Education
The Achievement of Desire
by Richard Rodriguez
Click here to read the article: “The Achievement of Desire”
Chicago’s Urban Prep Academy – Known for 100% College Acceptance Rates – Put Reputation Ahead of Results
by Chezare A. Warren
When I joined Urban Prep Academies in 2006 as the founding math teacher at what was to become the nation’s first all-boys public charter high school, the school’s faculty and staff had one central goal.
We were on a mission to get black boys from Englewood – a racially segregated and economically distressed neighborhood in Chicago, and a community described in the media as one of the city’s most dangerous – to and through college.
Each spring, Urban Prep Academies boasts that 100% of seniors graduating from each of its three campuses gains admission to a four-year college or university. But if you look beneath the 100% college acceptance claim – which sometimes gets misinterpreted as 100% actually going to college – you may find results that raise serious questions about the quality of education at the school.
College acceptance versus college readiness
For starters, the reality is only 12.8% of Urban Prep students at the West campus met Illinois’ college readiness benchmarks. Further, only about two-thirds of the class of 2017 at Urban Prep’s West campus actually enrolled in college. A little less than 44% of the school’s 2016 graduates were persisting in college based on the latest report.
In a statement to The Conversation, school officials maintained that a major reason its graduates don’t persist in college is due to lack of money.
“The number one reason we are given as why Urban Prep graduates choose not to continue pursuing their degree is a lack of financial resources and proper supports at the colleges they attend,” Dennis Lacewell, chief academic officer at Urban Prep Academies, wrote in an email to The Conversation. “This is consistent with national data related to first-generation and black male students going to college.”
However, in my own and other higher education scholarship, lack of money is sometimes related to students’ lack of academic preparation for college. For instance, at least two young men who participated in my study of Urban Prep’s graduates revealed that they lost an academic scholarship because of low GPAs.
West campus recommended for closure
The future of one of the school’s campuses – Urban Prep West – became imperiled in December 2018 when officials at Chicago Public Schools recommended shutting it down. That decision was later overturned by the Illinois State Charter School Commission.
When the school was in danger of closing, “some students stated” that they “didn’t care” if the school closed down or that it was “good” that it was closing.
One student spoke about how the “teachers put on a show” for parents, but treat students badly “behind closed doors.”
Reflections from Urban Prep graduates
Urban Prep graduates expressed similar sentiments when sociologist Derrick Brooms and I originally set out to conduct the research that led to my book – “Urban Preparation: Young Black Men from Chicago’s South Side to Success in Higher Education.” Our aim was to describe how students at Urban Prep saw the school in terms of helping them complete college.
Two of the young men shared how they felt like “commodities” and “caged in” at Urban Prep. Another young man revealed that “there was more time being put into the look of the school than the actual students.”
These young men admitted they did not want to let the school’s supporters down. They said they did whatever was asked of them to gain admission to college, which they knew would reflect well on the school. The young men’s comments point to pressure they felt to “look” the part of being college-ready, despite feeling as if they may not have initially had the necessary academic tools to succeed in college.
Several of the young men reported that they rarely felt academically “challenged” during their four years at the high school. Those who got to take an Advanced Placement course tended to agree these courses made them feel most prepared for college. Still, these young men’s broader reflections on their academic preparation, transition to college, as well as data from the Illinois Report Card, reveal that Urban Prep may have invested more in a portrait of academic success than they did in providing high quality educational experiences.
New lease on life
These criticisms aside, for other students and officials at Urban Prep, the March decision to allow the school to stay open is – as founder and CEO Tim King stated in a recent letter to supporters – a “major triumph.”
Publicly available data show that the school’s SAT scores and other indicators of college and career readiness remain a troubling reality. For instance, Urban Prep West students averaged scores in the 31st percentile on the SAT, which is considered “pretty low.”
Lacewell, the chief academic officer at Urban Prep, told The Conversation that Urban Prep students “outperform their peer groups on myriad metrics including high school graduation rates, daily attendance rates, standardized test growth.” Technically, that is true.
However, not everyone is convinced that Urban Prep West deserves to stay open.
“The school is not set up to be successful, and we are potentially just delaying a school closure because they’re not going to be able to do the turnaround that needs to happen,” Bill Farmer, one of two members of the Illinois State Charter School Commission who voted against keeping the school open, stated at a hearing in March. “There needs to be a bigger systemic approach to infuse areas with the appropriate resources they need.”
Race at the center: Looking beyond 100% college acceptance
Much of what the public knows about Urban Prep is based on images of clean cut young black men donning black blazers, button-down shirts and red ties, sporting the baseball cap of the college they intend to enroll. But that is where the cameras stop rolling. And this is precisely where the public must continue to ask probing questions such as: Do they enroll in college, do they persist and do they complete? And most importantly, do these young black men feel prepared to pursue their own dreams despite being confronted by “antiblack racism?”
Boasting about 100% college acceptance rates claiming to “change the narrative” about young black men and boys does very little to answer these questions.
_____________________
Chezare A. Warren is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education, Michigan State University and the author of Urban Preparation: Young Black Men Moving from Chicago’s South Side to Success in Higher Education. His essay originally appeared in The Conversation.
Chicago’s Urban Prep Academy – Known for 100% College Acceptance Rates –Put Reputation Ahead of Results by Chezare A. Warren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Education in the (Dis)Information Age
by Kris Shaffer
#education #analysis #argument #technology #advice #logos #disinformation #cognitivebias
We are all on the front lines in the war against disinformation.
I recently visited a seminar course for history majors at University of Mary Washington. In that course, students are digging into the differences between primary and secondary sources (a letter written by someone vs. a book written about them), learning the different means of evaluating each, and exploring ways to filter through the bias inherent in every source. I was there specifically to help them as they work through how to communicate their findings to a public, non-academic audience on the open web.
As we worked through some of the technical details, we also talked about the importance of what they were doing in that course in terms of the modern information landscape. After all, “fake news” has everyone talking about the reliability and bias of all kinds of information sources. Of all the things we could have talked about, though — Twitter bots, AI-generated video, memes, mainstream vs. partisan news media, Wikipedia, Wikileaks… — we spent most of our time on the hyperlink.
The hyperlink.
The oldest and simplest of internet technologies, the hyperlink and the “new” kind of text it affords — hypertext — is the foundational language of the internet, HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Hypertext connects all the disparate pieces of the web together. And it’s Sci-Fi name isn’t an accident. It’s hyperdrive for the internet, bending information space so that any user can travel galaxy-scale information distances with a small movement of a finger. The hyperlink still remains one of the most powerful elements of the web. In fact, I’d argue that the hyperlink is our most potent weapon in the fight against disinformation.
Now, I’m not talking about URLs, or “web addresses.” Yes, I can go anywhere on the internet if I know, and type, the right URL into the box at the top of my web browser. But a hyperlink is more than that. My site’s URL is pushpullfork.com, and colloquially many of us would call that the “link” to my site. But this is a hyperlink to my site — a tiny bit of colorful, underlined text that has the power to bend space and move information. That simple idea of text “marked up” with hyperlinks is the revolutionary idea of the internet. And it’s not just “marked up” as in highlighted, underlined, or even digitally annotated — it’s more than just what we’d write in the margins of our physical books. Clicking (or, most likely these days, tapping) on a link can take you to a whole other dimension of the internet. With one pull of the muscles in your finger, you can transform an artifact that looks very much like the artifacts we engaged in our pre-internet world of information poverty — a body of text that we can hold in our hands — into a portal to the world of information abundance.
But what does this have to do with history majors and evaluating information sources?
Think about what a digital historian (or musicologist or journalist or physicist or lawyer) can do with the hyperlink. Let’s take a primary source — an original document produced by people we are studying in the course of events we want to know more about — and see just what it can do.
This is an excerpt from the recently declassified and publicized memo about the FBI investigation into possible collusion between the Trump U.S. presidential campaign and the Russian government. This memo is presented in its original form: a scanned image of a typed and printed paper document. (To be fair, the “original” memo was printed, and before that lived on someone’s computer. But the scanned image is the form it was in when first released to the public as a declassified document.) Here’s the text of that excerpt:
Investigation Update
On October 21, 2016, DOJ and FBI sought and received a FISA probable cause order (not under Title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. Page is a U.S. citizen who served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Consistent with requirements under FISA, the application had to be first certified by the Director or Deputy Director of the FBI. It then required the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General (DAG), or the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division.
The FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals from the FISC. As required by statute (50 U.S.C. §1805(d)(1)), a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Then-DAG Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.
By selecting and retyping that excerpt, I’ve already done some significant things. First, I’ve honed in on a particular passage for a particular reason — in this case, one I can use to illustrate my point about hyperlinks. This choice leaves things out, though, and readers who engage it for different purposes may be (mis)led in certain directions because of what was included and what was left out. More digital-specific, I’ve made the text searchable and accessible — the original PDF from which I extracted that image had no embedded text, it was just a scan of a printed document. That means it was inaccessible to people with visual impairments, and was not able to be indexed by search engines. (No doubt there are searchable-text versions floating around by now, but for the sake of our discussion, it is important to note that most primary sources are simple images/scans like this one, which is, after all, the version linked by the New York Times.)
I’ve also added some structure, based on my interpretation. The heading “Investigation Update” was simply underlined in the original, but I know that is an older, typrewriter-based practice that denotes a section heading. So I replaced the underline with an HTML tag (<h3>) that gives it a place in the hierarchy that every web app understands and renders consistently — including screen readers and other text-to-speech apps. (I’ve similarly converted the typewriter-based underlined text to the italics that we’re more used to seeing in books and on the web. Some purists may balk at both of these changes, but based on my expertise in publishing and the web, I’m considering the typewriter and book/web versions equivalent, and “translating” the document from one domain into another.)
But let’s do something a little more dynamic:
Investigation Update
On October 21, 2016, DOJ and FBI sought and received a FISA probable cause order (not under Title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. Page is a U.S. citizen who served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Consistent with requirements under FISA, the application had to be first certified by the Director or Deputy Director of the FBI. It then required the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General (DAG), or the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division.
The FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals from the FISC. As required by statute (50 U.S.C. §1805(d)(1)), a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Then-DAG Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.
I’ve added links, obviously. But look more closely at what I’ve added. In the first paragraph, I’ve added links to Wikipedia — a generally reliable source with active checks against overt bias and disinformation, and with its own curated links to other sources. Likewise, the first link in the second paragraph is to the referenced legal code on an informational site hosted by Cornell University. By adding these links, I can provide context that provides balanced, in-depth information to help someone reading this memo for the first time to understand the background and make more informed, nuanced judgments about its content.
But look at the last two links. One is to FoxNews, and the other to FiveThirtyEight. The FoxNews link isn’t really about Andrew McCabe. But it does mention him in the context of a discussion of the top brass at Comey’s FBI … now leaving, and in McCabe’s case “stepping down amid questions about his handling of the Clinton email case,” according to Fox. The FiveThirtyEight piece is about the impact of the release of the Comey letter, and its negative impact on Clinton’s campaign.
While both of these articles present facts, there are clear biases presented as well. Fox’s article attempts to discredit McCabe, where the presence of a link to FiveThirtyEight can betray, or invoke, pro-Clinton and anti-Trump-administration emotions. By linking to either, I can trigger memories and emotions that exert some influence over the reader’s interpretation of what follows in the memo.
And that’s where the history major (or, really, any individual whose mind is tuned to think critically about sources in context) comes in. With experience in evaluating and distinguishing various kinds of sources, the critically minded student can parse these links and filter bias to pull nuanced meaning from these various texts. More importantly in our current information landscape, the student/professor/researcher-as-public-scholar/educated-graduate-as-mindful-citizen can curate the best primary and secondary sources as links, and use the opportunity not simply to prove their credentials and bolster their argument, but to educate the public, bringing more light than heat to whatever issue they are unpacking.
Think about it this way. If I’m the first person to take a primary source, transcribe (or translate) it, and annotate it with hyperlinks, and my public, digital writing gains traction, it will fast become the go-to source at the top of the search results. My hyperlinks and commentary will become the portal to the resources that people engage to gain context, background, and nuance. It’s a tremendous responsibility, but also a tremendous opportunity, to connect my skills as an academic and a humanist to the issues of the day, in an attempt to bring nuance and truth to the public consciousness.
On the flip side, if no one does this, or if they wait too long, the clickbait and conspiracy theories will win out.
Now, some might think that all of this would go without saying. This is the twenty-first century, digital natives, and all that. But there are two huge barriers to this kind of action being the default for educated users of the web.
First, academic work — both for students and faculty — still tends to be centered around traditional, pre-web conventions of writing. The printed book/article/essay, with footnotes and a bibliography, does not speak the language of the web, and footnotes/endnotes on a website do not encourage an audience to engage with more material more deeply. Putting an academic paper on the web is nothing like writing for the web. Until more faculty help their students learn to do the latter (and until faculty promotion and retention policies encourage faculty themselves to be fluent in writing for a public audience on the web), we’ll continue to raise up future generations of graduates (including the next generation of professors) who aren’t ready for their role in the fight against disinformation.
Second, social-media platforms have worked hard to kill the hyperlink. Sure, there are plenty of links to click on, but they aren’t generated by users. Remember the difference between a link and a URL. I can paste a URL into a tweet or a Facebook post and it becomes clickable, but I cannot write in hypertext. I cannot annotate and link my writing with that of others. And including multiple URLs confuses the platforms! (It would be ironic that platforms whose financial well being is determined by clicks would have this problem — if we didn’t know better.) Social media are designed to share text, images, video, and articles, but not to write in hypertext — the language of the web. After all, if I actually click on all those links, I leave the platform… and take my ad-revenue-generating clicks with me. And so I notice more and more that while the students and faculty I work with know what it means to read the language of the web (including clicking on links), they have been conditioned against writing the language of the web (including inserting properly functioning links into their text). It takes a conscious effort to resist this conditioning — conditioning which, in many ways, feels very similar to and is reinforced by traditional, hyperlink-less academic writing.
The internet was created by and for universities and government researchers. It’s not surprising that when researchers first started networking together digitally, they created a language based around a digital form of citation — hypertext. It’s also not surprising that as the internet has become commercialized, the language of open information discovery and sharing has been supplanted by platforms that limit the forms our discourse may take, in order to serve their own profit-driven agendas. As propagandists and perpetrators of (dis)information operations find those social-media limitations amenable to their aims, we need to resist. And we resist not only with better information, and better interpretation, but in recovering the language of the internet — the language of (digital) scholarship.
It’s time we brought back the hyperlink and learned how to really use it. It’s time we used information abundance to our advantage. And it’s time we disentangled our communications from platforms tuned for the spread of disinformation. The health of our democracies just might depend on it.
____________________
Kris Shaffer (@krisshaffer) is a computational musicologist, digital media specialist, author, and coder. He currently works as an Instructional Technology Specialist at the University of Mary Washington and Contributing Editor for Hybrid Pedagogy. He is also the lead author of Open Music Theory. Kris’s work can be found on the open web at pushpullfork.com and on GitHub at github.com/kshaffer.
Education in the (Dis)Information Age by Kris Shaffer was originally published in Hybrid Pedagogy and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
I Just Wanna Be Average
by Mike Rose
Click here to read the article: “I Just Wanna Be Average”
Jessie Simmons: How a Schoolteacher Became an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement
by Valerie Hill-Jackson
#civilrights #expository #sharedvalues #heroes #education #policy
Jessie Dean Gipson Simmons was full of optimism when she and her family moved from an apartment in a troubled area of Detroit to a new development in Inkster, Michigan in 1955.
With three children in tow, Jessie and her husband settled into a home on Colgate Street in a neighborhood known as “Brick City” – an idyllic enclave of single, working-class families with a shared community garden.
The plan was simple. Like many African Americans who left the South as part of the Great Migration, Jessie’s husband, Obadiah Sr., would find a stable factory job just outside of Detroit. Then Jessie would put to use the bachelor’s degree she had earned in upper elementary education from Grambling State University in the township of Taylor – just a few blocks from their new home.
But the plan went awry. Jessie first applied for a teaching position with the Taylor school district in April 1958, but was denied. The same thing happened in March 1959. And a third time in May 1959. The repeated denials may have set back Jessie’s plans, but they also set her up to fight an important battle for justice for black educators at a time when many were being pushed out of the teaching profession.
I interviewed Jessie’s family as part of my ongoing research into the history of black women teachers from the Reconstruction Era to the 21st century.
Fighting back
The battle began when Jessie filed a grievance with the Michigan Fair Employment Practices Commission, or MFEPC, on Sept. 1, 1959. Jessie’s grievance detailed her conversation with the superintendent Orville Jones in March 1958, in which he told her “there would be vacancies in 1959.”
In August 1958, the Taylor Township Board of Education – the body overseeing the school district where Jessie wanted to teach – took up the matter of employing Negro teachers at a board meeting. The reason the item was placed on the agenda? The Superintendent at the time, Orville Jones, “felt that any handicap” – he deemed race as a handicap – “be pointed out to the board.”
The chair of the school board, Mr. Randall, stated applications were “considered in the order of the dates they were received.” Since the Taylor school board was now on record regarding its hiring practices for teachers, Jessie used that statement in her grievance.
Jessie’s decision to file a grievance would be a costly one for her family. The couple had planned on two steady incomes. In 1959, now a mother of five children, Jessie took a job as a waitress and a cook in a cafe to make ends meet. Her job drew scorn from family members in Louisiana who knew she was severely underemployed. And though her children didn’t know it at the time, Jessie and her husband “gave up meals so the children could eat,” according to Jessie’s oldest son, Obidiah Jr.
In 1960 the MFEPC held a public hearing for the grievance filed by Jessie and Mary Ruth Ross – a second black teacher who was also denied employment by the Taylor board of education. According to the Detroit Courier, Jessie and Mary “were passed over for employment in favor of white applicants who lacked degrees.” Records uncovered by the MFEPC found that 42 non-degreed teachers hired between 1957 through 1960 were all white and “had a maximum of 60 hours of college credits.” Jessie and Mary, on the other hand, were both degreed teachers with some credits toward a graduate degree.
How the Brown decision hurt black teachers
While the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision is often celebrated and considered a legal victory, many scholars believe it had a harmful effect on black teachers. In 1951, scholars writing in the Journal of Negro Education rightly warned that Brown “might conceivably” impact “Negro teachers”. Nationwide, school district leaders pushed back against Brown in two ways.
First, school leaders slow-walked the implementation of Brown – for many school districts as late as the mid-1980s. Second, black teachers across the country lost their once-secure teaching jobs by the tens of thousands after Brown when black schools closed and black children integrated into white schools. In the South, for example, the number of black teachers had soared to around 90,000 pre-Brown. But by 1965 nearly half had lost their jobs. A 1965 report from the National Education Association, a leading labor union for teachers, concluded school districts had “no place for Negroes” in the wake of Brown. School officials railed against Brown and refused to hire black teachers like Jessie, turning them into what sociologist Oliver Cox described as “martyrs to integration.”
My own research confirms that the forced exodus of black women from the teaching profession was ignited by Brown. Discrimination by school leaders fueled the demographic decline of black teachers and remains one of the leading factors for their under-representation in the profession today.
First ruling of its kind
At the eight-day public hearing, Jones admitted that “the hiring of Negro teachers would be something new and different and something we had not done before.” He stated he felt that the Negro teachers were “not up to par.” The hearing eventually revealed that applications for “Negroes” were kept in distinct folders – separated from the submissions of the white applicants.
After more than a year, the MFEPC issued a ruling in Jessie’s case. The decision got a brief mention from Jet Magazine on Dec. 1, 1960:
In the first ruling of its kind, the MFEPC ordered the Taylor Township School Board to hire Mrs. Mary Ruth Ross and Mrs. Jessie Simmons, two Negro teachers, and pay them back wages for the school years of 1959-60 and 1960-61. FEPC Commissioner Allan A. Zaun said the teachers were refused employment on the basis of race.
The attorney for the Taylor board of education, Harry F. Vellmure, threatened to challenge the ruling in court – all the way “to the Supreme Court if necessary,” according to the Detroit Courier. The board stuck to its position that Jessie and Mary were given full and fair consideration for teaching jobs and simply lost out to better qualified teachers.
As a result of noncompliance with the MFEPC’s order, Carl Levin, future U.S. senator and general counsel for the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, filed a discrimination lawsuit against the Taylor school district on Jessie’s and Mary’s behalf. Even though the matter did not reach higher courts, Vellmure filed several appeals that effectively slowed down the commission’s order for seven years.
As the lawsuit dragged on, Jessie became an elementary school teacher with the Sumpter School District in 1961. By 1965, she left Sumpter for the Romulus Community School District. According to Jessie’s children, they would continue in the Taylor school district and were known as the kids “whose mother filed the lawsuit against the school district.”
In 1967, after seven years of fighting the Taylor school district in local court, Jessie and Mary prevailed. They were awarded two years back pay and teaching positions. Saddled by hurt feelings after a long fight with the Taylor school district, Jessie declined the offer and continued teaching in Romulus.
The Simmons moved into a larger, newly constructed home on Lehigh Avenue. Jessie gave birth to her sixth child, Kimberly, one month before moving in. Although the new home was only two blocks south of their old home on Colgate Avenue, Jessie’s four surviving children recall that their lifestyle improved and their childhood was now defined by two eras: “before lawsuit life and after lawsuit life.” And by 1968, Jessie earned a master’s degree in education from Eastern Michigan University.
Unsung civil rights hero
At her retirement in 1986, Jessie’s former students recalled that she was an effective teacher of 30 years who was known as a disciplinarian with a profound sense of commitment to the children of Romulus.
Jessie’s story is a reminder that the civil rights movement did not push society to a better version of itself with a singular, vast wave toward freedom. Rather, it was fashioned by little ripples of courage with one person, one schoolteacher, at a time.
___________________
Valerie Hill-Jackson is Clinical Professor of Educator Preparation and Director, Educator Preparation and School Partnerships, Texas A&M University and the author of five books on education the latest of which is What Makes a Star Teacher: 7 Dispositions That Support Student Learning (ASCD, 2019).
Jessie Simmons: How a schoolteacher became an unsung hero of the civil rights movement by Valerie Hill-Jackson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Liberal Intolerance Is On The Rise On America’s College Campuses
by Catherine Rampell
Male Teachers Are Most Likely to Rate Highly in University Student Feedback
by Merlin Crossley, Emma Johnston, and Yanan Fan
#reportinginformation, #systemanalysis, #proposal, #logos, #cognitivebiases, #research, #education
University students, like many in society, demonstrate bias against women and particularly women from non-English speaking backgrounds.
That’s the take home message from a new and comprehensive analysis of student experience surveys.
The study examined a large dataset consisting of more than 500,000 student responses collected over 2010 to 2016. It involved more than 3,000 teachers and 2,000 courses across five faculties at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney.
Most bias in science and business
Interestingly, the bias varies.
In parts of science and business the effects are clear. In the science and business faculties, a male teacher from an English-speaking background was more than twice as likely to get a higher score on a student evaluation than a female teacher from a non-English speaking background.
But in other areas, such as arts and social science, the effects are almost marginal. In engineering, effects were only detected for non-English speakers.
When one looks at the probability of scoring very high ratings, and dissects the categories into genders and cultural background, the results are clear. The disparities occur mostly at the very top end: this is where bias creeps in.
Previously the university had looked at just the average (mean) ratings of teachers of different genders, and found that they are more or less indistinguishable (unpublished data). But this new study goes further and provides information that is not evident in superficial analyses.
Should we abandon student feedback?
Student feedback can be a useful mechanism to understand the varied experiences of students. But student feedback is sometimes used inappropriately in staff performance evaluations, and that’s where the existence of bias creates serious problems.
One can make the case for abandoning student feedback – and many have.
But it’s problematic to turn a deaf ear to the student voice, and that is not what national approaches such as the Quality in Learning and Teaching processes (QILT) are doing.
This is because feedback can often be helpful. It can make things better. In addition, it is often positive. Sometimes the feedback is actually the way students say thanks.
However, sometimes it can be very hurtful and damaging, particularly if it is motivated by prejudice. We have to be aware of that and the barriers it can create.
We know that minority groups already suffer from reduced confidence and visibility, so biased teacher evaluations may exaggerate existing inequities.
What do the numbers mean?
It is very important to be cautious when looking at the raw numbers.
Firstly, let’s consider what the numbers mean. Students are not evaluating teaching and learning in these surveys. They are telling us about their experiences – that’s why we call them MyExperience surveys at UNSW. We resist the idea that they are student evaluations of teaching, as are used in some settings.
Peer review can make contributions to evaluating teaching while assessments can help evaluate learning – however they may not be enough to overcome bias. When considering professional performance at UNSW, we do not exclude the feedback that students provide on their experience, but we look at a basket of indicators.
Secondly, one has to be serious about the biases that emerge, acknowledge them and confront the issues. Most universities pride themselves on being diverse and inclusive, and students support this.
But this study reminds us that we have work to do. Biases exist. The message is strong. You are more likely to score top ratings if you come from the category of white male: that is, if you are from the prevailing establishment.
The influence of history
These results may be surprising given the diversity of the student and staff body at Australian universities.
But our cultural milieu has been historically saturated by white males, and continuing biases exist. The important thing is to be aware of them, and when looking at the numbers to realise that the ratings are provided in the context of a particular society at a particular moment in time.
The scores should not be blindly accepted at face value.
Most universities, including ours, are working on being more inclusive. At UNSW a new Deputy Vice-Chancellor Equity, Diversity and Inclusion – Eileen Baldry – was recently appointed, and we are working hard to combat bias and to introduce new strategies aimed at supporting diversity. For example, the university will introduce new training for members of promotion panels, explaining the biases detected in our new study. By understanding the problem, we can begin to address it.
All staff across all of our universities can benefit from becoming more aware of issues around bias – especially those in powerful positions, such as members of promotion committees.
Reducing bias will have great benefits for society as university students represent a large proportion of future leaders in government and industry.
It is clear that negative stereotypes will contribute to the partiality that exists within our student community. Encouraging more women and cultural minorities at all levels in higher education, in leadership positions and in membership of key committees will help shrink these biases.
Training in values
Training students is challenging, especially at large modern universities such as UNSW, which has a cohort of over 50,000 coming from more than 100 countries. But our study found similar levels of bias in local students, as we did in international students.
In training students we have to remember that we provide knowledge, but also communicate values via our words and our behaviours.
If we are to continue to listen to the student experience, we need to be careful with the results. Rigorous statistical analyses such as this study, can help us recognise bias and work to address it. If our students graduate with less bias than when they entered their degree, we will be contributing to creating a more equitable and inclusive society in the future.
It is not easy to uproot prejudices but the data are clear. We expect people will be on board and be pleased to contribute to moving things in the right direction.
____________________
Merlin Crossley is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic and Professor of Molecular Biology, University of New South Wales. Emma Johnston is Professor and Dean of Science, UNSW. Yanan Fan is Associate Professor of Statistics, UNSW.
Male Teachers Are Most Likely to Rate Highly in University Student Feedbackby Merlin Crossley, Emma Johnston, and Yanan Fan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
To Seek Common Ground on Life’s Big Questions, We Need Science Literacy
by Jonathan Garlick
We need to look no further than the Ebola crisis to appreciate the importance of science literacy. A recently elected senator has linked sealing the US-Mexican border with keeping Ebola out of the US, even though the disease is nonexistent in Mexico. Four out of 10 Americans believe there will be a large scale Ebola epidemic here, even though there have been just four cases in the US and only one fatality. Flu, on the other hand, which killed over 100 children here last winter, barely registers in the public consciousness.
Increasingly we must grapple with highly-charged and politicized science-based issues ranging from infectious diseases and human cloning to reproductive choices and climate change. Yet many – perhaps even the majority – of Americans aren’t sufficiently scientifically literate to make sense of these complicated issues. For instance, on one recent survey of public attitudes and understanding of science and technology, Americans barely got a passing grade, answering only 5.8 out of 9 factual knowledge questions correctly.
Without a solid understanding of the underlying science and its implications for our daily lives, we can neither respond intelligently on a personal level nor hold our public officials accountable for sound policy decisions. Moreover, we risk falling prey to the tremendous power of fear and partisan political rhetoric. By grounding our understanding of issues in knowledge, we can gain the confidence to participate in the science conversation in a thoughtful way. Science literacy is a path to that knowledge.
What’s needed to be scientifically literate?
Science literacy is a foundational knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes. For example, scientifically literate people should know that science is reproducible, evidence-based information that is fact and not opinion. They should have a working knowledge of the basic terminology needed to interpret the processes and outcomes of science. With this vocabulary in hand, they can engage in the critical thinking needed to apply healthy skepticism and to discern the grey areas and uncertainties inherent in science-based information.
As a stem cell scientist, I have spent my life tackling elusive questions such as “what is personhood” or “when does life begin.” Recently, my interest has shifted to helping the public engage in open-minded discussions about these types of questions.
The goal isn’t to move public opinion towards one side or another of the stem cell or any other debate, but rather to create a forum in which all sides are armed with basic scientific knowledge and have a legitimate voice in the conversation.
How to get literate
I teach a freshman seminar class at Tufts University called “Science and the Human Experience” that is largely populated with students whose interests are in the humanities and social sciences. The curriculum encourages these not-necessarily-science-lovers to explore the ways science affects their everyday lives. We talk about stem cells and abortion, right-to-die and drug treatment. We question when does life begin? What can our genome tell us? How do we experience pain? What does it mean to grow old? Students confront the emotional and personal consequences of science and its relationship to their lives.
Grappling with these issues is empowering. One student understood, for the first time, that her personal investment in science was connected to a loved one’s struggle with addiction. Another freshman planning on an English major discovered that she was, to her own surprise, “just as capable as anyone else of understanding and applying scientific material to my life.” Students uncover their own, personal rationales for engaging in these issues and then, most importantly, ask themselves, “Why does this matter to me?” They report that to learn the value of science, and to engage deeply in it, is to learn what it means to be human.
While knowledge is fundamental to addressing civic, science-based questions, our beliefs and values play an equally important role. As Yale law professor Dan Kahan, who studies science and civic engagement, says“What people ‘believe’ about global warming doesn’t reflect what they know; it expresses who they are.” In fact, understanding the science is perhaps the easier part of the equation. The greater struggle is for people with diverse views on science-related issues to wrestle with these conflicting values. This is a messy but necessary part of a healthy civic dialogue. Therefore, any program to increase science literacy must equally embrace the goals of promoting a respectful, civic conversation that will work towards shared understanding.
Informed citizens = productive dialogue
So what’s a responsible citizen to do? First, become sufficiently science literate to understand the nuances of the important science-based issues of our day. Next, be prepared to engage in difficult conversations with fellow citizens with different opinions so that dialogue is valued over doctrine, as we work together to balance self-interest with compassion.
If everyone comes to the table with a base level of information and a willingness to listen to each other’s concerns, we can replace the polarization of our current public discourse with productive public problem solving. We can then approach each other with a genuine curiosity to build a science conversation that is enlivened by a search for mutual understanding regardless of a position held on an issue. We need not hold the same beliefs or values to find common ground on the important science-based issues that face us today and will only become more urgent in the years ahead.
____________________
Jonathan Garlick is the Director of the Division of Cancer Biology and Tissue Engineering at the School of Dental Medicine, Tufts University.
To Seek Common Ground on Life’s Big Questions, We Need Science Literacy by Jonathan Garlick was originally published is The Conversation and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Visiting First Place School: Reflections on Other-Centric Education, Private Education, and Identity
by Shari Shepard
During my visit to First Place School I am distracted. Dawn Mason, a former WA State Representative, leads me through the halls on an informal tour. Her flowing skirt brushes against the walls as she walks. This place is another kind of home to her.
I am here to find myself some sense of purpose so that I can stay grounded while my father battles his tenth year of cancer back in California. I’m not sure what I’ll find.
It’s July. I’ve just moved 900 miles. I don’t have a job.
The brick building has an intimacy. Everything is within arm’s reach. The classrooms, the cafeteria, the front desk, the offices are all close at hand. The school itself embodies the chaos that defines most schools on the cusp of their ritual new beginning. In that way alone, First Place is like every other school.
I wonder, in the midst of my own personal chaos, what the students are doing during their summer? This is an elementary school for children who are, or are at risk of becoming homeless. The school has managed to stay open and under the radar for twenty-five years. running entirely off of private donations. After nearly shutting down ten years ago, with Dawn’s guidance it has flourished.
Why am I here? Because I’m trying to un-lose myself.
I think, Maybe I want to be a teacher. We sit across from each other in one of the counseling rooms. Dawn tells me about the different kinds of trauma the children cope with, shows me the anatomically correct dolls. I can’t seem to focus. Again, I wonder what the students are doing in the middle of July without school to hold them steady. Maybe I should become a school counselor instead. Somewhat randomly I ask, “But where do the students sleep? Where do they go after school?”
“Well…” And Dawn opens her hands in front of me as if in offering: “The school bus takes ’em back. Some of ’em live in transitional housing with their folks and some in the shelters. A lot just move around from house to house, you know, with different relatives, while their parents get their act together…” and she clasps her hands together again.
I wait for her to continue and she easily picks up from where she left off. Her words cascade over me and for a moment I let myself get lost in her comforting Mama Bear presence. Over Dawn’s shoulder I notice a large pane of reflective glass that almost looks silver in the room.
“It’s an observation window,” Dawn says, pointing her finger at the inset frame.
I study the details of the room through its reflection and find myself seated among plastic miniature chairs, dolls, blocks, stuffed toys and coloring books. We leave the playroom behind. Dawn leads me to the office of the head teacher, Miriam Reed, and disappears. For a brief second I feel abandoned.
Miriam is direct but warm. I can tell she is thinking of a dozen things when she very immediately, very succinctly, starts a conversation with me about preparing the students for entry into Seattle’s top schools: Lakeside, Seattle Prep, SAAS… She describes her proposed plan to implement a core multicultural curriculum, one in which the students learn the philosophies, arts, technologies, spiritualism and histories of non-western cultures beyond the context of European imperialism. A history of Africa before the Middle Passage. Religious studies of Native American animism before the missions. Latin American indigenous cultures before they were Latin.
As she speaks, things steadily start to come into focus. I start asking questions and Miriam begins pulling books off of shelves and hands them to me. Some are about Native American spirit animals, others have creation myths from different indigenous groups of the Americas.
“Start with this,” she tells me, “and make a lesson plan.”
I hungrily accept the challenge and walk to catch the 48 bus loaded down with books. For the next six weeks, I only see Dawn in passing while I come up with new and creative projects focused on Native American and African history.
All during this time, I am reminded of my own experience. Being handpicked by Mrs. Turner, a language arts teacher at my junior high school, to shadow at Menlo School, I like to think that it was the way I wrote essays and played the violin that drew her to me. Maybe. Really though, I was a kid that was lucky enough to test well under stress. At the beginning of the eighth grade I did particularly well on the STAR, California’s standardized test for elementary and junior high students. Mrs. Turner noticed. She interrupted one of my classes to talk to me, to gauge my interest in going to a prestigious high school in Atherton, CA.
At 13 I didn’t know there were public and private schools let alone that there was a difference between the two. I had never heard of Atherton or Menlo even though I had probably passed through and by it several times during my childhood. As an adult I remember that to my adolescent senses Menlo was collegiate, statuesque and exclusive. Teachers had resources and time. The students were brilliant not only in intellect but in appearance. I remember that the girls bathrooms had marble countertops and the walls were free of graffiti. Everything seemed to shine. Facilities staff drove around in electrically-powered golf carts, with students calmly mingling.
All at once I grasped the profound difference between public and private school education: experience. And something else: improved chances, for everything. Going to Menlo quickly went from being an intriguing option to an absolute necessity. But I had to get accepted first. I had to interview and take a placement test. I had to prove myself in an applicant pool full of kids who’d been going to private school since kindergarten. But I succeeded and the next fall, after a long application process and fully funded by a whopping $24,000 scholarship, I became part of Menlo’s class of 2005.
During our meetings at First Place, Miriam keeps telling me how smart the kids are. That they are capable and bright and inquisitive. She tells me about one student meeting President Obama the year before. She tells me they can make it to Lakeside.
I can’t stop thinking about Menlo. There were three others from my junior high that were accepted at Menlo. We were all scholarship kids and, with the exception of one, we were all some shade of brown. After our first year acculturating to Menlo’s culture of competitive over-achievement, none of us performed well enough in math or physics to continue into our sophomore year without summer school.
I had been built up by my teachers to believe that I was bright and I never doubted it until Menlo. My desire to resonate with my new classmates was quashed by the stigma of remedial education. I became silent in most of my classes where I was often the only black student. There I was: the black representative for the freshman class of Menlo School. But something in me held on to that truth, that betrayal, through summer school and my remaining years there, I held onto the possibility that I deserved to be where I was, even when some of my peers told me my only purpose was to fulfill a quota.
There is a school in the US that has successfully implemented an Afrocentric curriculum for their predominantly black students. In 2010, Marcus Garvey Academy in Detroit, MI outperformed the other schools in its district and in the state of Michigan on the MEAP (Michigan Educational Assessment Program). Their curriculum focuses on African and African American history based on principles of Kwanzaa and an Egyptian values system. In Canada, the Africentric Alternative School in Toronto surpassed other schools in the area and in the entire province of Ontario in reading, writing, and math. Yet school districts, parents, and politics continue to scrutinize and cancel classes that give students a more culturally well-rounded education that shows them how to look beyond the reaches of slavery and imperialism. Just this year in Seattle, Center High School was forced to suspend its 10 year long-running race and social justice section of humanities after one parent complained.
Imagine learning that your race was enslaved for hundreds of years before a controversial war that killed more people than all of the American wars in the 20th century combined freed them, only to be beaten down for a hundred more years by Jim Crow, terrorism and chronic discrimination. You learn about the Harlem Renaissance and celebrate the Civil Rights Movement during Black History Month, but for the most part you learn about a history fraught with struggle. It begins with slavery. It begins with pain.
So you go to college and attend classes about multicultural awareness and the legacy of slavery. You learn about white privilege and attend your university’s Race and Pedagogy conference. You talk the politics of affirmative action to death, but it doesn’t seem to fill the emptiness that you’re becoming more and more aware of. Even though you’ve risen above the world’s expectations of who you would become, you still don’t know how to address that void. You get used to the world telling you who you are. You read statistics that say African American women are still one of the lowest performing demographic groups in education and receive less pay in the work place than any other group with the exception of undocumented immigrants. You learn to push yourself harder than anyone else because you must outperform your white counterparts to be recognized as equal. And when you do outperform, when you tell people where you got your education, when you dazzle them with your articulate speech, you’ll still be asked to explain to the world your merits for the privilege of earning a private school education. And one day, as you explain your merits with confidence, you’ll realize you aren’t that confident in your merits at all because you decided to check the box specifying your identity on the Common Application: “Female, Black, Native American, Other…”
Confronting the disparities created by continued systemic discrimination never seemed to leave the academic arena in my undergraduate experience. My professors gave me a lot to think about but not a lot to do about it, and as my awareness expanded so did my frustration.
For the first time since graduating from college, First Place School gave me a medium through which I could work through my frustration. It gave me focus in the limbo of unemployment. If the students of First Place get a glimpse of history before slavery and the missions and Columbus Day; if they have something that’s more positive about their heritage than Thanksgiving, then they will see in themselves what others haven’t. They will see beyond who the world tells them they are. They will know better. They will be prepared.
____________________
Shari Shepard earned her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Puget Sound. where in 2008 she won the Esther Wagner Prize in fiction and later that year was awarded an interdisciplinary grant to write a collection of short stories centered around the impact that her father figures had on her life. She’s written play reviews for Seattle-based Drama in the Hood and contributed to the Seattle Star. She is currently working in central South Korea teaching English to elementary schoolers. Her essay is reprinted from The Seattle Star.
Visiting First Place School: Reflections on Other-Centric Education, Private Education, & Identity by Shari Shepard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
We Champion Racial, Gender and Cultural Diversity–Why Not Viewpoint Diversity?
by Clay Routeledge
Click link here to read this article: “We Champion Racial, Gender and Cultural Diversity–Why Not Viewpoint Diversity?”
You’re Not Going to Get Accepted into a Top University on Merit Alone
By Natasha Warikoo
After weeks of negotiation, Harvard University recently agreed to provide the Department of Justice access to its admissions files. The department is reopening a complaint by 63 Asian-American groups that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants. The complaint was previously dismissed under the Obama administration. Many worry that government lawyers plan to use the case to argue that all race-conscious admissions – including affirmative action – are a violation of the Civil Rights Act.
Separately, Harvard undergraduates have recently begun to take advantage of their right to view their own admissions files, often only to become frustrated in their efforts to pinpoint exactly why they got admitted.
The inquiries of the Department of Justice and the curious Harvard students have something in common: Both are unlikely to turn up any evidence of why some applicants make the cut and others don’t. That’s because both inquiries rest on the faulty assumption that admissions decisions are driven by an objective, measurable process that will yield the same results over and over again. As a Harvard professor who has studied and written a book about college admissions and their impact on students, I can tell you that’s just not how it works. I am not speaking officially for Harvard and I am not involved in undergraduate admissions.
Elite private universities have made clear time and again that their admissions decisions are made through a holistic decision-making process that involves a series of discussions among the admissions team. This means, for example, Harvard rejects 1 in 4 students with perfect SAT scores. The University of Pennsylvania and Duke University reject three out of five high school valedictorians. Despite universities like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford having closely aligned admissions criteria and similar rates of admission, just because an applicant gets into one school does not mean the applicant will get into another. That’s why it makes headlines when a student is reported to have gained admission to all the Ivies. This is a rare, unexpected event.
What a holistic approach entails
So, how do universities make admissions decisions? William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard, writes of an “expansive view of excellence.” This includes “extracurricular distinction and personal qualities” in addition to test scores and grades. Evaluating applications is a long process. At Harvard, it involves at least two readers of each file. It also involves discussions among a subcommittee of at least four individuals that last up to an hour. The process is similar for other selective colleges. Admissions officers at the same university often differ about which students to admit. The process is more art than science.
Holistic evaluation allows admissions officers to take into account opportunities, hardships and other experiences that may have affected an applicant’s grades and SAT scores. They may also consider how those things affected their participation in activities outside of school. Nevertheless, the outcomes of admission to the most elite colleges are unequal. In fact, while 37 percent of young adults in the United States are black or Latino, just 19 percent of students at the top 100 colleges in the country are.
In addition, while only one-third of American adults have a bachelor’s degree, a review of Ivy League universities’ published data reveals that about 85 percent of students have a parent with a bachelor’s degree. So, even if holistic evaluation does a better job than looking at test scores and grades alone, the process still concludes by systematically undervaluing working class, poor, black and Latino young men and women. That is, if we assume that talent and “personal qualities” are equally distributed in our society, this disproportion should tell us something is amiss.
In addition to the holistic evaluation process, admissions teams need to consider the needs of specific groups on campus. These needs vary from campus to campus and from year to year. Coaches can recruit top athletes for positions on their teams played by graduating seniors, and those recruits enter the fast lane to admission. And, just as the baseball coach can recruit a shortstop, the orchestra director may request a top bassoon player to fill a missing part in the orchestra. Since needs of campus organizations and teams vary from year to year, you can’t glean much from admission files in isolation like the DOJ and curious students hope to do.
Merit is overrated
Are there any discernible patterns between who gets in and students who were seriously considered but rejected? Probably not. Harvard President Drew Faust has said that Harvard could fill its incoming class twice with high school valedictorians.
In fact, we should discard the notion that admissions is a meritocratic process that selects the “best” 18-year-olds who apply to a selective university. When we let go of our meritocracy ideals, we see more clearly that so many talented, accomplished young people who will be outstanding leaders in the future will not make it to the likes of Harvard, Stanford and Yale. There simply are not enough places for all of them at those universities. Further, many more disadvantaged young people have never had the opportunity to cultivate talents because their parents did not have the resources to pay for private music lessons or a pitching coach. In fact, the gap between what wealthy and poor parents spend on extracurricular activities has dramatically increased in recent years. So looking for explanations for why you did get in, or whether some groups are favored over others, misses the broader picture of the lack of clarity on what gets anyone into elite colleges. It also ignores the unequal opportunities young Americans have in the process.
One way forward for college admissions, which I have suggested as a thought experiment in my book, “The Diversity Bargain,” is to take all qualified students for a selective college and enter them into an admissions lottery. The lottery could have weights for desired characteristics the college deems important, such as social class, geographic diversity, race and intended major. This method would make clear the arbitrariness in the admissions process. It would also help students admitted — and those not admitted – understand that admission — and rejection — should not hold the strong social meaning in American society that it does today. In “The Diversity Bargain,” I show the downsides of maintaining students’ beliefs that college admissions is a meritocracy. Most students expressed strong faith in a process that ultimately underselects black, Latino and working class applicants, among others. They will take these understandings with them as they ascend to positions of power and make hiring decisions, design tax policies and shape media discourses.
Until the Department of Justice and admitted students understand the arbitrary nature of how admissions decisions at elite colleges are made, they will be perplexed by the complex art that is elite college admissions.
____________________
Natasha Warikoo is Associate Professor of Education, Harvard University and the author of The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities. Her essay was originally published in The Conversation.
You’re not going to get accepted into a top university on merit alone by Natasha Warikoo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
Attributions
88 Open Essays – A Reader for Students of Composition & Rhetoric, edited and compiled by Sarah Wangler & Tina Ulrich is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Image credits
.“ENG Students” by Jbak87 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
“Cause I’d Rather Pretend I’ll Still Be There At The End” by Bethan Phillips on Flickr is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Photos of Jessie Simmons family archives, Author provided
Photo of Professor by Birger Kollmeier Oldenburg is licensed under CC0 1.0
Thinker thinks about how to take a sun burst shot by David Yu is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND
