Measuring Success Confidentially

This one has nothing to do with the election.  Promise.

Last year we started a program in which several full-time faculty, mostly tenured, were compensated for being on call for confidential peer-to-peer class observations.  The idea was that the formal observations done by deans go in personnel files, and are used for evaluation.  Anybody who’s nervous about their standing will probably go with some version of ‘greatest hits’ when the evaluative observation is being done.  Almost by definition, that limits the value of the evaluative observation.

But sometimes it’s helpful to get feedback from a colleague that won’t be used against you later.  That can be helpful if you’re struggling and want to improve, or if you’re trying something new and risky, or if you suspect you might have slipped into a rut.  

I like the concept a lot, but someone asked me a question that I wasn’t sure how to answer.  If the confidentiality of the observations is maintained, how do you measure success?  In other words, after a year or two, how do you know if the resources spent on the observations are worth it?

I admit struggling with this one.

The basic idea behind the question makes sense.  Given limited resources, it’s fair to ask that we do some due diligence to ensure they’re being used wisely.  No argument there.  But the nature of the project -- don’t tell me who got observed or how it went -- makes deeper assessment tricky.

Obviously, there’s the first-level quantitative indicator: if after a publicity blitz, nobody takes the group up on the offer, then I can assume there’s little appetite for it.  But assuming a reasonable rate of uptake, how to tell if the program is working?

“Working” implies a purpose.  I see the primary purpose as helping faculty be effective in the classroom, whether by getting back on track or by getting confirmation that something is working.  (In practice, I’d imagine there’s plenty of splitting-the-difference: “It was mostly great, but when you did x, it didn’t quite work; maybe try it this way…”)  The secondary purpose is validating faculty as professionals by conspicuously respecting their judgment.  That one’s harder to measure, but it’s really a by-product of the first.  If I could measure the first well, I’d call it good.

We could ask the people observed to fill out evaluations of the feedback, maybe at the end of the semester.  Waiting at least a few weeks might help people get past the knee-jerk response to criticism, if that’s what they got, and to focus instead on whether it was actually helpful.  There’s some value in that, though it relies a bit too much on self-awareness.  Sometimes the most useful feedback isn’t pleasant, at least in the moment.

I’m guessing I can’t be the first person to face a question like this, so I’ll ask my wise and worldly readers for help.  Have you seen useful ways to get feedback from smallish numbers of incumbent employees while respecting confidentiality?

The Knock at the Door

On Thursday I got second-hand reports (via the dean of an area) that some faculty reported students having meltdowns in class.  The students in question were either undocumented themselves, or children of undocumented parents, and they were terrified that the “deportation force” that the president-elect promised would send them, or their parents, out of the country.  The students didn’t know what they were going to do.

Later that afternoon, I had some errands on campus that involved walking outside between buildings.  In the course of maybe ten minutes outside, I saw more students smoking than I’ve seen in the last year.  It was enough to be noticeable.  

They’re scared.

College is stressful on a good day.  It’s relatively unstructured, compared to most jobs, but with high expectations.  Most students work significant hours for pay, which compounds the stress. Low incomes often bring with them unreliable transportation and its attendant side effects.  Many students are in the mate-seeking time of life, which brings stresses of its own.  And the constant awareness that college is just a brief stopover on the way to a destination that isn’t always clear adds some tension.  

Those are normal.  Those stresses are the background noise.  I wish the economic pressures weren’t so bad, but some amount of anxiety around impending exams or projects just comes with the territory.  

Some students -- more than many of us would like to think -- carry harder burdens.  They’re dealing with abusive relationships, medical issues, or substance dependency, either directly or indirectly.  Some are homeless or very precariously housed.  Many are hungry.  These stresses are signs of larger issues that I wish weren’t there.  They wax and wane, but never entirely go away.  We deal with them as we can.

But until this week, I never saw students afraid of the government.  That’s new.

I’m told that when the draft was last in effect, college enrollment was a way to escape it.  College was a shelter, a safe space.  This time it isn’t.  What Justice Frankfurter called “the knock on the door” can come at any moment.

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Community colleges in particular are based on inclusion.  It’s in their DNA.  The entire point of a “community” college is to serve the community.  The point of open admissions is to allow everyone -- even the young, scrappy, and hungry -- a shot.  

That openness that flies in the face of current fashion.  Years of talk of “accountability” and “performance” and “run it like a business” push in the direction of maximizing bang for the buck.  Being open to those who have limited preparation, or limited time, or limited direction brings costs.  It brings incredible cultural and economic benefits, but those benefits aren’t free.  If we want to benefit the entire community, we need to supply the services that actual students need.  That means faculty, of course, but it also means financial aid staff, and tutors, and counselors, and advisors, and coaches, and the people who run the back-office functions that keep it all running.  Now it also involves all sorts of equipment and technology, so students can be prepared to deal with the equipment and technology they’ll encounter when they get out.  IT isn’t free.

When my college was founded -- and this is true of many -- the cost of providing those services was heavily subsidized.  The idea was that a community college wasn’t just a factory for producing workers; it was a monument to the idea of equal dignity.  Over time, the commitment to that idea has frayed around the edges, which is why now students supply a majority of the college’s operating revenue.  But the idea is still there, and we’re at our best when we act on it.

Most of the people who work at community colleges -- adjunct faculty most spectacularly, but most full-time employees as well -- make less money than they could elsewhere.  They work here because they believe in the mission.  This is the sector of higher education with the highest proportion of female faculty, deans, and presidents.  This is the sector with the highest populations of students with disabilities.  This is the sector that was born “coed.”  This is the sector with the greatest racial diversity of students, faculty, and leadership; the greatest focus on teaching; and the most intense and unapologetic focus on local needs.  

We take students nobody else would.  We charge them less than anybody else would, and commit to meeting them where they are and getting them where they want to go.  We don’t do it perfectly, heaven knows, but we don’t stop trying to do it better.  

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Students come to Brookdale, or to their own local community college, seeking welcome and opportunity.  It’s where they know they can try on the next phase of life.

That can only happen when they have the confidence that it’s safe to try.

Economic pressures have slowly squeezed that sense of safety.  We’ve had to work harder to compensate, with partial success.  But this threat is new.  It’s fundamental, it’s overwhelming, and it’s corrosive of our daily work.  

Community colleges are uniquely American.  They’re about giving the underdog -- who maybe speaks a different language, comes from a different place, and practices (or not) a different faith -- a fair shot.  They do the things that our country is at its best when it does.  

They are not about exclusion.  Unlike many other sectors, they never were.  They were born egalitarian.  That’s their historic strength, and it’s their single best trait.

--

Community colleges have faced a difficult political climate for some time.  They’re publicly funded when taxes aren’t popular.  They’re complicated when simplicity is in vogue.  They’re inclusive when exclusivity is the direction of things.  

But this is new.  This is different.

I have worked with people from both parties, and have done so happily.  I’m eager to make common cause with anyone who shares the basic value of giving everyone a fair shot.  I’ve worked with private employers and public agencies, committed leftists and rabid conservatives.

But the commitment to equal dignity is not negotiable.  Violating that commitment is breaking a ground rule.

We, as a country, are at our best when we expand the circle of who is included in “we.”  That has always been true.  We aren’t always at our best -- no argument there -- but the direction of history is clear.  Inclusion ennobles on both sides.  Reaction doesn’t end well.  

The job of administration is creating the background conditions in which people can do their best work.  Students can’t do their best work looking over their shoulders, or crying in terror.  They can’t do their best work when they’re wondering if the counselor who is trying to help them will report them.

As educators, we may need to expand our reach to the highest levels of government.  I’m game.  The students are worth it.  They’re why we’re here. They should fear midterms and presentations, job interviews and bad dates.  They shouldn’t have to fear the knock at the door.  

The Tales We Tell Ourselves

When deep stories collide, the scene isn’t pretty.

I’ve been reading Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, which is her account of the insights she gleaned on red-state political attitudes by moving to rural Louisiana and living there for five years.  As always with Hochschild, the book is brilliant, and well worth the read.  But I haven’t been able to shake her idea of the “deep story,” and bump into it daily.

Hochschild spends years living among people who see the world very differently than she does.  Over time, she constructs a narrative that she thinks -- and her new neighbors confirm -- captures the way her new neighbors see the world.  She describes it as a “feels-as-if” story, similar to Colbert’s truthiness but without the irony. (p. 135)  In the deep story of her new neighbors, they’re waiting in a long line for the American Dream.  They’re waiting patiently, doing what they’re supposed to do.  But then other people -- defined mostly by race and nationality -- cut in line in front of them, and there’s President Obama, happily waving the line-cutters in.  When they complain, they’re called racist and looked down upon.  So they feel cheated.

The deep story isn’t meant to be literally true -- there’s no actual line -- and it’s certainly open to alternate interpretations, as in, why were you in front of the alleged line cutters in the first place?  But those caveats, true as they are, are beside the point; the deep story is the default structure within which people organize new experiences or information.  When people with very different deep stories interpret the same information, they can use it to confirm very different points of view.  Is Trump’s victory a story of revanchist racism, deference to the alpha male, media complicity, superior tactics, Clinton’s flaws as a campaigner, or the electoral college?  Depending on your deep story, you could take it as any or all of the above, or as something else entirely.

People with differing deep stories can talk right past each other, because the frames of reference they’re using to interpret the same thing are so different.  Those conversations -- we’ve all had them -- can be incredibly frustrating because both sides feel, to the people holding them, like they’re right.  “Why does management insist on concessions on health insurance?  Don’t they know we’re struggling already?”  “Why does the union fail to recognize that health insurance is killing the budget?  Do they want the place to go broke?”  Within a particular deep story, one of those viewpoints is sensible to the point of obvious, and the other clearly wrong.  Each feels right to the person holding it.  To the person holding one, the other seems vapid, if not offensive.  

In the community college world, we have several deep stories floating around and crashing into each other.  But we don’t always take the time to figure that out.

Some hold the “Prospecting for Gold” story.  In this story, the college or professor is a prospector with a sieve.  Students flow through the sieve.  Every so often, the sieve catches a shiny and valuable nugget.  Those nuggets -- excellent students -- are highly valued.  Everything else just flows past.  In this story, access is highly valued; you can’t pan for gold without a stream.  But a focus on student success seems beside the point.  Either a student is gold, or she is not.  Partisans of this deep story are fond of phrases like “weed them out” and “the right to fail.”  The book Community Colleges and the Access Effect offers a variation on the prospecting story, though it locates the sieve in high school.

I’ve known some people who held the “Savior” story.  To them, the role of the professor (or, less commonly, the college as a whole) is to rescue poor, helpless victims from a predatory world.  Partisans of the Savior story mean well, even as they do incredible damage by not distinguishing between helping and trapping.  When the Savior story crosses racial lines, which it often does, it can get especially icky.

The “Harvard on the Hill” story -- I’ve heard several community colleges refer to themselves that way; sometimes it’s “Harvard on the Highway,” depending on local geography -- imagines that the faculty and the college are guardians of an ancient tradition, and that their job is to resist any sort of change.  I think of them as Platonists who never read to the end.  Curmudgeons tend to be particularly fond of this one.

We all know the “13th grade” story, also formerly known as the “high school with ashtrays” story.  (Non-smoking campuses have relegated that to the ashtray of history.)  That has evolved, over time, to the “all remediation, all the time” story, in which community colleges are excoriated for the failures of other educational sectors.  The folks who like this story tend to use phrases like “dropout factories” a lot.  

Lately, the “Personnel Office for the Economy” story has become popular.  In this one, the college is a factory for turning out workers.  This one caught fire politically when the Great Recession hit, and is sustained by concerns about student loans.  In this version, faculty are moving parts that can/need to be swapped in and out depending on the shifting vagaries of local employers.  The holders of this story talk a lot about “accountability” and “performance funding,” though usually only in punitive ways.  They can often be spotted trashing “soft” disciplines like art history.

The stories clash on the ground.  Should a college spend money on more full-time faculty in humanities, or instead on more academic advisors?  To the Harvard on the Hill folk, the answer is obviously faculty; to the Personnel Office folk, money spent on humanities is money wasted.  Are high fail rates a sign of institutional failure, unconscious reproduction of social class, or the cream rising to the top?  Pick your story, and your answer will follow.

There’s no escaping deep stories; everyone has to make sense of the world somehow.  But being a little more conscious of where they lead, and what they imply, may make it easier to make sense of what otherwise seems like a fountain of nonsense spewing from the person in front of you.  The task of leadership, especially now, is finding a deep story that works, and telling it over and over and over again, from the beginning.  Because if we don’t provide stories, others will.    

Schrodinger’s Credits

It isn’t often that a sentence makes me stop, back up, read it again, email the article to my president, and then chew on it for most of a day.  And this one had absolutely nothing to do with the election.

In the IHE story about Affordable College, a new service (and app) to facilitate transfer from community colleges to four-year colleges, this line brought me up short:

“As for the community colleges, they would receive a share of the revenue for each successful transfer…”

(record scratch)

That’s a potential game-changer.

From what I can tell, Affordable College sounds like a sort of shopping app for transfer credits.  Students at Hypothetical CC can put in the courses they’ve taken, and then compare how many of them get accepted at various four-year colleges. The community colleges provide information; the four-years provide both information and funding.  For each successful transfer, some of that funding gets directed back to the community college.

I could write about this one all day.  But out of respect for my readers, I’ll cover a few highlights.

First, the idea of turning student transfers into a revenue stream for community colleges offers a conceptual solution to the chronic problem facing any provider of a public good: we don’t capture the full value of what we produce.  That leads to systemic, chronic underinvestment.  To the extent that we could recapture even a small fraction of the value we produce, we change the equation.  If we applied the same logic to employers hiring our graduates, we could really get somewhere.  I have no illusions that the amount we’d get would come anywhere close to solving real issues, but at a conceptual level, it would be the first formal recognition of a glaring structural flaw in our funding.  It could pave the way for something fundamentally new.

Second, it addresses a genuine student need.  Yes, many colleges have articulation agreements outlining which credits will go where and under what conditions, and some states (including New Jersey) have laws mandating certain kinds of transfer among public institutions, especially on the general education side.  But as those of us in the trenches know, it often doesn’t work as cleanly in practice as it does on paper.  Many colleges will be generous on the gen eds, but will defer to individual departments to look at courses in the major, so students wind up losing credits there.  They also frequently create a category -- “free elective” credit -- in which students’ credits are acknowledged, sort of, but not towards an actual degree. The transcript gets populated with Schrodinger’s Credits -- they both count and don’t count.  The student doesn’t open the box and see the dead cat until it’s too late.

If the app/program is sophisticated (and current) enough to distinguish between “taken for free elective credit” and “taken in a way that actually matters,” it could solve a major issue for students who are looking for the best deal.  It could even create competitive pressure among four-year colleges to be inclusive, which would be a lovely change.  Of course, that would require the four-year colleges to crack down on departmental home rule, which is a political challenge not for the faint of heart.  It would also require assiduous updating, since curricula evolve, sometimes precisely to evade mandatory transfer.  

That said, though, the app and payment systems sound like they’re built on the assumption that transfer only happens vertically, that is, from two-year to four-year.  It doesn’t.  

“Lateral” transfers -- two-year to two-year or four-year to four-year -- are as common as vertical ones.  That could complicate the payment system.  And “reverse” transfers -- four-year to two-year -- are more common than most people suspect.  They could make the payment system an enormous mess, depending on how it’s configured.  Reverse transfers in this use of the term -- as opposed to the student who transfers vertically before finishing a degree and then sends back some credits -- often happen for economic or familial reasons, though sometimes for academic reasons as well.  (In practice, the categories often overlap.  Family crisis leads to economic problem, which leads to working too many hours, which leads to academic problem.)  At my last college, the largest feeder schools for incoming transfers was another community college.  Any app or program built on the assumption that students only move in one direction will get it wrong.

Still, giving students (and parents) a legible, easily accessible shopper’s guide -- even an imperfect one -- offers the potential to shift incentives pretty drastically.  And if they can work out the economics of it -- which isn’t a given in the app economy -- it could establish a precedent that could eventually be a real boon to public higher education.

That’s a lot to ask from an app.  But in a world in which Instagram is worth billions and Kodak went bankrupt, we underestimate apps at our peril.  Color me intrigued.  

Rigor and Fairness

I’ve read that the hallmark of a great mind is the ability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously.  By that definition, academia is full of great minds.  Many of us manage to believe both of the following:

1. Grading is a core component of academic freedom, and should be left to the professional judgment of individual faculty barring extraordinary circumstances (i.e. harassment).
2. Students’ performance should be judged consistently across sections, and their GPA’s should not be held hostage to which section they take.

When you have, say, twenty people teaching Intro to Field, and one of them is a conspicuously, significantly, and consistently harder grader than the rest, to which belief should you default?

I thought about that in reading the IHE story about the adjunct who says he was fired for maintaining academic rigor in his classes.  Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but I’ve heard enough variations on that line over the years to want to offer some possible context.

Over the years at several different colleges, I’ve seen faculty who say that the reason students don’t like them is that they have high standards.  That sounds reasonable until you see other professors with high standards whom students love.  Having observed my share of classes over the years, I can attest that every so often, rigor can be the last refuge of the misanthrope.  

One clue is polarized feedback.  If student feedback on Professor Scrooge is evenly split between “best ever!” and “run away!,” that’s consistent with rigor.  If student feedback is uniformly negative, there’s likely a reason.

That said, I have to admit that yes, sometimes administrators will use pass rates to judge faculty.  At DeVry, I came under pressure to do that, which was a major reason I left.  In the very short term, you can increase pass rates just by passing anybody who can fog a mirror.  But in the long term, that approach is both unethical and institutionally suicidal.  I’ve been consistent in avoiding that and in instructing my deans to avoid that, precisely because I’ve seen what happens when standards fall.

In the context of a community college with a strong tradition of transfer, too much laxity on grading will lead to underperformance by students at destination colleges.  If too many of our students crash and burn at destination schools, the destination schools would eventually either stop taking them entirely or make them jump through so many hoops that they might as well start over.  

To me, the more elegant and sustainable way to handle ideas one and two is to go around them.  That could mean departmental norming sessions for grading papers.  It could mean trading papers and grading them blind.  It could mean agreed-upon rubrics.  It could even mean longitudinal tracking -- do the students who get A’s in Intro to Field do well in Field II, Son of Field?  If they don’t, that’s a red flag.  The red flag could signify any number of things, but it’s there.  

From this side of the desk, I’ve heard far more students complain about opaque or illegible expectations than about high ones.  For the most part -- and yes, there are exceptions -- students respect high standards when they understand them.   I remember in my own student days, the most frustrated I ever got with a professor was when a weak paper got an A-, and a subsequent stronger paper got a B-.  The overall level was probably about right, but the apparent disconnect between what I produced and the grades I received meant that I had absolutely no idea what was valued.  I had received tough grades before, but they made sense; I knew when I was struggling.  In that class, they didn’t make sense one way or the other.  That was maddening.  (To make matters worse, the professor was consistently inaccessible, so I couldn’t even ask the question.)

I’m happy to back up high standards when they’re clear.  If Professor Scrooge expects students in Field III, The Field Strikes Back to go above and beyond, so be it; college is supposed to be hard.  But if Professor Scrooge is miles away from everyone else in the Field department, it seems fair at least to raise the question.  Starting with threats would be counterproductive, but maybe a peer observation or a norming session would be in order.  

Wise and worldly readers, if Professor Scrooge is dramatically and consistently tougher on students than anyone else in the department, what would you do?  For extra credit, try not to violate ideas one and two...

Scenes from an Open House

Brookdale had its Fall Open House on Sunday.  I didn’t have a speaking role, and I dressed for the weekend, so I was able to move about inconspicuously and just listen.

For various reasons, we tried a new format this year.  In the past, it was held in the arena with rows of booths, like a trade show.  It was easy to see representatives from everywhere, but you didn’t get much of a flavor of the campus.  This year it used the entire campus, with faculty in their own program’s areas on campus.  It involved more walking, but the weather cooperated, and visitors got to see the entire place and the facilities.

My favorite comment of the day, overheard coming from a Dad: “This isn’t what I expected. (pause) It’s _nice_.”  

It kicked off with a welcome from the president in the arena.  I sat in the back, behind a family of four.  When she mentioned that 60 percent of our graduates finish debt-free, I noticed the Mom make a face at the Dad, the Dad make a face at the Mom, and a simultaneous nod.  They scanned the program carefully, apparently with a clear idea of which program they wanted to see.  

I heard murmurs when the president mentioned that our tuition is about one-tenth that of a popular local private university.  It struck me as a much smarter way to present tuition than a dollar figure.  And she made the point -- obvious to incumbents, but not necessarily to everyone -- that students can, and do, transfer on to high-toned places later and get the same degree for much less.  Parents throughout the audience perked up at that.

Walking from station to station was the highlight.  At one point, in the visual arts building, I popped into the photography area to see what was going on.  Shortly after, a family came in; apparently the Mom knew the professor.  When the professor mentioned brightly “we still have darkrooms!” the Mom did a fist-pump and yelled “Yes!”  Darkrooms don’t often get that response, but this one did.  

The poli sci faculty put out their life-size cardboard cutouts of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  If you aren’t expecting the cutouts, they’re a little unnerving.  The dean took my picture with the Trump cutout, which may come back to haunt me at some point.  History will decide.

Having faculty in their own areas, not hemmed in to a small booth in an arena, seemed to pay off.  They were mostly happier with it, from what I saw, and better able to talk to students who wanted to talk to them.  And in areas where facilities matter, they were able to show off what we have, instead of asking students to take their word for it.  At the end of the day, there’s no substitute for a professor talking to students directly about her field, and showing them what the place has to offer.  Spreading people all over campus reduced the auditory crowding, and made real conversation possible.  That’s the heart of the whole thing.

As a first foray into a new format, naturally, some areas for fine-tuning quickly became apparent.  But that’s fine; we can do that.  And there’s something fulfilling about putting your best foot forward.

Next year I start the college tour with TB, so I’ll get more of a comparative perspective then.  But in the meantime, I’m hoping my wise and worldly readers can offer the benefit of experience.  Have you seen a particularly successful approach to a college Open House?  Any tips we can steal to make the next one even better would be most welcome.

Friday Fragments

I don’t do much sports blogging, so those who prefer their reading sports-free should skip to the next fragment.

(clears throat)

Cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuubs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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In response to yesterday’s piece about colleges going “Full Florida” and allowing students to bypass developmental courses if they choose to, several readers commented that they’d expect to see instructors of 100-level classes, newly full of underprepared students, water down their standards to keep their pass rates steady.  It that happened, the pass rates might hold steady, but at the expense of actual learning.

There’s some truth in that; some faculty who feel under the gun -- correctly or not -- would be tempted to make the grade curve look however they think it’s supposed to look.  

But that’s hardly inevitable.  The relatively straightforward fix for that would be…

Trading papers.

In relatively large departments, which English departments usually are, there’s no shortage of people to do a sort of Secret Santa of grading.  The department could work out standards it would apply for different grades in various courses, and then distribute the papers internally for evaluation.  In other words, you might teach 25 students and grade 25 papers, but the 25 papers you grade wouldn’t be from your 25 students.  

Separating the teacher from the grader eliminates the conflict of interest that could tempt teachers to lower their standards.  It also recasts the teacher-student relationship from a psychologically complicated “I’m helping you, but I’m also judging you” to a psychologically simpler “I’m helping you; that shadowy figure in the corner is judging you.  Let’s impress him.”  

It wouldn’t even necessarily have to hold for every assignment.  Maybe do it for the second half of the semester, or on an alternating basis.   

The work involved in setting it up wouldn’t be trivial, but the payoff could be enormous.  If papers were put into the grading rotation without names, there would be a natural guard against bias, whether conscious or unconscious.  

Has anyone out there tried this?  It seems obvious, but I’ve never actually seen it done.

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Last Saturday we drove to Staten Island and took the ferry to Manhattan.  

Parking near the ferry is a bit of a nightmare, but the ferry itself is free, and it passes the Statue of Liberty on the way, which isn’t bad, as views go.  We decided to walk to, and across, the Brooklyn Bridge.  A few observations about walking in lower Manhattan:

• The landmarks are worth it.  We passed the Museum of American Finance, which we recognized from the Hamilton documentary, as well as several buildings with plaques noting their origin in the revolutionary war era.  One had a statue noting that it was where George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States.

• We also passed a massive Trump building.  I smirked but otherwise paid it no mind as we passed, until I noticed The Wife across the street.  She refused to walk on the same side of the street as the Trump building.  Instead, from across the street, she jumped sideways and displayed the state bird at it with both hands as she passed.  The kids were somewhere between mortified and fascinated.

• On a nice Saturday afternoon, the pedestrian walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge is a game of human bumper cars.  “Crowded” doesn’t quite begin to capture it.  Despite the close quarters, people apparently have no qualms about stopping abruptly to take selfies.  If I were on a jury and someone was on trial for body-checking a selfie-taker from behind, I don’t think I could convict.

• Melinda Karp, from the CCRC, noticed a tweet and invited us to meet for coffee and show off Brooklyn Heights.  Brooklyn Heights was much more fun than I expected.  We shared some Rochester nostalgia, conjuring visions of washing down garbage plates with Genny Cream.  If you know, you know.  

Going “Full Florida”

What if students had the option of skipping remediation entirely?

The state of Florida has been conducting a forced experiment to answer that.  The legislature passed a law declaring that most incoming community college students could decide to bypass remedial classes even if their placement test scores indicated that they needed them.  The idea was that remedial coursework often does as much harm as good, in terms of getting students to graduation, and that it consumes significant amounts of their financial aid.  (That took on a new urgency in 2012, when the Feds tightened the lifetime limit for receiving Pell grants.)  Rather than trying to reform developmental ed, it decided to cut the Gordian knot and simply stop requiring it.  Students are given the option of taking it or not.

According to a report in the Sun-Sentinel, enrollments in developmental courses dropped by about half.  Pass rates in first-level college classes either dropped slightly or held steady, but the rates are based on larger populations; even with a slight drop in the rate, the percentage of students who eventually pass a college-level class is higher.  

That finding fits both with intuition and with anecdotal reports I got from some of my colleagues from Florida at Aspen.  They also mentioned that pass rates in developmental classes increased significantly, theorizing that it was because the students who chose it actually wanted it.  

A few years ago, when I was at Holyoke, we did a very limited version of the Florida experiment.  Students with high school GPA’s in a given range -- I’m thinking 2.3 to 2.7ish, but I don’t remember exactly -- were given the option of taking developmental math or not.  About half chose each way.  The ones who chose not to did just as well in 100-level math as students who placed in directly; the ones who chose remediation did just as well, or slightly better, in remedial classes as those who were mandated.  The results weren’t overwhelming, but they were positive, and they suggested that some epistemological humility about predicting student performance from the outside is probably in order.  And that’s with using GPA, as opposed to Accuplacer; I have no confidence that Accuplacer is terribly accurate when used as most colleges use it.

Having spent nearly a decade as a chief academic officer at two different community colleges, I’m increasingly sympathetic to going Full Florida.  There’s something fundamentally broken about developmental education as it’s currently done, and placement has a lot to do with it.  Forcing students who have had bad experiences in a given subject to start by re-taking material they’ve had before, on their own dime, with no credit towards graduation, is a motivation-killer.  And it’s based on a theory of knowledge that I don’t think holds water.

It assumes that students can only learn material in one order.  It assumes that material progresses linearly, and that students have to go step-by-step to make progress.

I’m just not sure that’s true.

Take languages.  It’s possible to teach a language in a linear way, but that’s not how people best learn them.  They learn languages by being thrown in the deep end and flailing around a while.  Anyone who raised children can tell you that their learning is much more idiosyncratic than linear.  Yes, that can lead to gaps, but gaps can be filled.  And the fastest way to shut down a kid’s interest is to reduce it to workbooks.

Adults aren’t just taller children, but the same principle applies.  When I get a new gadget -- and I do love my gadgets -- I never, never, never read the instructions front to back.  I look for the specific points I need.  If later I realize that I missed something, I find it.  Students are often the same way.  We’ve been essentially forcing them to read the manual, then wondering why they lose interest.

I was actually encouraged at Holyoke when about half of the students given the option of skipping chose not to, and encouraged again to see that the same held true in Florida.  Some students know that they’re lost, and actually want the help.  As any teacher can tell you, when a student actually wants to learn, you’re halfway home.  Kay McClenney’s well-known admonition that “students don’t do optional” isn’t always entirely true.  They do when they know they need it.  

I don’t have a habit of thanking Floridian politicians for their wisdom, but credit where credit is due.  The rest of us should take a long, hard look at going Full Florida.

Guarding What’s There

A few years ago Jennifer Silva, a sociologist, published Coming Up Short.  It was a study in the ways that today’s twentysomethings define the markers of adulthood.  (I reviewed it at the time.)  She argued that many of the milestones of early adulthood for previous generations -- marriage, home ownership, steady job -- were so far out of reach for many young people today that they’ve become irrelevant (or, at best, aspirational).  Instead, today’s young people define adulthood as the overcoming of an obstacle in their personal life, whether that be addiction, a dysfunctional family, or some other trauma.  Those milestones are less susceptible to the whims of the economy, so they allow people to feel like adults even when struggling economically.

I liked the book a lot, and the ideas behind it have stuck with me for the last several years.  But this week I finally connected some dots that I probably should have connected a while ago.

The Chronicle recently published a piece by Philip Alcabes wondering if Boomer-era definitions of free speech still make sense on campus, given the rise of trigger warnings.  It suggested that felt notions of free speech are generationally specific, and reflective of the environment of that generation.

And I thought, hmm.

The economic contexts of the two pieces are notably different; Silva focuses on the working class, where the Alcabes piece focuses exclusively on affluent and selective colleges.  But put next to each other, they accidentally support each other.

If psychological milestones have taken the place of economic ones, then attacks on those psychological milestones hurt more.  They’re more threatening.  When identity is all you have, an attack on identity can feel like an attack on you as a person.  

In Silva’s fieldwork, the one exception to the new trend was a group of firefighters she spoke to.  They hewed closely to the older culture of the working class, with a focus on homeownership and an open hostility to therapy-talk.  But they were also the only ones in the sample who could afford homeownership.  Where the old economics of the working class still held, the old culture still held.  Where the economy fell down, the old culture couldn’t take root.

The reason I’m trying to knit this together is that I’ve sensed a fragility among students that I didn’t sense ten years ago.  Yes, I’m ten years older, and that may have something to do with it.  (I distinctly remember the moment at a concert when I thought to myself “those kids in the mosh pit are gonna get hurt!”  That’s when I stopped going to that kind of concert.) That explains why they look younger every year.  But the fragility seems to run deeper than that.

Criticizing young people who are hanging on for dear life on the grounds that they’re thin-skinned seems tone-deaf at best, if not actively cruel.  It misses the point.  

The great threat that Boomers faced was the government, broadly defined.  They heard about Nazis, watched communists, and grew up in wars that had drafts.  They prized the ability to attack governments, criticize them, and even flee them altogether.  And they had an economy that allowed them not to worry too much about making a living, at least for a while.

My cohort, the X’ers, came up when family dissolution was the great threat.  We were the generation that grew up during the single greatest spike in divorce in history.  For us, the greatest threat wasn’t the government; it didn’t seem terribly relevant one way or the other.  It was close relationships falling apart.  This is the generation of latchkey kids, with the highest age of first marriage on record.

For the group coming up now, the greatest threat is economic.  They’re much more sociable than we were, and more socially aware.  They see the government as a tool to fight off a threat; that’s why they could rally behind a 74-year-old self-described socialist.  For them, it’s about having allies to fight off the wolf at the door, whether those allies are friends on social networks or public agencies.  Isolation doesn’t just bring loneliness; it brings poverty.  That’s new.

To the extent that these hugely overdrawn caricatures have at least some truth, they may give a sense as to why policy solutions that made great sense for one cohort seem off-key to the next.  Telling millenials that you’ll protect them from Big Government is solving the wrong problem.  And attacking their sense of group identities in the name of free speech comes off as much more harsh than the attackers often realize.  When your group is all you have, you guard it jealously.  

In this climate, a notion like ‘free speech’ has a different valence.  Even twenty years ago, the great threat facing someone taking a public stand was being ignored.  Now, the great threat is being remembered and shamed.  One sideways comment and you unleash the fury of the interwebs.  Beyond embarrassment, that can cause real professional or economic damage.  That puts young people on a tightrope: compete for attention, but don’t say anything controversial.  Many of my more regrettable moments are lost to history; mine is the last generation for whom that will be true.

If we want students to develop a robust public sphere -- candidly, the greatest failing of my generation -- we need to recognize the context in which they’re working.  Telling them to toughen up just misses the point.