Technology won’t merely change the way that educational services are delivered and consumed. Technology will also significantly change the face of the education profession.

Here’s how and why: Historically until about the present, public school teachers have existed as a more or less homogeneous group, with similar job functions and experiences. Teachers’ unions have had an interest in preserving the impression of teachers as a united group in order to more effectively pursue their collective political goals. But, with the advent and ongoing rise of educational technologies, teaching is becoming an ever more differentiated profession. Online classes, and even whole online schools, require (or at least can operate more efficiently from) the services of teachers and other education staff with diverse skills, time commitments, and salaries. Positions might include course preparers, live call-in support, graders, supplemental tutors, and so on. Some of these staff members might be career professionals, others temporary workers and/or stay-at-home moms looking for supplemental work, and everything in between.

Preserving this united face of teaching has been costly for students and/or taxpayers. Importantly, take the existence of a single salary schedule in many school districts. According to these schedules, teacher pay is determined by a teacher’s level of education and years of experience (these are the union-sanctioned criteria for salary). Teacher pay is NOT usually determined by the teacher’s field of expertise — this would cause division among teachers, as qualified science and math teachers would in many places earn more than others (higher salaries being needed to draw them away from lucrative private industry jobs). This results in shortages of qualified math and science teachers, while many education dollars are wasted in encouraging teachers to pursue graduate degrees that do not seem related to improved student outcomes.

Diverse education sector employees mean diverse interests. It will become increasingly more difficult for unions to garner support for pensions, last-in-first-out policies, non-value-added assessment methods, and their other standard political fare when these issues affect teachers and other education personnel differentially. This could result in a dramatic evolution of the unions, if not an outright demise, in a bottom-up fashion, without the need for controversial top-down union busting (*cough* Wisconsin *cough*).

Neither technological nor political change is inevitable; these systems are not deterministic. But educational technologies are interestingly poised to make a difference in the structure of the education industry as we know it (hopefully for the better) and teaching will change commensurately. Thanks to Moe and Chubb for so clearly articulating this insight.

I don’t really doubt any of these observations, and maybe it does follow from them that schools and students of “education” per se should at least be defunded of public monies. But it remains to be considered whether it makes good philosophical sense to separate out education and treat it as a field unto itself. I had actually forgotten all about the article referenced above until I read something for School & Society class that goes exactly to this point. Here’s Alasdair MacIntyre, from an interview with Joseph Dunne:

What I have said implies that teaching itself is not a practice, but a set of skills and habits put to the service of a variety of practices. The teacher should think of her or himself as a mathematician, a reader of poetry, an historian or whatever, engaged in communicating craft and knowledge to apprentices. It follows that you cannot train teachers well, until they have been educated into whatever discipline it is that they are to transmit. Of course this requires a conception of mathematicians, literary scholars, historians and others that does not make it a requirement of being such that one should do or have done original work in one’s discipline. But such a conception is needed anyway. Specialist researchers make notable contributions to their disciplines, but they are only one section of the community that engages in and with any particular discipline. Specialists need to make themselves intelligible to and to engage in dialogue with all the members of the community of their discipline.

Understanding why MacIntyre is committed to this position would require a full discussion of his most important works. But the position is sensible, even considered alone. There is some sense in which teaching math is more like doing math than it is like teaching literature, and teaching literature is more like writing than it is like teaching math, and so on. Notice that MacIntyre doesn’t raise the bar too high — he doesn’t require that teachers of subject X be actual researchers in subject X; they need not produce original work. He merely claims that teaching is not its own standalone practice; rather it belongs in its various forms to other practices.

If MacIntyre is correct, then we have an additional reason to abolish schools of education. Lumping all the various kinds of teaching together gives the impression that teaching is a practice unto itself when actually it is more important for future teachers to be immersed in particular disciplines. And, that education is not properly understood as its own practice may even go some ways towards explaining the practical failures described in the CCAP article.

And here’s a quick but thoughtful critique of that summary over at the Quick and the Ed. Its author dispels two common criticisms of the value-added analysis:

1. We shouldn’t criticize value-added analysis simply on the basis that it shows many teachers’ effectiveness as shifting substantially from year to year. It’s possible that teacher effectiveness *does* shift from year to year, for whatever reason.
2. Because this particular method of value-added analysis uses individual students’ own previous scores as a baseline for measuring progress, it does not penalize teachers for having slower students in their classes (at least, the criticism must be more subtle, as a commenter suggests).

Still, the most interesting thing I’ve read on the subject remains cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham’s “3 key factors in teacher evaluation (beyond the hype of value added).” According to him, the key factors are:

1. Figuring out the goals of schooling, and only then crafting assessments to measure teachers’ success at attaining those goals. It’s backwards to assume that whatever we are able to test or assess must be the goal of schooling.
2. Taking into account the ages of students, recognizing that responsibility for students’ learning probably falls more fully on teachers of early elementary schoolers than on those of high schoolers.
3. Remaining cognizant of the limitations of any evaluation system in thoughtfully choosing criteria for firing teachers that balance the costs of keeping bad teachers with the costs of firing good ones.

Each of Willingham’s three key factors gets at what is essentially the major problem with value-added analysis: its results, even if accurate, lead us away from philosophical questions about education and teaching, the answers to which have important practical and policy implications. So I want to elaborate on them, with that in mind.

The goals of schooling are far from noncontroversial. Although most people would agree that proficiency in math and reading are amongst its goals, there is significant disagreement as to what constitutes proficiency and how it ranks in importance as compared to other goals of schooling (character development, socialization, preparation for the workforce — which may or may not require proficiency in math and reading, etc). It’s a mistake to establish teacher evaluation policy based on value-added analyses without having clarified at least some of the goals of schooling and their relative importances. As should be obvious, this value judgment can’t be generated from the value-added analysis itself. Rather, it will be outcome of philosophical discussion regarding the moral value of character development/socialization/preparation for the workforce, the best kind of life for a human to lead, how these responsibilities should be shared between schools and families, etc.

Willingham’s second point, about the ages of students and their respective levels of responsibility for their own learning, also raises moral questions. The discourse surrounding value-added analysis has seemingly taken entirely for granted that teachers ought to be doing all that they can to raise students’ test scores, regardless of their ages. This stands in need of defense. While we may be reluctant to blame 7 or 8 year old students for failing to learn math and reading, it may be appropriate to blame 16 and 17 year olds for failing to progress in those subjects. Some high school teachers may manage to raise teenagers’ test scores significantly, and they will come out looking better than other teachers in the value-added analysis. But, even if raising students’ test scores were of the most pressing importance in their early years, other functions may be more important for teachers to engage in at the high school level — maybe helping students to think about their future educational and career plans, and taking a more laissez faire approach in order to begin acclimating them to the “real world.”

So this ties back into the previous point, about the goals of schooling. If raising math and reading test scores is, literally, the one and only proper goal of schooling, then all teachers should be expected to do so each year. However, there may be many other goals of schooling that are more difficult to test. Teachers will need to make tradeoffs in pursuing these various goals, depending not only on their relative importances but based on what their students are like. Maybe, in some particular class, some of the students are ok at math but have social difficulties. Assuming that social development is one of the goals of schooling, the teacher might reasonably decide to devote more time to group work than to math drills. As a result, the students might progress more slowly in math than in previous years, while having made strides socially that do not show up on any test.

The third key factor, about criteria for firing teachers, raises even more moral questions. There are costs associated both with keeping bad teachers and with firing good teachers. If you keep a bad teacher, many students in his or her classes will fail to learn as much as they could have learned with a better teacher, negatively impacting their future educational outcomes and maybe even significantly harming their life prospects. If you fire a good (or at least adequate) teacher, you unduly harm that teacher and demoralize her colleagues (and the replacement teacher might be an unknown quantity who turns out to be worse). We might privilege students’ well-being over teachers, erring on the side of firing, or we might privilege teachers’ well-being in order to show respect to what many consider one of the most important professions. The methods of economics may tell us how to set teacher firing criteria so as to be financially cost effective, but that’s not necessarily the end of the story from the moral perspective.

None of this to say that value-added analysis is “bad,” or has no legitimate purpose. Its results might be quite accurate and useful to some degree, as is perhaps the case in this Los Angeles situation. But we need to realize how it does — or doesn’t — square with our conception of what education, and teaching, ought to be (and, if we lack such a conception, we need first to develop one). At the end of the day, value-added analysis is a descriptive/evaluative tool, and not a normative one.

There’s also an important followup to the first video: “Re: Learning Styles Don’t Exist.” Here, Willingham emphasizes that there are in fact plenty of individual differences that are relevant to education, such as differences in students’ interests and motivation. Teachers can and should take these legitimate differences into account, just not the mythical “learning style.”

But why do so many people think that there are learning styles, when there aren’t?  First of all, the theory has popular opinion on its side. Willingham reports that 90% of University of Virginia students believe that they exist, for instance. Second, although the theory’s applications to the classroom are misguided in the way the first video suggests, it’s actually true that people can learn things in different ways. Third, and maybe most importantly, confirmation bias leads us to inappropriately interpret ambiguous education situations as confirming the theory.

I’m interested in two further reasons why learning styles theory may have become so popular:

1. It could allow students to deny the existence of genuine individual differences in intelligence ;
2. It could allow students to externalize responsibility for learning failures.

Sometimes teaching is described as if, were the teacher to say or do something magical, it would unleash the immense learning potential of even the least apparently intelligent student. This student allegedly just has some special, particular learning style, a style that is not currently being acknowledged by the teacher. But all this is wrong. Sometimes people are just not good at certain types of activities or at learning certain types of content (we can leave open whether the cause of these differences is nature or nurture).

For example, I am pretty good at learning content from lectures (in fact, I often ignore talk handouts, which I often find distracting). I am not so good at spatial tasks (maps & directions). It is not the case that, had only my geography teachers verbally described the maps to me, I would have learned that spatial information more easily. Rather, there is a genuine individual difference between me and my classmate who has great spatial skills.

But who really wants to hear that they are just kind of bad at something? It can be psychologically more comfortable for a student to externalize responsibility for failures in learning and blame the teacher instead. Learning styles theory facilitates this, because it purports to provide a scientific basis to justify the demand that we receive an education customized just for us. When no such custom education is forthcoming, we can point to learning style theory and complain that the system has failed us.

These are not good reasons to accept learning style theory. Like it or not, there are cognitive individual differences. Like it or not, some of the responsibility for learning lies with you. Learning style theory fails, in that it represents not only apparently sketchy science but also a reification of wishful thinking.

PS — It seems that I have  a bad habit of titling posts with a three word list. I have decided not to resist this tendency, and to add an Oxford comma. I hope I don’t lose readers over this :-)

‘At hope’ kids better than ‘at risk’?: Washington state lawmaker wants to banish negative labels

The bill is motivated by the good-hearted desire for disadvantaged children to see themselves more positively, and for their teachers and others to focus on the children’s potential instead of on their deficits. This change would probably have not merely symbolic importance: psychological experiments provide some reason to believe that the labels we use to describe people actually have effects on their behavior. From a recent Psychology Today blog post:

The long-term consequences of labeling a child like Hannah “smart” or “slow” are profound. In another classic study, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told teachers at an elementary school that some of their students had scored in the top 20% of a test designed to identify “academic bloomers”–students who were expected to enter a period of intense intellectual development over the following year. In fact, the students were selected randomly, and they performed no differently from their unselected peers on a genuine academic test. A year after convincing the teachers that some of their students were due to bloom, Rosenthal and Jacobson returned to the school and administered the same test. The results were astonishing among the younger children: the “bloomers,” who were no different from their peers a year ago, now outperformed their unselected peers by 10–15 IQ points. The teachers fostered the intellectual development of the “bloomers,” producing a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the students who were baselessly expected to bloom actually outperformed their peers.

Opponents to the bill object to spending money and time changing just the language of education policy. Rather, they stress the importance of actual reforms, expenditures, programs, etc. for the benefit of these children, whatever we call them. There is also the predictable charge of this being a manifestation of excessive “political correctness.”

I think that everyone’s sort of correct. The “at hope” language could really prevent children from thinking as badly of themselves as the  “at risk” label might. However, it would almost certainly fail to bring about the “paradigm shift” in education that its proposer has in mind. So the bill’s opponents are right that the label change in itself won’t revolutionize the treatment of the children, and they’re also right that there might be more important places to spend money than on passing the bill and changing the label. But, at the same time, it would cost relatively so little to make the change that it may well be worth it — such a small amount of money would be unlikely to do as much good elsewhere in the education budget.

At the end of the day, though, this raises what is essentially a question about the “tracking” of students, which is just what it sounds like — placing them on different academic paths based on their abilities or apparent potential. There are plenty of problems with tracking, and this case gets at an important one: even when implemented with the best of intentions, dividing up student in this way may have negative social and academic consequences, possibly even to the point of outweighing the advantages. Part of the negative social and academic consequences could arise on account of the particular label used, such as “at risk.” But it seems to me that many of the negative consequences are inherent to the practice of tracking, and cannot be eradicated by renaming the groups. Kids aren’t stupid — they will very quickly figure out who are the smart or privileged ones among them, and begin behaving accordingly. And teachers will, of course, still know who the smart and/or privileged kids are. This will tend to affect their behavior towards the groups students (if subconsciously), which can very easily lead to self-fulfilling prophecies about the “at risk” or “at hope” children doing poorly.

Therefore, the apparently benevolent legislators behind programs for “at risk” or “at hope” children are fighting against powerful human psychological tendencies. They need for children to be separated into groups so that some of them can be given special attention, instruction and resources. Maybe that is theoretically just and good. But, in forming the requisite groups, one also nearly unavoidably forms a hierarchy and opens the door for the marginalization of groups with low status.  It will be difficult to decide in advance whether any particular educational enrichment program’s actual effects will further the goals that its crafters had in mind.

A year and a half ago, I taught an introduction to philosophy course independently. The lectures were in person, but the tests were online because the class only met once per week and I didn’t want to use up a whole week’s worth of lecture for each test. The students were repeatedly instructed, both in class and on the test itself, not to use any sources other than their notes and textbooks.

Upon grading the first test, I discovered that a few students had copied and pasted answers or parts of answers directly from Wikipedia and Yahoo! answers. This was very disappointing, and I dreaded having to deal with the situation. I arranged times to speak with the students, planning to deal with them pretty harshly.

However, when I spoke to them, I was surprised by what I heard. At least two of them seemed kind of baffled that what they had done was wrong, as if they didn’t know that it constituted plagiarism and/or as if they had done the copying and pasting totally unthinkingly. This fit with the fact that the rest of their tests were quite good — there was no need for these students to cheat out of fear of failing. It seems that, in today’s internet culture, it didn’t even occur to them that there could be anything wrong with the casual, undocumented use of online sources.

I was, and continue to be, torn about what to do in these cases. On the one hand, I did plainly forbid the use of other sources in the test’s instructions. Taking a test constitutes tacit consent to its terms, and I would have been well within my rights to give the students a zero on the test, or worse.

On the other hand, though, I’m sympathetic to these students on account of the fact that they appear not ever to have had a respect for academic honesty and a crippling fear of accidental plagiarism instilled into them. Babies don’t pop out knowing about plagiarism, after all. Given the sorry state of education, many of my students probably never learned about plagiarism — what counts as plagiarism, how to cite things properly, what the consequences of committing it can be. And if they didn’t have the relevant knowledge, then there is a case to be made that they are less than fully responsible for their acts of plagiarism.

On the other hand (you have three hands, right?), a lack of knowledge concerning plagiarism doesn’t immediately imply that these students have no responsibility for their acts. They could be responsible for not taking the initiative to learn about plagiarism on their own, such as by reading the whole student handbook or the materials made available on the school’s library’s website. This is a kind of second-order responsibility; failing to take these steps reveals a blameworthy deficit of concern for the academic terms to which one has agreed and amounts to a form of negligence.

Furthermore, a lack of knowledge concerning plagiarism also doesn’t immediately imply that the students ought not to be punished for acts of plagiarism. Punishments, blameworthiness, and responsibility are interrelated in complicated and controversial ways. Sometimes there are prudential or moral reasons not to punish someone who is responsible for a bad act and blameworthy for it (punishment would be too expensive, or the person is now old and sickly, or not punishing the person would somehow or other maximize utility). And sometimes there are prudential or moral reasons to punish someone who was not fully responsible for a bad act, and/or who is not properly blameworthy for it. In the plagiarism case, it’s very difficult to tell who did or didn’t know what constitutes plagiarism or that plagiarism is wrong. Maybe it is better to send a message that there is “zero tolerance” for plagiarism of any kind — willful, ignorant, or willfully ignorant. This has the added benefit of saving teachers all the time and trouble of deliberating endlessly about the particulars of a plagiarism incident.

Yet, I remain undecided on this kind of case. Plagiarism is obviously unacceptable, but the circumstances surrounding can differ widely and seem to matter. I hope that in the future, I either never encounter plagiarism again (fat chance) or that it is so egregious that I can punish it without qualms (but isn’t that kind of a weird thing to hope for?)

First, I’ll backtrack just a little and say that there is a meaningful respect in which you “cheat yourself” when you cheat. Many people agree that there is something intrinsically valuable about an education, apart from its value as a means to a career and a livelihood. As such, in cheating, you may keep yourself from life-enriching educational opportunities that would have had intrinsic value. The line between prudence and morality is not firm or easily defined, however, so it may be difficult to tell whether or not the “cheating yourself” line is more of a distinctively moral aphorism or more of an appeal to a students’ self-interest. You can read my last post as a defense of the latter interpretation. I suspect that people provide this advice to students as a kind of backup motivation for not cheating, in the case that they don’t see the moral force of other-oriented considerations, or just don’t care.

But here are some of those other-oriented considerations, ordered from those typically involving the most to the least harm:

1. Your fellow students: These are the people who you harm the most when you cheat on a test or on a paper. Even though your professor may not deliberately “curve” grades, he or she surely grades at least somewhat relatively to the abilities and performance of the class. It is very common for a professor to look over the test or papers to get a feel for them before marking any scores. Particularly in a small class, one or two cheaters could skew the grades all by themselves. Further, as Adam notes in this comment, enough cheating can ultimately end up devaluing diplomas. Finally, even if your cheating does not affect anyone else’s grade or diploma, the existence of cheaters negatively affects all students via the effects it has on your teacher (more on this below).
2. Your teacher: I had no idea of how much cheating (including plagiarizing) harms teachers until I personally began teaching about two years ago. Previously, I figured that it would be kind of fun to catch cheaters and punish them mercilessly. Actually, it hasn’t been like that at all, at least in my experience. I have come to dread reading any work that students have done at home, for fear of finding plagiarism. When I copy and paste a sentence of a student’s work into Google, I brace myself for the results. I didn’t really have an awesome “gotcha!” feeling when I caught someone with a crib sheet during a test. Because cheating and plagiarism happen with quite some frequency, I now approach all students as potential cheaters and must investigate all students’ work (perversely, especially the best work) for evidence of academic dishonesty. This attitude is detrimental to the relationship that teachers ideally ought to have with students: one marked by cooperation, congeniality, goodwill and mutual respect. Beyond a teacher personally being harmed in having to play cheating detective and then deal with the offenders, the negative effects on a teacher can easily trickle back down to the students in changing the way they are treated by a teacher for the worse.
3. The author: Honestly, I doubt that authors whose work has been plagiarized are often materially or substantially harmed by the plagiarism. In the kind of courses I’ve taught (critical thinking, intro to philosophy, biomedical ethics), very few of the students are headed for academia, and the assignments are not of the type that one could go on to publish. But harm to authors can and does occur, probably mostly when one academic plagiarizes work from a lesser known academic and gets all the credit for it.

I’d really like to hear from anyone else who has teaching experience, either to confirm or disconfirm (2) above.

Also, there are probably even more reasons why cheating is wrong. I want to hear them!

First up: the “you’re only cheating yourself” perspective on academic dishonesty

Two questions:

1. Does this perspective adequately explain the badness/wrongness of cheating?

2. Does this perspective adequately explain why we enforce academic dishonesty policies?

“You’re only cheating yourself” might explain one aspect of the badness of cheating, albeit in an awkward way. Ordinarily, “cheating” is used to express an act involving fraud or deceit. While academic cheating does involve fraud or deceit, they are not directed towards oneself, as the saying suggests. (And, while it is possible to deceive oneself, cheating and plagiarism are not usually accurately described as self-deceit). Other bad features of cheating do affect oneself, though: cheating (and plagiarism) involve basically telling a lie about the origin of one’s work, and this threatens a person’s integrity.  It also cheapens the value of a student’s word, as everyone at least implicitly agrees to some academic misconduct policy by enrolling in courses at a college. But of course, it is much catchier to say “you’re only cheating yourself” than “you’re only harming yourself,” for instance.

But the reformulation of “you’re only harming yourself” starts to make clear what’s wrong with the “you’re only cheating yourself” perspective on academic misconduct — it’s plainly false. While there surely is some sense in which you are cheating/harming yourself, there are also plenty of other people you could be harming, typically including but not limited to the author(s) from whom you stole work and your teacher who has to deal with the problem.

So basically, “you’re only cheating yourself” tries to make cheating look like it’s not in your self-interest and therefore is an imprudent thing to do. But, beyond being imprudent, cheating is typically immoral. As such, “you’re only cheating yourself” provides only an incomplete account of the badness/wrongness of cheating.

But let’s just pretend that “you’re only cheating yourself” were true, and that cheating does not harm anyone other than yourself. It would still be a misguided perspective to hold on cheating, because it can’t convincingly explain why anti-cheating policies are enforced. After all, students do tons of things that are inconsistent with fulfilling their academic potential: drinking too much, not paying attention in class, skimming or skipping assigned readings, etc. Cheating is only one among many such practices, and it is not obviously worse in terms of imprudence or “cheating yourself.“Maybe you’re a student who conscientiously comes to class and reads the textbook, but you’re having trouble writing one little section of a paper and so you plagiarize it. Or, you’ve studied well but you draw a blank on an important test question and so you cheat off of your neighbor. Why are these academic misconduct scenarios necessarily any morally worse than a person who always spaces out or falls asleep in class? In terms of harms to oneself, they are actually better.

It would be seriously and inconsistently paternalistic to enforce academic misconduct policies on the grounds that a student is cheating herself, while not enforcing all other similarly self-harmful student behaviors. Enforcement only makes sense on the assumption that some other people are harmed or have their rights violated when you cheat. More on this next time.

Of course, my mind immediately snapped to Teachers’ Appreciation Day/Week, which is coming up soon, actually. Would the Facebook friend be as quick to reject that holiday, on the grounds that teachers are also merely doing their jobs? Fully expecting to get flamed, I made a comment to this effect on the Facebook thread. Oh no, she replied, teachers deserve the extra recognition because they are so badly underappreciated, underpaid, and they “make us who we are today.”

Well this is where I almost spat my drink at my monitor. I have no doubt that these sentiments are very, very widely held. But they are unjustified, or at least are very hasty generalizations. Contrary to popular belief, teachers on the whole are not in fact paid badly at all. The Cato Institute has done research in this area; see especially this report and this post. And teachers do “make us who we are today” — but “who we are today” is unfortunately a population whose members often don’t read, write, or do math sufficiently well even to carry out basic life activities, and “who we are today” is a country that spends more on education than ever before — with no apparent payoff, except to teachers and other bureaucrats.

And, just on a personal note,  I think I’d rather be the person who I would have been in the absence of about 1/3 of the teachers I had in K-12. Surprisingly many of them were not only incompetent, but petty, power-hungry, and even vindictive. I remain angry and bitter about those damaging years, and it’s part of why I’m so interested in education now (Maybe I’ll write a whole post on my anger and bitterness another time). But, because it was a wealthy area, most of the students did just fine academically — despite these bad teachers, not because of them. And, every year, the parents were coughing up expensive gifts and gift certificates for the poor, underappreciated teachers. I reckon that many of the teachers who truly deserve some extra appreciation — those who work with severely underprivileged students, those whose schools are unsafe, those who don’t make a decent living — are those who are, sadly, the least likely to receive it, holiday or not.

So I don’t know what to make of this situation. Obviously, I’m not a big fan of Teachers’ Appreciation Day (in fact, it makes me stabby). But, then, are both Administrative Professionals’ Day and Teachers’ Appreciation Day unjustified? Or is there some important difference between the two professions that I’m overlooking? The intentions are probably good — to draw attention and recognition to female-gendered, often marginalized lines of work. But perhaps these holidays are now past their prime. If you know an administrative professional or a teacher who is genuinely exceptional, you should thank him or her on your own time and on your own way. To suggest that all of these professionals are worthy of recognition and rewards just for existing is not fair to the ones who truly are.