Jerking Indiana Students Around

This is from the Marion Community Schools website, published in the Marion Chronicle Tribune, signed by the county school superintendents. My freshman daughter Sophie still faces close to ten more standardized tests even though she's already passed all the tests my oldest step-daughters ever had to pass, caught in the cracks of this madness:

"Here is a look at events that have had a profound impact on our students in Marion, and students around the state:

• Summer 2010: Indiana approves the Common Core Standards, and schools across the state began to develop curriculum and identify supporting instructional resources. 
• 2013/early 2014: (after three years of planning by educators to transition to the new set of standards), Indiana pauses and then formally withdraws from Common Core Standards. 
• April 2014: Indiana State Board of Education formally approves Indiana College and Career Ready Standards (leaving school districts only a few weeks to develop new curriculum and identify supporting resources prior to the start of the 2014-15 academic year). 
• February 2015: Newly developed ISTEP+ test is approved. Educators soon learn it will take 20 hours for students to complete the test. After public outcry, state officials quickly move to cut test down to 12 hours. Different forms of the test are administered to different students, even within the same grade level in a single school district. 
• Spring 2015: New College and Career Readiness test is administered to sophomores. This is separate from and in addition to the End-of-Course Assessments that have been a main component of school accountability at the high school level. At Marion, only a small percentage of students take the additional CCR test in Spring 2015, because information on this test and its impact on school accountability is unclear going into the testing period. 
• Summer through October 2015: A committee works with Indiana of Department of Education to determine passing scores for the new test. During this process it is discovered that paper/pencil versions of the assessment were less difficult than the online versions. IDOE decides to award bonus points to all students who took online versions. Many questions arise as to the validity of this process. 
• Mid-December/January 2015: Finalized ISTEP+ scores are expected to be released and subsequently unembargoed for media/public discussion. This is just a few weeks before the next round of ISTEP+ testing is set to begin (leaving very little time to adjust curriculum and supporting resources based on what the 2014-15 scores reveal). 

"The Bottom Line: Schools had little time to prepare for the changes in standards and assessments that were swiftly enacted last year, and we are still striving to understand what is expected this spring, when we will take the new ISTEP+ again!"

Stephen L. Edwards, interim superintendent, Madison-Grant United School Corporation
Tab McKenzie, superintendent, Mississinewa Community School Corporation
Brad Lindsay, superintendent, Marion Community Schools
Joel Martin, superintendent, Oak Hill United School Corporation

Indiana's Teacher Problem

Closing of Marion schools as students
exit to the county schools.

I thought I'd link to an article yesterday in The Washington Post called, "Indiana's got a problem: Too many teachers don't want to teach there anymore." No doubt there are elements in this article that some will dispute, but some aspects can't be disputed.

The key one is this: the turn over in teachers in the Marion School system this year is epidemic. My sense is that as many as 40% of the teachers in some of the Marion schools did not return this year. As a case in point, my son was scheduled to take a follow-up course with a favorite teacher he had last year for Bio-Med. Thankfully, they were able to find a teacher for this year, but the well-liked teacher is gone. MANY teachers are gone.

There's no disputing the problem. Why are the teachers jumping ship like rats? There is a serious problem here, and someone needs to get to the bottom of it! As this article indicates, it is not just a Marion problem. It is not just an Indiana problem. It is a widespread problem in the US. (So I am not casting aspersion at any of the leadership of the Marion Community Schools.)

Perhaps the most poignant paragraph in the article is this one: "a combination of under-resourced schools, the loss of job protections, unfair teacher evaluation methods, an increase in the amount of mandated standardized testing and the loss of professional autonomy."

That all sounds about right to me. Lots of thoughts. Here's just a few.

• I understand the drive to give choices to parents. But the consequence is that the schools that need the most help get less and less. 
• The behavior problem is MAJOR. I'd say to put those that can behave together regardless of academic ability but I'm not sure how many "behaved" classes you would actually have. All I can think of is having two teachers in many classrooms, with a well-designed system of student removal when problems arise. Again, that means more money to the very schools from which the Indiana legislature is taking it away.
• You can't ignore the lowest common denominator to focus only on the middle and upper classes. The end result is out of control crime, violence, and drug traffic, not to mention a stupid majority. 
• Decades of bureaucratic interference by both parties has sucked all the fun out of teaching. Democrats are notorious for administrative nonsense, and the Republicans in Indiana last year signed into law, was it fourteen hours worth of standardized testing?
• By merit pay linked to student scores, you reward the teachers with easy rural students and penalize those that are willing to teach difficult, inner city students.

I'll leave it at that. But lest I give the wrong impression, my four children have had great teachers and have received an excellent education in the Marion school system. They have also seen lock downs, outbursts, and uncontrolled behavior in a small Indiana town that I never experienced growing up in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida public school system.

Nevertheless, let me again emphatically agree with the principal of Marion High School last week. MHS is still the best high school in the county in terms of its academic offerings. Gifted students who have fled to the counties for better behavior in middle school should come back for high school. The AP and honors possibilities at MHS are unmatched by the county schools, as far as I can tell.

Academic Cultures 3: Developmental Cultures

1. In the last couple posts, I've been looking at Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy, but cooking the categories a little differently.

a. the research emphasis - sees faculty research at the center of a university, emphasizes academic freedom

b. the formational emphasis - sees college in terms of forming students in some way, whether through the liberal arts, Christian worldview, or some other set of core values (e.g., Lennox's "sanctifying context")

c. the vocational emphasis - sees college primarily in terms of equipping students to get a job

d. the pedagogical emphasis - focuses on extensively delineated outcomes, expectations, and assessments as the key focus of the academy

Chapter 3 is about what Bergquist and Pawlack call a "development" culture. Looking into this chapter, I can see that what I have called a "pedagogical" emphasis really relates more to what they are talking about in this chapter. (In their view, the developmental culture grew out of the managerial culture as they talk about it.)

2. So to create another category that relates more directly to the other dimension of chapter 2, how about the teaching emphasis. 

This emphasis refers to the institution that focuses extensively on teaching, where faculty are not so much expected to write or do research as to teach. So it is not uncommon at institutions like this one for the basic loading for a professor to be outrageously high from the perspective of a faculty member at a research institution. Beyond this basic teaching, such professors may also do a lot of overload teaching beyond the minimum expectation. This extra teaching may compensate to some degree for the lower salary such faculty usually have in comparison to faculty at research institutions.

Certainly when I first came to IWU, it was solidly a teaching institution. For undergraduate professors, the basic loading is 24 credit hours a year. For master's level courses it is 21 credit hours a year, and it is 18 credit hours a year on the doctorate level. Overloads were rampant when I came.

I would strongly defend the legitimacy of this approach, as I would the legitimacy of most of the others as well.  The key to me is that we not pick just one and say all the others are wrong. There are those who like to teach, and there are those who like to teach a lot. And there are those who do it well.

Frankly, I do not think even a majority of professors these days will ever produce much of any lasting significance in the area of research. We like to think that we are all researchers, but most professors will be most useful if they know and communicate the truly best research of the time rather than trying to be part of the front edge of research in our areas.

If we think of the university as a business, with students as the primary customer, then those who choose to teach more than research should be highly valued. Faculty with a focus on research should probably be a minority in most colleges today, because only a small number will contribute enough to the reputation of the college to offset the more obvious value of good teaching.

3. So if what I have called a "pedagogical emphasis" is part of the developmental culture of chapter 3, I want to call another emphasis implied by this chapter a paternalistic emphasis.

The chapter is about a culture that emphasizes student, faculty, and employee development in general. This is a good thing, despite the fact that I am seeing the dangers. So it is good to be clear about what the outcomes of a class are, to make expectations clear, and then to assess and confirm that in fact you have met those outcomes.

What worries me is what I see as a tendency to go to the opposite extreme in what I called a pedagogical culture. Too much is detailed and not enough room is given to professors whose classes are more spontaneous. Not only that, but there can be an implicit distrust of professors to do what they say they are doing, not to mention an obsession with administrivia.

4. So also, the idea of supporting faculty in their development is a good thing. It is a service to the employees of the university. If we want professors to be better teachers, then it makes sense to offer seminars to help them. We give them allowances to go to conferences and reward them when they produce scholarship. That all sounds like good practice.

My worry is again what might happen in the extreme. Millennials already grew up with helicopter parents who hovered over them. Dare we say that this fosters a sense of entitlement, expecting service. Employment can be like a wake up call in this regard.

I remember hearing a story of a millennial who took a job as a staff pastor and was a little disappointed that the senior pastor, a boomer, didn't spend more time mentoring him. The advice given was that now that he had a job, mentoring was now his job to do more than to receive.

So what happens when millennials start becoming professors, as they are? Is it possible that they will expect the university to revolve around them? Is it possible that they will have a tendency to see the university as existing for them rather than them for the university. Perhaps now they will subconsciously assess their bosses by how well they serve them.

You can see that this attitude in combination with the collegial culture is deadly. Being a professor comes to be about the university doing all it can do to support their research. Indeed, isn't the university privileged to have them there thinking deep thoughts? Shouldn't I be rewarded for every little thing I do?

Suffice it to say, I'm not too sympathetic to that sort of culture. Even fifteen years ago, we created courses and no one paid us anything. We made new course preps, bought the books, and considered it part of the job. Didn't they hire us because we already knew a little something? Some of us didn't need to be rewarded to write, and we certainly didn't turn in little piddly things that hardly pass for scholarship.

Those of us who teach these days are all fortunate to have a job. There are plenty of others who would love to take our place. All of us could be easily replaced. The administration is not our servant. It is our employer, our boss. We work for the institution, and our primary work is to teach students.

Public School Education Idea

I was brainstorming yesterday how we might fix our schools in America. Let me make it clear that I don't blame the teachers. I point to the culture of our children and youth, who are attention deficit and chaotic in general. I've long got the impression that little gets done in many American classrooms, having had four children go through the public schools. Yelling doesn't change things. Other teachers try to hold attention for just a few minutes of instruction and then inevitably let the class "work on homework," which more or less means chaos for the rest of the time.

Since the kids are the presenting issue, it doesn't matter if you give them vouchers to private schools--the advanced classes are often no different from the regular ones. And go look up the Bastille in Wikipedia if you think ignoring the lowest socio-economic factor in some sort of meritocracy has any long term merit. I wait for the prophet who has ideas on how to change our homes to produce children with a different potential for schooling.

All that is background. I was thinking yesterday that, at this point, we really need to shift away from corporate teaching and toward one-on-one instruction. If we could somehow arrange ten minutes an hour of one-on-one conversation between a teacher and a student, we would probably accomplish way more than we are accomplishing now. When temperament allowed, we could even have one-on-three or four instructional moments. Maybe some one-on-four groups could go for twenty minutes an hour.

Basically, the ideal would be for all students to have their own IEP (Individualized Education Plan) modeled on a one-on-one, 10 minute atom of instruction. Certain clusters of temperaments might allow molecules of slightly more students with slightly more time. The amount of paperwork associated with these atoms should be minor so that teachers can teach rather than spend hours reporting on teaching.

In the meantime, the intervening chaos between instruction should be managed instead of let to go free. Sports, games, shop, skills, video games--they're already wasting most of their school time. Plan it and it is no longer chaos but a culture of fun, a spoonful of sugar. It makes school a fun place.

And I categorically believe that it is much better for most students to be in this environment than at home. The homes of America--and the streets--are where the default chaos is perpetuated and advanced.

A few thoughts, for anyone who might be listening...

Christian Century on Seminary Education

The latest issue of Christian Century was a fun read about how some mainline seminaries are finally beginning to address the changing realities of education in general. It is interesting to watch some of the more traditional seminaries enter into the online playing field--better late than never.  The articles have a feel of "Gordon Conwell is cutting edge" because its students can now do a third of their MDIV in their pajamas at home without moving to Boston.

That tone is very amusing because over ten years ago Asbury students could already do two-thirds of their MDIV online. I actually hear that Asbury's current president is somewhat skeptical of online education, but thankfully he hasn't been able to dislodge the faculty yet.  Students at our seminary, Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University, can also do two-thirds of their program online and have been able to do so since we were founded over three years ago.

It is almost surreal to read some of the things in the cover story, as if they were something new. We've been doing them for years. For example, the government has tested and documented that the learning in online education is at the very least equal to that onsite and in many instances is probably better. After all, you can usually hide in the back of an onsite class (especially when it is in lecture format), but in an online class you either participate or you're absent.

The article also addresses some of the continuing skepticism about developing close community online.  In our program, because you start together onsite, because you move through the program in a cohort, and because you return onsite once a year throughout your program, online classes are not disembodied or random.  They're like calling someone on the phone that you already know (even that illustration is outdated, but I'm trying to meet the skeptics where they usually are on the technology spectrum). Again, I guarantee you there is as much community going on there as in most traditional seminary classrooms.

Some of the examples in this article are actually about the new MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and the use of increasing bandwidth to put longer lectures online. This is actually a step back pedagogically the way it is currently being done, although IWU will almost certainly enter this playing field because of the demand.  Currently, it is simply transplanting the "90% loss of learning" in lecture format into the online world.  Those like Asbury, Fuller, and Wesley who have been doing this for years know that lecture is the least effective learning method there is.

Those who say you cannot effectively teach preaching or do spiritual formation online simply have no idea what they're talking about. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.  I don't think any of us have any real idea what is coming.

Where would Jesus teach?

The grades are out for the schools of Indiana according to the new metrics put in place by Tony Bennett, the current State School Superintendent.  He is proclaiming victory with the 60% of schools in Indiana who received As and Bs by the new standards.  Of course, only two of the seven Marion Community Schools squeaked by with a passing C. The rest are Ds or Fs.

In fact, if you download and glance through the 2012 School Grade Results, you'll see that a preponderance of the schools that have significant poverty and diversity, especially in urban areas, did very poorly. There are many issues swirling here and I'm only on the edge of them, but they have all come up in the debates between Bennett and Ritz. 

One question is of course whether the standards themselves are appropriate.  Another is whether the amount of paperwork and data collection in relation to the standards has become oppressive.  The current approach largely blames teachers for the grades.  The logic is, "Our schools are failing because our teachers don't do a good job," as opposed to the counterclaim that, "There are significant underlying social issues that bias students in certain areas for failure."  

Whatever the truth might be in relation to the details, I know what Jesus is most concerned about, given his focus on earth.  He did not come for the healthy but for the sick.  If Jesus were here, where would he teach?  He would be focusing on the lives of those to whom life has handed a recipe for failure. 

Brain Rule 2: The Brain Evolved...

For various reasons I find myself having to read through a book called Brain Rules.  The first two chapters are fascinating, although no doubt many will push back on its evolutionary approach.  The first chapter gives John Medina's first rule: Exercise!  Even a little exercise improves brain power.

He takes an evolutionary perspective.  Humans evolved to move.  That's how we survived as a species, he will say in the second chapter.  We moved 12 miles a day on average in the early days of our ancestors, he says.  It's stupid to cut recess out of public school education, he says.  It's like eating less in order to gain weight. I think this is the chapter where he says it cuts the risk of Alzheimers by something like 60%.

His second rule is that the brain evolved too.  It's a fascinating chapter.  "The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion" (31-32).  It did this so that we could survive long enough to have sex, have children, and live long enough to protect them to grow up to have more sex and children.  From a Christian perspective, I might add, it's not a particular grandiose view of humanity, but we are at least this much.  We may be more, but we are at least this much.

Later on in the chapter, he has a rather crass, even if possibly accurate sense of how the human womb evolved.  The key to the survival of our species, Medina claims, is not that we got stronger but that we got smarter (32, 37).  This meant that those with bigger brains--and thus bigger heads--survived more effectively than others.  This meant that women with larger wombs survived birth better--and that babies came out sooner.  Now parenting and childhood had to take place for years, unlike species where the offspring come out pretty much ready to go.

Medina has a fascinating version of human evolution.  We should keep in mind not only that his account may be debatable to some Christians but also among evolutionary experts themselves. Medina traces the key to our evolution to fundamental changes in the earth's weather (35).  It knocked our human ancestors out of the trees and onto flat ground that made offspring who stood upright and moved around a lot better suited to survive than those bent over.

Here is one of the take-aways from this chapter. We survived as a species, he says in so many words, because we became a species that improvises and adapts to new environments rather than staying in the same place.  We moved out all over the globe and adapted wherever we went.  His take-away for learning is something called Variability Selection Theory.  Learning is the interaction between two powerful features of the brain: "a database in which to store a fund of knowledge, and the ability to improvise off of that database.  One allows us to know when we've made mistakes.  The other allows us to learn from them" (37-38).

His conclusion is that "any learning environment that deals with only the database instincts or only the improvisatory instincts ignores one half of our ability."  Learning should not err on either extreme.  It should both provide content of knowledge and develop creative skills to be able to improvise and apply knowledge to new situations.

No matter how a person thinks the human brain developed, Medina's evolutionary model helps us picture what the three basic parts of the brain do.  First, we have a "lizard brain," basically our medula, our brain stem.  "The brain stem controls most of your body's housekeeping chores" (40), like breathing, heart rate, sleeping, and waking.

Then we have a second brain sitting on top of it, our mammalian or cat brain.  It is the seat of our emotions and animal functions like fighting, feeding, fleeing, and reproductive behavior.  The amygdala is responsible for emotions and emotional memory.  The hippocampus converts short term into long term memory.  The thalamus is the "control tower of the senses" (41).

But the human brain overshadowing these other parts is the cortex.  It is the part where our ability to fantasize comes from.  Humans can uniquely "attribute characteristics and meanings to things that don't actually possess them" (33).  Medina draws on "Dual Representation Theory" and actually starts off the chapter with the story of his son treating a stick as a sword (31).

This higher function of our brains allows us to "peer inside somebody's mental life and make predictions" (44).  It allows us to pool our strength together in order to survive.  That is the title of the chapter, Survival.  Rather than evolve stronger, Medina says, we decided to cooperate with each other and face that Wooley Mammoth together (43-44).

Accordingly, relationship is important to learning.  In his summary of the chapter, one of Medina's points is that "Symbolic reasoning... may have arisen from our need to understand one another's intentions and motivations, allowing us to coordinate within a group" (47).  And as a by-product, poor relationships between teacher and learner can often sabotage learning.

Christian Vote Matrix

If you want to decide who to vote for as a Christian mathematically:

1. Go through the list and decide between Obama and Romney on that issue.
2. If one issue is more important to you than another, double or triple that vote.
3. Add up the totals.  That's who to vote for.

I did this in a half hour this morning, so obviously it can be improved... I've tried to word things in fresh ways, rather than using the catch phrases of the respective parties.

1. Moral Issues: Do you think that the federal government should enforce and implement Christian values that are specifically Christian (e.g., no gay marriage)?  If yes, one vote for Romney.  If no, one vote for Obama.
2. Moral Issues: Do you think that the government should be involved in helping those who currently do not have the means to take care of themselves (e.g., those in poverty, certain elderly)?  If yes, one vote for Obama.  If no, one vote for Romney.
3. Moral Issues: Do you think that monetary wealth is the same as personal property and thus that taxing is stealing if such monies are not used to benefit you personally without your permission (one vote Romney) or do you think that economic systems channel monetary wealth in different ways depending on how they are structured and thus that it is appropriate to distribute monies more evenly throughout the system (one vote Obama)?
4. Economy: Do you think that austerity measures and low taxes are more likely to grow the economy and thus help more people (one vote Romney) or stimulus and selective taxes (one vote Obama)?
5. Foreign Policy: Do you think Obama or Romney is more likely to facilitate greater long term peace in the world?
6. Foreign Policy: Do you think an Obama or Romney administration is more likely to see people come to Christ around the world in the long run?
7. Education: Do you think that the overall educational system in America will improve more under Obama or Romney?  Part of this equation is whether you think that the overall education situation will improve more if opportunities for private education are increased (Romney) or whether more attention needs to go to the public school system (Obama).
6. Judges: Do you think that Supreme Court judges need to be appointed who will eventually vote that Roe vs. Wade was inappropriate because the federal government was intruding on an issue that is more properly an issue for the States to decide (vote Romney) or do you think judges need to be appointed who will continue federal priority over the positions of individual states on these sorts of issues (vote Obama)?
7. Immigration: Do you think that law-abiding individuals (apart from their illegal status) who have lived in the US for decades, especially Latinas/os, should be given an opportunity to become legal?  If yes, one vote Obama.  If no, one vote Romney.
8. Abortion: Do you think that the law should do everything within its power to discourage abortion, including requiring intensely physical examinations (then one vote Romney) or do you think it is better to focus on preventing pregnancies and promoting adoption among those who might otherwise have an abortion (then one vote Obama).

Addendum: I have tried to word these in a way that, no matter which way you went, you could be expressing Christian values in your choice.  Here's the most important question of all for pastors out there: Would Christians who go both ways on the choices above feel comfortable in your church this Fall?  If not, are we not harming the church?

How will Mitch Daniels do...

I personally like Mitch Daniels. He certainly did well for Indiana budgetarily and has managed not to get caught up too much in the shifting Republican scene of the last four years, the waves that ousted old school Republicans (Lugar, me frankly) or shifted you toward libertarianism to survive (Pence?). 

However, I have wondered how well he'll do as President of Purdue.  I saw a sign of someone at Purdue protesting his appointment.  It said something like, "What experience do you have for this job?"

Being a university President is very much about raising money.  Being a successful politician certainly gives a person a lot of experience in that area.  So Daniels may do very well at that piece of the puzzle.

Daniels has been involved heavily with WGU, the online university (from out of state ;-) that he has promoted on television.  One perk for IWU of his Purdue presidency is that we don't have the governor of the state promoting competition with us. ;-) Whether he will push online education at Purdue is an interesting question. The president of the University of Virginia went majorly cross-ways with her university over this issue.  Daniels is somewhat mild mannered, so it's hard for me to see him being heavy handed with this, although I can see him pushing Purdue in the MOOC direction.

I suspect that working with faculty in shared governance might be a bit like working with a legislature run by the opposition party.  An adversarial college president's days are numbered, but Daniels doesn't seem of that ilk.  These last few years of course he's had a Republican legislature, but he did have some strong resistance at points from the minority Democrats. That is the kind of experience that does prepare a person to be a college president.

Purdue is an engineering school. That might fit with Daniels.  I think in these shifting educational times, having a sense of utilitarianism in knowledge is necessary.  Will this subject help students get a job?  Here is where it will be interesting to see how Daniels does.

Part of a good university is also an element of truth for its own sake, the love of knowledge.  The university that will do well in the future, by contrast, is the one that focuses on truth that will get you a job.  But hopefully they will never abandon the liberal arts entirely.  My knee-jerk suspicion is that Daniels probably wasn't a big friend of the arts or other life-enriching-but not-essential elements as governor (I could be wrong but he racked up a surplus while cutting education significantly).

If he can keep the liberal arts healthy while focusing on the utilitarian subjects that are already Purdue's specialties, he might just do well as its university President.

Educational Microevolution

It occurred to me the other day that the current changes underway in education are a little like the peppered moth in England in the 17 and 1800s.  In the 1700s, before the Industrial Revolution, white peppered moths thrived because they blended into the trees. Black peppered moths, on the other hand, were easily seen by birds and so were much lower in population.

Enter the Industrial Revolution and the burning of coal all over England.  The trees became sooted and now, the population of black peppered moth began to thrive and the population of the white peppered moth took a nose dive.  In biology this is called natural selection--nature "selects" for survival the species that are most suited to adapt to a particular environment.

It occurred to me that we are seeing a similar shift in college education right now, especially in the online environment. The professor who nature will select tends to be more administratively gifted, one who gives relatively quick feedback and can manage more and more moving parts. This is especially true for online courses.

Relevance is another element. Somehow, a lot of colleges and universities have been able to get by with a frequent focus on truth for its own sake.  With the availability of online classes and the rise of community colleges, the stationery "come live here for 4 years" college won't be able to compete unless their greater value is somehow apparent, especially if they remain exorbitantly more expensive.

So the old professor who just lectures and talks about whatever research s/he's doing, of no interest or relevance to the student is a white peppered moth in an Educational Revolution. The ponderous, absent minded professor, the foreign grad student that no one can understand, they're not going to be selected.  The deep professor who leaves the student thinking, "It sure sounds like English but I haven't a clue what she's saying"... crow feed.

The college that specializes in the liberal arts, unless they're high end or have other programs to keep that sinking consumer ship afloat... bird prey.

If I were to found a university...

When we went about designing a seminary, we started with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions we believed a pastor should have and worked backward to the curriculum. This is not the traditional way of doing education. The traditional way is to have a set of standard courses that correspond to classical subjects that have been around in some form or another since ancient times. You start with the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.  Then you add the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

The traditional university potentially faces the same crisis that seminaries have. They are perceived to be irrelevant to what a person actually needs to know with a price tag that can infuriate. Universities do have a major advantage that seminaries don't. Eighteen year olds don't go to college just to get educated. Honestly, it's much more about the social life.

If we were to design a college or university from scratch these days, we would ideally start with what students actually need to know, be able to do, and what attitudes they need to have to do them.  Then we would work backward to a curriculum to get them there.

Mind you, the best universities have been back filling their curricula for years.  And very targeted disciplines have been required to do these sorts of things to meet state standards and such.  If you are studying nursing or education, your field is well sorted.

There is the additional problem that a lot of students don't know what they want to do.  It is perhaps only natural that colleges tend to start with the bottom part of the triangle above, liberal arts, then go to the top part to train specific skills, while slipping in some theoretical depth for those who want it--or you can get that in graduate school.

Ideally, though, you would know the specific career you wanted to go into from the start and you would first learn the very concrete skills you need to be able to do it well.  Then you would add theoretical depth to understand the "inners" of why you do things that way.  Finally, you would study what it means to be a virtuous and full human, especially in the context of the life you plan to lead. At a Christian university, this is the place where faith especially comes into play.

What distinguishes a university from a technical school more than anything else is the bottom part of the triangle. Without a sense of history, of culture, of art, of virtue, of the place of science in the world we live, we cannot intelligently participate in the governing of society.  The problem is that these areas are often not taught in ways that make their relevance clear, nor are they usually taught in relation to a person's trajectory in life.

If I were founding a university, I'd try to do what we tried to do with the seminary.  Focus especially on the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job, while adding as much theoretical depth as possible while still remaining affordable. And in the university setting, you would add the element of "training to be human," the liberal arts, but taught in a way that makes their relevance to life clear.

Good and Bad Scholarship: Talpiot Hullabaloo

I don't have time to write this morning, but I thought I'd refer anyone interested to some good scholarship on Mark Goodacre's blog about the hullabaloo James Tabor and others have been generating for some time about a supposed "lost tomb of Jesus" found in Israel.

Here's his summary of the situation.

Bad scholarship is when one refuses to let the evidence modify your hypothesis. Tabor and friends are, in my opinion, a good example of bad scholarship. However, they do not represent the vast majority of biblical scholars who are really interested primarily in truth and in following the evidence to its most logical conclusion.

Unfortunately, Tabor and others play easily into America's current problem with "expertophobia," the ironic instinct Americans seem to have that if someone is an expert on a subject, they should be viewed with suspicion because they're probably evil. For example, according to a recent comment in the public sphere, I am a snob for hoping more people can get a college education. This is actually as strong a sign of our decline as a nation as any other. The "greatest generation" didn't feel that way--not at all.

Most experts in a field are exactly that--experts, people who by definition are more likely to be right about that subject than you or me.

Christian Teaching Today...

Very interesting piece by Jenell Williams Paris in Christianity Today in response to Mark Noll's book, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind.  It really gives a good sense of the thousand different ways a Christian professor is pulled at a Christian college.

The body of Christ imagery is as always so simple and yet very helpful.  Even among professors you will find different gifts. Some are gifted to lead the way in thought. Some are gifted to lead the way in service and application. Some are good at organizing the very place of learning. Some are good mentoring students. Some can do several of these things well.

A robust institution wants a little of everything and, even in the spread of universities, we also have the possibility of differing emphases.

Indiana Education Reform

Governor Mitch Daniels signed into law yesterday a bill that allows students to take the tax money appropriated for them in the public schools and use it toward private schools.  If I understand correctly, it mainly funds middle and lower income families, which I presume is what Governor Daniels meant by social justice.

First of all, I like Daniels.  I voted for Daniels.  I consider him an honorable man.  He would make a better Republican President than anyone else I know in the field.

I have two strong concerns about this particular program.

1. The first is that the public school system, when it functions properly, is meant to provide a neutral education zone that equips the public to be profitable and fully functioning members of society.  Private schools, on the other hand, like home schools, are often mechanisms for insulating children into tribal backwaters.

Let's say there was a city where most people were Schenckacrucians, a new religion that believes the earth is flat and that we should abolish the Constitution in favor of my Book of Schenck.  The redistribution of funds for public education will only add to the return to pre-modern tribalism that is well underway in America by allowing the loony parents of Cultsville to send their children to my private school.

2. The problem with the public schools--I say as someone with several children in them and very, very close friends who are on the ground in them--is not the teachers.  The problem are the kids who daily call their teachers obscenities in the middle of class that I can't even mention here (I'm talking elementary school).  These are the kids who have all manner of defiance disorders who, because of funding cuts, have nowhere to go but the public school classroom.  They flip desks, daily cause classrooms to be emptied of the good students so that whoever--sometimes funding cuts have reduced support staff almost to secretaries in the office--can talk them down.  School personnel are not allowed to touch them and are discouraged from calling the police.

These are the kids who are in class with your children who, if they were adults, would be locked up or be put in a mental health facility.  Funding cuts take away support systems like behaviorists and clinical social workers--four such jobs have been eliminated from the Marion Community Schools system already for next year.  And we criticize and hold accountable teachers who are not trained to do that level of psychotherapy and abnormal behavior management on a daily basis. These are not special ed issues--they are mental health issues beyond the competency of teacher training.

How can a school pass ISTEP when these students, and mentally challenged students, and students who have  massive attendance problems are part of the assessment?  And then we tell the teacher they will be penalized if their class as a whole doesn't improve?  We discourage them from taking on hard classes because their pay would be contingent on a no win situation.

My son takes Taekwondo and occasionally, the master will have them play a game where they compete to see who can pull a strip of cloth out from behind their opponent.  But he sometimes ties it so that, without the person knowing it, there's no real chance he or she can win.

That's what we've been doing to the public school system these last ten years.  We've set it up for failure and then treated our teachers like dirt when their students' test scores don't improve.  This new law, however well intentioned, is yet another example of hamstringing an incredibly important part of the American social contract... in my opinion.

State Educators and Bad Punctuation

I'm embarrassed to say that I often find educators on every level who don't know some of the fundamentals of punctuation.  Here's one of the basics.  In America, commas and periods go inside final quotation marks.  Schenck pointed out that "commas and periods go inside final quotation marks."  See where I put the period.  That's how we do it in America.

Now mind you, the British way of doing it makes more sense.  In England, commas and periods go outside quote marks, unless of course you are quoting a whole sentence, then the period is part of the quote.  But, for whatever reason, we don't do that here. I'll confess that I have bad thoughts when a fellow professor messes up on such basics, but I won't tell you what they are.

So I was downright disgusted yesterday to find that whoever put together the sample ISTEP materials on the State of Indiana website--for the samples having to do with writing--messed up on this basic.  Have the rules changed, I asked myself?  Rules do change and, as I mentioned, the British way does make more sense.  But I don't think they have.  I suspect, rather, that the state of education is so bad in the US that some on the state level of education don't know what they're doing.

It's not that punctuation is a big deal in real life.  I'm talking about educators and the people who direct educators.  In this realm, this sort of flub calls into question your competency as an educator.

I leave you with a homework assignment my son brought home the other day asking which was more: 0.01 grams or 10 milligrams.  I was puzzled: gram, decigram, centigram, milligram.  0.01 grams is a centigram, which is 10 milligrams.  I double checked myself, went online.  Yep, they're the same.  I had him write, "They're equal."

The teacher marked it wrong.

Merit Pay for Teachers?

For the first time in a long time, Republicans now control the Indiana State legislature and it looks like education reform is high on the agenda.  One element of the measures proposed is merit pay for teachers.  In theory, I am very much in favor of rewarding our teachers astronomically for those who demonstrate massive giftedness in our public schools.  I couldn't do what they do, given the behavior issues and ADHD environment.

Here's the deal.  Merit pay is a bad idea if it is solely linked to student scores.  This rewards the teachers who, either by politics or even incompetence manage to get the easy students.  The biggest problem in the classroom is the massive behavior management issue, not the incompetence of teachers.  Merit pay linked to scores does not take into account the incredibly gifted teachers who take on the children in our schools who are overwhelmingly likely to spend the majority of their life in prison or on the streets.

So merit pay is a great idea to me but only if it is administered in the light of a whole range of competencies.  What we need more than anything right now is brilliant classroom managers.  Almost anyone with a classroom full of "normal" children could improve test scores.  There just aren't very many classrooms like that in the failing schools of Indiana.

P.S. There were only two passing schools in Marion last year and, because the failing schools shewed their worst and dullest to them, there may not be any passing schools this year.  The problem is not the teachers; it's the kids as they have emerged from their "families."

FLHS: Mr. Pickett understood

I had an incredible high school AP math teacher my junior and senior year, Mr. Pickett at Fort Lauderdale High School (FLHS).  My class (1984) by the way was great.  They still get together in Ft. Lauderdale during the holidays.  In fact all the classes before and after me were great.  They were the stuff of what we picture high school to be at its best.  At least I thought so.

And now to the obscure you could only expect of me ;-)  I had Mr. Pickett for Calculus my senior year.  He was, by the way, even better than my college calculus teacher.  He was so good for me that I can still remember things he said, and I don't remember anything from real life. ;-)

I remember him talking about the "epsilon-delta" confusion in the first weeks of calculus.  He told us not to worry about it.  He said the only person he knew who claimed to understand it was a fellow student of his at Florida State, who occasionally would fall down the stairs because he wasn't paying attention to where he was going.  He said they would yell, "Are you okay, x?" And he would yell back, "Yeah."

I took that as a challenge.  I would eventually look at this epsilon-delta confusion.  I would understand it.  And I did when I was in college.  It isn't actually that big of a deal.  It's mathematicians dotting their i's and crossing t's in a way that seems complicated--much ado about nothing for the rest of us.

The point is that Mr. Pickett understood.  I know he did.  He just knew it was completely unnecessary for us to know.  It would have blown almost everyone's circuit breakers over something completely unimportant unless you're going to be a math professor.

So here's to Mr. Pickett, wherever you are.  He moved back to South Carolina the year or so after I graduated, much to the loss of FLHS.

P.S. Yes, I remain a nerd on my own time. ;-)

Christian Schools and Churches

One of the Wesleyan churches in Marion has a school associated with it.  Until recently, it had a middle and high school, but because of the recent financial crisis, it bit the bullet and limited itself to pre-K through 5.  Now it looks perhaps to rebuild.

I am not wise in the way of such things, but their situation does raise all kinds of questions that churches around America and in other places might profitably ask.  For example, to what extent do Christian schools sometimes become albatrosses around a church's neck, to where the school becomes the ministry to their communities?  In other words, they have to expend so much energy and resources keeping a school going that they can hardly do anything else.  It reminds me a little of the situation many districts have faced with camp meetings that serve a very small niche minority but require massive amounts of the district's resources.  Hard to get out of the business once you're in it.

At the same time, the public school situation here in Marion is quite challenging, to say the least.  It's not the teachers, despite the rhetoric we hear from state and national officials.  The children are just out of control because of their home issues past and present, and the system has pruned back the kind of staff that used to handle these things (e.g., doing away with "time away" and making the teachers deal with it, with whatever social worker and office staff is available in a never ending day moving from crisis to crisis).  The good teacher is the person who manages to teach the teachable while managing the psycho distractions.  It's a bloody mess.

So there probably is a market in Marion for a good private school, and we have a couple.  The question mark is always whether your child is going to receive a "mainstream" education there.  The market for Christian schools is often what I might call "reactionary fundamentalist" of various kinds.  Are the kids going to learn mainstream history and science or will it look something more like what the school board in Texas has been about these days?  Are they going to learn English in the second grade by memorizing the five different sounds the phoneme "ra" can have, because of some bizarre sense that anything but an extreme phonics approach is that liberal whole language approach?  That's the sort of psycho-stuff that often fuels the founding of Christian schools in America, in my opinion.

One thing in today's newspaper is encouraging to me about the possible return of upper grades at the local Wesleyan Christian school.  There is talk about partnering with IWU.  I personally would have loved to see IWU have started a charter school a few years back when we bought the property of Center School.  What better way to give to the community and train teachers.  If the local church school could extensively use student teachers from IWU, that might be a win, win in some ways.

Of course, I could just be babbling nonsense about things I don't know.  Never done that before ;-)

Education is Broken

I am more and more convinced that the American system of education is ludicrously wasteful.  It is designed for a small number of students gifted in a particular way, with a particular learning style.  It is designed for the cultural leader, the future scientist, the researcher, just as the liberal arts college is.  But this is a small percentage of the population.  What is worse is that it often doesn't even give these individuals the best they could get and, because of the drain from the vast majority who are just in the wrong system, it fails to serve even these well.

I'll say it again.  The vast majority of American students need to be prepared to get a job and be healthy contributors to society.  Sure, they need to be able to read and write, but even a minimally effective elementary school system can give them everything they need in general for that.  Beyond that they need 1) to know how to be good members of society in general and 2) to know a skill that will get them a job. Accordingly, the vast majority of high school is a waste of time, except that it gets them off the streets.

Where to begin, where to begin?  I have little confidence at this time in any top down correction.  I think it should best start local, with the government validating, supporting, and then getting out of the way.  Here's my suggestion.  Local businesses should coordinate with local high schools and city administration to create career tracks in high school. The high school would offer courses that equip students for those jobs and those employers would provide internships, job placement, and would be involved in the high school curriculum.

I'm not limiting things to blue collar jobs.  More advanced employers could continue this track through local colleges and work with them as well.  Ball State has a program where a student's last two years of high school are done on campus, doubling for the first two years of college.  Given the waste of time that is most high school senior years, this is a great idea.

Newton had made most of his major discoveries before he was 22.  We're wasting our brightest kids' time.

Google thought...

I was sitting on a runway in Chicago today thinking Schencky thoughts as usual.  Here was one.

If I were the CEO of Google... or the president of a small dying college, I would either start a college as part of my company or, better, buy or cooperate with one about to go out of business.  The degree--a BS in Google whatever.  Why not let the industry cooperate with an innovative college to create a problem based curriculum whose main purpose is to feed a company like Google employees?

Google of course is just an example.  A degree in Intel whatever.  A degree in Boeing whatever.  Sure, we'll throw in humanities courses so these engineers have a soul.  Just because you can make a really nifty microbe that can wipe out the planet doesn't mean you should.  Sure, the college would insist the students get a little philosophy and history, not to mention an understanding of physics that is a little broader than how to put a transistor on a sheet of silicon.

But the building block model of learning is too slow to keep up with the cutting edge of the twenty-first century.  Technology companies should grow their own.  But to keep their people human, colleges could facilitate it.

What do you think?  I personally nodded off just after having this thought... ;-)