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Rob Levine: Charter Schools in Minnesota after 25 Years, a Costly Failure

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2018 //
15

Recently I posted an article by pro-choice advocate Paul Peterson about the origins of charter schools. He wrote, “No, Albert Shanker Did Not Invent Charter Schools.” Shanker wanted teacher-led schools, schools-within-schools. He believed that their teachers would be union members and that the charters would be approved by the other staff in the school and by the local school board.

But, wrote Peterson, Minnesota rejected Shanker’s views and instead wrote a law in 1991 that allowed other authorizers besides the district, that cleared the way for entrepreneurs and other non-educators to open charters, and that were not bound to accept teachers unions. Shanker wanted charters to be Research and Development programs for public schools. Led by Ted Kolderie and Joe Nathan, the Minnesota reformers wanted charters to compete with public schools.

A few states made school districts the sole authorizers of charters, and those states have few charters. Most, however, followed Minnesota’s lead, encouraging many authorizers, many kinds of charter management organizations, and the emergence of an aggressive entrepreneurial sector. The latter states have h7 drew of charters of varying quality.

So what happened to charters in Minnesota, the first state to launch them in 1992?

Rob Levine, native Minnesotan, writer, photographer, blogger, assays the failed promises of charters in Minnesota in this post.

Levine shows that the push for charters came not from teachers or parents, but from “a who’s who of the state’s business, civic, foundation, non-profit and political elite.”

“Key to that sales pitch: the idea that education is, at its heart, a business and should operate by the business principles that govern virtually every other sector of the economy, with a spoken goal of “breaking the government monopoly” on public primary and secondary education. The unspoken goals were many and varied but the budgetary results of those efforts are quantifiable: the conversion of nearly $1 trillion spent annually nationally on public primary and secondary education to private profit, and the breaking of the nation’s teachers’ unions.

“To make this palatable, charter boosters focused on a righteous idea: the creation of better and more educational opportunities for poor children of color. In the end, the change model they embraced was what’s sometimes called the Shock Doctrine. First you create and/or declare an emergency in a cash-rich public sector, then you propose the solution that inevitably results in the privatization of as much of the sector as possible.

“In a wide-ranging proposal to reform government called the Minnesota Policy Blueprint, Mitch Pearlstein, a leader in Minnesota’s “School Choice Movement,” admitted as much in his chapter on education policy. In Pearlstein’s view, the answer to the challenges of public education is obvious: all public schools should be converted to charter schools.
Today only two of Minnesota’s 174 operating charter schools have a unionized faculty.”

“It’s not hard to see why that conclusion appealed to Pearlstein. For decades, the teachers unions have been the bête noire to GOP lawmakers in state houses across the nation. As the founder and leader of a Republican “think tank”, the Center of the American Experiment, Pearlstein understood that unions would not be able to get a foothold in charter schools. He was right. Today, 22 years later, only two of Minnesota’s 174 operating charter schools have a unionized faculty.”

Charter promoters, he says, worked out a deal that the state would ignore segregation in return for higher test scores.

“Twenty five years later the results of those “deals” are clear. After adjusting for external factors charter school students do no better, and probably marginally worse, on standardized test scores than students at regular public schools. And charter schools are decidedly more segregated than their regular public school counterparts. By 2016 there were 93 “hypersegregated” schools in the Twin Cities – more than 95% children of color. Almost two-thirds of those schools are charters. Children of color in the state who attend charter schools are twice as likely as their regular public school counterparts to attend a highly segregated school…Today, according to a report from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, “Of the 50 most racially concentrated Twin Cities schools, 45 are charters.”

The Big Daddy of charters in Minnesota is the Walton Family Foundation. Levine points out that “the Walton Family Foundation…has started or helped to start 30 percent of all charter schools ever opened in the state. In effect we’ve partially outsourced the starting up of new schools to the heirs of the Walmart fortune.”

Levine writes that there are 48,000 students in the Minneapolis schools, public and charter. 36,000 are in public schools. Reformers plan to add 30,000 new “relevant and rigorous seats.” He assumes they mean seats in charters. He foresees the withering away of public schools in Minneapolis.

Given the charters’ failure to fulfill any of their promises, he thinks the public might get tired of paying for them. But he worries that time grows short.

“A journalist once seeking to report on the Gates Foundation’s education activity lamented how difficult the job was because nearly everyone in the education community was taking his money. That’s how it is in Minnesota education policy discourse. The only voices making it through our media din are the ones with a steady stash of tax-exempt income. The reformers’ money guarantees a seat at every table.

“When they’re not dredging up or paying for bogus studies or polls, the foundations and organizations are sponsoring events to push their agenda. These events are then broadcast by local public media, presented as a “public service.” This is especially true for non-profit media the foundations contribute to, especially MinnPost, but also including Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities Public Television (TPT).

“Education reformers will need all that firepower because evidence and reason are always just around the corner. They can only make excuses for low test scores, all kinds of impropriety, incompetence and segregation for so long. Providing marginally better test scores at a few segregated schools won’t cut it. And it remains to be seen how long the voting public will take paying taxes to support schools while having little to no control over them. If we wait much longer to take action to end the failed experiment of charter schools it could very well result in the end of the Minneapolis public schools, and that’s just a start.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Minnesota, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Tom Ultican: How NCLB and Charters Killed the Public Schools of Inglewood, California

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2018 //
14

This is the most important story you will read today. It is a warning about where School Choice is heading, what it will do to the democratic institution of the public schools, what it has already done to the schools of one district in California. If we don’t reverse the tide, more districts will be drowned by choice and debt.

Retired physics teacher Tom Ultican has been researching the Destroy Pubkic Education movement. This movement creates nothing positive. It tears down what once belonged to the community, paid for with their tax dollars.

The story of Inglewood, California, is a textbook case of the destruction of a small district, brought low by NCLB, then strangled and left for dead by a series of Broad-trained superintendents and the steady expansion of privately managed charter schools.

The story of Inglewood is an indictment of the so-called reform movement, which destroyed the public schools of that district.

Are Public Schools in Inglewood, California a Warning?

Ultican begins:

“In 2006, the relatively small Inglewood Unified School District (IUSD) had over 18,000 students and was a fiscally sound competent system. Today, IUSD has 8,400 students, is 30% privatized and drowning in debt. In 2012, the state of California took over the district, usurped the authority of the elected school board and installed a “State Trustee” to run it. IUSD is on its sixth state appointed trustee in six years.

“This crisis was created by politicians and wealthy elites. It did not just happen. Understanding the privatization of Inglewood’s schools through the choice agenda is instructive of the path that could lead to the end of public schools in California…

“NCLB set the table. Students in poor communities were guaranteed to produce bad test results. Billionaires were pouring huge money into developing the charter school industry. State leaders were putting privatization friendly leaders in charge of school districts. The state trustees were never in place long enough to provide stable leadership.

“Eli Broad attended public school and went on to become the only person ever to develop two Fortune 500 companies, Sun America and KB Homes. Broad, who is worth $6 billion, decided that public schools should be privatized and established a school for administrators to promote his ideology.

“In Oakland, the first state trustee was a Broad Academy graduate named Randy Ward and three more of the next 6 superintendents who followed Ward were also Broad trained. Oakland suffered nine superintendents in 13 years.

“In Inglewood, one trustee was a charter school founder who was concurrently serving as a board member of the charter school and the last two superintendents were Broad trained. Inglewood received six state appointed trustees in six years.

“How much longer before large school districts like San Diego and Los Angeles – with 25% or more of their students in privatized schools – are forced into bankruptcy and taken over by the state? Both districts are currently running massive deficits caused primarily by charter school privatization and unfair special education costs.”

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, California, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Privatization, Testing

Kate Raymond Challenges Depiction of Common Core Mathematics

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2018 //
130

Kate Raymond of the University of Oklahoma challenges the claim by Mate Weirdl of the University of Tennessee that the Common Core is deeply flawed in the early grades.


As a mathematics educator, I was disturbed by recent comments made by Dr. Mate Wierdl on your blog site and felt the need to contact you to respond, educator to educator.

It is interesting to me that Dr. Wierdl ended this comment by saying he is not an expert on ELA; implying that he is an expert on the teaching and learning of mathematics. While Dr. Wierdl is a mathematics Ph.D., nowhere could I find any reference to education he has received or research he has done on teaching and learning.

Perhaps if he had such an education, he might have avoided some elementary mistakes he made in his critique of the common core. While I am by no means a proponent of, or an expert in, common core mathematics, the baseless and inaccurate assumptions Dr. Wierdl only serves to muddy the waters when it comes to a discussion of standards, curriculum and assessment in mathematics education. In large part, this is because Dr. Wierdl fails to distinguish between standards (which can generally be thought of as goals), curriculum (the experiences of students) and assessment (a measure of students’ understandings). Most fundamentally, Dr. Wierdl has conflated Common Core Standards with the standardized tests referred to in the article that compares Finland and the US. The tests referred to in that article were not written by the creators of common core, and the literature in mathematics education already documents that they are not well aligned with the intentions or the content of common core; the article itself references this problem when it speaks to the fact that Pearson, a for profit company, developed both textbooks series and standardized tests for the state of New York. So to critique the common core based on these tests is simply illegitimate.

More disturbing however, Dr. Wierdl makes several assumptions that, had he had an education in teaching and learning, he might have avoided. For example, he states that young children can intuitively understand the difference between 12 and 21. While I am sure this was intuitive for him as a young student, research shows that for the vast majority of students, this is not at all intuitive. Young children often see the difference between these two numbers as akin to something like * # verses # *.

Would you necessarily see these two as fundamentally differently? Would you intuitively know that one is larger than the other? As the article that Dr. Wierdl points out, students are just learning to read in grade one; that includes learning to read numbers. Many mathematics standards, including Finland’s, as it turns out, place an emphasis on “properties of numbers” and “the use of manipulatives to break down and assemble numbers” (language I quote from a description of the Finnish mathematics standards, see http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2015/encyclopedia/countries/finland/the-mathematics-curriculum-in-primary-and-lower-secondary-grades/) in order to help students build a schema for understanding numbers. While many (but not all) students may be able to successfully add relatively small numbers without such a schema, those who do not begin to have difficulty in adding and/or multiplying large numbers. For example, if asked to add 3472 and 1248, students without such schema struggle to remember when to “carry” (or “borrow”, for subtraction), because they have not build the concept that 2 and 8 make one whole ten (so that they can carry a one to the tens place) or that that carried ten, the 70 in the first number and the 40 in the second number combine to be one whole hundred and two extra tens, so that a 2 should be placed in the tens column while a 1 is carried to the hundreds column.

The difficulties become even more pronounced when students are asked to multiply 54 times 19. I would imagine Dr. Wierdl, like many mathematicians, is fluent enough to understand that he can multiply this in a number of ways, including multiplying 54 by 20 (which is a much more simple problem due to the round number) and subtract 54 to get 1080-54= 1026, rather than a long step by step procedure which often makes very little sense to young children. I imagine that Dr. Wierdl finds such flexibility with numbers intuitive, but research shows most students do not. However, students’ ability to be flexible with numbers can be greatly improved if they learn to communicate mathematical thinking. Vygotsky’s social constructivist theories of learning have been proven time and again in mathematics education research; students learn by reflecting on their own thinking and the mathematical thinking of others. This is reflected in Common Core and other standards by emphasizing the development of students abilities to communicate mathematically, a skill by which Dr. Wierdl makes a living. However, contrary to Dr. Wierdl’s assertion, I challenge anyone to find a set of standards that requires students to “explain the difference every time they see it”.

Given all of that, I do agree that “fake” real life questions are a significant problem in US mathematics instruction. However, while standards promote application of mathematics to real problems, nowhere do the standards promote the use of contrived “fake” real life scenarios. Those scenarios are largely the result of textbooks (which are generally not developed by writers of standards) and teachers who do not have the educational background or mathematical strength to apply mathematics in more authentic and interesting ways. This is again a problem with the curriculum, not the standards, and one that is being addressed by many leading experts in mathematics education (see https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover, for example).

While I have a Master’s degree in mathematics, I would not presume to present myself as an expert in the field of mathematics. Since Dr. Wierdl has no background in education, I would respectfully ask that he do the same and that the community at large be wary of opinions put forth by ‘experts’ who have no background in teaching and learning.
Sincerely,
Dr. Kate Raymond

Kate Raymond, PhD
Department of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum
Mathematics Education
University of Oklahoma
Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education
820 Van Vleet Oval, ECH 114
Norman, OK, 73071
kate.m.raymond@ou.edu

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, Education Reform

Should Liberals Love Non-Union, Segregated Charters?

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2018 //
19

The New York Times published an opinion article yesterday by Conor P. Williams of the New America Foundation, in which Williams argues that liberals should love charter schools and ignore the fact that Betsy DeVos loves them too.

He selects one school in Minneapolis to make his point. Hiawatha Academies, where 95% of the students are Hispanic. The school is non-union, like most every charter school. Williams proposes Hiawatha as a charter very different from the views of Betsy DeVos. But he forgets to mention that DeVos just gave Hiawatha Academies $1.8 Million. Maybe not so out of step with Betsy as he pretends.

But even though it is segregated and non-union, writes Williams, liberals should love it because it is good for Hispanic children.

But liberals are critical of charters, and Williams doesn’t understand why.

“And now the teachers are being forced to respond to criticism from people who by most measures should be their allies. Robert Panning-Miller, the former president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, has called Hiawatha schools emblematic of a “corporate reform movement” that values “compliance and test scores over critical thinking” and criticized them as being part of an “apartheid education” movement, because their students are almost exclusively children of color.

“It’s true that nine out of 10 Hiawatha students are Hispanic. But if Hiawatha schools enroll a high number of minority students and English learners, that’s because they serve them well.”

Now why in the world would the leader of the state union reject a non-union school? Shouldn’t all schools be non-union?

Williams says certain liberals are picking on charters because they are part of the DeVos agenda.

“Progressive critics are taking advantage of the moment to tie charter-friendly Democrats to her toxic public image. On the day after President Trump’s inauguration, Valerie Strauss, a Washington Post education writer, accused Democratic reformers like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, the former Newark mayor, of “advancing corporate education reform” through their support of school choice.”

Corey Booker is not only in favor of charters, he also supports vouchers. Is it possible for Booker to be completely aligned with DeVos’ school choice beliefs and still be a “liberal?”

Williams writes, “Progressives can ill afford this kind of sniping. The last thing the left needs right now is a war between teachers unions and liberal charter supporters.”

He does not explain why teachers unions should support non-union schools.

The New America Foundation has a long list of big donors. The biggest is Eric Schmidt ($4 Million), former CEO of Google. The second biggest is the Gates Foundation.

What Williams forgets to mention is that the biggest funder of charter schools is the far-right Walton Family Foundation, the far-right Anschutz Foundation, the far-right Koch Brothers, the Heritage Foundation, plus ALEC, plus every red state Governor and Legislature. The Waltons funded one of every four charters in Minnesota. This article is fundamentally dishonest.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Segregation, Unions

Why Rich Kids Ace the Marshmallow Test

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2018 //
17

The marshmallow test supposedly shows which kids are able to defer gratification, and those who can will ultimately be more successful than those who can’t. Nut new studies have debunked the marshmallow test and showed that children of affluent families can defer gratification better than those from poor families. They know the pantry is always well stocked. They know that they can defer gratification without risk of getting nothing at all.

You will find this article intriguing.

“The marshmallow test is one of the most famous pieces of social-science research: Put a marshmallow in front of a child, tell her that she can have a second one if she can go 15 minutes without eating the first one, and then leave the room. Whether she’s patient enough to double her payout is supposedly indicative of a willpower that will pay dividends down the line, at school and eventually at work. Passing the test is, to many, a promising signal of future success.

“But a new study, published last week, has cast the whole concept into doubt. The researchers—NYU’s Tyler Watts and UC Irvine’s Greg Duncan and Hoanan Quan—restaged the classic marshmallow test, which was developed by the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s. Mischel and his colleagues administered the test and then tracked how children went on to fare later in life. They described the results in a 1990 study, which suggested that delayed gratification had huge benefits, including on such measures as standardized test scores.

“Watts and his colleagues were skeptical of that finding. The original results were based on studies that included fewer than 90 children—all enrolled in a preschool on Stanford’s campus. In restaging the experiment, Watts and his colleagues thus adjusted the experimental design in important ways: The researchers used a sample that was much larger—more than 900 children—and also more representative of the general population in terms of race, ethnicity, and parents’ education. The researchers also, when analyzing their test’s results, controlled for certain factors—such as the income of a child’s household—that might explain children’s ability to delay gratification and their long-term success.

“Ultimately, the new study finds limited support for the idea that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes. Instead, it suggests that the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success.”

Categories Education Reform

Mississippi: What Happens When a State Refuses to Fund Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
13

Mississippi is usually ranked #49 or 50 or 51 on any measure of poverty or funding for schools. Of course, its students have low scores because standardized tests accurately measure family income.

A state that refuses to fund its schools will have high poverty, a poorly educated citizenry and workforce, and a stagnant economy.

In 2015, educators and parents tried to pass a state referendum to force the Legislature to spend more, but a coalition of very wealthy people from inside and outside the state swamped the voters with propaganda and defeated the referendum. The Koch brothers debated a quarter million dollars (pocket change for them) to ensure that poor black and white children in Mississippi did not get enough funding to offer a decent education.

I recently posted Jeff Bryant’s Report on the pending state takeover of the public schools in Jackson, Mississippi. First, they underfund the schools, then they declare they are failing. And officials who can’t provide a decent education anywhere in the state plan to impose their will on the children of Jackson. You can be sure that their solution is charter schools, not more funding.

A teacher in Jackson wrote this comment after she read Jeff’s article.


Diane, you and I have corresponded several times over the years about the conditions in my school in Jackson. I regret to inform you that the conditions of the physical plant are now beyond words. When I was moved from a classroom with carpet that hadn’t been cleaned in years, a room where I fought respiratory and skin ailments for years, I found my new room infected with black mold. It took a few weeks and a trip to the doctor, but I got that mitigated to the point where I can deal with it.

Then over the Christmas holidays, the city of Jackson suffered a cold snap that destroyed the city water system. Jackson Public Schools had to close for a week due to the water crisis. When we resumed classes, our building’s pipes, I believe had also frozen, leading to a re-occurrence of a sewer line break that has literally rendered the main hall and its classrooms a s—hole. About fifteen years ago, the same situation had occurred when I was also on the main hall. Eventually the district dealt with the situation by going under the building to dig out the contaminated soil and re-plumbing the pipes.

I’ve told everyone who will listen, but the situation only got worse until they finally closed the restroom when the new poop was coming from. Even so, there is always a lingering odor of raw sewage which becomes unbearable after a rain and when the temperature warms up. When I was checking out of my room this week, the stench gagged me, and I swelled up with tears because the whole situation is just so surreal.

The facilities manager was in the building and I told him that I had been trying to decide whose office I needed to visit with a box of poop to put on the desk and ask “How would you like to smell this all day every day?” I told him that it would be his office. He assured me that they will address it this summer.

I also told this story to the principal who related that there is the intent to go back under the building, dig the dirt out again, and once more re-plumb the pipes. If it is effective, then it should hold out long enough to get me through to retirement.

Jackson Public Schools announced this week that they will issue a bond to put money into repairing aging buildings. Our building is one of the oldest in the city, with the distinctions of once having been the only high school in the state for African Americans. We’ll see if our building’s problems will be adequately addressed.

It is absolutely true that the power brokers in this state don’t want to pay for African American children to be educated. When Jackson Public Schools mainly educated the children of the power brokers, the schools were just fine. Now that those children are educated in the private and suburban schools, we see those schools excelling. Meanwhile, the students left in tax-poor JPS are languishing in second-world conditions.

My experience leads me to advocate for a new school funding mechanism that does not put schools at the mercy or benefit of their local tax base. Our country is clearly OK with relegating a third of our children to poverty and its consequences or we would have already done something about it.

(Thank you for letting me rant.)

Lorraine

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Koch Brothers, Mississippi, Poverty, Privatization, Racism

Mate Wierdl: The Problem with Common Core Mathematics

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
39

Mate Wierdl is a professor of mathematics in Tennessee and a reader of the blog. He posted this comment:


I think the problems with CC is perfectly described in this blog post which compares a Finnish and a US first grade tests.

First Grade Math Tests in American and Finnish Classrooms

Simply looking at the two tests is enough: you can easily understand the Finnish test without knowing Finnish, while you may have to reread some questions in the US one.

Finnish

US

Click to access the-math-test.pdf

The US early emphasis on word problems to connect math with (fake) real life is one of the basic issues with CC. This corresponds to the close reading nonsense. The other basic issue is insisting on kids’ giving logical , detailed explanations for concepts they can easily understand intuitively (such as, they have no problem understanding the difference between 12 and 21, but CC wants kids to explain the difference every time they see it). This corresponds to poem analysis until the poem is dead—as you guys mentioned it before.

If I had to give a single sentence to describe the problem with the CC math: it wants to take art out of math and replace it with logic.

Probably, the same could be said about ELA, but I am not an expert on that.

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Join Me at the Class Size Matters Dinner in NYC June 19

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2018 //
1

Leonie Haimson is executive director and founder of Class Size Matters. In addition to advocating for reduced class size, Leonie is a nationally recognized defender of student privacy and has won notable battles against data mining. She is also the most effective education activist in the city of New York. I am a member of her board.

I hope you will join us on June 19 for the annual dinner to benefit Class Size Matters.

Please reserve your seat now for our Annual Skinny Award dinner on Tuesday June 19. We will be honoring four tremendous individuals who have given us the “real skinny” on NYC public schools:

Council Member Danny Dromm, Chair of the Finance Committee & former Education Chair

Norm Scott, retired teacher and
blogger/videographer extraordinaire

Fred Smith, testing expert and critic

And a surprise honoree who will be announced at the event!

Join us on June 19, 2018 at 6 PM at Casa La Femme, 140 Charles St. in Greenwich Village, for a delicious three course meal with a glass of wine and great company!

This is always one of the most joyous events of the year, where we celebrate our victories and gain strength for the challenges to come. Buy your tickets today.

Even if you can’t make it, please consider making a contribution at the above link in honor of these terrific awardees, and to support our work going forward.

Hope to see you at the Skinnies, and thanks! Leonie

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-529-3539

Make a tax-deductible contribution to Class Size Matters now!

Categories Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Frank Bruni: Who Killed Aristotle?

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2018 //
63

New York Times opinion columnist Frank Bruni worries about the vocationalization of liberal arts colleges, many of which are racing to turn their curriculum into college readiness pathways.

This is not a new concern. Twenty years ago, classicist Victor Davis Hansen wrote “Who Killed Homer?” about the death of the classics.

What Bruni describes is a giant scythe mowing down liberal arts majors in the pursuit of occupational relevance.

He writes:


History is on the ebb. Philosophy is on the ropes. And comparative literature? Please. It’s an intellectual heirloom: cherished by those who can afford such baubles but disposable in the eyes of others.

I’m talking about college majors, and talk about college majors is loud and contentious these days. There’s concern about whether schools are offering the right ones. There are questions about whether colleges should be emphasizing them at all. How does a deep dive into the classics abet a successful leap into the contemporary job market? Should an ambitious examination of English literature come at the cost of acquiring fluency in coding, digital marketing and the like?

Last Sunday The Chronicle of Higher Education published a special report that delved into this debate. One of the storiesdescribed what was happening at the flagship campus of the University of Illinois and at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., casting these developments as different harbingers for higher education.

Illinois is pairing certain majors in the liberal arts — for example, anthropology and linguistics — with computer science. Assumption is doing away with a host of traditional majors in favor of new ones geared to practical skills. Goodbye, art history, geography and, yes, classics. Hello, data analytics, actuarial science and concentrations in physical and occupational therapy.

Assumption is hardly an outlier. Last year the University of Wisconsin at Superior announced that it was suspending nine majors, including sociology and political science, and warned that there might be additional cuts. The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point recently proposed dropping 13 majors, including philosophy and English, to make room for programs with “clear career pathways.”

While these schools are swapping out certain majors for others, some higher education leaders are asking whether such devotion to a single field of study — and whether a college experience structured around that — are the right way to go.

“The future of work calls for something more radical: the elimination of academic majors as we have come to know them,” Jeffrey Selingo, the founding director of the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership, wrote in a column that was part of The Chronicle’s special report. He advocated a college education that spans “all academic disciplines.”

Selingo is the author of several books about the rightful role and uses of college, the most recent of which, “There Is Life After College,” illustrates how thoughtful he can be on these matters.

But I worry that he’s suggesting an either/or where there needn’t be one. I worry that the current conversation about majors is part of a larger movement to tug college too far in a vocational direction.

And I worry that there’s a false promise being made. The world now changes at warp speed. Colleges move glacially. By the time they’ve assembled a new cluster of practical concentrations, an even newer cluster may be called for, and a set of job-specific skills picked up today may be obsolete less than a decade down the road. The idea of college as instantaneously responsive to employers’ evolving needs is a bit of a fantasy…

Part of the skepticism toward traditional majors reflects a correct feeling that at some schools, some fields of study and course offerings are preserved largely because the faculty have a selfish investment in the status quo. If seats in the classroom are perpetually empty and money is sorely needed elsewhere, colleges shouldn’t ignore that.

But it’s a balancing act, because colleges shouldn’t lose sight of what makes traditional majors — even the arcane ones — so meaningful, especially now. And they shouldn’t downgrade the nonvocational mission of higher education: to cultivate minds, prepare young adults for enlightened citizenship, give them a better sense of their perch in history and connect them to traditions that transcend the moment. History, philosophy and comparative literature are bound to be better at that than occupational therapy. They’re sturdier threads of cultural and intellectual continuity.

And majoring in them — majoring in anything — is a useful retort to the infinite distractions, short attention spans and staccato communications of the smartphone era. Perhaps now, more than ever, young people need to be shown the rewards of sustained attention and taught how to hold a thought. That’s what a major does. There’s a reason that it’s often called a discipline.

“Becoming versed in the intricacies of a complex thing is itself a worthwhile skill,” Johnson said. I agree. It also underscores what real knowledge and true perspective are. In a country that’s awash in faux expertise and enamored of pretenders, that’s no small thing.

Students interested in using their education for expressly vocational purposes should have an array of attractive options in addition to college, which isn’t right for everyone and is hardly the lone path to professional fulfillment. Some of those options should be collaborations with employers grooming the work force they need.

But students who want to commune with Kant and Keats shouldn’t be made to feel that they’re indulgent dilettantes throwing away all hope of a lucrative livelihood. They’re making a commitment to a major that has endured because its fruits are enduring.

Categories Education Reform, Higher Education

John Merrow: Which Side Are You On? Whose Side Are You On?

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2018 //
57

John Merrow has seen the light. Once you begin to doubt the testing regime, nothing ever looks the same again. The usual ed reform conversation begins to sound like “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” You watch people discussing the data but it no longer makes sense. It once did, but no longer.

In this post, he says there are four groups of people in the conversation about education today.

The DeVos crowd wants to abandon public education.

The reformers are locked into the mindset of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. They control the debate and their ideas are stale.

The third group is uninformed and not interested.

The fourth group are progressives, who are trying to imagine a different way to educate children, in which they learn with excitement and purpose.

John thinks of himself as a progressive. I do too.

Where do you stand?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing
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