Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
Off-Campus Cyberbullying and the First Amendment
posted by Daniel Solove
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit recently upheld a school’s discipline of a student for engaging in off-campus cyberbullying of another student. In Kowalski v. Berkeley County Schools, — F.3d — (4th Cir. July 27, 2011), a student (Kara Kowalski) created a MySpace profile called “S.A.S.H.,” which she said was short for “Students Against Sluts Herpes.” Another student, however, claimed it really stood for “Students Against Shay’s Herpes,” referring to a student named Shay N. Kowalski invited about 100 people to join the page, and about 24 people joined. Students posted comments and images making fun of Shay N. One student posted a picture of Shay N. and put “red red dots on Shay N.’s face to simulate herpes and added a sign near her pelvic region, that read, ‘Warning: Enter at your own risk.’ In the second photograph, he captioned Shay N.’s face with a sign that read, ‘portrait of a whore.’”
After a complaint by Shay N. and an investigation, school officials determined that Kowalski created a “hate website” that violated school policy. Kowalski was suspended for 5 days and received a “socail suspension” for 90 days, unable to participate in various social events at the school.
Kowalski sued, claiming that the discipline violated her free speech rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Under the “substantial disruption” test, as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court in Tinker v. Des Moines School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969), the school must demonstrate “facts which might reasonably lead school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities.”
July 28, 2011 at 1:03 am
Posted in: Education, First Amendment, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming)
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Some Thoughts on The FAIR Education Act
posted by Ari Waldman
My apologies to the Co-Op community for being incognito the previous week. There’s the wonderful medicine called Augmenten that is finally getting me well!
The quaint Sacramento Bee published an Op-Ed of mine today. It urges California Governor Jerry Brown to sign SB 48: The FAIR Education Act, that asks California school districts to find a way to include references to the contributions of gay Americans in their history or social studies curricula. I see this as an essential tool in combating anti-gay hate and bullying in schools.
Maybe it was a mistake to include my email address at the bottom of the Op-Ed (though that is the Bee’s, and most paper’s, custom) because I’ve already gotten quite a few emails using the word “Satan,” “destroying America,” “sodomy,” “rectum,” “bending over backward” and even a few veiled threats from one person who insisted on reminding me that he is a “real Christian.”
Any time someone mentions the word “gay,” there always seems to be a small, vocal and virulent segment of the population that cannot help but think of sodomy and how “gross and unnatural” they think it is. Historically, it is common for hateful societies to identify and exaggerate physical or personal features of those groups they wish to keep down. In Germany, Hitler published photographs of Jews that over-emphasized hooked noses; in the Jim Crow South, it was terribly and disturbingly common to equate African Americans with monkeys.
But that obvious and outward hate only worked because it tapped into long held, deeply rooted beliefs about Jews and African Americans. Hooked noses symbolized the Jews-as-sinister stereotype for Germans; monkeys reminded Southern whites that African Americans were less than human. Images conjured up by words like “rectum” and “bending over backward” comport with homophobic stereotypes of gay men as sex-crazed, obsessed with pleasure and incapable of love, only lust.
The only way to fight against these stereotypes is to teach reality: that gay people can love each other, that gay lives are no different than straight lives and that gay people have been positive forces in American history. So-called “real Christians” (methinks he doth protest too much!) may be unreachable, but that is because their religious leaders feed into the stereotypes and teach them. To suggest that forces of tolerance and acceptance are not allowed to teach the truth to combat these devastating stereotypes is to accept the legitimacy of hate, homophobia and discrimination.
July 13, 2011 at 12:40 pm
Posted in: Education, LGBT
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Universities and the So-Called Customer
posted by Thomas Crocker
After a longer than expected hiatus while I transitioned to new institutional setting in Germany, I have some thoughts to share about the plight of higher education, which has been much under discussion lately (see this overview of a number of recent books on the topic). I have this creeping sense, as I do about a number of other things such as politics or income inequality, that things are changing around me in significant ways, but I lack the perspective to see enough of them or sufficient insight to understand what they mean or how to affect their direction. Recently, the authors of a study—which has generated its own discussion about the failures of education—wrote an Op-Ed that both cites to the statistics demonstrating that “a large number [36 percent after four years] of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing,” and attributes a cause to this failing. In “Your So-Called Education,” they cite as a significant cause the turn away from educational spending by colleges and universities to expenditures on counselors, administrators, recreation centers, and the like. In the process, a particular view of education has taken hold:
“The situation reflects a larger cultural change in the relationship between students and colleges. The authority of educators has diminished, and students are increasingly thought of, by themselves and their colleges, as “clients” or “consumers.” When 18-year-olds are emboldened to see themselves in this manner, many look for ways to attain an educational credential effortlessly and comfortably. And they are catered to accordingly. The customer is always right.”
Yet, as the Chronicle reports, there are political forces agitating to entrench this losing practice further, seeking to empower the student, not the professor, in order to “make students the actual customers for higher education.” They propose seven solutions without identifying a real problem in need of solution. Texas looks to be the next battleground to test this issue, but less ideologically driven voices have also called for changes in line with the so-called “customer’s” wishes. More focus on teaching, less emphasis on research, and superficial calls for reducing costs by ending tenure (as if tenured professors were the source of ballooning higher education costs rather than the recreation centers, the administrators, the counselors, etc.) are components of a new view of higher education—one that is deeply problematic. And, one that is at odds with giving serious consideration of the future of the social sciences and humanities.
May 21, 2011 at 9:11 am
Posted in: Education
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Law Schools and the Curve
posted by Solangel Maldonado
The New York Times has published yet another article accusing law schools of misleading students, this time of failing to inform admitted students with merit scholarships contingent on maintaining a certain grade point average of the possibility of losing their scholarships. I agree with many of the article’s points and the comments in response. For example, I completely agree that law schools should inform admitted students of the curve (it varies from a 2.67 at some schools to a 3.4 at others) and provide them with their grading guidelines. I found the following information on the websites of four law schools:
Law School 1
A+ 1%
A 8%
A- 15%
B+ 25%
B 20%
B- 12%
C+ 7%
C 4%
C- 4%
F 4%
Law School 2
A or higher No more than 10 percent
A- or higher No more than 25 percent
C+ or lower At least 15 percent
C- or lower At least 6 percent
Law School 3
A+ 0-2%
A 7-13%
A- 16-24%
B+ 22-30%
B Remainder
B- 4-11%
C 2-5%
D/F 0-5%
Law School 4
At least 20% of grades are A- or above and at least 20% of grades are C+ or below.
***
Given that grading guidelines vary from school to school, knowledge of a law school’s grading system may help merit scholarship recipients assess their likelihood of retaining their scholarships. However, I disagree with the article’s suggestion that the curve is the main reason why many students lose their scholarships. The curve is generally not the reason why a student who never had a grade lower than a B+ in college may earn a B- or C in law school. In my experience, the curve does not lower a student’s grade but instead bumps the grade up or has no effect at all. In other words, in the absence of a curve, many more law students would earn B minuses and Cs in their first semester (or first year). The reason is that few first semester law students write good exams. This is understandable. Law school exams are generally very different from the exams students took in college or other graduate programs, and it takes a while to figure out how to take a law school exam. A student may have memorized the “black letter” law, but lack the skills to apply it to a complex fact pattern with numerous legal issues. As the article acknowledges, law students, especially those with merit scholarships, assume that because they performed well as undergraduates, they will automatically perform well in law school—even in their first semester. However, this is not the case. Many students do not learn how to apply the law to a new fact pattern or how to advise a client of “all the potential claims and defenses” (a common law school exam question) until after their first round of exams when they meet with their professors individually to review the exam. Maybe law schools need to do a better job of providing students with feedback before they take exams and with formative assessments, as the Carnegie Report on Legal Education recommends, that focus “on supporting students in learning rather than ranking, sorting and filtering them.”
May 4, 2011 at 9:59 pm
Posted in: Education, Law School
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“Low-Cost” Baccalaureate Degrees: Will You Soon Pay for What You Get, at Least in Texas?
posted by Taunya Banks
Colleges and universities across the country are trying to find ways to curb, or off-set, increasingly prohibitive tuition costs. But Texas Governor Rick Perry has thrown down the gauntlet by challenging that state’s public universities (and the nation) to come up with a baccalaureate degree that cost students only $10,000. The current yearly in-state tuition at Texas universities ranges from $15, 348 to $25,477. These figures include tuition, fees, book, board and transportation.
This week Texas Commission of Higher Education, Raymund A. Paredes, declared that Perry’s proposal is “highly feasible.” He argues that the goal is “about making sure we have a range of options for young people so they can select a path to a baccalaureate that makes the most sense to them.” According to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, this clearly and consciously “stripped-down degree” would account for ten percent of the total baccalaureate degrees from Texas schools. The more pressing question, however, is which students are most likely to “opt” for the “low-cost” degree. The obvious answer is low income students who also just happen to be disproportionately non-white.
What is not addressed by either the Coordinating Board or Commissioner Paredes is the long-term consequence of opting fora low-cost degree. What happens when students with low-cost degrees apply to graduate and professional schools? Will their degrees be considered competitive or will these graduates be consigned to jobs that nominally require a college degree? Will they become second-class college graduates – educated cashiers at fast food restaurants?
Most of us in higher education readily admit that tuition costs are too high and that we need to think about cost-cutting measures. But hopefully few of us want any variation of the Texas two-tier model, for if Texas has its way “low-cost” JD and MD degrees may not be far behind. I doubt that anyone wants to be treated by a physician with a low-cost medical degree, and I certainly would not want to be represented by a lawyer with a low-cost law degree. In the meantime in an attempt to off-set costs we set universities where increasing few teachers are tenured and language or classic departments and/or programs are gutted with little thought about their educational value.
It is time we ask ourselves a hard question the answer to which we might not want to know: whether the popular American notion that college should be available for anyone who has the money (or can borrow the cost of tuition) contributes to the high cost of a college education. In many countries with quality higher education systems, only the most talented need apply, and the costs are low. But before we can even think about limiting access to higher education we need to (re)commit to providing better primary and secondary education for everyone in this country. Only then can we focus on how to ensure that truly talented individuals obtain a college degree without being burdened with a life-time of debt. In the meantime, folks in Texas may have to “settle” for second-class degrees.
This is my final post on Concurring Opinions. Sorry I did not have time to post and provoke more. I’ve really enjoyed my month’s stint.
April 27, 2011 at 8:14 pm
Tags: academia, Education
Posted in: Education, Uncategorized
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Digital Law Books: II
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
As we all migrate to the digital world, imagine the future of the law school course book by reflecting on its history, purposes, and promulgation over the seven generations since C.C. Langdell initiated our current mode of legal education in 1870.
Some see the future of digital course books as a radical shift, akin to the original revolution of Langdell’s Contracts casebook. Others dismiss it as a simple marketing maneuver, the way post-Langdell addition of notes, questions or problems might be regarded.
In a new essay, I look back at casebook history to find it suggests that digital course books are more likely to be something in between, an incremental but meaningful evolution. The essay, a chapter in a new book on the subject, engages with great innovations in law school course books over the past century-plus, highlighting historic contributions from luminaries across the century and today.
April 5, 2011 at 1:17 pm
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Education, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Student Discussions, Law Talk, Teaching
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Key Performance Indicators: Power as Knowledge
posted by Frank Pasquale
There is an excellent review essay by Simon Head on the future of British universities in the NYRB. It discusses the Strategic Plan of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), including the “Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) led every six or seven years.” As of 2008, panels of 10 to 20 specialists in 67 fields evaluate work during RAEs. As the author explains,
The panels must award each submitted work one of four grades, ranging from 4*, the top grade, for work whose “quality is world leading in terms of originality, significance and rigor,” to the humble 1*, “recognized nationally in terms of originality, significance, and rigour.” The anthropologist John Davis . . . has written of exercises such as the RAE that their “rituals are shallow because they do not penetrate to the core.”
I have yet to meet anyone who seriously believes that the RAE panels—underpaid, under pressure of time, and needing to sift through thousands of scholarly works—can possibly do justice to the tiny minority of work that really is “world leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour.” But to expect the panels to do this is to miss the point of the RAE. Its roots are in the corporate, not the academic, world. It is really a “quality control” exercise imposed on academics by politicians; and the RAE grades are simply the raw material for Key Performance Indicators [KPIs], which politicians and bureaucrats can then manipulate in order to show that academics are (or are not) providing value for taxpayers’ money.
Imagine “needing to sift through thousands of scholarly works” in short order; what a bizarre process. There are many critics of RAE; this essay is particularly worth reading because it connects the dots between corporate-speak and the new academic order:
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March 4, 2011 at 5:27 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Culture, Education, Law and Humanities, Philosophy of Social Science
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Rights and Responsibilities of Digital Citizenship
posted by Danielle Citron
In response to a previous post, Seth Finkelstein asked me to develop the implications of a conception of digital citizenship, and rightly so. This post begins by explaining which intermediaries Helen Norton and I address and then develops our conception of digital citizenship in a bit more detail. A follow-up post will provide preliminary suggestions about how intermediaries could, and should, educate users about their rights and responsibilities as digital citizens.
As Jack Balkin highlights, the “informational filter, not information, is king” in our digital age. Internet intermediaries wield significant influence over our information landscape in much the same way that mass media does. Search engines, such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, determine “what we read” and “who gets heard” by producing links to content in response to user requests. Popular social media sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Digg, structure online environments that enable large groups of individuals to connect with each other. While highlighting certain content and voices, Internet intermediaries downplay, block, and delete others. Christopher Yoo has extolled intermediaries’ exercise of editorial discretion as “promot[ing] important free speech values by helping shield audiences from unwanted speech and by helping them identify and access desired content.” As he observes, “the image of the Internet as an unintermediated experience, in which speakers speak directly to audiences without passing through any gatekeepers, is more myth than reality. The real question is not whether some actor, but rather which actor, will serve as the intermediary.”
Commentators have expressed concern about governmental efforts to enlist intermediaries as “proxy censors to control the flow of information.” In Intermediaries and Hate Speech: Fostering Digital Citizenship for the Information Age (forthcoming Boston University Law Review 2011), Helen Norton and I focus exclusively on intermediaries’ purely voluntary decisions to address hate speech. As private entities, intermediaries can, and do, refuse to address cyber hate. Twitter has taken this position. Rather than taking a neutral position vis-a-vis online hatred, other intermediaries encourage it. Consider the social network site Hate Book whose motto is “Post something you hate!” and thousands of websites, blogs, social network sites, and the like designed to spread hate. Our conception of digital citizenship addresses intermediaries that choose to prohibit hateful content (and those might do so in the future) rather than intermediaries that ignore or support it. Pursuant to terms of service agreements and community guidelines, intermediaries remove, denounce, or ignore instances of cyber hate. Yet beyond vaguely-worded prohibitions of “hateful or offensive” speech, intermediaries often provide little explanation or consistency for their actions. They leave unstated and perhaps unexplored how their decisions regarding cyber hate impact citizens whose capability to participate meaningfully offline and online depends upon their inclusion in networked spaces. Intermediaries ought to teach users how to be responsible and respected digital citizens. Read the rest of this post »
November 28, 2010 at 10:53 am
Posted in: Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Education, Google & Search Engines, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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College Preparedness, Law, and the Structure of Standards
posted by Craig Livermore
The Pathway of Preparedness
There is a current debate concerning whether the standard of college preparedness should be written into the structures of education law. The college preparedness argument has been rising to the fore due to the revisions to the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act-popularly known as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA)-proposed in the Obama Administration’s “Blue Print for Reform.” President Obama’s suggested revisions would replace the current NCLBA math, English language arts, and science proficiency standards as a means of evaluating schools with various other measurements, including whether students at schools are being prepared to be “college and career ready.” The proposed change to the legal federal assessment standard is driven by the administration’s view that post-secondary education is essential to individual, communal, and national competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century. President Obama has announced the goal of regaining the global lead in the proportion of the citizenry obtaining post-secondary degrees by 2020. In the realm of education, law is increasingly being relied upon to create incentives, structures and values which have traditionally been thought to be in the realm of private production. The traditional conception of the public school is properly being recast from a provider of information and skill, to the central institution in communal renewal.
However, the federal focus on college preparedness, as with many educational initiatives of the Obama administration, has received criticism. Critics of this emphasis argue that college preparedness is a one size fits all category which will inevitably stigmatize students without the ability or proclivity to attend college, and thus contribute to greater levels of failure and higher school drop out rates due to psychological pressures. Such critics contend that there are many solid middle class trade careers of value which can be viable options for students without the skill level or desire for college. However, defenders of college preparedness are often concerned with a specific context-the inadequacy of our educational systems to address the needs of dis-empowered minority groups, especially in the urban context. College preparedness champions often believe that critics do not fully understand and/or acknowledge the causation of the extreme racial disparities in educational outcomes.
November 11, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Tags: College Preparedness, Education, Education Law, Education Policy, Higher Education, Minorities and Education, Obama administration, Policy, Race and Education
Posted in: Civil Rights, Culture, Current Events, Education, Law and Humanities, Law and Inequality, Race, Uncategorized
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Higher Education Accreditation and Brain Drain
posted by Alan Chen
For the past two years, I’ve served on the steering committee and a subcommittee preparing for the University of Denver’s re-accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission, the regional accreditation body for post-secondary education institutions in the North Central region of the United States. The HLC site team is visiting our campus this week, and many of us involved will need to attend numerous meetings during its visit. And, no doubt, our duties are not yet at an end, as surely there will be issues after the initial HLC report to which the university will need to respond. About a month ago, I sat in a meeting to begin planning for my law school’s self-study for its ABA re-accreditation, with our site visit scheduled for spring 2012. Other members of my law school’s administration and staff have recently completed the chore of responding to the annual ABA questionnaire. Feeling a lot like a hamster in a wheel, I have been thinking a lot about the impact that various accreditation processes have on the human capital of higher education faculties.
In my view, the opportunity costs of the collective human resources that are routinely expended by higher education institutions on accreditation compliance border on the unconscionable. The total personnel hours alone are enormous, but the costs are qualitative as well as quantitative. Universities and professional schools have a strong incentive to assign the vast data collection and compilation and report drafting to faculty and staff whom they trust to ensure that their self-studies are done thoroughly and professionally. In my experience, those assigned to accreditation committees are likely to include many of the institution’s more prolific scholars and best teachers. Thus, two of the most important things that we are evaluated for – teaching students and generating scholarship – inevitably suffer because of the time drawn away from those activities to compile the self-study. One can imagine someone like David Lodge parodying the conversation between a site inspector and a university representative about the school’s lack of scholarly production because the faculty has been immersed in the self-study effort.
This brain drain is not indigenous to the school being inspected. The same could be said about those from other institutions who serve on site-inspection teams (also likely to be successful teacher, scholars, and administrators), who are likewise taken from the things they are the best at so they may evaluate others. Of course, there are dozens of other things that detract from teaching and scholarship, not the least of which is committee service in general (and don’t even get me started on that brain drain), but none quite as ironic as the time lost to accreditation.
To be sure, accreditation by outside bodies serves important purposes
November 9, 2010 at 1:47 am
Posted in: Education, Law School, Uncategorized
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Law, Education, and Hard-Driving Reform
posted by Craig Livermore
Shortly after Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty was defeated in the mayoral primary this September, Michelle Rhee resigned from her position as the Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor. In her three years in the position, Rhee had gained a national reputation as a zealous “no-excuses” reformer seeking to hold teachers and educational administrators accountable in an attempt to raise urban student assessment scores. Along with Geoffry Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Rhee is spotlighted in the educational documentary Waiting for Superman as the type of reformer needed to turn around the multi-decade dysfunction and despair of urban education. However, Mayor Fenty’s political loss and Michelle Rhee’s resignation can rightly been seen as the most visible incident of a growing national educational trend to push back on hard-driving top-down reform with genesis outside of the communities which are in need of reform.
When Newark Mayor Cory Booker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg (Geoffry Canada was there as well) recently appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to announce the $100 million donation to the Newark Schools by Zuckerberg, Oprah hinted to Mayor Booker that Rhee is a dynamic reformer who could fill the soon to be vacant position of the Newark Public Schools Superintendent. Mayor Booker affirmed Rhee’s dynamism, but quickly stated that the real genesis of reform in urban education must emanate organically from the community. It is the parents, students, and community members which must be the supermen and superwomen. And thus, on November 1, 2010, an initiative called PEN Newark (Partnership for Education in Newark) has been launched as the first stage in the utilization of the Zuckerberg donation for education reform. PEN Newark has been founded as a collaborative effort between Mayor Booker and Newark Public Schools Advisory Board of Education Chair Shavar Jeffries. Jeffries is an organic leader from Newark who ran his campaign in 2010 on a platform of community engagement. The initiative is an extensive feedback and outreach initiative. Its mission is to connect, interview, survey, and speak with all stakeholders within the Newark community concerning the types of reform the Zuckerberg donation should generate. Mayor Booker has learned this political lesson well. And, indeed, this is the model of participative and collaborative reform that is gaining momentum nationally as a reaction to hard-driving no-excuses top-down reform.
But if this is all politics and education, what does it have to do with the Law? Everything. Public education in the United States is completely constructed and defined by an interactive array of legal regulation–both policy and jurisprudence. From comprehensive federal accountability legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act (the current iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first passed by Congress in 1965), to the interpretation of educational rights by state and federal courts, to the strong support of collective bargaining agreements by most state law makers, education is minutely regulated. For example, the New Jersey Supreme Court’s 20 Abbott v. Burke opinions have interpreted the New Jersey Constitution’s right to a “thorough and efficient education” (Article VIII, Sec. 4) to not only delineate school funding formulas which provide for vertical equity (more money for students facing greater need), but have also mandated preschool education, reform from specific educational models, facilities construction and even curricular content standards. Over the past forty years, as urban schools have increasingly struggled with low performance, inefficiency and mismanagement, and, at times, corruption, greater detail and layers of policy and jurisprudence-based regulation have been implemented. When such micro-regulation has been added to schools within communities under great stress and poverty, dysfunction has been guaranteed, and stasis has resulted.
November 1, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Tags: Education, law and education, Reform
Posted in: Education, Jurisprudence, Politics, Uncategorized
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Online Learning and Bias
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
The New York Times ran stories today and one month ago sparked by the billionaire Bill Gates’ campaign to transform college teaching from the traditional classroom model to an on-line system. The two stories mention empirical research about the value of online training compared to traditional classroom teaching.
Today’s article cites research showing that students taking a basic college course partly online did better on tests and in later recall than students taking it entirely in the traditional classroom way. Omitted in today’s article is the research referenced in the story a month ago showing that those results may hold up for some groups of students, but not all. Doing worse online than in the traditional classroom setting were Hispanics, males, and “low achievers” (those with lower grade point averages).
I’m concerned that today’s omission makes the story misleading. True, the two referenced studies differed a bit. The one reported last month compared pure traditional classroom teaching with pure online teaching; the one reported today compared pure traditional teaching to a hybrid format combining online and classroom components. Still, today’s piece made it sound as if there’s no doubt that the hybrid model is clearly superior to the classroom model for all students. But it doesn’t appear that the research makes that clear.
In today’s paper, there was plenty of space to add a qualifier. As it stood, the piece contained several paragraphs taken from the public relations materials that Mr. Gates and his backers have developed to promote this vogue in education. A few column inches were allocated to a photograph of Mr. Gates. IMHO, it would have been better to mention the qualifications and ask proponents of online college teaching to comment on how such qualifications affect their vision.
Below are block quotes from the two NYT stories for contrast. Read the rest of this post »
October 11, 2010 at 10:23 am
Posted in: Education
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Back to School: Research and Teaching
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
Research and teaching are what I do for a living, and I’m delighted to work at a university whose President, Steve Knapp, knows their value. In a courteous review in yesterday’s N.Y. Times, Dr. Knapp demolishes the dusty themes in a new book by the curmudgeons, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education? The book bears clichés and canards against the modern university, primarily denying the value of research and rehearsing laments about its opposition to teaching. Dr. Knapp’s polite piece delightfully debunks these specious critiques.
Dr. Knapp notes the book’s strengths: it is ”lucid, passionate and wide-ranging,” “well-structured and strongly argued,” and poses “searching and sometimes troubling questions” about today’s university operations and purposes. Questions involve topics, some within university control some not, like the narrowness of academic specialization, the greediness of some faculty, and the frivolity of some student/parent demands for extras. The book usefullly identifies well-known laudable goals, like reducing student debt, “engaging students,” “mak[ing] students use their minds,” and “end[ing] the exploitation of adjuncts.”
Dr. Knapp notes that the book’s primary target, though, is research. The book makes the suggestion that, once upon a time, universities saw their role solely as education, and today they see it as all about publishing research. The authors heap heavy scorn on the notion that research actually helps teaching or is necessary to good teaching. Their most extreme proposals are that universities “spin off” medical schools and research centers, end paid sabbaticals, and abolish tenure. Dr. Knapp notes that the authors, who should know what they’re talking about, Hacker being a noted academic and Dreifus a long-time adjunct professor, rely on “sometimes sweeping generalizations.”
August 20, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Posted in: Education, Teaching, Uncategorized
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South Carolina, Stimulus, and Federalism
posted by Thomas Crocker
South Carolina has been notable for its newsworthiness of late—not much of it flattering as Jon Stewart has colorfully appreciated. South Carolina’s current woes and weal bring together a pointed issue about federalism and federal stimulus that should give some pause to the rush to again save the salaries and jobs of teachers nationally, which some in Congress want to do.
Let me say from the outset that as a general matter I support federal expenditures for teachers, and in many ways think that because education is a national good, the federal government should play a much larger role in public education. A child undereducated in South Carolina, a description that unfortunately applies to far too many children, can cause problems for the later adult who may live in Massachusetts. Education is closely linked to our national economy, even if education is not (ordinarily, at least for now, but see . . .) itself an economic activity as a Supreme Court majority claimed, and even if public education is closely tied to its local community. So Congress should fund teachers when States are unable to do so—right?
June 17, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Education
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BRIGHT IDEAS: Andrew Sparks on Charter School Boards & Non-Profit Governance
posted by Dave Hoffman
Andrew Sparks is a recently minted PhD in education whose dissertation on the governance of Philadelphia Charter School boards I happened to come across. He’s developed a precis of that thesis, Finding Their Own Way: The Work of Philadelphia Charter School Boards in a Complex Accountability Environment. The short report (which you should read) is a particularly nice example of qualitative research into non-profit board behavior – a subject lamentably understudied by legal academics. In part spurred by the NYT’s recent articles on Charter performance and governance, I asked Andrew whether he’d be willing to talk with us about what he found.
1. Why did you write about charter school governance?
When I decided to study charter school governance about 5 years ago my advisors at Penn were not thrilled. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, the “sexiest” topic to research and isn’t where the research money has been headed. Within the charter school research arena, the vast majority of time and energy has been devoted to trying to figure out whether charter schools “work” – whether they are better than their non-charter competitors. For me, showing that school A scored a 745 (on a given test) and school B scored a 731 isn’t usually very interesting, especially when it’s only measuring math and/or reading. Even if we could say school A is better than school B, do we know exactly makes school A so good and do we know how to replicate that with what will likely be a different group of students, teachers, administrators and parents?
At about this time I also had a few friends who were asked to join charter school boards. While these friends were talented people, they had no education background, so I began to wonder, more broadly, “who’s on these boards and what are they doing?” Having worked in the non-profit field, I was aware of the impact that a board can have on an organization – for better or worse. Having worked with and researched charter schools enough to understand their general governance framework, it seemed that governance might be a critical piece in their potential success and expansion.
May 21, 2010 at 11:32 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Bright Ideas, Education
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Checklists: Valuable for Exam Taking as in Life
posted by Danielle Citron
In The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Dr. Atul Gawande demonstrates the power and importance of checklists for our increasingly complicated twenty-first century lives. As the set of issues that professionals face become more complex and specialized, professionals routinely fail to follow protocol, not because they don’t care but because they simply cannot manage the bewildering array of responsibilities before them in a reasoned way.
Consider the routine administration of central lines into ICU patients. As critical care specialist at Johns Hopkins Dr. Peter Pronovost discovered, adhering to checklists can prevent an enormous number of central line infections, saving lives and money. To avoid infections, doctors are supposed to (1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a mask, hat, sterile gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the insertion site once the line is in. Although these steps seem easy enough, Dr. Pronovost discovered, in a controlled study, that in more than a third of patients, doctors skipped at least one. After requiring doctors to follow a checklist checked by nursing staff, the ten-day line-infection rate dropped from 11 percent to zero. Over a fifteen-month period, only two line infections occurred. There, the checklist prevented 43 infections and eight deaths while saving two million dollars.
The Checklist Manifesto explores a variety of fields where checklists have helped professionals navigate complex times, from aviation to structural engineering. Law, and law student life, seems no exception. Some tests give students three or four hours to analyze a variety of fact-intensive hypothetical problems. It’s often a lot to tackle, whacking through complicated fact patterns, identifying various legal issues, ignoring red herrings, and working through policy and theory that your professor has emphasized. In this crazy environment, checklists can be incredibly helpful. They can help ensure that students don’t “miss” issues/elements/policy concerns. To be sure, checklists can’t analyze the problems for you — that skill is often what differentiates solid exams from stellar ones. But it can help get you started in a most productive way.
May 1, 2010 at 11:48 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Education
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Public/Private Divides, Law Clinics, and the Role of Educational Institutions
posted by Deven Desai
The New York Times reports that law clinics that take on large corporations are under pressure from private companies. The pressure has resulted in some saying that state dollars should not be used to allow clinics to take on “controversial issues.” Frankly, if educational institutions aren’t supposed to take on controversial issues, they will cease to be places where new ideas from any perspective, left, right, or center, are explored and used to test what our society is doing. Sanitizing schools so that only non-controversial issues are addressed is a mistake.
One proposal before the Maryland legislature would cut state funding to a “clinic if it does not provide details to the legislature about its clients, finances and cases.” I am not certain, but I think that move has some free speech and confidentiality problems. For now I call that question out for others to ponder. The part about the story that I am wondering about is the relationship between funders and schools.
The Times piece indicates that several other state law schools are facing similar scrutiny. If public law schools must cut back on clinics, would private law schools expand their offerings? Private schools might, if there is a demand, is one argument. But what is that demand? Is it the training before entering the profession issue? Given the recent focus on the problems of internships without pay, getting rid of clinics could exacerbate the lack of meaningful ways for students to get some practice experience. If so, then public schools already challenged by lack of funding might face an exodus of students to private schools because those schools simply offer the chance for training. In other words, if public schools have to abandon or reduce their clinic offerings, would certain students who could not afford private schools miss out on an important training opportunity?
Then again, private and public schools in general must continually navigate the tension between pursuing the school’s varied goals and funders’ interests in squashing pursuits that may conflict with funders’ business goals. Any major industry is of course sensitive to any questions about its practices. Public and private schools by now have learned that must try to navigate the receipt of donor funds so that they don’t impede the schools’ research interests. Yet, as I understand it, the smaller the school and/or its endowment, the more difficult it is to avoid strings and pressure from the funder. With all schools struggling to find funding whether because of over-reliance on endowment income or shrinking state money, the ability of funders to exert influence over schools is likely to increase. If so, questions about public interest funding, the role of educational institutions in questioning society’s practices, and the value of having skeptics are more important than ever.
April 6, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Posted in: Corporate Law, Education, First Amendment, Politics
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Can We Teach?
posted by Robert Ahdieh
Reading Alfred’s posts on choosing a law school, I got to thinking about the quality of teaching at any given school, as a factor in that choice, and of an article I read in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, on Building a Better Teacher.
The piece describes, in essence, the effort to improve the quality of primary and secondary education in the United States, by more carefully/fully training teachers in how to teach. By contrast, it counsels, merely incentivizing teachers (whether with the carrot of merit pay, or the stick of dismissal/school closure) fails to get at the root of the problem. Teachers, thus, need to be taught how to teach.
The teacher trainer profiled, for example, suggests that the generally derided and dismissed issue of “classroom management” is actually foundational to whatever learning does (or does not) occur in the class. As the article puts it, “students can’t learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions.” (By way of empirics, I might note, the article cites data to certain that the students of the best teachers get 18 months of material, for each year in class, while those of the worse teachers get only 6 months!)
What about those of us in law school teaching, though? Can we teach? Is there any reason to believe that the skills that get us our teaching appointments are well correlated with teaching skills?
I’m doubtful there is, though I might perhaps be convinced otherwise. Even if there is some such correlation, however, wouldn’t it still be useful to think about relevant training in classroom instruction, for law students thinking about going into teaching – or perhaps at least for those who actually end up there? Isn’t that especially appropriate if, as the research reported in the article suggests, evidence of natural teaching “ability” aren’t highly correlated with student success?
One need not abandon a commitment to scholarship as the most critical metric in appointments, in promotion, and even in evaluating the overall “success” of a law professor, thus, to recognize that there are relevant skills to teaching – and perhaps to law teaching in particular – that we ought to know.
If so, how might we go about accomplishing as much? By having a teaching “track” in law school, which would include some training in teaching? Perhaps with some sort of intensive summer program, in which newly hired teachers would enroll for a time before embarking on their teaching careers?
No single solution would be perfect, of course. I’m reminded, though, of my complaints to a colleague, in my first year of teaching, that I wasn’t sure I was doing a particularly good job at teaching. “I’m sure they love you!” he responded. Perhaps they do, I remember thinking, but that need not mean I was doing a good job.
March 11, 2010 at 10:55 am
Posted in: Education, Law School (Teaching), Teaching, Uncategorized
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What a “Ghetto” Party at UCSD Can Teach Us About the Importance of Racial Diversity on Campus
posted by Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Black History Month just ended. In honor of Black History (or perhaps its end), certain students at the University of California, San Diego decided to leave us with one last lesson about the importance of diversity.
On February 15, 2010, individual members of a fraternity at UCSD held an off-campus party in honor of Black History Month called the “Compton Cookout” (The President of Pi Alpha Kappa criticized the party and asserted that the party was not sponsored or condoned by the fraternity.). The invitation included references to “dat Purple drank,” which the party creators described as consisting of “sugar, water, and the color purple, chicken, coolade, and of course Watermelon.” The students sent the invitation via Facebook with dress and behavior requirements for attendees.
Men were asked to be “stuntin’ in ya white T (XXXL smallest size acceptable), anything FUBU. . . .”
Women were asked to come as “ghetto chicks” with “short, nappy hair” (Did we not learn anything from Don Imus?). The dress and behavior requirements for women were extensive and included the language below:
“For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes – they consider Baby Phat to be high class and expensive couture. They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors, such as purple or bright red. They look and act similar to Shenaynay, and speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face. Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as “constipulated”, or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as “hmmg!”, or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises, grunts, and faces. The objective is for all you lovely ladies to look, act, and essentially take on these “respectable” qualities throughout the day.”
March 2, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Tags: Compton Cookout, diversity, Grutter, Parents Involved, Proposition 209, UCSD fraternity party
Posted in: Civil Rights, Current Events, Education, Race, Uncategorized
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For Faculty Buyouts
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
Universities nationwide are in a vise, devastating for most, but an opportunity for a few. The grip is how financial woes dictate reduced spending while rankings intensity demands enhanced research prowess.
For most universities, the cross-pressures mean spending and research curtailed. But a few universities can make the dilemma others face into an opportunity. They can shed highly-paid professors who do not conduct research and hire newer professors devoted to that. That saves money and promotes valuable research.
This strategy will not help already-established national research universities like Harvard or many University of California schools. They must rely on furloughs and other cuts to deal with fiscal adversity and cling to hope that existing research resources will hold their own. Nor would it pay off for the vast majority of universities lower in the academic hierarchy. They must not only resort to furloughs and such but are not positioned to leverage research investment.
But it may be an ideal strategy for well-established and well-regarded universities towards but not at the top of the academic hierarchy. My employer, George Washington University, may be the perfect example and probable beneficiary of this strategy. GW is a centuries-old, large and famous university. It is well-respected for excellent pedagogy, student life and prospects and a generally solid research orientation. But it is not routinely ranked as among the finest national research universities. Read the rest of this post »
February 17, 2010 at 9:23 pm
Posted in: Education
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