Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel challenge the recent spate of books and articles complaining about college students.
They write:
For broader participation to lead to positive outcomes — for example, the completion of degrees without huge debt burdens — students must have good experiences in the classroom. This is especially important yet incredibly difficult as the new economics of college are compromising the time, energy, and money that students and many of their professors have to spend on quality learning.
These are the core challenges of college today — and yet they are too often ignored. Instead, symptoms of those problems dominate air time, as the stereotype persists of “academically adrift” “snowflakes” “coddled” by their universities. Consider the recent essay by Nancy Bunge, “Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers. It Hurts Students,” which takes on student evaluations. Bunge contends the “unearned arrogance encouraged by the heavy reliance on student evaluations helps produce passive, even contemptuous students who undermine the spirit of the class and lower its quality for everyone.”
Her enemy appears to be sites like the often-lamented Rate My Professors, but her piece also attacks the students themselves, and reinforces a set of assertions largely drawn from one influential yet extremely narrow study, Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Jospia Roksa. The limited learning lamented by the authors is said to be linked to insufficiently challenging instructors, and according to Bunge those instructors are not demanding more of their students because they want to get good grades. She cites a Chronicle survey in which faculty members claim that students are “harder to teach” these days. The overall narrative suggests we should feel sorry for the faculty. If only they could have more-engaged students to teach.
There is an alternative explanation. Today’s college students are the most overburdened and undersupported in American history. More than one in four have a child, almost three in four are employed, and more than half receive Pell Grants but are left far short of the funds required to pay for college. Rather than receiving help from their parents to pay for college, even the youngest college students often have to use their loans to pay their parents’ bills.
Whereas previous generations could turn to food stamps for help, today’s students have to first work long hours to qualify for the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Similarly, students years ago could quickly talk to an adviser for help, but now they may be sharing that adviser with more than 500 other students. “Kids these days” aren’t kids at all. But this fact is neglected by many researchers and by too many faculty members who think of their own experiences in college rather than their students’ when crafting teaching plans…
In other words, the work of higher education — as with all of education — has to begin with a deep respect for students. They are not mere data points, not just rows in an online grade book. Students are human first. And so are their teachers. The exploitation of adjuncts, erosions to tenure, and the overall dismal working conditions throughout much of higher education contributes to faculty frustration and anger — which is now spilling over to affect students.
College has become the place America loves to hate, and college professors and students are the unwitting victims. It doesn’t require much cynicism to recognize this as part of a political plan to destabilize or even reverse the democratization of higher education.
But we can do better. As educators, we need to lead the way and design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging, and compassionate. And it requires that institutions find more creative ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching. This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.
18 year olds who suffer from 12 years of ill-conceived content-lite curriculum are going to struggle in college. Until we understand that college readiness means “brain stocked with broad knowledge” we will continue to have many college freshman who cannot read or listen to lectures with good understanding. College professors I know blame the problem on K-12’s failure to “teaching critical thinking and problem solving skills” or lack of rigor. They are wrong –ironically that’s all we’re trying to teach, and that’s the problem. Skills workouts don’t work; they don’t add value to the brain. They don’t make for college competence. Acquiring broad knowledge is the only route to college competence, reading ability, critical thinking, creativity and all the other qualities we value. Unfortunately, few teachers understand this. They need to read E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham!
I am teaching at one of those universities where most students work, and a large percentage of them work two jobs. The problems mentioned exists very much. From the higher side, the only solution I can see is free public college to all. (Of course, the Common Core and associated nonsense need to be taken care of at the same time).
Is it a fact that kids are less prepared for college than, say, 10 years ago? In my experience, yes.
On the other hand, no matter how compassionate a prof is, you cannot lower the standards since the student may end up designing your child’s next car, or may administer your medication in the hospital.
Many states, including mine, have a funding formula that rewards colleges with high graduation rates and punishes students (by taking scholarships and financial aid away) if they take longer than 4 years to graduate. So the poorer a student is, the more likely she gets punished.
What many colleges do is spend money on “student support” and on more leaders who will whip students and profs, while picking up exorbitant salaries— paid from tuition money.
Students are less prepared for college today that they were ten years ago?
I seem to recall Bill Gates saying 8 years ago to wait ten years to see if his stuff (Common Core, testing,VAM, etc) is working.
I guess that means we can expect dramatic improvement over the next two years.
No, the Gates clock gets reset periodically
Wait another 10 years
“Student support” is putting new paint on a house with a bad foundation. See James Traub’s City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College” which tells the tale of the first experiment with open admissions in the US, and how valiant efforts at remedial education failed over and over. K-12 schools need to do a better job at building foundations, and the way to do that is by building a foundation of *knowledge –that alone builds reading comprehension ability. Until K-12 leaders grasp this, poor kids will keep failing at college.
I first began hearing from community college-teaching friends that freshmen were far less prepared than 10 yrs prior– 10 yrs ago. 10 yrs ago, teaching friends blamed it on deteriorating qual of public K12. Mentally, I attributed that as more likely due to so many more hisch grads seeking tertiary ed– at least 1/3 of those freshmen would in prior decades have sought vo-tech/ trades [have found gainful employment at age 18]. As to current friends w/the same complaint, I’ve mentally attributed that to the same [continuing] cause– compounded by deteriorating qual of K12 ed consequent to NCLB/ RTTT/ CCSS-aligned assessments.
Do you think I’m right?
Here are two conversations which begin to describe my experiences 10 years ago and now.
10 years ago
“OK, guys, how would you solve this problem?”
“But we haven’t done this kind of problems before.”
“Yeah, so why don’t you guys think about it a bit?”
“That’s too frustrating. Why don’t you just tell us the recipe how to do these?”
Now
“OK, guys, how would you solve this problem?”
“But we haven’t done this kind of problems before.”
“Yeah, so why don’t you guys think about it a bit?”
“What do you mean?”
So with all the additional testing craze what got lost is exactly what CC math was supposed to nurture: kids creative thinking. Some kids explicitly tell me “I don’t know how to think about solving a problem.” I suspect, teachers cannot take time to let kids think on their own as they try to prepare them for yet another math speed test, which requires no thinking and minimal understanding.
If it’s at all possible, kids have even less confidence in their math abilities. And I think, this is exactly because the CC system demands (some claim, only “recommends”) understanding where it’s not appropriate.
And yeah, bethree5, there are definitely more students go to college than should or really want to. Some may be more interested in becoming an electrician than an electrical engineer but they were told that in 21st-century economics, they don’t need electricians.
“K-12 schools need to do a better job at building foundations” – until Whole Language is repealed nationwide, you can forget about building foundations. One cannot build on sand. No reason to spend 13 years in school if one cannot read let alone comprehend.
Mate,
Math teachers at my school talk vaguely about how they’re trying to teach problem solving (what this seems to amount to is that they give them problems to solve –is this “teaching problem solving”?). You say CCSS is supposed to lead to creativity. It would be nice if we could teach problem solving and creativity, but there’s a little problem: no one actually knows how to do these things. One can teach long division. One can teach about the Mongol invasions. With this knowledge, one can become a better at solving certain kinds of problems and more creative. We know how to teach knowledge; I’m skeptical of claims that we can teach anything else.
Math teachers at my school all agree, after 4+ years of Common Core math, that kids have less number sense than ever. They say that this is exactly what Common Core promised to improve! These teachers sense that something is gravely wrong. I’m beginning to see the outlines of catastrophic failure on a national scale.
Ponderosa, at least in math, content and creative thinking go hand in hand. It’s difficult to prescribe the exact percentage of each ingredient because it varies from class to class and from kid to kid. To make matters even more complicated, not only the percentage of the ingredients matter but also how they are mixed and presented to the kids. Similarly to cooking, where you need not only tasty ingredients in appropriate quantities, but the cooking also needs to be great and take into consideration the people who’ll eat the food. Even a “simple” hamburger is prepared differently for 8-year-olds at a bday party or for college graduates.
Can kids from the very beginning take part in shopping for ingredients and cooking? Why not? Would then they appreciate and enjoy the meal more?
I think where the CC system makes the grave mistake is that not only it demands (no, it doesn’t just recommend) kids to take part in cooking, but it wants them to understand what they are doing and why, and also wants to test this understanding in timed exams. The fun is ruined, and we have really bad eaters, who try to avoid cooking at any cost.
Ponderosa captures it: “It would be nice if we could teach problem solving and creativity, but there’s a little problem: no one actually knows how to do these things. One can teach long division. One can teach about the Mongol invasions. With this knowledge, one can become a better at solving certain kinds of problems and more creative.”
“Problem-solving”, “creativity” – & “critical thinking” – are discrete, teachable skills– thought nobody anywhere ever– except peddlers of discrete-teachable-skills-stds-&-aligned-assessments.
I have no idea what Ponderosa means by “problem-solving skills”. Why would anybody call kids’ solving math problems as “skills development”? Is that all we have, “content” and “skills”?
Teaching only content in math, only asking kids to follow recipes, memorize and plug into formulas, is close to useless, passive activity, not to mention that it’s extremely boring for most. Most people forget the math content by the time they are 30—which is perfectly fine.
This is the kind of experience they won’t forget.
With the content, they can and should experiment/play. Not “10 years from now in college if you are a math or engineering major”, but from the beginning. Kids can play, willing to try stuff, it’s not something new they need to “develop”. For the general population, math is not about correct answers, As the teacher at the end of the video says:
It was never really about the answer, it was about the process. It was about working out our brains. And we had fun too.
No doubt, the above is not testable, while content knowledge is. And hence the emphasis currently is on the latter.
Mate, I hesitate to say much more because I’m not a math teacher, but your desire to make experimentation and play the main objective of math education sounds like Ivory Tower cloud-cuckoo-land thinking. I can see the math teachers at my school, facing already raucous classes, guffawing at the idea. Come back down to my ordinary public middle school world. For a genius teacher at an elite private school, perhaps. But foisting this conception on the masses is a recipe for a fiasco. Neither the teachers nor the students are up for it. Better to skip math education completely than attempt something so difficult to pull off in practice.
It seems to me that learning the algorithms solidly is the best, most realistic outcome we can expect. The kids who end up going further in STEM education will have a good foundation. The other kids will be able to balance their checkbooks and calculate how much fieldstone to buy for their patio project. By shooting for more, kids seem to be learning nothing except hatred of math (and a sense that they are stupid). Perhaps many hated math the Bad Old Days too, but at least they learned something in the process. The perfect is destroying the semi-good.
My bright 10 year old nephew, happily exempt from the miasma of Common Core at his Montessori school, tells me he’s having fun doing long division these days.
“Mate, … your desire to make experimentation and play the main objective of math education sounds like Ivory Tower cloud-cuckoo-land thinking. ”
Not only I do not have that desire, but I also do not think, those are the main objectives of math education. They are very important tools and methods, though.
Since you brought it up, what do you think the purpose of math education is? Is it the content alone? Isn’t it the case, though, that people remember almost nothing from their high school math? What percentage of the people ever use the math they learned in high school? How do trigonometric identities enrich anybody’s life? If math concepts and formulas do not enrich the average person’s life, and if they are not useful for her, then how can they be the sole purpose of math education?
As I said, in learning math, content and problem solving activities go hand in hand. The video I showed you was not made in my ivory tower. The main idea behind it is this: word problems are the most terrifying things for kids. Normally, after the teacher shows couple of examples in class, the kids are told to solve three more problems more or less on their own, then go home, and solve 10 others. Then on the test, they are given 3 minutes to comprehend and solve such a problem. The goal of this drills-only method of teaching math is to prepare kids for speed-tests. Is this the goal of math education, to solve math problems quickly, without thinking?
In the video, the kids solve a single word problem during the whole class. That’s all they do. And they do it after they acquired the content needed for it. They learn the content in a probably similarly hands-on way, but, most importantly, for this single word problem, they take the whole class time. Are they going to be tested on such word problems? Hopefully not. But was the class a useless activity?
In Montessori schools, they teach long division and other stuff in a similarly hands-on way to the video. At least that’s what they do here in the Montessori school on Mud Island.
Problem-solving is not a drill, it is not a skill learned using magic, it is an activity, and, preferably, a joint activity. Yeah, there are some drills needed while learning math, such as when learning the multiplication table or when learning long division. But making math education a series of drills to acquire content is neither useful nor enriching.
As for the relevance of math for those who go to college: A reasonably good enough college can and does deal with kids with varying math content knowledge, but dealing with passive learners, who were raised for 12 years to expect and efficiently execute recipes is a much more difficult issue. Such kids are not “college ready”.
Mate,
I don’t mean this in a snarky way, but I think it might be very illuminating and interesting for you to spend a year teaching 7th grade math at an ordinary public school. You could test out your theories yourself and see what works and what doesn’t.
Are you telling me, Ponderosa, that 7th graders cannot flip a coin 100 times in class and only college kids should be allowed to do such high-level activity? That 7th graders should be just told what would happen if they flipped the coin? Is only the teacher qualified to flip the coin for them? Can a Montessori 3rd grader flip a coin without getting hurt? Are you worried about maintaining discipline if kids are allowed more than just sit quietly and absorb what the teacher is saying? In Montessori, kids are not sitting quietly—in fact, they are not even required to sit. Here is how they learn and do long division (You brought Montessori and long division up, not me)
The point is not how they actually learn it, but the time they are allowed to take.
Mate, it seems to me that people who are not public school teachers have a very difficult time getting to know what’s actually going on in classrooms. Outsiders have difficulty getting into classrooms, and even when they do, they’re often shown a sanitized Potemkin Village instead of the genuine article. Or they get so little exposure as to be unable to form an accurate picture of how things are going. When outsiders talk to teachers, they often hear what the teachers think they want to hear, rather than what teachers say when they talk honestly amongst themselves. I hear my math colleagues complain bitterly everyday about Common Core math and its dismal results, but you will never hear them saying this to outsiders. Do you feel you have your finger on the pulse of the average Memphis public school math class?
For some reason, you, Ponderosa, have been hammering in that I am a fan of CC and that I am far removed from what’s going on in a K-12 classroom. Why?
I have had my own experience with the CC system: I got on this blog exactly because I was upset how my kids had to learn math (not teachers’ fault), I know the CC very well since I taught it to elementary school teacher majors, and I meet the students who were raised by the CC system and who are called “college ready” every single day.
What the Montessori video shows exactly why your 3rd grade relative was pleased: in Montessori, they do exactly what CC only preaches, but makes it impossible for public school teachers to accomplish. Namely, in Montessori, kids can take the time necessary so that what they learn makes sense to them and not just crammed down their throats. Instead of following the textbook, I did something very similar to what you see on the Montessori video with my elementary education majors. The students said “So I now finally understand what I am doing. But do I have to test the kids on this?” And that’s exactly one of the two biggest problems with the CC system: it wants to test what the girl is doing on the video. The creators of the CC system think, kids’ enormously varying ways to reach understanding of a formula or algorithm is testable.
The other big problem with the CC system, of course, is that its suggestions are not age-appropriate.
Before you make further assumptions about my background in teaching math and my lack of undersanding of the purpose of math education, and give snarky suggestions how to remedy them, please think over your background in the same.
I understand that you are a fan of kids’ sitting in your classroom quietly, absorbing what you say. But your subject is not math. In teaching math, constant input from the students is necessary, and your 3rd grader relative can remind you that this kind of teaching can be done if the teachers are not confined by the CC or other test-centric system. But public school math teachers are confined by CC, and so your math teacher colleagues have every right to be upset.
Don’t miss my comment below!!!!
“The expansion of education that propelled widespread positive change through American communities in the 20th century has reached beyond high school, and more people than ever before understand the importance of postsecondary education in all its forms.” – one can stop reading right after the first paragraph. What is, in reality, is happening is that secondary education is diluted, which causes drop of skills in HS graduates, which causes 40% to 80%, depending on a uni, remedial classes, which causes outcry, which causes canceling of remedials in many unis, which causes diluting of higher ed as well. The whole educational pipeline gets progressively watered down, while young people are being told they need higher ed to “compete in the global economy”. The winners are the unis and the creditors.
Your premise is, “secondary education is diluted.” How diluted? It sounds like you mean the population of secondary school has been inundated by ___(?) Immigrants/ ESL students? Or perhaps lower-acad-achieving studs, now in college-bound courses, who once would have been taking vo-tech courses. Or you may mean secondary curriculum has been diluted/ narrowed by test-prep due to NCLB/ RTTT/ CCSS-aligned assessments. Or?
BA is like the reformers. He/she believes that education is a disaster and teachers should be blamed.
Look, my dear friend who read here…this is not short, but it is so important, that I took hours our o fly day here on the Gulf of Mexico, at Lover’s Key Florida, to write it. If you trust MY VOICE, please read it to the end, and go to the Links!
Learning is learning… higher lower education is no more than labels.
It is all about learning, and the most important factor to accomplishing that is TO KNOW WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE.
Pardon the capitals, but this site does not allow boldface, italics or underlining, and that phrase ‘WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE” (WLLL) explains how and why the charlatans have been able to hoax the public with magic elixirs.
It is no surprise to Joel Shatzky who (a decade ago) wrote about the assault on ‘higher’ education! It was fiction, and it is a satire, but boy-oh-boy did Shatzky nail it! https://www.amazon.com/Option-Three-Novel-About-University/dp/0985113871
When he sent it to me for a review, I realized the that ‘poor’ college ‘teacher’ was facing the same tsunami that would —eventually — overwhelm all LEARNING as it systematically, across 50 sates and 15,5880 separate school systems, inundate THE AUTHENTIC, EXPERIENCED, DEDICATED, TALENTED, EDUCATED PROFESSIONAL PRACTITIONERS OF PEDAGOGY… just ask ti had drowned my exceptional practice and me!
I wrote my Magic Elixir article decades ago —long before I published it at OEN — after reading Daniel Willingham’s wonderful piece (YES— PONDEROSA) “Measured Approach or Magical Elixir? How to Tell Good Science from Bad” in “The American Educator;” he discussed how magical’ elixirs –curricular and technology — are sold to school districts because no one demands EVIDENCE. https://www.opednews.com/populum/page.php?f=Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
Prescient— decades ago!
The cabal of billionaires did their thing…:” A Layman’s Guide to the Destroy Public Education Movement” The DPE Movement is Well Financed and Determined: https://tultican.com/2018/09/09/a-laymans-guide-to-the-destroy-public-education-movement/ They’ —the cabal and its tool the EIC ((the Educational Industrial Complex) https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf — subtly changed the conversation from LEARNING to TEACHING…. http://www.perdaily.com/2011/08/subverting-the-national-conversation-a.html
The EIC run by the cabal of billionaires owns all the media.
…and IT WORKED because everyone in this country who went to any school, AND had ‘teachers’, knows exactly what TEACHING looks like! Yeah!!
Talk to them! But the cabal had to ENSURE TO END the voice of the TEACHER -PRACTITIONER!
We had to go, because we professionals knew what the young human mind needed to learn
1- Clear Expectations for Achievement
2- Rewards for hard work and achievement
3- An educator who knew the content/SKILLS being presented, AS WELL AS WLLL!
…and BTW, I read that appellation for educator, years ago. You guys and gals who teach and WRITE about teaching, should replace the word ‘teacher’ with—> TEACHER-PRACTITIONER!
Doctors and lawyers are NOT the only ones who study a complicated discipline to do benefit humans and society.
So…to end the conversation about learning, and change it to one about teaching as Bush pushed his NCLB, and Duncan followed with his ‘expert’ direction of nation policy, which brings us to the ‘denenoumois’ — the final act in the war on pubic education, and thus on our democratic society itself!
A respectful conversation about Teacher-Practice like this one: https://www.ed.gov/teaching/national-conversation DISAPPEARED, and was replaced by the endless fake news about those ‘bad, lazy older teachers…who do not care about the kids and are only there to get the benefits!
Goodbye to the dedicated, talented teacher-practitioners who love kids and who know how to FACILITATE AND ENABLE learning!
(Excuse the capitals, but those two verbs were the heart of the NEW STANDARDS RESEARCH, or which I was the NYC COHORT.)
Now, with the current political control of education, it is “Magic-ElixirVille” — by usurping the power of local education boards and putting legislators who have no conception of what learning really entails, in CHARGE of “education’, the professional practice of pedagogy, has been eradicated.
Now they are going after ‘higher’ ed’.
No surprise there.
You cannot have an educated citizenry and elect a Trump. Shared knowledge that MAKES DEMOCRACY POSSIBLE. An ignorant citizenry is the goal.
Click to access hirsch.pdf
So they turned the conversation to money-making tests, and Pearson obliged.
When kids FAILED to LEARN the GENUINE/AUTHENTIC skills necessary to think critically (analysis and comparison) they pointed to the teacher, ignored the child’s background of poverty, and shouted; ” another bad teacher goes to the ‘ rubber room;’ that school gets and “F” too, lets replace it with a charter school.
Learning not Teacher evaluation should be the emphasis of media but….
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Learning-not-Teacher-evalu-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-111001-956.html
Finally, once again..here is how the shot me down in NYC, http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html a time when I was one of the most celebrated educators in NYS, and the Harvard observations of MY unique practice was traveling around the nation with the Pew National Standards…. all of which has DISAPPEARED.
Isn’t it time that ONE OF YOU reading about the Pew project with Harvard, did some DIGGING AND RESURRECTED this THIRD LEVEL RESEARCH on WLLL or as Harvard put it: “The Principles of LEARNING!” FOUR were about what the best TEACHERS demonstrated in their practice and FOUR crucial principles were for the ADMINISTRATION who had to provide the site, the materials , the organization and EVERYTHING that supports the TEACHER-PRACTIONER, and thus LEARNING!
Like!
Thanks, Susan. On a side note: in order to make something in bold, prepend it with
and end it with
. For example
.
learning
appears as learning . This way you can make several lines appear in bold with a single pair ofThe code didn’t come out.
“Teacher-practitioner” does convey the idea that teaching experience gives wisdom that non-teachers don’t have access to. It’s important for the Reformsters to grasp this.
If I take your meaning, I totally agree that the political shift from responsibility on students to avail themselves of ed opportunity – to apply themselves – to learn… to onus on teachers for ed achievements of their students – has been harmful to all involved [& is clearly motivated by conservative politics/ union-busting, & worse: libertarians looking to dump public ed altogether.]
Yes to what ponderosa said. If we follow the logic of tenured profs complaining, blame should lie with the pre-k teacher. They started it! As John McClain says in Die Hard, “welcome to the party, pal!”
College-hating is the second wave of the libertarians’s tax defunding strategy, an agenda Fox promotes. The plan to target higher ed was always intended after the K-12 abuse. By picking groups off sequentially, oppositional momentum was lessened. In colonialist societies, by making education very hard to obtain, those who receive it become beholden to those who grant the entrance.
We don’t want to leave Bill Gates and Z-berg’s investment in for-profit schools-in-a-box out of this discussion. Anyone who thinks Gates has noble intent should review Aspira Inc., the training ground for the director of the Puerto Rican efforts of American Progress (Gates-funded Center for American Progress), a group that self-appointed to “aid” the island. We can surmise that the objective is to privatize PR’s public schools- disaster capitalism.
Hedge funds and tech tyrants seek to control even the maimed. They are ever plotting to advantage themselves.
Your skepticism is a breath of fresh air. Not buying into this particular party line, which sounds as tailor-made for curmudgeonly Fox-watchers as “kids today.” In my day a 1/2 century ago (& for decades), about 30% of hs grads went on to college. Today it’s 60%. Policies have consequences. Agree w/article: quit complaining & meet them where they are.