part of this problem too. It’s like yelling at 6 month olds to get up and walk! We are making a generation of A.D.H.D., damaged kids with no empathy, due to “individualized” education, a.k.a., plug them into an ipad and let ’em be…
LikeLike
Mike Barrett: a most pertinent quote. Thank you.
😃
Interestingly, W. Edwards Deming (accomplished numbers/stats guy and renowned management expert) addressed the issue of standardizing electrical plugs and traffic lights and railroad gauges and such (on a worldwide basis no less) as an example of beneficial cooperation that results in a WIN-WIN situation. He opposed, for cogent reasons, what he saw as artificially competitive standardization that resulted in WIN-LOSE situations.
For one set of particulars, see THE ESSENTIAL DEMING (2013), pp. 160-162.
And the sort of standardization that is discussed in this posting and thread? He would have patiently explained how it is a worst management/business practice.
A caveat. What we are discussing for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN (the vast majority) is not what is being implemented and planned for the institutions of genuine learning and teaching that the self-styled “education reformers” like Bill Gates and their enablers ensure for THEIR OWN CHILDREN. Just go to the websites of Lakeside School (Bill Gates) and Harpeth Hall (Michelle Rhee) and Delbarton School (Chris Christie) and U of Chicago Lab Schools (Rahm Emanuel) and the like to see what the leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” provide for their offspring.
Keeping in mind the above, it is helpful to recall what a leading proponent of the CCSS thinks about applying the object of her fierce promotion/advocacy in her new position as the head of an elite private school. This appeared in a posting on this blog of 3-24-2014: “This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core. in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.” I quote from a large part of a statement released by Dr. McQueen that can be accessed via the link below.
[start quote]
First, the Common Core State Standards have not been adopted by Lipscomb Academy. While the standards have been adopted by the state of Tennessee along with 44 other states, private schools have the freedom to determine if they will use all, some or none of the CCSS. To date, Lipscomb Academy administrators have not adopted the standards, but have encouraged the faculty to learn about the math and English/language arts Common Core State Standards that are changing the expectations of students not only in Tennessee but also across the nation.
Second, I have also not been in any discussions about formal adoption of the CCSS at Lipscomb Academy. Currently, Lipscomb Academy draws from a variety of quality national and state standards selected by the school leadership and faculty to set a vision for what content, instruction and curriculum will be used at each grade level. This has proven to be effective; thus, I don’t anticipate any changes to this process now or in the future. As is current practice, all standards available will be reviewed at set intervals by leadership and faculty to determine the direction of Lipscomb Academy.
Third, some of you have voiced concerns that the academy will adopt the PARCC test that will soon replace the current Tennessee standardized test or TCAP. Lipscomb Academy uses the ERB test, not the TCAP, and there are no plans to replace the ERB test with PARCC.
[end quote]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/23/common-core-for-commoners-not-my-school/
The disconnect between word and deed was nailed by a very old dead Greek guy:
“Hateful to me as are the gates of hell, Is he who, hiding one thing in his heart, Utters another.” [Homer]
😎
LikeLike
Bill Gates is no Einstein. Remember Einstein was a European. There is an ocean of difference between a European intellectual and an American intellectual. There aren’t many top-quality intellectuals left in America, and the ones I know moved to Canada years ago.
LikeLike
There are many, many people in U.S. universities of breathtaking brilliance. It is my fervent hope that many of these will speak up, loudly, when this regimentation hits at the college level. The Department for the Standardization, Regimentation, Dehumanization, and Privatization of U.S. Education, formerly the USDE, has big plans for post-secondary schooling: college evaluations, standardized testing, fewer faculty, and more computerized learning. As with K-12, it’s basically the Gates plan. This ranking system is just the beginning.
LikeLike
I guess R. Feynman must have had the mind of a gerbil, eh??!!
LikeLike
Friedman is the hired help. He is paid handsomely to perform the role of public intellectual because he says what the oligarchy wants to have said.
LikeLike
Perhaps Dr. Ravitch could tell us about her former life, when she was at the Hover Institute. Surely she only advocated for those positions because she was a hired gun.
LikeLike
TAGO, Duane!
LikeLike
Let’s start comparing politicians to slot machines, starting with President Obama.
LikeLike
Why don’t we rate and clean house of all the politicians?
LikeLike
Living near Las Vegas, Eleanor, you know they call those things one armed bandits, right? It is appropriate under the circumstances.
LikeLike
Absolutely!
LikeLike
I don’t think it will happen. They gutted their own regulations on for-profit colleges at the insistence of lobbyists, and there’s reams of damning “data” on for-profit colleges. The regulations are a joke.
It’s pretty easy to bark out orders to middle class school teachers and local superintendents in K-12 public ed. They’re not real powerful people.
University presidents have real power and prestige and huge alumni networks.
It’s not like bossing around some harried principal in Des Moines who is just trying to keep the light on and administer the 500 mandates she’s been ordered to put in 🙂
I’ll watch and see if higher ed is treated with more respect and deference than K-12 was. I will bet you five dollars it will be 🙂
LikeLike
The big issue is cost.
Gates gives talks and interviews about this ALL THE TIME. His solution:
Cut faculty and use more teaching software,
raise entrance requirements to reduce the dropout rate,
institute a program of standardized testing at the college level,
and evaluate and stack rank and force out any faculty members who don’t comply.
Teaching, there’s an app for that.
And he and his partners will be happy to provide it.
LikeLike
He is a monster, a mad scientist.
LikeLike
Comment from my 22 year old son who received his bachelor’s last Sunday – “Like a blender? That’s whack…a university is so complex, there are so many factors to consider. One isn’t anything like another. [He knows because he transferred from one to another.] Who said this? She obviously doesn’t know what she’s talking about, so she should just keep quiet.”
LikeLike
Being a School Counselor for 23 years, the last 3 years have been like sticking my head in a blender. Pure abuse, no support.
LikeLike
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.
We must trust autonomous people to do their jobs if we wish for people to do those jobs well because people are made that way. They are intrinsically, not extrinsically motivated.
Each of these initiatives takes another nibble out of freedom. In no time at all, there will be none left. Everything will be regimented, standardized, evaluated, centrally planned, commanded, and controlled.
And that seems to be just fine with Barry O.
LikeLike
Yes, Bob.
The movie “Metropolis” has come to life.
LikeLike
I agree with you Robert. I hope that Batman “The Dark Knight” isn’t next up for us. My college educated son can attest to the myth of stem skills leading to a career here, he has 5 part time offers in electrical engineering. He has a degree in counseling to, his best job offer, a probation officer.
LikeLike
Oh, and by the way, if you want to know exactly what you need in order to succeed in today’s world economy, David Coleman can tell you. He has made up a list of items for you to check off.
No matter who you are.
No matter what you plan to do.
No matter what the future brings.
He has the answers for you.
And Bill is going to program all that into some learning software that will be SO MUCH CHEAPER than it was to pay all those noisy, quarrelsome professors who had their own ideas, often idiosyncratic ideas, about what constituted attainment in their fields of study.
Fortunately, we won’t have to deal with that messiness any longer.
We will have Lord Coleman’s list, PreK through college and beyond.
And that’s how it should be, at least for the proles, for surely, as Hobbes argued in the Leviathan, monarchy is best. Surely, in Hobbes’s words, we all need to live under “a common power to keep [us] all in awe,” for as Queen Elizabeth I wrote in 1601, “The Royal Prerogative [is] not to be canvassed, nor disputed, nor examined, and [does] not even admit of any limitation.”
LikeLike
This stuff out of the USDOE is really getting crazed…I mean like have we have been transported to BizarroWorld! It does not good to use my expensively attained vocabulary because “bizarre” does the trick…
LikeLike
It has become obvious to the small number of rational people left in this country that Arne Duncan and the President are either mentally incompetent, or one of them is the Anti-Christ.
No sane human would perpetuate this kind on evil on children and be considered “normal”.
LikeLike
Unis are living organisms, and like these can sometimes be afflicted with ill being to the point of maybe actual pathology.
What is needed is not a formula – an algorithm – but a heuristic. Otherwise you just distort the activity you are merely mean to be ‘measuring’. ________________________________
LikeLike
What’s a “unis”?
LikeLike
We have to remember that this all part of a greater civilizational decline. Once the decline happens, then it can go quite quickly. The corruption is so strong and entrenched, that nothing is able to stop anything. Money and Oligarchy rules. Our job is just to comment on the destruction and watch it happen, I guess. With a controlled media, I don’t see anything possible. If you are young, I wouldn’t feel bad about moving to Europe. I imagine that Americans will soon be apply to apply for asylum in Canada, and European countries. This will be easier now before the big rush happens. The only freedom you have left is the freedom to move to another country. It’s better to drive a cab in Copenhagen than teach under corporate fascism.
LikeLike
Ever heard of the Montgomery Bus boycott?
LikeLike
Hi Diane, How was your knee surgery? Hope you are feeling fine. Your readers are invited to listen to a new radio show, Teachers Voice Radio, at http://teachersvoiceradio.net. It can also be heard every Friday from 6 pm – 7 pm at http://www.haitiaradioliberte1804.com with call-in access at 832-999-1718. We created two symbolic characters, Brother M and Brother Nomad, to host the show in order to silence our egos and give the floor to teachers’ voices. In Solidarity, Antoine
LikeLike
There are always these claims about deeper thinking but when you look at the content it’s so depressing. Look at the model Art and Poetry units on the Massachusetts DOE website.
Click to access ELAg9-ArtPoetry.pdf
LikeLike
Even more depressing is how few kids get an art class.
LikeLike
I know PRECISELY what you mean there, Sarah. I see this CRAP every day. It’s extraordinarily depressing and sickening to see this junk. We have allowed an invading force of technocratic philistines to take over the instruction of our children.
LikeLike
I have, at this point, seen a few thousand Common Core lessons, activities, questions, etc., that reduce interaction with a work of literature to some sterile technical exercise: Answer parts A and B. Part A. Which of the following best describes the mode of exposition used in paragraph 23 of the selection? Which of the following sentences from paragraph 23 best illustrates this mode of exposition.
Meanwhile, the selection is about a boy living with his grandfather while the old man is dying, and the boy loves his grandfather more than anything, but he comes to resent him and to feel guilty about this, and it’s an extraordinarily powerful human testament.
And NONE OF THAT MATTERS.
LikeLike
I sometimes think that these Ed Deformers are a different species altogether. Vogons are something. Here’s how the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy described the Vogons:
“Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders – signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. . . . On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.”
What do you think? Perhaps the highest policymaking positions in the U.S. have been taken over by Vogons. That would explain a lot.
LikeLike
cx: Vogons or something.
LikeLike
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Now that just makes me want to slap somebody. Next chapter: how to catch lightning in a bottle, and keep it there.
LikeLike
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.”
Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
LikeLike
I can foresee a huge exodus of young people leaving America. I don’t think they will be going to Europe, but most likely South America, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. This exodus will be something like the flower children of the 60’s going to San Francisco. I wish them well, and if I were young, I would be going with them.
I think of my Scottish ancestor who came to America in 1752 after getting a Land Grant from a Lord in North Carolina after the British took away their clan rights following the Battle of Culloden. I would be doing what he did in reverse. Looking for new opportunities in a better place.
What’s left of America now is like the burned out shell of a building, like the image we saw following 911. Americans are Burned Out. They have been abused too long.
Scientist have determined that “burnout” is actually the same as PTSD. Americans have been functioning in traumatic stress for so long ( “except” the 1%) that everyone has PTSD, which is known to usually include Dissociative Disorder. When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the story of Dr Jekell and Mr Hyde, he was describing behavior of Dissociative Disorder that he had observed, since it didn’t have a diagnosis then. Now it is common in every phase of government and business in America. How many “Mr Hyde’s” does the average person know? We are in a transition period of returning to modern barbarianism.
LikeLike
We in the Counterheeformation need a writer with the talent for satirical caricature of a Dickens or a Molière, with the sensitivity to futility and alienation of a Kafka, with the gift for rendering the absurd of a Kafka or an Ionesco or a Barthelme, with the moral outrage of a George Orwell and a John Steinbeck and a Kurt Vonnegut, to tell the bizarro-world tale of Ed Deform.
What a cast of characters such a writer would have to work with!
The tale would start, perhaps, with senile uncle Ronnie. And then it would run to
The rapacious corporate EduProfiteer masters of the universe
The Profiteers’ political windup toys, the fixers
The officious, philistine, uneducated but degree-bearing Educrats
The grifter Ed Deform Edupundits, now swarming like cockroaches over the feast (so many of these!!!)
The grifter Ed Deform Edu-entrepreneurs
The technocratic philistine Ed Deform Edu-entrepreneurs (note: a different breed from the former)
The party public relations propagandists masquerading (not very convincingly) as public intellectuals, which come in several varieties, including,
The Social Darwinist American-style neo-Liberal ideologue apologists and
The completely clueless Laputian policy wonk social engineers
All wallowing in that great green river of plutocrat cash and selling out our freedom and our kids.
The caricature part is done already. One simply has to paint these people from life, for they caricature themselves, again and again and again.
The great American poet and critic Randall Jarrell wrote that ours would be remembered as the time when parody became impossible because one couldn’t parody people’s actions and thought more than they already parodied themselves.
He and Orwell. Prophets.
LikeLike
Here is my analogy of what Bill Gates and gang want for out nation’s students… Anyone remember an old “I Love Lucy” episode where Lucy and Ethel are quality control workers at a chocolate factory? My exact memory on this episode might be fuzzy but it goes something like this… Lucy is in charge of making sure all the chocolates being mechanically “spit out” onto a conveyor belt are in orderly rows and are “good ones” and she must toss out the bad ones so the rest can be packaged. Our nation’s students are the chocolates and our teachers are the factory workers manning the conveyor belt. Gate’s envisions that all the ingredients to make those chocolates are exactly the same, that all factories have the same set up, the same quality production components etc and he thinks that he can evaluate teachers based on how many chocolates are orderly and how many have to be tossed from the conveyor belt. The more chocolates that don’t meet the conveyor belt criteria… the worse the teacher and he keeps increasing the pace of the conveyor belt. If the conveyor belt doesn’t work properly, if the electricity fails, if the weather effects the quality of the chocolate bean, if the chef gets the recipe wrong, if the roof has a leak … the people to blame are … the factory worker’s culling the chocolates on the assembly line .. or in Gate’s case… the teachers! Meanwhile, the teachers recognize the futility of it all and some choose to try and “game the ridiculous system” by cheating… remember when Lucy was stuffing her face with ill placed chocolates??? Sure wish Gate’s would go into retirement today!
LikeLike
She and Ethel were supposed to be wrapping the chocolates.
LikeLike
For your listening pleasure: The Milton Friedman Choir
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/let_markets_rule_us_20140526
LikeLike
Just when I thought we hit rock bottom ….. along comes this:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/16738/trafficked_teachers_neoliberalisms_latest_globalized_labor_source
LikeLike
The way things have been going, this was fully to be expected.
LikeLike
Puny earthlings, you are helpless before the demands of The Masters of the Planet Oligarkia and their courtiers.
Surrender your children now!
LikeLike
“Three bling for the educrats under the sky,
Seven for the edubullies who on teachers throw stones,
Nine for mere teachers doomed to die,
One for the Snark Lord on his dark throne
In the Centres of EduExcellence where the shadows lie.
One BlingRing to rule them all, One BlingRing to find them,
One BlingRing to bring them and in the darkness bind them
In the Board Room of Gates where the shadows lie.”
–Redacted by KrazyTA from various ultrasecret eduinvestor coven meeting recitations of “The Lord of the Blingring,” book DCLXVI of the Blingringelungenlied.
For more on classic Rheeformish songs and spells, see “Prosody of Financial Statements and Other Rheeformish Poetry” in “Grimoires and Other Rheeformish Literature,” Appendix 10 of the Rheeformish Lexicon.
LikeLike
I liken it to this scene, as educators and students are subjected to federal top down policies that wear them down and demoralize them, all to weaken them so that the plutocrats can devour society.
Take a look at this scene from Fritz Lang’s brilliant parable:
LikeLike
Where is the satire?
Is this not where the USA is headed?
Humorous for now, but tragic for later . . . .
LikeLike
Roars and cheers for satire, for humor shall keep us sane.
LikeLike
DCLXVI , BTW = 666, LOL.
Which, amusingly enough, are the first six Roman numerals in reverse order: I, V, X, L, C, and D.
LikeLike
When I was an anthropologist I studied how symbols and metaphors affect the ways people think about the world, and this is only one of the most heinous examples of turning kids into machines. People will say, “Well, it’s just an image,” but that image comes from a concept in the speaker’s mind and affects his/her behavior toward the subject in subtle and not so subtle ways. As program director for a non-profit that helps low-SES and first generation-college kids get to college, I was startled to hear one of our board members refer to the kids as “widgets.” He seemed to see them as standardized things that could be manufactured, not as individuals. That made it difficult to discuss subtleties and program changes with him. A good book on the topic is Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget.”
LikeLike
This sort of metaphorical frame is becoming increasingly common, and yes, it is VERY disturbing that that should be the case.
LikeLike
Excellent points, Will, and Laniers’s book is useful.
Unfortunately, however, we are increasingly ruled by gadget worshippers, who believe their gadgets and algorithms give them extra-sovereign powers over the rest humanity.
LikeLike
These deformers and their learning algorithms and databases and bullet lists and evaluation lists and data chats and blah blah blah blah blah remind me of those 1940s videos about “the world of the atom” and “the world of the future.” Their “vision” is of a Disneyesque Tomorrowland.
LikeLike
Will, I appreciate this post. It also reflects the kind of wisdom that should be guiding USDE policy, the leadership in higher education and the activities of many more teachers.
“Think of it. In what way is an electric blender like or unlike a university?” sounds like a great assignment for Arne Duncan, who has a Harvard degree in sociology. Ah, Harvard, the electric blender where economists mince, dicee, and reduce student test scores to VAMs and sell that junk science to members of Congress.
LikeLike
I may as well add that the head of college counseling for the Noble Network of Charter Schools here in Chicago has an engineering, not a counseling or college admission background. His pride and joy (which I admit is pretty interesting in and of itself) is something he designed called The Robot. He has input years of data and devised formulae that he claims will be able to predict where their students will get into college. It appears to leave out ideas about where they might WANT to go or what the vagaries of each admission year will be.
LikeLike
As a public school English teacher for thirty-one years, and a university adjunct in a master’s fellowship education program for twenty-two, there’s been no shortage of “entertainment” provided me by many outside the profession, in their misguided attempts to identify…anything regarding the art that is good teaching, and the celebration that is meaningful learning. The power of metaphor is incalculable to all of us in our attempts to come to meaningful terms with this circus we call “life” (there’s one, right there). When I first heard system administrators begin to apply, however ineptly, any of various tragically awkward business metaphors and models to education (particularly that one which referred to students and their parents as “customers”), I knew we were in trouble. The well-intentioned (or is it?) meddling of Bill Gates, for example, in public education makes my blood run cold!
LikeLike
mine, too
well-intentioned? who knows. he stands to make a LOT of money from these policies he’s been peddling
LikeLike
meanwhile:
LikeLike