University Rankings

Malcolm Gladwell has a terrific article in the most recent New Yorker on college ratings in the United States. Gladwell shows quite conclusively that the ratings are largely determined by the individuals and companies that produce them. The categories used turn out to be far more subjective and therefore subject to the whims and prejudices of the rankers than previously thought. Ratings in general have been a destructive means of differentiation between different universities and colleges in Canada. The Maclean’s (one of Canada’s few national magazines) survey which is roughly equivalent to the US News and World Report survey uses categories from the experiences of campus life to quality of teaching that cannot and should not be summarized in a simple question and answer format. Even though both magazines claim that they do a great deal of research, have you ever seen questions and categories that relate more directly to curricula within the humanities? How about a question about whether students have the chance to spend some time being creative outside of the context of demands largely defined by the credit system? The various categories used for the surveys could be described as ‘soft.’ How much money comes in for research? (This will inevitably favor the large universities and always does.) Here is a quote that describes one of the categories:

STUDENTS & CLASSES (20 per cent of final score) Maclean’s collects data on the success of the student body at winning national academic awards (weighted 10 per cent) over the previous five years. The list covers 40 fellowship and prize programs, encompassing more than 18,000 individual awards from 2005 through 2009. The count includes such prestigious awards as the Rhodes scholarships and the Fulbright awards, as well as scholarships from professional associations and the three federal granting agencies. Each university’s total of student awards is divided by its number of full-time students, yielding a count of awards relative to each institution’s size.

When you go through the award winners the large universities always garner the most not only because of their student numbers, but also because they have an infrastructure to support and seek out awards. This would not necessarily be a bad thing were it not for the fact that the “student” category is so important to the overall placing of the school. Or take another category entitled, faculty. Awards and research monies are tallied and even though these are adjusted to FTE (full time students) size, inevitably large universities gather in the most money. The problem as Gladwell so carefully explains, is that comparisons between large and small schools are fraught with problems not the least of which is that it is difficult to measure the impact of an institution on its faculty, students and community without in-depth research in each community. “The first difficulty with rankings is that it can be surprisingly hard to measure the variable you want to rank— even in cases where that variable seems perfectly objective.” (New Yorker of Feb 14 and 21, 2011 p. 70) Without going into too much more detail, weighting of different categories is ultimately a subjective choice.

Ironically, the large institutions all follow and devote themselves to rankings which have become the holy grail upon which an institution’s status stands or falls. This has also led governments and policymakers into centralizing the majority of their funding with institutions that are “the best.” I will let Gladwell have the last word:

There is no right answer to how much weight a ranking system should give to these two competing values (efficacy and selectivity). “It’s a matter of which educational model you value more.” (p. 74)

Learning in the 21st Century (Part Three)

I recently had the privilege of talking to a group of parents about the culture of schools and the education that their children were receiving during what is clearly a transitional phase in the history of education.

Many of the parents were very worried about their children and with some justification. This was a boy’s high school and the parents were concerned that their sons were spending an inordinate amount of time on computers as well as playing video games. I put up a slide with the words moral panic written in bold and this seemed to describe their feelings — a combination of hostility, fear and acceptance.

However, my intention in putting up the slide was not to reinforce the moral panic that they were feeling, but rather to explore the implications of the shifting cultural space now occupied by a generation that lives within the “net.”

Distinctions between online and offline life are no longer relevant nor are they germane to the way people learn. The continuum of relationships set up through mediated environments will only become more complex as societies explore the many layers of information and knowledge that now define not only relations among people but also among societies.

We are living within a period of history that is not dissimilar to the massive changes experienced during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. These changes were as much a product of scientific invention as they were of fundamental social change. In fact, a key feature of that period was the advent of real scientific solutions to previously difficult challenges. At the same time, many old ways of thinking had to change as science gave empirical explanations for what had hitherto been thinking based on religion or superstition. 

Social and cultural changes ‘dislocate’ societies in various and often-unpredictable ways. For example, the Internet makes schools not so much centres of learning, as social spaces for the exploration of relationships, which may include immersion in particular disciplines but not in the manner to which we have become accustomed over the last fifty years. The issue is not only the availability of numerous venues for learning, but also comes down to the choices students make and the emphasis they place on learning experiences in different places.  

As John Falk and Lynn Dierking emphasize in a recent and brilliant article in American Scientist, (Nov-Dec 2010 issue) students spend only five percent of their lives in the classroom and learn most of what they know about the sciences outside the classroom. “We contend that a major educational advantage enjoyed by the U.S. relative to the rest of the world is its vibrant free-choice science learning landscape—a landscape filled with a vast array of digital resources, educational television and radio, science, museums, zoos, aquariums, national parks, community activities such as 4-H and scouting and many other scientifically enriching enterprises.” (p. 486)

Since Falk and Dierking are talking about K-12 as well as post-secondary, it would not be too hard to extrapolate an even lower percentage of university students for whom the classroom is the main venue for learning. This raises interesting issues for policymakers who have focused all their efforts on grading and testing while not recognizing that informal modes of learning are the dominant mode of learning.

I believe that parents are worried because mediated environments can lessen social interaction and can decrease if not eliminate the qualities of everyday conversation so essential to our well being. They are also worried because the information on digital culture is itself so contradictory. Statistics appear everyday from varying sources that suggest a whole variety of impacts caused by the swift appropriation of the Internet for nearly everything we do on an everyday basis. This is so to speak more of a source for the ‘panic’ than the actual engagement of children and adults with digital experiences.

In part four, I will look into the issues of moral panic and digital culture in greater detail with an emphasis on the importance of this discussion for learning and education.  

Learning in the 21st Century (Part Two)

One of the recurring themes in discussions about learning and education is that our post-secondary institutions are always to varying degrees on the verge of decline or even death. “The American Liberal Arts College died today after a prolonged illness. It was 226 years old.” (Washington, D.C., 2 July 1862) Quoted in the Winter 1971 edition of the History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4 p. 339.

In 1862, colleges in the US shifted from a skills orientation to broader curricula more concerned with social, economic, artistic and cultural issues than traditional approaches to job-ready training. It is important to remember that in the 19^th century it was not necessary to go (as Richard Hofstadter has put it) “…to college to become a doctor, lawyer, or even a teacher, much less a successful politician or businessman….Higher education was far more a luxury, much less a utility, than it is today.” (History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4 p. 340)

The key word in what Hofstadter says is “utility.” Today, in our rush to promote the utility of education, we have reduced learning to a series of “courses” defined in larger measure by a structure that privileges speed over gradualism. Intuitively, learners know that new knowledge cannot be ‘acquired’ through the simple consumption of information. Intuitively, teachers know that tending to the emotional intelligence and needs of their students is perhaps more important than promoting rote learning. Nevertheless, schools try to squeeze learning into narrow disciplinary boundaries. So much of the structure of schools works against change including the fact that hiring of new teachers is still defined by discipline.   

When economies go into crisis, policymakers look to schools to solve the immediate challenges of unemployment and thereby raise expectations that schools will simply ‘produce’ the workers needed to solve the economic challenges. This is also why the for-profit sector in education has become so large because they play into the fears learners have that they will not be employed unless they have specific skills needed for specific jobs. Policymakers amplify this even further by linking funding for public institutions to labour market data that is often years behind the economy itself.

In a globalized environment, it is increasingly difficult to predict economic direction and to manage complexity. Schools should be the places where we encourage complex thinking and doing, creating and collaborating. Instead, we rush to both prove the value of education and its outcomes. In the process, we have created straightjackets that limit invention, innovation and crucially the human imagination from flourishing and thereby actually decrease the opportunities for change and impact.

Our educational institutions are not dying, although some will disappear. The rhetoric around their value has become embedded in the fabric of Western democracies. The challenge precisely is to understand how that value can be transformed to reflect and enhance the ability of learners to generate, shape and contribute to knowledge-based societies.

Part Three will examine some of the central characteristics of the knowledge society and whether schools are in fact the pivot for the new digital era.

Learning in the 21st Century (First of a series)

These days there are many documents and reports circulating about 21^st Century learning and outcomes. For example, here is a classic programmatic statement: “Within the context of core knowledge instruction, students must also learn the essential skills for success in today’s world, such as critical thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration.” 

BUT, and it is a big but, this has always been the ambition of most schools, most teachers and most governments. Who doesn’t want their students to be good communicators? Would any school suggest that problem solving is unimportant? Collaboration has always been celebrated as essential to learning.

So, is this just rhetoric? Are these just convenient descriptors without any real content or are they essential and new aspects of the learning process?

Context is crucial here. Can schools built on a mid-twentieth century industrial model of education promote critical thinking in the 21^st century?

Can twenty to forty students sitting in a classroom develop the insights needed to meet and challenge not only their own points of view, but also those of others?

In 1828, the Yale Report (a foundational document in the history of American education) appeared and here is a brief quote from page six: “From different quarters, we have heard the suggestion that our colleges must be new-modeled; that they are not adapted to the spirit and wants of the age; that they will soon be deserted unless they are better accommodated to the business character of the nation.”

Sound familiar? Have our schools ever been able to meet the needs of the age? I doubt it. More often than not education and learning are sources of dispute, mediators in the culture wars or progenitors of conflict. These are not bad characteristics, it is just that learning, for better or worse is not about information, schools or responding to what teachers suggest or talk about. The social space of schools is much like social media, places of conversation where the unintended outcome is often far more important than any of the artifice used to frame conversations in a specific way.

The hubris of educational institutions is that they believe they are central to the lives of their students and are the hubs around which learning takes place. For the most part, learning is neither clear (as to intent — you may want to learn, but everything from the emotional state that you are in to the classmates and teachers you have muddy the waters) nor is it linear. The lack of linearity drives policymakers crazy. They have forgotten of course that play is central to learning and deficiencies in the understanding of information and knowledge cannot so easily be cajoled into positive outcomes. In fact, the drive to constrain the inherently chaotic nature of learning leads to examinations and modes of evaluation that measure not what has been learned, but how effectively students can play the outcomes games required of them.

Part Two will examine the specifics of outcomes and the expectations of policymakers.