What's in a degree?

President Obama was the latest to publicly question the value of majoring in art history in remarks made January 30^th in Wisconsin. He said,

“…a lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career.  But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.  Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree -- I love art history.  (Laughter.)  So I don't want to get a bunch of emails from everybody.  (Laughter.)  I'm just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need.”  (Applause.)

Making a good living seems to be the nation’s priority right now as we watch the middle class circle the drain, and the uber-rich plot even more political and financial control over what are clearly dwindling resources. Where there might once have been public outrage at the suggestion that institutions of higher education should be judged on the salaries of graduates, now we even have accountability schemes that will judge those institutions on the job performance and satisfaction with professional training of graduates three years after graduation. (See my previous blog post about this happening in my field of teacher education).

The defensive responses to attacks on the value of a liberal arts education are often to justify its worth in a lucrative field. Why study music? It makes you smarter in math. For example, here’s the response from Linda Downs of the College Art Association to Obama’s jab at art history:

It is worth remembering that many of the nation’s most important innovators, in fields including high technology, business, and even military service, have degrees in the humanities. Humanities graduates play leading roles in corporations, engineering, international relations, government, and many other fields where their skills and creating thinking play a critical role. Let’s not forget that education across a broad spectrum is essential to develop the skills and imagination that will enable future generations to create and take advantage of new jobs and employment opportunities of all sorts.

I don’t want to dwell on this sorry state of things too much as others have done a very nice job picking apart these arguments and political rhetoric. (See for example this excellent article by Virginia Postrel). Instead, I thought I’d share how my art history and Italian double major in college, followed by my graduate degree from Syracuse University’s Florence program in Renaissance Art, have helped shape me into the professor I am today, teaching future early childhood and elementary teachers. First, two stories to capture a glimpse into my formative experiences:

It’s the first day of a seminar on the history of prints in my senior year at Wellesley College. My professor, Nia Janis, has prepared works from the college museum’s collection that are covered in brown paper save for a square inch window that reveals a piece of the print’s surface. We are given the task of categorizing and analyzing the marks we find. This careful, up close looking paves the way for learning to understand the range of techniques and surface effects that can be achieved with different types of printmaking. I have never forgotten this important idea that looking closely at something is as important as looking more broadly. It was to become a foundational idea for the work I did in interactional ethnography in my dissertation on how teachers manage dilemmas in the classroom.

I am with my fellow graduate students in Florence, Italy. It’s fairly typical to have class in a church or museum, and on this day we are meeting at the Basilica di S. Maria del Carmine. We enter the Cappella Brancacci to see the first bits of restoration with our professor, Umberto Baldini. He excitedly shows us the newly discovered fresco fragments, two heads each inside a round frame, that were behind an altar in the center of the chapel. One, he explains, is clearly by the teacher, Masolino. The other is clearly by Masaccio, his apprentice.

Masaccio

Masolino

This discovery, he explains, is important for two reasons. First, the vivid colors are intact having been protected by the tomb from years of smoke and soot, and provide a basis for knowing how to clean the fresco cycle. Second, like a key to a puzzle, they show that the two artists, whose work was later completed by Filippino Lippi, intentionally worked for a balance of their individual contributions between the scenes. Art historians had previously thought that when Masolino left for Hungary, Masaccio simply took over the commission. Aside from the sheer thrill of being up on scaffolding, literally touching the plaster where one giornata connected to the next, and seeing the patches of cleaned surface revealing the vivid colors underneath the dirt, I learned that art history is a living, breathing, changing thing built on discoveries of clues to the past.  

A fresco detail by Masaccio showing the giornate lines

For my thesis, I investigated the restorations of the frescoes on the wall facing the Maesta’ in the Palazzo Civico of Siena. Gordan Moran, an American living in Florence, together with his friend Michael Mallory, had been working on a problematic attribution to Simone Martini of the fresco known as Guido Riccio at the Siege of Montemassi. They recounted their tireless work on this enigma in a 1991 article, saying the story

concerns far more than red-faced art historians, an outraged city government, and reluctance to face the distinct possibility that parts of textbooks and guidebooks will have to be revised. More important are the issues of scholarly ethics, censorship, and the possible withholding and even destruction of crucial evidence.

The controversy over Guido Riccio has never been fully resolved in any sort of official way, although many agree with Moran and Mallory. I learned from my experience studying the problem of Guido Riccio that politics has a way of shaping knowledge, and that too was a formative lesson.

In my work as a teacher educator, I constantly have to think about issues that surfaced for me in those formative years of study. How do we really learn, and not just memorize, only to forget? How is history the “imaginative reconstruction of the past” in the words of educational historian Lawrence Cremin? Why is it important to continually revisit the events of the past to understand the present? What is it about politics and power that shapes the way we see the world and understand it? Why must we value depth as well as breadth, and why do we need specialized expertise to understand our world? My time studying art history in college and the Syracuse Florence program shaped my thinking and expanded my mind. For that, I am forever grateful.

Teacher Preparation Standards Add New Outcomes

The new standards for accrediting teacher preparation programs have just been adopted by the Board of Directors of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) to ensure that candidates completing programs are “classroom-ready” and can demonstrate they have a positive impact on student learning. This latter quality seems a reasonable goal for a new teacher, and there is careful language about using multiple measures of valid and reliable data that is spelled out to include ways of measuring growth over time. The first three standards all address what happens during the program, but standard four is a new addition, an attempt to measure candidates’ effectiveness and success in their careers, and their satisfaction with their professional preparation, once they have graduated and have been teaching in full time jobs. It’s going to mean that institutions will have to do more than keep a list of alumni, they will have to continue to gather complex data and create survey instruments, following graduates even when they move out of state.

Let’s just make an analogy for a moment. Let’s say we imagine two doctors who finish medical school, pass the board exams, and get full time jobs in the emergency rooms of hospitals. One works in a large city ER, while the other is in a suburban ER. The medical school will be judged on the health records of the patients of these two doctors, as well as their satisfaction with their education. The city ER doctor has twice the patients of the other doctor, horrible working conditions, constant stress from treating gunshot and stab wound victims related to gang activity, and feels betrayed by her medical education that did not prepare her for this reality. She eventually quits. The other doctor enjoys an efficiently run hospital with well-trained colleagues, and the personal rewards of helping his patients get immediate care and treatment, and saving lives. He gives high marks on a survey measuring his satisfaction with his medical education. The medical school is penalized in the case of the ER doctor, and rewarded in the case of the other doctor. As cases like this accumulate, the program shifts from encouraging and preparing doctors to work in settings like the first one to creating more opportunities for doctors to go to jobs like the second one. How might such a trend negatively impact the health of patients?

Now let’s imagine a case of two teachers. They are from the same institution, and are enrolled in masters programs that lead to dual certification in students with disabilities. The first teacher is getting certified in early childhood, the second teacher in secondary mathematics. They both graduate with honors, pass the state exams with high scores, and find full time jobs. The first is employed in a large city district in a first grade inclusion classroom in a high poverty school. Her students are not old enough for state tests, so the first problem is what will be the valid measures of this teacher’s impact on her students’ learning? How can we control for absenteeism, student turnover, neglect or abuse in the home, the effects of homelessness, hunger, and other common conditions of poverty? What of the effect of working conditions on this teacher, such as a large class size, stress, lack of resources or support, staff and administrative turnover? How will we know if she uses harsh punishments to “manage” poor behavior? Suppose she has poor evaluations from her principal because her students often misbehave and are not reading and writing well enough. When asked to rate her teacher preparation program in a survey, she gives low marks because she feels she was not prepared for the realities of her current position. After two years, she quits.

The other teacher gets a job in a suburban district teaching special education classes to ninth graders who are way behind and hate math. Their scores from previous state tests are very low. This teacher uses computer programs to provide remediation, and rewards students frequently with prizes, candy, free time and pizza parties to improve their attitudes. Although they love the teacher and their test scores do go up a little, they really haven’t improved their knowledge or skills enough to handle high school level algebra. The teacher does have positive evaluations from the principal because of the perception that students are well behaved, participate, and make progress on the computer programs. This teacher gets tenure and gives high marks to the institution that prepared him.

The teacher preparation program is penalized for not meeting the requirements of standard four in the case of the first teacher, and rewarded for meeting them in the case of the second. As cases like this accumulate, the institution shifts focus from encouraging and preparing teachers like the first one to preparing more teachers like the second one. Over time, the focus in teacher preparation is on effectiveness, defined as performance on standardized tests by the teacher’s students, as the singular measure of teacher quality, and concerns for how teachers attend to moral dimensions of learning, or to issues of diversity, diminish. How might such a trend negatively impact learning for all students?

So although it may seem reasonable to say that institutions preparing teachers should be held accountable for the outcomes of that preparation, there are simply too many factors outside the control of the institution for that to be a reasonable requirement, at least in the way it has been designed in the CAEP standards. The other big problem, which underlies so much of what is wrong with educational policy, is the misuse of standardized testing to measure things it was not designed to measure. Serious concerns have been raised about the use of value-added measures (VAMs) seeking to capture student growth over time, and using those scores as a heavy consideration in rating teachers and granting tenure (see this 2011 letter from top experts to the New York State Regents for example). Now these teacher preparation standards are asking even more of the VAMs, and it is quite an unreasonable and dangerous leap to say they are valid measures of the quality of teacher preparation programs.
We are engrossed in a policy world in teacher education that doesn’t think through the unintended consequences of making changes to standards and reporting requirements of institutions.  Extant research on the statistical invalidity of using value-added measures of student learning and growth to evaluate teachers, schools, and programs is ignored.  There is little or no discussion of the moral implications of these policy decisions, and there is no way to know whether the ends to means are achieved in defensible ways or through cheating and gaming the system. As Diane Ravitch has said, “Test-based accountability encourages a slew of negative behaviors.” It also creates burdensome and costly administrative requirements to collect and analyze data that do little to promote meaningful reforms to programs and improve how and what teacher educators teach their students. These standards create requirements that will suck time and money away from teacher preparation institutions, and in teaching, time and money are precious resources that should be carefully protected and closely monitored.