‘An Industry of Mediocrity’: Study Criticizes Teacher-Education Programs

A couple of loyal readers suggested I post some version of this news, “‘An Industry of Mediocrity’: Study Criticizes Teacher-Education Programs.” Here’s a quote from this Chronicle of Higher Education story:

Colleges of education are “an industry of mediocrity” that churns out unprepared teachers to work in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools, according to a highly anticipated report.

The report, “Teacher Prep Review,” describes the findings of a controversial effort to rate the quality of programs at 1,130 institutions nationwide that prepare about 99 percent of the nation’s traditionally trained teachers. Released on Tuesday, the report is the product of a partnership between the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News & World Report.

I’m kind of dubious of rankings/evaluations from groups like U.S. News & World Report, and given the history of “teacher’s colleges” and “normal schools” in this country, it is no surprise to me that where we train our teachers are not typically “elite” schools. And the article and many of the comments point out that the methodology these folks employed to come up with their findings are dubious.

Anyway, read it if you want. I’m going to enjoy a lovely late spring/early summer day instead.

The usual discussion on budgets and college sports

With the new EMU budget comes renewed discussion and concern about how much money EMU and similar schools are dumping into athletics, particularly football.  From annarbor.com, see “Eastern Michigan University athletics’ $10.73M operating budget reliant on general fund.” Of that budget, $9.24 million come from the general fund of EMU, but really, it’s a lot more than that because that operating budget doesn’t include the $7.1 million in scholarships that EMU gives to athletes.  So really, we’re talking more like of $16.5 million a year out of the operating fund to run sports at EMU.

Go Hurons! Emus! Eagles!

Here’s a passage from the annarbor.com piece that sums it up well the problems for me:

“I think it’s clear that Eastern Michigan University spends too much money on athletics,” said EMU business professor and head of the school’s faculty union Howard J. Bunsis during the Tuesday regents meeting. “The dream of filling Rynearson stadium… is never going to happen.”

He added: “The faculty is not against sports… but we just think it’s too much money.”

EMU’s athletic department has the highest level of general fund support of any athletic department in the MAC, according to a USA Today database.

University President Susan Martin has been a strong supporter of EMU’s athletic programs, saying sports create a dynamic college experience for students and are on their way toward becoming more self-supporting.

“We’re a Division I program and we do spend money on athletics, but certainly it’s fair to say that we hope the revenue-generating sports can generate more revenue,” Martin said, also projecting changes to the MAC will bring in more money from TV spots.

I think Howard is absolutely right: I’m not against college sports per se, I just think that EMU is in no position to pay for it. And part of the problem is this frankly delusional quote from President Martin: we are never ever ever going to generate any significant amount of revenue from TV spots or anything else. Certainly my business-minded colleagues in Welch Hall would agree that if you have to spend over $16 million to garner a $1-2 million from TV spots, appearance (e.g., paid to lose) fees, tickets, etc., etc., then that is not “revenue.”

Two other things to contemplate along these lines. First, from a loyal reader comes “Researchers show students subsidizing college sports at alarming rates in some conferences,” which links to the more informative/interesting Bloomberg News piece “How Poor Students Subsidize Unworthy College Sports.” The amount of money students pay through their fees to pay for athletics at places like EMU is enormous of course, but the surprise here is the extent to which students at places like EMU seem unaware of how much of their student fees are going to pay for athletic programs that have little to do with their education. Read both, especially that Bloomberg piece– interesting stuff.

And second comes this handy NCAA Financies Infographic from USA Today. A couple of “fun facts” from this I learned in about five minutes:

  • Of the 228 Division I programs listed here, only seven report no subsidy to the athletic budget from tuition and fees, and only 27 have a subsidy of less than 5%.
  • EMU ranks 24th on this list for the highest percentage of tuition and fee subsidy at 83.61%. Yikes.

“Eastern Michigan University board approves 3.75% tuition hike and $296.4M budget”

No EMU-related news for a couple of weeks and it all comes at once: also from annarbor.com, “Eastern Michigan University board approves 3.75% tuition hike and $296.4M budget.” I think it’s kind of a good news/bad news thing.  The good news, as annarbor.com reported it:

This year’s hike follows a 3.95 percent increase last year, a 3.65 percent increase in 2011-12, a tuition freeze in 2010-11 and a 3.8 percent increase in 2009-10. The five-year average for tuition increases at EMU is roughly 3 percent.

“It beats all the other public universities here in the state, so that in itself is a testimony of Eastern Michigan’s commitment to holding the rates and fees and tuition increases down and making it affordable,” said recently appointed EMU regent Mary Treder Lang, an accountant.

That’s the good news. The bad news?

During the past decade, tuition rates have been raised a total of 66.4 percent for in-state tuition in-total.

Ouch. That’s the trend across the U.S. of course, but still, ouch.

“Man pleads guilty in wife’s fatal stabbing and will serve at least 30 years”

From annabor.com comes “Man pleads guilty in wife’s fatal stabbing and will serve at least 30 years,” where the man in question is former EMU adjunct Jean-Pierre Trias. He plead guilty to second degree murder as part of a plea deal. Here’s a kind of disturbing quote from the article:

When Washtenaw County Trial Court Judge Donald Shelton asked if he killed Porter, Trias said,“Yes sir.”

“How did you kill her?” Shelton asked.

“I used two different knives to stab her until she was dead, sir,” Trias replied.

Pittsfield Township police discovered Porter’s bloodied and bruised body in a bathroom when they responded to the home on Jan. 11.

Definitely a sad story all around.

 

“In the Ivory Tower, Men Only”

A loyal reader suggested I post this:  From Mary Ann Mason writing for  Slate comes “In the Ivory Tower, Men Only,” which is about the penalty female academics pay (compared to male academics, of course) when they have a child.  Here are the opening paragraphs:

In 2000, I greeted the first entering graduate-student class at Berkeley where the women outnumbered the men. I was the first female dean of the graduate division. As a ’70s feminist I cautiously thought, “Is the revolution over? Have we won?” Hardly. That afternoon I looked around the room at my first dean’s meeting and all I saw were grey haired men. The next week at the first general faculty meeting of the semester I noted that women were still only about a quarter of the faculty, and most were junior.

Our Berkeley research team has spent more than a decade studying why so many women begin the climb but do not make it to the top of the Ivory Tower: the tenured faculty, full professors, deans, and presidents. The answer turns out to be what you’d expect: Babies matter. Women pay a “baby penalty” over the course of a career in academia—from the tentative graduate school years through the pressure cooker of tenure, the long midcareer march, and finally retirement. But babies matter in different ways at different times. A new book I co-wrote with the team at Berkeley, Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower, draws on several surveys that have tracked tens of thousands of graduate students over their careers, as well as original research.

The most important finding is that family formation negatively affects women’s, but not men’s, academic careers. For men, having children is a career advantage; for women, it is a career killer. And women who do advance through the faculty ranks do so at a high price. They are far less likely to be married with children. We see more women in visible positions like presidents of Ivy League colleges, but we also see many more women who are married with children working in the growing base of part-time and adjunct faculty, the “second tier,” which is now the fastest growing sector of academia. Unfortunately, more women Ph.Ds. has meant more cheap labor. And this cheap labor threatens to displace the venerable tenure track system.

I think that this is mostly right but still one of those “your results will vary” kind of things, and I think it’s significant that Mason is writing about “research 1″ kinds of institutions and she seems to mostly focus on the sciences. My wife (who is also a professor in the English department) and I have spent our academic careers decidedly not at those kind of institutions, and I think English as a field is more gender-balanced than a lot of the sciences.

That said, it’s hard to deny that children have a huge impact on the careers of women in academia and almost none on men in academia. Of course, the same could probably be said for almost any other job in this country.

“Student loans are a big business for government, bringing billions in profit”

A loyal reader sent me this from the Freep web site, “Student loans are a big business for government, bringing billions in profit.” In some ways, it’s a story we’ve heard before, but the opening paragraphs do put this in pretty stark perspective:

The U.S. government projects to make more money off student loans this fiscal year than ExxonMobil, Apple, J.P. Morgan Chase or Fannie Mae made on their respective businesses last year, a new analysis shows.

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections,the federal government projects a record $50-billion profit on student loans this year. ExxonMobil made $44.9 billion in 2012, according to published reports, making it the most profitable company in the country. And if Congress doesn’t stop rates on some loans from doubling on July 1, that profit will rise more, up to an additional $21 billion, a recent report found. However, there are those who claim the projections don’t accurately reflect risk taken by the government and the profits are much smaller.

“I can understand private companies making profits off student loans — part of mine are private — but it doesn’t make sense for the government to be making huge profits off the backs of young students just trying to make themselves employable in a terrible economy,” said Kristy Currier, 26, of Detroit.

We’ve made a choice as a society (a bad one, IMO) to defund public higher education in this country and shift the cost burdens to individuals. But it seems to me that the least the government could do is make the cost for borrowing money to attend college– particularly public community colleges, colleges, and universities– a break-even proposition and as inexpensive to borrowers as possible.

By the way, this same loyal reader also sent an interactive site about student loan default rates for Michigan schools. According to this, the default rate for EMU is 8%, which isn’t great but isn’t horrible.  The “winning” default rate schools in Michigan are Paul Mitchell the School of Escanaba (68%), Flint Institute of Barbering (44%), and Paul Mitchell the School Great Lakes (33%).  When I had a “real job” that was involved with the student loan business about 22 years ago, the highest defaulting schools were also barbering/hair salon places.

ze frank, “On Starting College”

Like I said, it doesn’t feel like there’s a ton of news to share here, and I stumbled across this on one of my favorite ways to kill a little time on the Internets, “a show” by zefrank.  This episode, “On Starting College,” is a little more introspective, honest, and less silly than many others, but still funny and reasonably good advice– at least for traditional 18 year olds leaving home for the first time to go to college.

New “PA” Program and Rackham Hall Remodels

Still not much news around campus lately, so I thought I’d share these two bits of news about the new Physician’s Assistant Program coming to EMU. First, there’s the press release from EMU about all this here. Second, there’s a piece in Concentrate Media here, though it seems to focus more on the remodeling of Rackham Hall.

I guess this is all a good idea, but aren’t PA programs usually associated in some way with medical schools?

“Gordon Gee, Ohio State’s Gaffe-Prone President, Will Retire”

In the “what does it take to get forced to retire as a university president” file comes “Gordon Gee, Ohio State’s Gaffe-Prone President, Will Retire” from CHE. The story is Gee said a bunch of crazy stuff about “the untrustworthy” priests at Notre Dame and about students at Louisville not being able to read. NPR had more about this on Morning Edition this morning.

To me, Gee’s story puts a president versus alum argument about a discontinued mascot at a cocktail party into perspective.

“Do the Best Professors Get the Worst Ratings?”

Making the rounds on the internets and the facebooks is this post/article from Psychology Today “Do the Best Professors Get the Worst Ratings?” by Nate Kornell, who is an assistant professor at Williams College.  It’s an interesting albeit not revolutionary/surprising piece that recounts a couple of clever studies about student evaluations.

The first is an experiment that took place in a laboratory setting where student subjects watched one of two videos of the same lecture. In the first version of the lecture, the teacher spoke fluently, “stood upright, maintained eye contact with the camera, and spoke fluidly without notes.” In the second video, the teacher wasn’t as fluent of a speaker, “stood behind the desk and leaned forward to read the information from notes. She did not maintain eye contact and she read haltingly.”The first version of the lecture was rated as “more effective” by the students—that is, the first version received a better evaluation—but “when it came time to take the test, the two groups did equally well,” which suggests that the charisma and performance of the teacher mattered a lot in the student evaluation but not necessarily in a measure of student success.

Kornell also talks about a much larger and more complex study that involved multiple sections of an introductory course at the Air Force Academy that all used the same syllabus and final exam. In that study, the less experienced instructors who (the study speculates) were doing more “teaching to the test” received higher evaluations than the more experienced instructors who were teaching a broader understanding of the material. However, students in the courses that were generally rated lower in student evaluations actually did better on the exam.  As Kornell writes:

Bottom line? Student evaluations are of questionable value.

Teachers spend a lot of effort and time on making sure their lectures are polished and clear. That’s probably a good thing, if it inspires students to pay attention, come to class, and stay motivated. But it’s also important to keep the goal–learning–in sight. In fact, some argue that students need to fail a lot more if they want to learn.

These results don’t surprise me one bit. I’ve had any number of students come up to me years after they had been in a course of mine– particularly a class like first year writing, which almost no one actually wants to take– who tell me that they figured out some time after the class that the stuff I was having people do was actually useful.  This is one of the very difficult problems of any kind of “assessment of learning” exercises, be it by students or by some kind of institution: it’s often hard to tell.