The “Government-Education Complex” Defined

Don't let the picture of a grade school classroom that accompanies this article about the "Government-Education Complex" mislead you. The same complex fortified by foundations, armed with learning analytics algorithms and directed by managers bereft of teaching experience stalks HigherEd and the academic labor that makes it work. Adjuncts, lecturers, contract and tenured faculty are the boots (loafers, pumps, moccasins) on the ground teaching in classrooms. The Campaign for the Future of Higher Ed is working to make sure teaching voices are central to any discussion and the future and quality of higher education. The New Faculty Majority supports and joins the Campaign as an active participant and voiced for bring adjuncts/contingent faculty and other underrepresented NTTs.

Since the launch, the Campaign initiated a discussion group and scheduled a conference in Boston. In the meantime, let's do our homework - get intel: learn as much as possible about the "Complex" and its major players, analyze their arguments and formulate classroom-room, learning-centric alternatives.

While we're at it, let's add pictures showing our classrooms.

The “Government Education Complex” is the interlocking set of interests that control the vast majority of American education dollars, education policy, and the steady increase in unnecessary education job creation. The explosion of spending, debt, and taxation we’ve witnessed in the last 25 years was used to fund the growth of this Complex.

The complex is made up not only of associations of administrators and teachers unions, but an interconnected network of bond dealers, builders, architects, law firms, textbook companies, and other service providers who profit off of the overproduction of service contracts, debt, public employment and bureaucracy....

Like the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned of, the “Government Education Complex” is politically powerful, and completely self interested in perpetuating itself....[but] has failed to provide our society with the educated populace we are paying for.

The “Government-Education Complex” Defined

community college classroom

Together at last!

Even ready to pumpkinate and with I concentration at low ebb, I noticed this item in my rss reader. It grabbed me, brought me back to life. The piece deserves better and more intelligent comment than I can manage just now. On the other hand I have to post this one before I forget about it, lose tracking of watching it and especially bringing it the attention of our own corner of the precariat. Can use this? Could it be an answer to similar questions plaguing New Faculty Majority?

"Here’s one to watch. Down in New Zealand, a country with an unusually cohesive (though struggling) union movement, affiliates of the national union federation have launched an innovative thing called “Together“. We’re calling it a thing because it doesn’t really fit into any of the usual drawers. It’s not a union, not an NGO, not an organisation, not a network, not an association, club, sect, faction, fraction, tendency or movement. What it is, above all else, is a potential solution to several of the quandaries that unions have been trying to solve for at least 10 years."

Together at last! « NewUnionism's Blog

We interrupt this blog to bring you a tweet review

It's been quiet here, hasn't it? I haven't been blogging but I have not been totally idle on the New Faculty Majority social media presence and content curation/management front. I'm spending more time and posting more directly the the NFM Facebook page, followed by dipping into the twitterstream more often.

To better coordinate NFM cyberspace manifestations, I've been experimenting with embedding Tweets as ‘Clickable’ in a(n edited) screenshot image: aka Tweeter's Digest Condensed Tweets. This tool (I may try another tomorrow or another day) captures screen images one at a time (in reverse chronological order, unfortunately) and embeds links so you can follow them directly from here. It can also include tweets from other accounts I follow. That strikes me as far more interesting than posting just @NewFacMajority tweets. Next time, ditto the rest of the social media lecture ... and now on with the Twitter Show

Reading Room: Within the Academy

For post computer hiatus catching up, rss feeds are even more of blogger's boon than usual, even if waking up to 1000+ in the reader can be a bit daunting. Omnivore, the Book Forum blog, posts series upon series of themed and briefly annotated links. Academia is a frequent and especially welcome theme. Imagine my relief and delight to see academia on today's menu. Tweeting and sharing links on Facebook are more stopgap than permanent solution. No longer 'Calgon, Take me Away' but 'Omnivore to the Rescue' (not a bad post or series feature ~ file for future reference). Really now, everyone should go out and subscribe to the feed. Truly omni-voracious, topics range wide and far, ever to the tastes of the hungriest reading omnivore no matter how discriminating the palate... 

Within the academic community

Kenneth L. Marcus (IJCR): Academic Freedom and Political Indoctrination. An article on Ayn Rand indoctrination at American universities, sponsored by the right wing. The Tea Party has made presence felt in several community college elections, but most experts don't see it becoming a major force in the sector. A Solitary Thinker: Stanley Fish has angered many scholars by questioning others, and built a fierce mind by questioning himself. What would writing a book with Larry Flynt mean to David Eisenbach's academic career? 

Academic bloggers everywhere: Blogging has moved from being a nerdish undergraduate pastime to an accepted communication medium within the academic community. In for nasty weather: Is faculty life, as it once was, officially a relic? Andrew Gelman on the "cushy life" of University of Illinois sociology professor David Rubinstein. About 100 years ago, higher education restructured to meet the needs of the industrial age; it has changed little since, even as the internet has transformed life — another revolution is needed. 

Is college ready for its innovation revolution? Years after the Web disrupted business, technology is set to change education. The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year's most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell '89 and Stanford '89, by the way) leading the charge. Your so-called education: New research questions how much you really learn in college. Top colleges, largely for the elite: The admissions policies of elite colleges don't matter just to high school seniors — they're a matter of national interest. Sticker Price 101: Why can't the government make it easier to compare college costs? Wendy Brown outlines eight frightening changes that privatization will bring to higher education.

 &  for desert try  a serving of 'Insanely great ideas'

Beware of Economists Bearing Education Reforms

 New Faculty Majority is committed to quality in higher education. Adjunct working conditions - our teaching conditions - are also the learning conditions for most students walking the (all too often booby trapped) higher education maze, which cannot be separated from education issues in general. That includes assessment, standardized tests, teaching to tests, falling or being pushed into lockstep "scientific measurement" and "quantifiable outcomes."  Speaking out and insisting on a greater faculty voice in higher education is key to the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education

Time then to add education, pedagogical and learning issues to the topic list. We also all know that the discussion is as much about money as it is quality and results. With that in mind, today, I offer this, posted via Defend Education discussion group, Saturday May 28, 2011. Monty Neill, Fair Test Organization, warns us to ... 

"Beware, of Economists Bearing Education Reforms" by William J. Mathis

"As I see it," wrote Paul Krugman, "the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth." Krugman himself is, of course, an economist (and a Nobel Prize winning one at that) which demonstrates that economists can indeed spot the pitfalls of their field. As an educator, when I look at economists' education reform ideas they, all too often, show manifestations of Krugman's syndrome. They confuse mathematical symmetry with truth.

When applied to education, the pathology takes three identifiable forms: unitheoryia, measuremyopia, and regressionia.

Unitheoryia manifests itself in the narrow vision of education as an economic free-market commodity. The afflicted reflexively turn to privatization and choice as ways to improve the quality of schooling. Those in advanced stages tend to explain all human and social behavior
as the pursuit of self-interest through competition. Eruptions about international competitiveness being dependent on standardized test scores are a common symptom.

The debilitating aspect of unitheoryia is that it results in a complete misreading of the purposes of schools in a democratic society. In checking these purposes in the fifty state constitutions, there's a remarkable absence of clauses centered on "education for economic competition." Instead, I found phrases like "Intelligence and virtue being the safeguards of liberty and the bulwark of a free and good government . . ." (Arkansas), "Knowledge and learning, generally
diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a good government; . . ." (Indiana), and ". . . the encouragement of virtue and prevention of vice, . . ." (Vermont). Virtually every state also has an equal protection clause, which is quite the theoretical obstacle when extolling the values of competitive economic Darwinism.

Measuremyopia is characterized by a fixation on indicators that are easily quantifiable and reliable. For traditional economics, that indicator is money. For schools, this leads researchers (of many persuasions) to worship at the altar of the standardized test score. The intellectual rationale seems to be, "It might not be a valid measure but it's the best we got and nobody can say we didn't uniformly apply it!" Sometimes, a researcher afflicted with measuremyopia will throw in
graduation rates or attendance data, since these are also quantifiable.

Constitutional phrases like "civic virtue" and "preservation of a democratic government" are simply beyond the conceptual consideration of most economists.These terms are too value-laden to be represented by well-behaving mathematical variables. Furthermore, the effects of schools, parents and communities are all inter-related in a tangled way. (Some acute observers may point out that test scores actually present the same problem, but this truth is forbidden in the orchid hothouse of economic analysis).

Sometimes, the real success of a school is in the shy child who bloomed and became a community leader, the artist who transformed a city-center, the needy child who found a positive role model, or the quirky kid whose creativity later led to a medical break-through. The fundamental flaw is that the really important things about schools (and about life) don't lend themselves to economic analysis.

Regressionia reveals itself when, to the exclusion of all else, the afflicted seek a statistical model to understand schools. This often leads to the use (and misuse) of various forms of a technique known as linear regression, applied in infinite color and hue. (Regression is a correlational approach based on how variables change with each other). Beta weights, dummy variables, hierarchical models, and regression discontinuities are paraded about in formulated exotica ornamented with Greek symbols. It's all very impressive and creates the impression that
truth can be found here.

Sadly, although the technique has proven quite valuable, the over-reliance on regression models is, perhaps, encouraged because it is so easy to do. No knowledge of the subject being studied is required. You don't actually have to go inside a school. It only requires a data base, a packaged statistical computer program, and a slice of the unitheory to be tested. Not surprisingly, economic (as well as other) studies tend to confirm their own theories. Scientific American laments
the epidemic of "false positives and exaggerated results."

One of countless examples is found in an Education Next article ballyhooing the successful effects of school competition. The economist authors found that having a private school within 1.1 miles of a public school increased test scores by 1.5% of a standard deviation. Such
findings can easily be "statistically significant" in a state with 2.6 million students. However, from a policy point of view, these effects are trivial. This study hits the Trifecta: measuremyopia, using
regression to force-fit a unitheory. Does the study add anything to the policy discussion of schooling other than a "beautiful" model (to paraphrase Krugman)? Not really.

Fundamentally, the problem is that none of the variables are particularly good indicators of what they are supposed to measure. For example, test scores are only a small part of schools and seniority is not a good measure of teacher quality. Further, the basic model assumes that the world is linear, relationships remain static, and that groups and individuals behave in predictable ways. This means that the exercise is often elegant numerology. For instance, a really robust regression equation might show school effects accounting for only a fourth of the variance. Now a curious person might want to know in what black hole the other three-fourths of the variance can be found.

Cohesiveness, cooperation, altruism, caring and the common good are vital to a democratic society. But these are alien concepts to economists' visions of school reforms. Thus, the richness of what education is and should be is unseen, oblivious to e.e. cummings' message, "While you and i have lips and voices which are for kissing and to sing with, who cares if some one eyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring with?"

Be wary of economists bearing reforms.

William J. Mathis is the Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center, University of Colorado at Boulder. He previously served as a school superintendent in Vermont and is a member of the state board of education. The views expressed are his own.