“Are Too Many Students Going to College?”

The cover feature for the November 13 issue of the Chronicle Review section of the The Chronicle of Higher Education is a forum on the question: “Are Too Many Students Going to College?”

People are sure to differ in their judgments as to how that question should be answered. What I want to call attention to is the Chronicle Review editors’ presumptions as to what kind of question is being addressed, as indicated by their choice of Forum Participants:

FORUM PARTICIPANTS

• Sandy Baum, professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College and senior policy analyst for the College Board
• Bryan Caplan, associate professor of economics at George Mason University
• W. Norton Grubb, professor of policy, organization, measurement, and evaluation at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education
• Charles Murray, political scientist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
• Marty Nemko, career counselor based in Oakland, Calif.
• Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and professor of economics at Ohio University
• Marcus A. Winters, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute
• Alison Wolf, professor of public-sector management at King’s College London
• Daniel Yankelovich, founder and chairman of Viewpoint Learning Inc., which develops dialogues to resolve public-policy issues; Public Agenda, a nonprofit policy-research organization; and DYG Inc., a market- and social-research firm

Apparently, they see this as a question of economics, a question for which they see no need for input informed by curriculum consciousness.

Chicago (A) style citation for the feature:

• Baum, Sandy, W. Norton Grubb, Charles Murray, Marty Nemko, Richard K. Vedder, Marcus A. Winters, Alison Wolf, and Daniel Yankelovich. “Are Too Many Students Going to College?” The Chronicle (of Higher Education) Review, November 13 2009, B7-B10.

Click here for a Curricublog post on Curriculum Studies and the questions concerning “What is worthwhile?”

Mass., Va., etc. “students’ religious freedom” bills

There’s “An Act Relative to Protecting the Religious Freedom of Students” pending in the Massachusetts legislature which, according to Antoinette Pizzi reporting in the Cape Cod Times, “has bipartisan support and is expected to pass favorably through the Joint Committee on Education.”

Folks at the National Center for Science Education have taken particular notice of this interpretation by a co-sponsor of the bill, as Pizzi reports:

“Students are discouraged from any conversations about religion,” said Poirier, who also is a co-sponsor of the bill. “Perhaps in science class, when evolution is discussed, a student would be able to bring up creationism.”

An April 2008 article by By Jeremy Leaming of Americans United for Separation of Church and State reporting on comparable developments in a number of states, including Oklahoma and Missouri, relates how similar legislation was dealt with in Virginia:

The Virginia General Assembly is considering a bill dealing with “students’ voluntary expression of a religious viewpoint.” When the bill, H.B. 1135, was introduced, it contained language as sweeping as Oklahoma’s. After AU and other critics raised concerns in letters to Virginia lawmakers, the bill was amended to strike language that would have forced students to be a captive audience to other students’ religious expression.

Toward the end of February, [AU's State Legislative Counsel Dena] Sher sent a letter to Sen. Edward Houck, chairman of the Virginia Senate Committee on Education and Health, regarding the bill’s provision on students’ rights to mention their religious beliefs in class work assignments.

Sher wrote that the bill should be further amended to ensure that students’ work was “graded according to academic standards of substance and relevance.”

She observed in her Feb. 27 letter, “Students’ right to express their viewpoints in school work, however, is not a license to engage in unrestricted free speech. It is critical that whatever viewpoint expressed ‘is germane to the assignment’ and that it is ‘judged by ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance and against other legitimate’ education concerns.”

Without such assurances, Sher continued, “this statute could be understood to force biology teachers to give equal credit to students who, when asked questions about evolution, answer with religious views about creation. It is not difficult to imagine the many other potential problems Virginia’s teachers could face.”

On February 28, Houck’s committee approved an additional amendment to the bill stating that “classroom work shall be judged by ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance and against other legitimate pedagogical concerns identified by the school.”

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CERU: 12th Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends

The Commercialism in Education Research Unit, a partner center of the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University, has released Click: The Twelfth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2008-2009.

The word “Click” is part of the title this year (not just part of the link), since this year’s report is concerned with children getting plugged into the online consumer marketplace through their experience in schools:

As part of their efforts to create a total advertising environment, companies continue to aggressively market in school to children and youth. Advertisers now routinely blur the boundaries between editorial content and advertising in an effort to thoroughly infuse childhood with marketing messages. The goal of creating a total advertising environment has been brought closer to reality through the exploitation of digital venues such as video games, social networking websites, and cell phones.

This year‘s report considers how marketing and advertising subtly help shape children‘s socialization into values associated with commercialism. Although commercialism isn‘t explicitly included as part of the curriculum, it is taught subtly in school environments that include marketing and advertising. As marketing messages promote particular products, they simultaneously promote values that validate and support commercialism.

Some people — including many school-age kids — would ask, “So what? What’s so bad about commercialism?” After all, isn’t our freedom as consumers in the marketplace the very thing we work for in the unfree workplace, and the unfree classroom? For many, the Mall is a favorite place to hang.

Some might think the problem is that kids in school are being delivered as a captive audience for merchants. Well, of course, there is that; but the main concern of these reports over the years is with the students’ socialization into a consumerist value system, as can be seen by these headings in this year’s report:

• The Values Taught by Marketing in Schools
  • Money and the Meaning of Happiness
  • Food and Nutrition
  • Sexuality and the Commodification of Desire

Still, there are those who would see this as just another tired old bugaboo of those fun-hating, freedom-hating lib-er-als that the talk show hosts are always talking about on their radio programs. Who are those critics of consumerism, anyway, to say that their values are somehow superior to the values chosen by the young people, themselves, and for themselves?

Chris Hedges | BookTV | Colbert Report

On Sunday, October 11th at 12pm noon (ET), BookTV on CSpan2 will be re-airing their “After Words” interview of Chris Hedges on his new book, Empire of illusion: the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle.

I saw this segment last weekend, and then I bought the book. Hedges has more depth and perspective than I expected from some of his previous work.

His thesis also made me think of Stephen Colbert, and how much fun it would be to see Hedges interviewed on Colbert’s show. The kinds of “illusion” and “spectacle” he’s talking about after “the end of literacy” are exactly the kind of “Truthiness” that Colbert parodies, so spectacularly, on his show every night. It would be fun to see what Colbert would do with that. Since he did interview Hedges on an earlier book, I expect Hedges will be on again for this; but I’m posting this now to maybe help get the ball rolling.

In the book, Hedges has enough to say about literacy and education — and especially higher education — to warrant putting this here on Curricublog (rather than the blog I keep just so I have someplace else to post things that are not curriculum-related); although the BookTV interview doesn’t get into that as much.

The BookTV segment can also be viewed online at its C-SPAN video library page, where there’s also information on the event and on how to buy the DVD.

US Educ Sec Arne Duncan on Colbert (Oct 5, 2009)

This weekend I saw Chris Hedges on BookTV’s “AfterWords,” and I thought “this is somebody that I need to see on the Colbert Report.” I decided to do some posting to encourage that encounter (that will be my next post after this one — see the post above this one, or the link with arrow, above right); but first I thought I should check Colbert Nation website to see if Hedges has already been on for this book (he was on earlier for another book), or if a future visit has been announced.

I don’t see any sign there of Hedges going on Colbert for this new book; but I do see that Stephen’s guest tonight (Monday, October 5) is U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who has said in a recent speech that “The net effect [of NCLB] is that we are lying to children and parents.”

civic education study 2009

Two people landed on this blog today by doing searches on “civic education study 2009″.

I think I’ve had browser windows open for the last few days on what they probably were looking for, but I hadn’t had the time to save those items, much less post anything about them.

Anyway, the most substantial source on that topic would be the IEA’s ICCS 2009, directed from the University of Maryland; but that’s probably not what they were looking for.

It’s more likely they were looking for the recently more highly publicized “studies” reported by Matthew Ladner, on high school students in Arizona and in Oklahoma.

These have been tossed around in anti-public-education circles. Ladner does have an agenda and a point of view, but his own writing seems more fair and balanced than I had expected from some of the publicity it’s gotten. Ladner writes:

Louisiana procedures for disputes over anti-science materials in biology classes

WILL SENTELL of the [Baton Rouge] Advocate Capitol News Bureau reports that “Procedure [have now been] crafted for handling evolution-materials complaints“:

NCLB “lying to children and parents” – U.S. Ed Sec Duncan, Sept. 24, 2009

According to an Ed Dept press release:

In his speech, Duncan said that the NCLB law has significant flaws and that he looks forward to working with Congress to address the law’s problems. He said the law puts too much emphasis on standardized tests, unfairly labels many schools as failures, and doesn’t account for students’ academic growth in its accountability system.

“But the biggest problem with NCLB is that it doesn’t encourage high learning standards,” Duncan said. “In fact, it inadvertently encourages states to lower them. The net effect is that we are lying to children and parents by telling kids they are succeeding when they are not.”

See google news listing of coverage here.

“neutrality” strikes again: banned band shirts in MO (evolution/religion dispute)

photo by Hal Smith / Sedalia Democrat (copyrighted)

A story by Tonya Fennell for the Sedalia (MO) Democrat reports on the action taken by Assistant Superintendent Brad Pollitt in response to complaints from some parents about T-shirts designed for the school marching band’s program, “Brass Evolutions 2009.” Pollitt says he “made the decision to have the band members turn the shirts in after several concerned parents brought the shirts to my attention,” and he offered this explanation:

Pollitt said the district is required by law to remain neutral where religion is concerned.

“Where religion is concerned,” he said. But where, exactly, is religion concerned, in this T-shirt design? (Click the image at left for the article, with a link for an enlarged version of the image, if you think that might help you find something about religion on the T-shirt.)

Pollitt’s explanation continues:

“If the shirts had said ‘Brass Resurrections’ and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing,” he said.

Well, in that case it would be easy to see how religion would be concerned in the design of that T-shirt, but where can we find anything like that kind of religion concerned in the graphic on the T-shirts that he has banned the band from wearing? 

Three books for civic economic literacy (Book TV)

Three books on BookTV (CSpan2) this weekend:

Economics Does Not Lie: A Defense of the Free Market in a Time of Crisis , by Guy Sorman

About the Program

Mr. Sorman argues that to get rid of the free market because it’s imperfect would be a danegrous overreaction to recent events. Rebuilding trust in the market is where energy should be placed, because the benefits of free market capitalism, with the public sector in the wings, have far outweighed even the worst of cyclical downturns.  Mr. Sorman argues that free market capitalism has lifted almost a billion people across the globe out of poverty.

About the Authors
Guy Sorman

Mr. Sorman was an economics advisor to the Prime Minister of France from 1995 to 1997.  He taught economics at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences from 1970 to 2000.  He is author of over 20 books, including The Empire of Lies, and the Conservative Revolution in America.

LINKS (generally you can view these programs online at either of the following sites):

• BookTV.org
• c-spanarchives.org

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street, by Justin Fox

About the Program

Justin Fox, business and economics columnist for Time magazine, presents a history of Wall Street from its inception and the basic principals of the Market to the people who won and lost fortunes.  He focuses on the efficient market hypothesis and profiles a group of current economists who now refute its tenets of a market that is never wrong and that maintains that the greatest signifier of a stocks value is based on the decisions of judicious investors.  This event was hosted by the World Affairs Institute in San Francisco.

About the Authors
Justin Fox

Justin Fox is the business and economics columnist for Time magazine where he writes the blog The Curious Capitalist for Time.com.  Mr. Fox was formerly a writer and editor at Fortune.

LINKS (generally you can view these programs online at either of the following sites):

• BookTV.org
• c-spanarchives.org

When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors, by Sally Satel

About the Program

An FBI probe in New Jersey resulted in the arrest of political and religious leaders for alleged offenses that include organ trafficking.  Yale University School of Medicine lecturer and kidney transplant recipient Sally Satel argues that underground organ trafficking will continue to thrive as long as the government prohibits organ recipients from paying donors.  The event first aired live on C-SPAN from the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

About the Authors
Sally Satel

Sally Satel is a lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine, a staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington DC, and W.H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She has written numerous articles on health issues that have appeared in dozens of academic journals, as well as The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The New York Times, and SLATE.

LINKS (generally you can view these programs online at either of the following sites):

• BookTV.org
• c-spanarchives.org

TCS report on new Texas science standards

A report by Texas Citizens for Science on the Science Standards adopted by TSBOE in March is now posted on the TCS website. Dr. Steven Schafersman, President of TCS, tweets:

New TCS report on Texas science standards just posted on the website. The new standards can be used to improve evolution education if the science textbook authors and publishers cooperate.

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ICR tries again in suit over grad “science ed” degree in Texas

Unwilling to deal with the hilariously hideous complaint that was filed initially by the Institute for Creation Research in their attempt to get accreditation for their graduate degree program in “science education,” the judge ordered ICR to file an amended complaint, and then a second amended complaint, with a maximum page limit of 20 pages.

The second amended complaint has now been filed, and it is another doozy (although, this time, a shorter doozy).

new Lowe standards for Texas Social Studies

An AP article on Gail Lowe, successor to Donald McLeroy as chair of the Texas SBOE, can be found now on the websites of the Houston Chronicle and the Lufkin Daily News.

The story quotes Chairman Lowe expressing her agreement with the preachers who have been appointed by the Board as “Experts” to advise them in revising the state’s social studies standards, in their view that figures such as Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall don’t deserve the places that they’ve had in history textbooks:

Marshall and Chavez are “not particularly known for their citizenship,” Lowe said. “Figures we use to represent those character ideals (citizenship, patriotism and community involvement) and the type of persons we want your students to emulate should be politically neutral.”

Current drafts for revised Texas social studies standards can be found now on the TEA website.

Texas is one of the four states not participating in the project to develop common standards for use (with variations) nationwide.

Also, the Governor who appointed Lowe as chair has been saying that it may be time now for Texas to secede from the United States.

“Neuatheismusstreit”: Was ist das?

My recent post on “Mooney & the ‘new atheists’: another round” begins with a reference to the latest round “in the ongoing Neuatheismusstreit.”

I’ve been asked what that is–this “Neuatheismusstreit” that I’m referring to. Let me begin with the “sense” (or Sinn) of the word, and then explain its “reference” (or Bedeutung) in the context of that post. “Neu” means “new,” “Atheismus” is “atheism,” and “Streit” is “dispute”; so “the Neuatheismusstreit” is “the dispute over new atheism.”  

Mooney & the “new atheists”: another round

Another round in the ongoing Neuatheismusstreit was touched off by an opinion piece in the L.A. Times by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, authors of the new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. They write:

It often appears as though Dawkins and his followers–often dubbed the New Atheists, though some object to the term–want to change the country’s science community in a lasting way. They’d have scientists and defenders of reason be far more confrontational and blunt: No more coddling the faithful, no tolerating nonscientific beliefs. Scientific institutions, in their view, ought to stop putting out politic PR about science and religion being compatible.

Here are some responses up to now:

• PZ Myers (@ Pharyngula): here and here
• Jerry Coyne
• Jason Rosenhouse
• Greg Fish: here and here (pointing to a clever Onion-esque spoof of the Mooney & Kirshenbaum book)

My 2¢ (for now): In all the sound and fury posing this dispute as a conflict over political and cultural strategy, the question of curriculum is being neglected, even though the conflict is joined most pointedly in struggles over teaching natural science versus something else in science classes.

Without regard for political or cultural strategy, and simply as a matter of curriculum, students are not learning to understand the natural science disciplines such as biology, chemistry, or physics if they come away thinking that any of these sciences has anything at all to say, one way or another, about notions of the supernatural such as, for example, belief in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, or belief in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Such beliefs are not even beliefs about the world that natural science investigates. The beliefs of Cardinal Schönborn and Pope Benedict concerning creation are on the same order: They are beliefs about metaphysical “substances” in the same sense as in “transubstantiation”–”substances” in a sense that makes no sense in the natural sciences, yielding no hypotheses or claims or propositions with any “sense” open to natural science confirmation or disconfirmation.

This is not because of any calculation about political or cultural strategy. This is just a matter of the difference between scientific and religious thinking. A student who does not understand this, does not know what science is; and to understand this, the student needs to understand that scientific thinking and investigation, per se, cannot make sense of things like “transubstantiation,” and have nothing to say about such things.

A biologist can say, “As a biologist, I don’t believe in the Immaculate Conception … I don’t understand why anybody would believe it … it makes no sense to me … in fact, it seems like a goofy idea to me.” But a biologist cannot rightly say, “the science of biology demonstrates that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception [or the virgin birth of Jesus, for that matter, which is a different belief from the IC] cannot possibly be true.”

It’s fine for scientists to point out that religious beliefs do not make sense scientifically (indeed, scientifically literate religious believers would not claim that they do); and while scientists should condemn the pretenses and deceptions of ID proponents claiming that Intlligent Design is “scientific,” and combat attempts to deny scientific knowledge on the basis of religious authority, such combat and condemnation does not demand any condemnation or disparagement of religion, as such. In fact, the cause of defending science against pretenders may be confounded, if the profound difference between what science and religion are about becomes obscured.

Comer decision appealed

added 8/31/2009: The case of the banned band T-shirts in Missouri may be eerily related to this case.

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Chris Comer, who was forced out of her job as Science head in the Texas Education Agency for forwarding an email announcement of a talk by Barbara Forrest in Austin, has filed her brief appealing the decision by a district court judge who had dismissed her lawsuit challenging her job termination.

A previous post here proposed a different legal strategy for the appeal. Briefly, I suggested that since the TSBOE and the TEA were pretending that creationism was not even being considered for inclusion in curriculum in any way, Comer could not be held legally responsible for acting on the knowledge that the question of inclusion was actually a matter for consideration by the Board (in effect, that the Board members were telling lies). The lower court’s reasoning is totally dependent on the premise that Comer knew that creationism would be considered as a matter for a policy decision by the Board.

I think my suggested approach, taking the Board members on their word, as speaking honestly and in good faith, might stand a better chance on the appeal. How can federal courts rule that Comer had a legal duty to conduct herself on the basis of knowing that the Board members were lying to the public?

Comer is taking a more straightforward approach, directly claiming that creationism has been the policy of SBOE and TEA, and calling on the courts to rule this policy (and the job action in her case) unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Her victory on these grounds will be much more valuable than it would be following my suggested argument, if she does win the case.

NCSE: Science coverage better, but creationism creeping in

A new study by NCSE staff (available in html and pdf) finds improvement in state science standards, marred by the creeping influence of creationist language. Here is the abstract:

In 2000, Lawrence Lerner and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation reviewed state science standards in 49 states and the District of Columbia, specifically with respect to the coverage of evolution. We repeat his survey for all current standards publicly available as of May 2009 and discuss the history and role of state science standards in American public education. Our survey indicates that science standards tend to cover evolution more extensively than they did a decade ago, and that the average quality of the treatment has increased. However, certain types of creationist language are also becoming more common in state standards. We also discuss the history and role of state science standards in American public education.

A brief article on the report is on the NCSE website at http://ncseweb.org/news/2009/08/evolving-standards-004990 .

Click the map below for the full-size image with state-by-state grading of the standards:

Click image for full-size view