College Education

Schools are going to be facing enormous pressures as poverty and suffering increases. As usual, those who are in the worst shape are facing the most dire circumstances. From the New York Times:

Battered by the recession and the deepest and most widespread budget deficits in several decades, a large majority of states are slicing into their social safety nets — often crippling preventive efforts that officials say would save money over time. . . .

[Federal stimulus] money will offset only 40 percent of the losses in state revenues, and programs for vulnerable groups have been cut in at least 34 states, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a private research group in Washington. . . .

Ohio and other states face large cutbacks in child welfare investigations, which may mean more injured children and more taken into foster care [some counties losing 75 percent of their investigators]. . . .

[In Arizona,] the child protection agency stopped investigating every report of potential abuse or neglect, and sharply reduced counseling of families deemed at risk of violence. Some toddlers with disabilities like autism and Down syndrome are not getting therapies that can bring lifelong benefits.

Source: Aaron Schutz

cross posted from Daily Kos

I was not a supporter of the selection of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, but I was willing to withhold judgment, to see where he would attempt to take the nation in education policy. I thought perhaps policy might be made in the White House, with him serving as the public face. I was wrong. Duncan is attempting to drive education in ways that will destructive. Many of the policies he is pushing demonstrate his fundamental lack of understanding.

Today I will briefly explore the issue of mayoral control of big city school systems. Remember, such is Duncan’s experience in years in Chicago. He started as an assistant to Paul Vallas in a system controlled directly by Mayor Richie Daley, succeeding him in that position for a number of years before being tapped by his basketball buddy, the new President, to head our national educational efforts.

In this exploration I am going to rely on an op ed in yesterdays New York Times entitled Mayor Bloomberg’s Crib Sheet, by Diane Ravitch.

Diane Ravitch is currently a research professor of education at New York University. One of her books is The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973. Trained as an educational historian, she served as Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander from 1991 to 1993, where she was responsible for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education. As Assistant Secretary, she led the federal effort to promote the creation of state and national academic standards. She holds positions as a senior researcher simultaneously at Hoover and at Brookings. She has become an outspoken critic of No Child Left Behind. While I do not always agree with her, I consider her a friend. And before we start with her op ed, I have to put you on notice: she is NOT a fan of Duncan, having recently described him as “Margaret Spellings in drag.”

Ravitch begins by noting Duncan’s call for mayors to take control of the nation’s school and of his pointing at New York City as an example. She then writes

Actually, the record on mayoral control of schools is unimpressive. Eleven big-city school districts take part in the federal test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Two of the lowest-performing cities — Chicago and Cleveland — have mayoral control. The two highest-performing cities — Austin, Tex., and Charlotte, N.C. — do not.

Stop for a moment, remember that Chicago has had mayoral control of its schools since Paul Vallas was put in place by Daley in 1995, with Duncan succeeding him in 2001. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is considered the best single, independent measure of school performance we have. Let me quote from the linked Wikipedia article to provide a bit of context:

NAEP conducts assessments periodically in mathematics, reading, writing, science, and other areas.[1] New assessments in world history and in foreign language are anticipated in 2012.[2]
NAEP is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a division of the US Department of Education.
Since NAEP assessments are administered uniformly to all participating students using the same test booklets and identical procedures across the nation, NAEP results serve as a common metric for all states and selected urban districts that take the assessment. The assessment stays essentially the same from year to year, with only carefully documented changes. NAEP reports all results at the national level and provides state results for some assessments. On a trial basis, NAEP is releasing the results for a number of large urban districts.
NAEP results are based on representative samples of students at grades 4, 8, and 12 for the main assessments, or samples of students at ages 9, 13, or 17 years for the long-term trend assessments. These grades and ages were chosen because they represent critical junctures in academic achievement. NAEP provides data on subject-matter achievement, instructional experiences, and school environment for populations of students (e.g., all fourth-graders) and groups within those populations (e.g., female students, Hispanic students). NAEP does not provide scores for individual students or schools, although state NAEP can report results for selected large urban districts.

Educational researchers consider the main NAEP the best single indicator of educational performance over time. There is somewhat less confidence in the accuracy of what is known as state NAEP, especially since participation became mandatory in 2001 with the passage of No Child Left Behind. State NAEP scores provide a check on claims by states for improvement on their own state assessments, those state assessments being used to determine Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB.

Two quick comments about what NAEP has shown before we return to Ravitch. First, an examination of NAEP scores completely destroys the idea of any Texas miracle in education during the 6 years G. W. Bush was governor – and remember, it was that Texas miracle that was used to sell the nation on NCLB. The Nation’s Report Card, as NAEP is sometimes described, showed no improvement for Texas in the 1990s, and has shown little improvement in the 6+ years since NCLB went into effect. Second, Duncan spent 7 years in charge of Chicago schools in a system of mayoral control that predated him by another 6 years. Vallas was cited by Clinton for raising test scores, but (a) the scores that were raised were a selective set of Illinois tests, not consistent across all of the state tests, and the city showed little progress on NAEP. As we return of Ravitch remember her point – that of the 11 urban districts participating in NAEP for separate scoring, the two lowest scoring were under mayoral control while the two highest were not. And Chicago, after 13+ years of mayoral control, including more than 7 under Duncan, was at the bottom.

I cited the one book by Ravitch because writing it provided her with probably more knowledge about the history of schools in New York City than anyone else in the country. Diane was trained as an educational historian, and IIRC, her dissertation was supervised by perhaps the greatest historian of education we have had, Lawrence Cremins. While I will sometimes disagree with the conclusions she draws, she is a solid researcher on educational history. When evidence proves her previous ideas to be inaccurate, she will acknowledge and correct them, as she is doing in the book on which she is currently working.

Duncan recently came to New York to urge renewal of the state statute, passed in 2002, that gives the mayor control of the schools in New York City. That law expires at the end of this school year. Ravitch points out two key things to know about NYC schools

1. Mayoral control is nothing new: “From 1873 to 1969, the mayor appointed every single member of the Board of Education. The era of decentralization from 1969 to 2002 was an aberration, because the mayor had only two appointees on a seven-member board.”

2. The control over schools Bloomberg currently has is unrivaled in the city’s history, with previous mayors respecting the independence of school board members they appointed. By contrast, “The present version of the board, the Panel on Education Policy, serves at the pleasure of the mayor and rubber-stamps the policies and spending practices of the Department of Education, which is run by Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.”

Let me deviate from Ravitch a bit. One of the ironies of mayoral control has been the pattern of appointing people to run schools who really lack the background as professional educators one might expect. I teach in Maryland. A superintendent must meet certain qualifications in order to head one of our 24 school divisions (23 counties and the City of Baltimore). One of those requirements is a doctorate in education, although that State Superintendent can waive some of the requirements (and Superintendent Nancy Grasmick, who herself started as a teacher, has done so). Ever since Seattle experienced some success with hiring a non-educator to run their schools, mayors and governors have somehow thought such an approach was the solution to the seemingly intractable problems of urban education. But retired Maj. Gen. John Stanford was sui generis, and the success he had in Seattle has not been duplicated by similar appointments, whether of Generals (Julius Becton in DC), former Governors (Roy Romer in Los Angeles), financial managers (Paul Vallas in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans), or lawyers (Duncan in Chicago and Joel Klein in New York). [Michelle Rhee in DC did spend several years in a classroom with Teach for America, during which time by her own admission she was a lousy teacher until near the end of her second year. Her subsequent experience was running The New Teacher Project, a non-profit that was one of many spinoffs from the TFA family. Her highest degree is a Masters in Public Policy]

Ravitch – and remember her background and her responsibilities in the US Dept of Education – examines the claims of supporter of the Bloomberg-Klein regime of spectacular improvements. They argue for approval without change of the current law. She quotes Sec. Duncan

I’m looking at the data here in front of me,” he said while in New York. “Graduation rates are up. Test scores are up … By every measure, that’s real progress.”

Except that claim is unsupported by independent measures:

On the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress — widely acknowledged as the gold standard of the testing industry — New York City showed almost no academic improvement between 2003, when the mayor’s reforms were introduced, and 2007. There were no significant gains for New York City’s students — black, Hispanic, white, Asian or lower-income — in fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade reading or eighth-grade mathematics. In fourth-grade math, pupils showed significant gains (although the validity of this is suspect because an unusually large proportion — 25 percent — of students were given extra time and help). The federal test reported no narrowing of the achievement gap between white students and minority students.

When supporters of the Klein regime try to point to scores on state tests, which have improved, Ravitch responds:

indeed, the state scores have soared in recent years, not only in the city but also across New York state However, the statewide scores on the N.A.E.P. are as flat as New York City’s. Our state tests are, unfortunately, exemplars of grade inflation.

She also points out how other measures, such as graduation rates reported by the city schools, do not indicate improvement:

The city says the rate climbed to 62 percent from 53 percent between 2003 and 2007; the state’s Department of Education, which uses a different formula, says the city’s rose to 52 percent, from 44 percent. Either way, the city’s graduation rate is no better than that of Mississippi, which spends about a third of what New York City spends per pupil.

Moreover, the city’s graduation rates have been pumped up with a variety of dubious means, like “credit recovery,” in which students who fail a course can get full credit if they agree to take a three-day makeup program or turn in an independent project. In addition, the city counts as graduates the students who dropped out and obtained a graduate-equivalency degree.

Let me step back for a moment. First, remember the requirement of NCLB to participate in NAEP. This was required precisely to serve as a check on state’s manipulating their own tests to “show improvement.” One can establish a first year cut score (the raw score which represents passing) to show a low pass rate, then lower the cut score to show” “improvement” even if the raw scores have not changed. I experienced that in the one year I taught middle school in Virginia. The year before I arrived our school had a 58% pass rate on middle school American History. The year I was there, with the other two teachers being first year teachers and me being new to the curriculum, our pass rate was 81%, which seems to be a spectacular improvement. Except that the cut scores were changed to have a more acceptable passing rate – if we had restated the previous year’s scores according to the new pass rate, it would have been about 71-72% – we improved, but not that much. And of course, we were comparing two different cohorts of students.

The manipulation of graduation rates is a well-known phenomenon. We saw it in Texas during the tenure of Gov. Bush, especially in Houston under Rod Paige. Students would be held back, sometimes more than once, in th grade (because the Texas tests were in 10th grade), until they dropped out, then they would not be listed as a drop out if you could get them to say they might go eventually for a GED, instead being listed as transferring to an alternative educational program. All this was in this professional literature in work by Walt Haney BEFORE NCLB was passed into law near the beginning of Bush’s first term.

Let’s return to Ravitch. She notes that the NY figures do not include as dropouts those listed as discharged during their hs years:

Some discharges are legitimate, like students who moved to another school district. But many others are so-called push-outs, students who were ejected from school even though they had a legal right to be there, often because their grades and test scores were bringing down their schools’ averages. The Department of Education refuses to disclose how many students are in each of these categories. We do know, however, that more than one-fifth of the members of the class of 2007, or 18,524 students, were discharged and not counted as dropouts.

One point to bear in mind is that Ravitch is not totally opposed to some level of mayoral involvement in the governance of schools. She is opposed to the model one sees in NYC, in which there is no oversight of the actions taken by the mayor and his designee, and hence no public participation in s school governance. She is willing to have the mayor appoint the members of the Board of Education for fixed terms,

Candidates for the board should be evaluated by a blue-ribbon panel so that no mayor can stack it with friends. That board should appoint the chancellor, and his or her first responsibility must be to the children and their schools, not to the mayor.

What a remarkable idea – the head of the school system has as first responsibility the children. If one returns to the history of Paul Vallas, for example, one finds him finishing second in 2001 (to Blagojevich and ahead of Burris) for the Democratic nominee for Governor of Illinois, has since considered running again in 2010 and has announced that he plans to run this year for the Cook County Board as a Republican. Reasonable people might well question his dedication to the children that should have been his primary responsibility.

Ravitch believes that school boards need to make their decision in public, subject to public scrutiny. She further advocates for some level of parental control, writing

Local school boards composed of parent leaders should oversee the schools in their districts, although they should not have any financial authority.

She wants independent auditing to evaluate claims of improvements in test scores and graduation rates. The current New York law has none of these features. Instead all power resides within the hands of a chancellor / ceo, Joel Klein, who is answerable only to the mayor. So far that model has not proven successful, and yet that is what Duncan wants to propagate across the nation, perhaps because that is his own personal experience, an experience which has not shown positive results.

If our schools are truly public schools, they should be answerable to the public. Their governance should be democratic. The model of mayoral control, especially as implemented in New York City, meets neither of these criteria. By itself that should be sufficient reason to reject that model of governance. The model is further undercut by the lack of success that can be demonstrated by independent evaluation, not only in New York, but also in Chicago under the leadership of Duncan and of his predecessor.

Let me offer the final paragraph penned by Ravitch in this piece:

Not every school problem can be solved by changes in governance. But to establish accountability, transparency and the legitimacy that comes with public participation, the Legislature should act promptly to restore public oversight of public education. As we all learned in civics class, checks and balances are vital to democracy.

checks and balances are vital to democracy – we have just escaped from an 8 year administration that did not believe it should be subject to checks and balances, and we came close to destroying our economy and our international standing as a result of actions taken without such checks and balances. If nothing else, we should have learned that no public function can be trusted to people who are not subject to checks and balances. Our public schools should be preparing our children not only to be employed, but to be participating citizens in a representative liberal democracy. The model of governance advocated by Duncan is opposed to that. By itself that should be sufficient reason to reject it. And it does not work, as both his experience in Chicago and the tenure of Joel Klein in New York demonstrate.

Peace.

Source: teacherken

In case you haven’t been following this blog, this series of postings looks at John Medina’s book Brain Rules chapter by chapter, looking to see what the implications might be for workplace learning.

Rule 4: We don’t pay attention to boring things

In this chapter, John Medina makes a number of hugely important points. I hope he won’t mind if I provide you here with a liberal sprinkling of direct quotes which make these points more clearly than I could manage:

• "The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus the more elaborately the information will be encoded – and retained."
• "Before the first quarter of an hour is over in a typical presentation, people usually have checked out."
• "Emotionally arousing events tend to be better remembered than neutral events."
• "Emotional arousal focuses attention on the gist of an experience at the expense of peripheral details."
• "Our brains tend to be filled with generalised pictures of concepts or events, not with slowing fading minutiae."
• "Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions."
• "We can’t multitask. People who appear to be good at multitasking actually have good working memories, capable of paying attention to several inputs, one at a time."
• "Studies show a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to complete a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50% more errors."
• "The most common communication mistakes? Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots. Lots of force feeding, very little digestion."
• "It’s key that the instructor explains the lecture plan at the beginning of the class, with liberal explanations of ‘where we are’ sprinkled throughout the hour.
• "Each segment should cover a single core cpncept, always large, always general and always explainable in one minute."

There are major implications for anyone who makes presentations, runs classroom sessions or creates e-learning materials:

• You’ll achieve nothing if you haven’t captured the attention of your audience.
• The best way to capture attention is with an emotionally-arousing experience of some sort – perhaps an anecdote, a surprising fact, a scenario, an activity – that is relevant to the point you will be making.
• Even if you do manage to capture the audience’s attention, you’ll have lost it within 10 minutes if you don’t stimulate a fresh emotional arousal.
• Start with an overview and provide regular progress updates.
• In each 10 minute block, concentrate on a single, very general key point.
• Avoid interruptions.

I’m only part way through Medina’s collection of rules, but I can’t help thinking that this is the one that will have the most impact. I for one will be keeping these ideas to the forefront the next time I design an intervention.

My postings on Brain rules #1, Brain rules #2, Brain Rules #4

The Brain Rules book

The Brain Rules website

Source: Clive Shepherd

An article – I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told – in this week’s Economist, emphasises just how important it is to relieve poverty if we are to achieve equality of opportunity in education.

Three years ago, Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. Apparently "those who had spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items in their memory at any time. Those brought up in a middle-class family could manage 9.4, and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle."

According to the article "working memory is crucial for comprehending languages, for reading and for solving problems."

Since Farah’s work was published, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have been studying the phenomenon in more detail. Their recent report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that children’s brains develop.

As The Economist summarises so clearly: "Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn."

We’ve known for quite a while that stress was an inhibitor to learning in the short term. It is a shock now to find out that it could cause permanent damage to the capacity to learn.

Source: Clive Shepherd

Prezi is the most exciting new presentation aid I’ve seen in ages and today sees its formal launch. Prezi is a Flash-based tool that does away with the traditional slide show metaphor. Instead you arrange your images, text, audio, video and PDF files on one great canvas that you navigate throughout your presentation. What makes Prezi exciting is the way you pan and zoom from object to object, either on a pre-defined navigational path or at will.

Until now, all editing was conducted online, but the release version now includes a desktop editor, which synchs up to your online account. This seems to work nicely and provides a great deal of extra flexibility.

I’ve been experimenting with the most basic Prezi functionality using a presentation I conducted in January called Ten Ways to Thrive in a Downturn. With any luck you should be able to view this at http://prezi.com/9738/. It includes a fair amount of text, which wouldn’t, of course, have been needed if the presentation was conducted live.

The basic version of Prezi is free, as long as you are happy for all your output to be public and to include a logo. You’re also limited to 100MB of storage. The Enjoy option, for 39 Euros a year, gives you some privacy and 500MB of space. The Pro option lands you the offline editor and 1GB of storage.

There will be a race on now to see who can make the best use of Prezi at a live event. I’m certainly going to be entering.

Source: Clive Shepherd

Thanks to Kineo for pointing me to the Market Update recently released by Ambient Insight which forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 16.3% from 2008 to 2013 for learning technology products and services. The report notes that "the market is favorable for learning technology suppliers, despite, or perhaps because of, the recession." The report forecasts especially rapid growth for collaborative e-learning, mobile learning, self-paced learning, and simulations and games.

Without wishing to dampen down these optimistic forecasts, it is worth remembering how fallible expert predictions can be. Nicholas Kristof’s recent posting Learning How to Think for NYTimes.com tries to uncover just why it is that experts get it so wrong so often. He cites Philip Tetlock, the expert on experts:

"His 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment, is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about. The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board."

Slightly more reliable are the stories of what is actually happening right now, as reported to the latest MASIE Center Barometer in Uncertain Times. Of the 532 respondents, 62% reported their enterprise learning budget going down (21% substantially), while only 12% said it was going up. Headcount is also being hit as 36% of respondents reported a reduction. At the same time, spending on external services (consultants, content development, etc.) is dropping in 60% of cases, and volume of classroom training in 50% of cases. The biggest impact is on travel for learning purposes, where 79% are reporting cuts, 51% substantially.

There are some notable increases: the volume of e-learning on offer is up in 51% of cases, with a similar rise reported for the use of web conferencing. In addition, the use of social learning is up in 30% of cases, games/simulations in 12%, and user-generated content in 29%.

As ever, MASIE Center results will be coloured by the fact that the respondents are self-selecting and favourably disposed to e-learning, but these are such powerful figures that it’s impossible to underestimate them.

Source: Clive Shepherd

Rule 3: Every brain is wired differently

In this chapter, John Medina explains how every brain is different from every other:

• "When you learn something, the wiring in your brain changes."
• "What you do in life physically changes what your brain looks like."
• "Our brains are so sensitive to external inputs that their physical wiring depends upon the culture in which they find themselves."
• "Learning results in physical changes to the brain and these changes are unique to each individual."
• "Students of the same age show a great deal of intellectual variability."

So what are the implications of the fact that every student is different from every other and that every student takes something different from every learning experience? Here are John’s suggestions:

• To the extent that you’re committed to learning in groups, keep class sizes small, so teachers/trainers stand a better chance of understanding and reacting to the differences inherent in every student.
• When you hire teachers/trainers, use one of the established tests for detemining their empathetic ability, because this is so crucial to effective communication.
• Develop adaptive software that provides an individsualised learning experience that is well suited to the particular learner.
• For best results, combine adaptive teaching with adaptive software. John’s cites research carried out by Carol McDonald Connor which showed, when teaching reading skills, that a combination works better than the teaching or software used alone.

What does this mean for in the context of workplace learning when delivery is online? Here’s my take:

• Empathetic teaching is going to be inhibited by the fact that, unless webcams are being used, students are not visible to the trainer and therefore no body language cues are available. To compensate for this, the trainer needs to work hard to establish a climate of open communication, in which students can freely articulate their needs and provide feedback.
• We need to place a renewed emphasis on the development of adaptive, intelligent learning materials. Back in the 1980s, when artificial intelligence was in vogue, we saw some real progress being made in this area. By comparison, modern e-learning materials are prettier but dumber. You could argue that the best way to increase adaptability is to make the materials modular and to provide the student with the facility to determine their own progress, but this is only useful to the extent that the student knows what they know and what they need to know; novices require structure and support.

My postings on Brain rules #1, Brain rules #2

The Brain Rules book

The Brain Rules website

Source: Clive Shepherd

Cathy Moore is a champion of engaging, really effective e-learning. She pleads with us to dump the drone. When Cathy talks about design, you listen, because you know she practises what she preaches. That’s why, when Cathy recently announced the launch of her Elearning Blueprint, a performance support tool for designers, I was determined to take a close look.

According to Cathy, "the Blueprint is an interactive job aid that helps anyone design lean, lively elearning. It can be used by one person or an entire team—including subject matter experts. And because it’s based on Action Mapping, the Blueprint helps you create materials that improve business performance."

You can explore the Blueprint using the guided tour, or you can try the first five or six pages of the product for real. What you’ll find is an engaging mix of tips, examples, interactive exercises, slide shows, videos and worksheets. The format – relatively long, scrolling web pages each containing a wide variety of activities and resources – works well for a performance support tool, and certainly saves on the endless ‘click to continue’ routine.

This is very much a practical and not a theoretical offering (although it draws on the latest research and does a good job of debunking myths) and is compact enough not to be overwhelming. I’d thoroughly recommend it.

See my Webcam Interview with Cathy Moore.

Source: Clive Shepherd

I have mixed feelings about classroom training. On the one hand, it frustrates me that the classroom is still the default format for a formal learning intervention, often chosen without regard for its suitability to the job in hand. On top of this, so much classroom training is poorly delivered, comprising little more than a technical presentation / knowledge dump, supported by tedious PowerPoint bullet-point slides.

On the other hand, even though my specialism is e-learning, I do myself regularly facilitate classroom workshops and am as sure as I can be that these make a difference – we achieve something that simply would not be possible online or asynchronously. True, I am much happier when the classroom element forms only a small part of the blend, but an important element none the less.

For this reason, I am pleased to see the results of the survey just released by the Training Foundation, in conjunction with the British Institute for Learning and Development (BILD). Now I must declare an interest here, in that I have in the past worked with the Training Foundation (an organisation that specialises in providing train-the-trainer services) in the development of their e-learning curriculum, although that is not the main subject of this study. The results show that classroom training (in this case teaching trainers how to deliver better classroom training) can make a lasting difference.

The survey was conducted online amongst learning and development professionals who had completed a TAP qualification (TAP is the branding that the Training Foundation uses for its train-the-trainer offering) between September 07 and January 09. Some 726 responded. Here’s what they found:

• The skills and techniques learned on the courses were put into practice on a routine basis by 97.6% of respondents. This is amazingly high when you consider that the average length of time between respondents finishing the course and participating in the survey was eight months, which is plenty of time for the learning to have evaporated or not to have proved useful.
• Some 97.4% said that learners provided better feedback when the TAP methodologies were applied by the respondents on their own courses. Now the TAP methodology is highly participative and reduces the role of the trainer as a presenter of information to an absolute minimum, so you can understand why this might have worked well.
• As many as 78% of respondents reported an increase in their own self-confidence.
• Practically all respondents advocated the TAP system strongly.

What this all tells me is that (1) it is possible to do a good job of classroom training and that (2) it is possible to teach others to do the same. If you’re going to use classroom training as part of the mix, then you may as well make a good job of it.

Source: Clive Shepherd

The House of Representatives last week passed the GIVE Act, which would, among other things, provide up to $6 billion in federal funds to increase AmeriCorps, expand volunteers to 250,000 (up from 75,000 currently), increase education funding, expand service-learning for K-12 education and colleges and universities, and expand service options for seniors and veterans. This bill is analogous to one currently in the Senate, the Serve America Act, which will most likely replace the House version. The Senate version was endorsed by both Obama and McCain back during the campaign on 9/11 in NYC. The likely money is that it will pass later this week.

I want to focus on one small aspect of this bill, what has been termed “Campuses of Service” in the bill. The short story is that each state will submit the names of three institutions (one 4-year public, one 4-year private, and one 2-year institution). The Corporation for National and Community Service then chooses 25 “Campuses of Service” out of all of these submissions. There are six criteria for judging the submissions; I want to focus on the first three (the fourth has to do with work study, and numbers five and six focus on graduates going into public service employment and careers):

• the number of service-learning courses offered
• the number and percentage of students who were enrolled in the service-learning courses
• the percentage of students on the campus engaging in activities providing community services, the quality of such activities, and the average amount of time spent, per student, engaged in such activities

What becomes immediately clear is that such criteria are neatly aligned to the Carnegie Foundation’s voluntary “community engagement” classification. This is the diffusion model of institutionalizing service-learning across higher education, most clearly seen in a highly popular rubric developed by Andy Furco. I have in my previous work contrasted this incrementalist vision with a transformational vision.

There is nothing wrong with either institutionalization model or the entire “Campuses of Service” premise if one believes that we in higher education actually know what we mean by “service” and “service-learning”; i.e., if in fact we actually know how to do it, how to teach it, and how to assess it. If, moreover, we know how to actually do the “4 Rs”: reflection, reciprocity, respect, and relevance.

The conventional wisdom is that we do. According to the most recent HERI survey, faculty have overwhelming become attuned to community engagement, with 88 percent believing that colleges should be actively involved with local community issues and the majority finding it “very important” or “essential” to “instill in students a commitment to community service.” Campus Compact is thriving, and President Obama’s consistent calls for a culture of service makes the bandwagon pretty darn big.

Yet I am not so sure. For if one begins to dig down into the details, it becomes pretty muddy pretty fast. The “campuses of service” and Carnegie classification models are deeply and distinctly campus-centric. As Amy Driscoll, the point person for this initiative at Carnegie, acknowledges, community involvement and impact are the least amenable to institutions’ documented success. Or as Randy Stoeker, a key scholar in the community-based research movement, ruefully notes in a wonderful forthcoming book with Elizabeth Tryon, Unheard Voices, “By not knowing what service learning does to the communities it purports to serve, we risk creating unintended side effects that exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the problems those communities suffer from…We may be setting into motion dialectical processes that ultimately undermine the entire effort of service learning.”

The federal model is an attempt to develop a useful proxy variable for service through sheer force of numbers. The more courses, the more students, the more hours, then, seemingly, the better the service. But this is silly and dangerous. It promotes quantity over quality, through-put of students rather than sustained impact, and sky-high numbers rather than on-the-ground changes. Stoeker and Tryon’s work, for example, found that the short-term nature of service-learning was one of the major problems faced by community partners. This needs to be acknowledged.

Even the service-learning field itself is worried. A “democratic engagement white paper” getting lots of recent attention is a summary of a 2008 conference at the Kettering Foundation of the major players in the community engagement movement. The conference’s central guiding question was: “Why has the civic engagement movement in higher education stalled and what are the strategies needed to further advance institutional transformation aimed at generating democratic, community-based knowledge and action?” The conference attendees provided numerous responses (such as the lack of clear definitions and high fragmentation) before propounding a new model of “democratic engagement” rather than simply “civic engagement.” While laudatory, the binary nature of its vision and guiding assumptions of the academy and the community suggests, at least to me, that it will not have much traction for truly changing actual practices and policies in higher education. (I am writing more on this white paper for another time.)

So what’s my point? My point is that while the key players in the service-learning movement worry that their deeper vision of transforming higher education has not come to fruition, the movement they have launched is only further gaining steam. As I wrote a couple years back, my sense is that the service-learning movement is about to get swamped by the very institution it attempted to storm. This is of course not a one-way street. Higher education has of course embraced important aspects of community engagement. But look again at that HERI survey: Two-thirds of the faculty surveyed felt that community service should be considered when admitting applicants. Um. That’s really nice. But some states require every single high school student to perform community service in order to graduate. Maryland has been doing this since 1997. So does every Maryland applicant now have an advantage in the college admittance race?

More likely, what is being expressed by faculty is an idealistic and idealized sentiment of “service.” It is a sentiment that sounds great in rhetoric but has highly deleterious consequences in practice. It privileges a whole host of already hierarchical relationships about who serves whom, to what end, and for whose benefit. In the end, it all too often becomes all about the faculty teaching, the privileged college students volunteering, and the colleges which get the attention from all this activity. Not because anyone is doing anything “wrong,” per se. It’s just that the system as set up highlights and rewards exactly the wrong criteria for determining quality and impact.

Which takes me back, finally, to these “campuses of service.” What we are basically seeing is the institutionalization of service-learning exactly in the wrong way as envisioned by the founders of the movement. This is goal displacement, from attempting to make a difference to attempting to count the numbers. It is the end product of the quantification of the field. It is a mistake. All that is counted are students, courses, and hours. There is no community. There is no impact. What is left unquestioned, and thus unanswered are just the basic questions: ”Service-learning for whom?” and “Service-learning for what?”

Source: Dan W. Butin