Dear faculty: FU

The President

     Gosh, while the college seems particularly interested in giving students what they need (nurturing and valuing, evidently), it appears to have declared war on faculty and their needs.
     On Friday, some of us* received an email, from the Office of the President, that informed us of “new processes for Campus Events.”†
     They are preposterously demanding.
     According to the new process,

     In order to schedule … any campus activity, an IVC-Facilities Use Application Form must be completed and submitted to Facilities. … The form must be completed and submitted … at least 90 days in advance of the event. After submission of the form, the requestor must contact [Facilities] to discuss details, requirements, and answer questions. Facilities will then schedule a date for the requestor to attend a Facilities Use Work Group meeting held on the first and third Wednesday of each month.

Plus:

     The requestor may also be required to fill out additional forms and/or applications…. These forms ... are necessary to fully support your event. Failure to complete all forms in a timely manner may cause your event to not be scheduled or supported.

     —I.e., if you don't fill out all the forms, NO SOUP FOR YOU.
     So let me get this straight. If I want to schedule, say, a department meeting somewhere on campus, according to the new “process,” I am obliged to

• Submit my request three months prior to the event.
• Contact facilities to answer their questions.
• Attend a Facilities Use Work Group meeting (which is held on Wednesdays, quite possibly when I teach)
• (Likely) fill out additional forms and/or applications.

     Wow. Three months. Attending a special meeting.
     I guess there’ll be no more events on campus—except those of certain special people.

*A friend who is a department chair forwarded the email to me.
†The email also announced a new process for reserving the President's Conference Room.

The remarkable inferiority of education research

     This morning, I’ve been doing more reading on the poor quality of education research. (Background: The latest from the “experts” (1) and (2))
     It’s pretty damned clear that, for the most part, education research is dreadful, a factoid long recognized but widely discussed especially in the last twenty or so years, as the issue of education reform has heated up, now enveloping higher education.
     What amazes me is that so many of my colleagues are unaware of education research's well-deserved reputation as dreck.
     Recently, I cited some influential works that start with that dismal “diagnosis” and suggests approaches to improving research. But not much has been done about the problem. There's been lots of gnashing of teeth. Some cursory flossing maybe.
     One of the more interesting articles about the poor quality of education research appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education fourteen years ago: D.W. Miller's The Black Hole of Education Research. It's a good place to start if you are among those who tend to take the education "experts" seriously. Do so at your, and students', peril.
     But also check out Carl F. Kaestle's earlier The Awful Reputation of Education Research (PDF).
     Here are some excerpts from Miller's article.

• The Black Hole of Education Research, by D.W. Miller, originally in Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 6, 1999: The Black Hole of Education Research

     …Research on the effectiveness of reforms is often weak, inconclusive, or missing altogether. And even in areas illuminated by good scholarship, it often has little influence on what happens in the classroom.
     All disciplines produce lax or ineffective research, but some academics say that education scholarship is especially lacking in rigor and a practical focus on achievement. “Vast resources going into education research are wasted,” says James W. Guthrie, and education professor at Vanderbilt University who advises state legislators on education policy. “When you look at how the money is channeled, it’s not along productive lines at all.”
. . .
     The research-to-practice pipeline, according to scholars and educators, has sprung many leaks. Governments and foundations don’t spend enough on research, or they support the wrong kind. Scholars eschew research that shows what works in most schools in favor of studies that observe student behavior and teaching techniques in a classroom or two. They employ weak research methods, write turgid prose, and issue contradictory findings. Educators and policy makers are not trained to separate good research from bad, or they resist findings that challenge cherished beliefs about learning. As a result, education reform is often shaped by political whim and pedagogic fashion.
. . .
     A fundamental problem facing the field, says Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, a professor of education at New York University, is its fragmentation among many disparate disciplines, including statistics, anthropology, and cognitive psychology. In education, she says, “there are no common patterns of training. If you don’t have common patterns of training, it’s hard to reach agreement on what research is, much less what good research is.”
. . .
     A growing number of quantitative scholars want to revive a research tradition, prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, of evaluating classroom practices through randomized tests. …[M]any of them see the clinical trails of medical research as a model for education scholarship. When a drug company wants to test the benefits of treating some new pill, they reason, it finds a group of volunteer patients and compares them to an identical control group. “Why is education research any different?” asks Paul E. Peterson, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
     Yet such trials, routine in the sciences, are relatively rare in education research, according to Thomas D. Cook, a sociologist at Northwestern University. He recently found that such experiments have hardly been used to examine the effectiveness of common reforms, including vouchers, charter schools, whole-school reform, and continual teacher training.
     A task force sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is urging researchers to increase the use of random sampling and control groups. Without them, advocates say, no researcher will ever be able to attribute a successful outcome to a particular policy. Any other method leaves doubt about alternative explanations, such as selection bias.
. . .
     Some scholars say that the experimental approach is resisted for ideological reasons. “The whole field of education research is dominated by an orthodoxy that the best kind of learning is the kind that spontaneously emerges,” says John E. Stone, an education professor at East Tennessee State University. The so-called learner-centered approach, he says, assumes that learning will occur when “conditions are right,” so qualitative researchers account for differences in achievement by examining the differences between one classroom and the next.
     Many scholars, financing agencies, and journal editors, he says, would prefer to ignore experimental research, which tends to show that traditional, directed instruction, with drills, lectures, and step-by-step lesson plans, works better than more-spontaneous approaches. By example, he points to a $1-billion federal evaluation in the 1970s of various Great Society programs designed to help low-income students. After most approaches flunked and a method called direct Instruction came out on top, he says, the education field essentially ignored the results.
. . .
     At the nexus of most of those complaints lies the sprawling network of U.S. professional schools that train teachers. Those institutions and departments, of which there are more than 1,700, are responsible for cultivating many of the nation’s education researchers as well as for training most of the public-school educators for whom research is intended. Officials at education schools readily acknowledge that they do a poor job of training educators to distinguish good research from bad, and also of training their scholars to make their findings accessible to practitioners.…

OTHER INTERESTING READS (I encountered this morning):

• The Awful Reputation of Education Research (PDF), Carl F. Kaestle, Educational Researcher, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Jan. - Feb., 1993), pp. 23+26-31. (JSTOR)

• Improving the "Awful Reputation" of Education Research, Gerald E. Sroufe, Educational Researcher, Vol. 26, No. 7 (Oct., 1997), pp. 26-28 (JSTOR)

• Scientific Culture and Educational Research by Michael J. Feuer, Lisa Towne, and Richard J. Shavelson - EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER, November 2002 vol. 31 no. 8 4-14

• The Accountability Game…., Leon F. Marzillier (Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, October, 2002)

     ...The whole concept of MSLOs [measurable student learning outcomes] as the latest fad in education is somewhat akin to the now discredited fad of the '90's, Total Quality Management, or TQM. Essentially, the ACCJC adopted MSLOs as the overarching basis for accrediting community colleges based on their faith in the theoretical treatises of a movement.... After repeated requests for research showing that such use of MSLOs is effective, none has been forthcoming from the ACCJC [accreditors]. Prior to large scale imposition of such a requirement at all institutions, research should be provided to establish that continuous monitoring of MSLOs has resulted in measurable improvements in student success at a given institution. No such research is forthcoming because there is none….

• Beyond awful: rethinking education research, Sarah M. Fine, Apr 25th, 2011. EdNewsColorado, April 4, 2011

     ...Last month, Ednews editor Alan Gottlieb published a commentary in which he shared a vision that can only be called bleak. In the piece, he describes a meeting where education researchers and policymakers sat down in an attempt to reconcile their differences – apparently to no avail....

* * *

Further reading:

• Issues in Education Research: Problems and Possibilities (1999), edited by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Lee S. Shulman

• Improving Student Learning: A Strategic Plan for Education Research and Its Utilization (1999)

• Education Research On Trial: Policy Reform and the Call for Scientific Rigor (2009), edited by Pamela B. Walters, Annette Lareau, Sheri Ranis

* * *

• Why education ‘research wars’ leave no winners (Washington Post, Feb. 5, 2013)

     …These kinds of sloppy inferences play a dominant role in education debates and policy making, and they cripple both processes. Virtually every day, supporters and critics of individuals, policies, governance structures and even entire policy agendas parse mostly-transitory changes in raw test scores or rates as if they’re valid causal evidence, an approach that will, in the words of Kane and Staiger, eventually end up “praising every variant of educational practice.” There’s a reason why people can – and often do – use NAEP or other testing data to “prove” or “disprove” almost anything.
     Nobody wins these particular battles. Everyone is firing blanks.

• Big Surprise: Yet Another Ed Reform Turns Out to be Bogus (Mother Jones) —By Kevin Drum - Mon Jan. 28, 2013 9:55 AM PST

• More Pupils Are Learning Online, Fueling Debate on Quality (New York Times, April 5, 2011)

     …[C]ritics say online education is really driven by a desire to spend less on teachers and buildings, especially as state and local budget crises force deep cuts to education. They note that there is no sound research showing that online courses at the K-12 level are comparable to face-to-face learning….
. . .
     The growth has come despite a cautionary review of research by the United States Department of Education in 2009. It found benefits in online courses for college students, but it concluded that few rigorous studies had been done at the K-12 level, and policy makers “lack scientific evidence of the effectiveness” of online classes.
. . .
     Like other education debates, this one divides along ideological lines. K-12 online learning is championed by conservative-leaning policy groups that favor broadening school choice, including Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which has called on states to provide all students with “Internet access devices” and remove bans on for-profit virtual schools.
     Teachers’ unions and others say much of the push for online courses, like vouchers and charter schools, is intended to channel taxpayers’ money into the private sector.
     “What they want is to substitute technology for teachers,” said Alex Molnar, professor of education policy at Arizona State University....

• Classroom Technology Faces Skeptics At Research Universities (Information Week, February 08, 2013) – Largely, a discussion of “Technological Change and Professional Control in the Professoriate”

     …Professors at top research universities are highly skeptical of the value of the instructional technologies being injected into their classrooms, which many see as making their job harder and doing little to improve teaching and learning.
     That's the conclusion of "Technological Change and Professional Control in the Professoriate," published in the January edition of Science, Technology & Human Values. Based on interviews with 42 faculty members at three research-intensive universities, the study was funded under a grant from the National Science Foundation and particularly focuses on professors in the sciences, including chemistry and biology, with anthropology thrown in as a point of comparison….

Glenn Roquemore: omnishambles

The omnishambolic Glenn Roquemore, permanent IVC President

     Yesterday, as one of the senate reps for the School of Humanities and Languages on the IVC Academic Senate, I attended the August 29 senate meeting. It was pretty uneventful, I guess.
     Maybe it had one interesting part. At one point, a senate officer discussed college fiscal matters. He reviewed various grim factoids.
     When he finished, I asked him a series of questions—about a topic that has dominated senate discussion for nearly a year, namely, the great "fiscal panic" of 2012-13. In asking my questions, and in the brief subsequent discussion, I essentially argued a thesis, namely,

IVC President Glenn Roquemore oversees an omnishambles.

     That was indeed my thesis, though I didn’t use that particular term. Found it this morning.
     According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “an omnishambles is a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, and is characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.”
     Yeah. That's the right word all right.

     OMNISHAMBOLIC MOMENTS. "How so?" you ask. Well, remarkably, about a year ago, President Roquemore fell into a sudden panic, having “discovered” that, according to projections, college expenses would soon exceed revenue! (They seem to have discovered the same situation down at Saddleback as well.)
     How can this situation have come as a surprise?, we all wondered. Don’t you people plan for the possible future? Don't you ask yourselves if we're prepared for stuff that might happen? What, you didn't know that expenses were creeping up but revenue was flat?
     Guess not.
     Next: it soon became clear that, despite an agreement Roquemore made with the Academic Senate that the college would hire 10 faculty that year (IVC decided to spread out hires over three years; meanwhile, Saddleback hired en masse), he gave every indication of preparing to unilaterally cancel all hires as a money-saving measure. (That's Omnishambolic moment #2, in case you're keeping count.)
     Naturally, faculty were angry. After all, there’s more going on at the college than hires; and, in any case, hiring faculty—just to replace those we've lost!—should be a priority! No?
     Plus what about the agreement?
     When senate leadership caught wind of Roquemore’s disposition to ixnay the ireshay, they immediately hit the alarm button; they did everything they could think of to derail the Heedless (and seemingly Headless) Rocky Express.

     THE BUDGET SOLUTIONS RECOMMENDATIONS GROUP. That resulted in creation of yet another committee: the Budget Solution Recommendations Group, or BSR. Meanwhile, the college would tentatively pursue a handful of hires.
     And so it was that BSR commenced meeting to try to determine the facts, budgetwise, and to identify possible solutions beyond simply pulling the plug on faculty hires. Near as I could tell, they were a good group and they did good work.

     GLENN'S SINGULAR PROCESS F*CKUP. Meanwhile, various due dates relative to possible faculty hires came and went, and Roquemore failed to take the usual steps at the district (for advertising with HR, etc.). When Glenn's intentional (or doofusular?) foot-dragging was discovered (over the holiday break [December '12], as I recall), Glenn was compelled to rush the paperwork through, though deadlines had already been long passed. (That's omnishambolic moment #3, I suppose. I'll stop counting.)
     In the end, there were a handful of searches and interviews. At least one of those (physics) seems to have hit a snag: no hire. So, in the end, Glenn pretty much got what he wanted.
     Meanwhile, BSR continued its work.

     QUESTIONS STILL NOT ANSWERED. At the senate (during Fall '12, Spring '13), we would receive reports about BSR’s progress. Our senate reps on BSR (and other BSR members) would raise simple questions about college funding and expenses, but Roquemore and his budget guy were often unable to answer them. “We’ll get back to you,” they would say. The clock ticked. BSR waited.
     Yesterday, I pressed the matter. Did they ever answer your questions? Senate officers then asserted that “we still don’t know where all the money was.”
     That's just great.
     OmniFREAKINshambles.
     At yesterday's senate meeting, I suggested that "incompetence" is the right word to describe Glenn and Co's conduct. There was some cringing and gnashing of teeth. It was as though Glenn were our Titular Tot to love and hug and protect—even from richly deserved criticism.
     Still, I'm sure no one in the room supposed that Glenn was anything but the total f*ckup that he is.

     WHAT'S BECOME OF BSR'S RECS? I pushed on. I asked if BSR finally issued recommendations, whether those recs have been published, and whether administration has accepted and implemented any of them.
     Yes, BSR made its recommendations. Long ago. Ah, but, beyond that, there are no clear answers to my questions.
     How can that be? But it BE all right.
     Mega-Omnishambles!
     But it gets worse. Senate leaders acknowledged that at least one BSR recommendation seems to have been embraced, namely, the maintaining of a reserve. At present, our reserve is $1 million. Good!

     ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK. Ah, but again, there was a problem. Very recently, our reps worked on various "scenarios" with Rocky’s fiscal guy, and it soon became clear that, on many of these, the reserve would soon dwindle and disappear to nothing. Wasn't that a problem? – A big one?
     Only faculty on the committee noticed this. Not administration. Not Glenn's Budget Boy.
     “Oh.” Hadn’t thought about that, I guess.
     Mega-omnishamblesTHOUSANDFOLD.

     Well, said one senate officer in defense of Budget Boy, the Boy does fine on lots of things, but he just “isn’t a planner.” He has strengths, but planning just isn’t one of ‘em.
     Really?
     It seemed to some, I guess, that I was laying too much blame on our fiscal officer. After all, he's doing the best he can!
     But that wasn’t my intention. I said essentially that, in my view, it is the President’s responsibility to have contingency plans for possible (and especially probable!) scenarios. The President is supposed to make sure the planning gets done! Right? –Right?

     RIGHT? 

     (Trustees, are you listening? But of course you're not.)

     AWKWARD. It was an awkward moment at the senate in silly old BSTIC 101 on a hot Thursday afternoon in silly old Bovine Freakin' Valley College, home of the Pinheaded Permanent President, a geologist named Rockmore, who, long ago, sold his soul to BeelzeGoo to become an administrator.
     VPI Craig Justice was in the back of the room, listening to all of this. He didn’t have much to say.
     Natch.

* * *

     IT WAS FOURTEEN YEARS AGO TODAY. Well, as it turns out, I found an old post from our newsletter, The ‘Vine, reporting an event on this exact date 14 years ago. It’s a transcript of a meeting about a budget omnishambles overseen at the time by IVC President Raghu Mathur, the man (at Mathur’s urging) Glenn Roquemore replaced a dozen years ago.
     Reading this, one thinks: golly, things don't change much at IVC, do they?
     No, they don't.
     Isn't it time for a change?

     Check it out:

Vigorous Finger Pointage: Mathurian shenanigans at the 8/30/99 Board Meeting

     Participants in that fascinating long-ago discussion: VC Gary Poertner [then serving under Chancellor Cedric Sampson], IVC Ac. Senate Pres. Peter Morrison, budget person Beth Mueller, trustee Dave Lang, trustee Don Wagner, and trustee Dorothy (“Dot”) Fortune.

SEE ALSO:

• Budget crises looming for Saddleback and Irvine Valley colleges - October 5, 2012
• Last week's college forums mentioned looming fiscal issues—but apparently soft-pedaled them - October 6, 2012
• Agnostic - October 11, 2012
• The Great Fiscal Squawk of 2012: now sans ambivalence - November 2, 2012
• College-Wide Forum at Saddleback College (featuring the Chancellor and three trustees): any questions? - November 7, 2012

20 California community colleges face accreditation problems, chancellor says (San Francisco Business Times)

     As many as 20 California community colleges face some sort of accreditation challenge, California Community Colleges Chancellor Brice Harris said Thursday....

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge"

Philoctetes, by James Berry

The poet Seamus Heaney has passed away which has made Rebel Girl weep a bit this warm morning.  Here's a little something to remember him by.

an excerpt from The Cure at Troy,
a translation of "The Philoctetes," by Sophocles.
-Seamus Heaney

Human beings suffer,

They torture one another,

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols

Beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker's father

Stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracle

And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:

The utter, self-revealing

Double-take of feeling.

If there's fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry

Of new life at its term.

March on Washington, Aug. 28, 1963

*

New York Times obituary here.

*

The IVC PAC: "odd geometries"

     A friend sent me a link to the latest issue of Orange Coast Magazine, which offers lists: "A compendium of local freebies, indigenous foods, celebrity mug shots, iconic blondes, and other unforgettable realities of Orange County life!"
     Sounds like fun.
     One of the lists, composed by Alan Hess, is "5 architectural wonders," including the Crystal Cathedral.
     Those "wonders" are paired with 5 architectural "wonder whys." 
     I hate to tell ya, but Irvine Valley College's celebrated Performing Arts Center was #3 among the Wonder Whys. 
     Check it out:

     In case you can't read the caption, it says: "Odd geometries are all the rage in architecture, but here they're done without conviction or an understanding of how to balance and compose skewed lines to create energy and unity."

     I've got to admit: there's something goofy about that building. From a distance, one can make out a shape: it's the state of Texas. WTF?

     I dunno. Maybe the problem is that Glenn chose the color scheme. Could be.

     He should go back to 'splainin' rocks.

Reportedly, Glenn's first choice was plaid

His second choice got the thumbs down too

It says "Texas" to me. Plus it's red.

Skepticism abounds

Skepticism Abounds: A Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology (Inside Higher Ed)
     Online education arguably came of age in the last year, with the explosion of massive open online courses driving the public's (and politicians') interest in digitally delivered courses and contributing to the perception that they represent not only higher education's future, but its present.
     Faculty members, by and large, still aren't buying – and they are particularly skeptical about the value of MOOCs, Inside Higher Ed's new Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology suggests....

The Two Cultures of Educational Reform By STANLEY FISH (New York Times)
     Excerpt:
     Or, in other words, we’re probably measuring the wrong things and the right things are not amenable to measurement. If this is true and it is also true that the culture of measurement is in the ascendancy, we might expect that things that resist measurement — quality, poetry, insight — would be dismissed and set aside, on the reasoning that if it can’t be measured, what good is it? A new technology typically turns its limitations into a mechanism of evaluation and consigns phenomena outside its capacities to the margins, not merely to its margins but to the margins of what is generally significant and worth worrying about….

Obama Plan to Tie Student Aid to College Ratings Draws Mixed Reviews (Chronicle of Higher Education)

4 Key Ideas in Obama's Plan to Control College Costs Bear Familiar Fingerprints (Chronicle of Higher Education)