Down the tubes, that’s where it’s going. Education, I mean. Especially higher education. And by extension, all that we know as America the Beautiful is in the toilet, too.
Mercifully I don’t have to teach in the lower grades, where administrators and taxpayers feel teachers should work for poor pay in worse working conditions and are reviled for daring to organize. Instead, along with legions of my colleagues, I get to teach the products of those conditions.
Here’s what’s on the wind at the Great Desert University: At a recent college meeting, faculty were informed that the university plans to eliminate as many faculty associates as possible.
“Faculty associates” are grossly underpaid part-timers, desperate enough to take contract work with no benefits and, given the de facto workload, at less than minimum wages. When I was teaching at GDU in a full-time adjunct position with a modest salary and benefits, I taught eight sections a year. For what my salary and benefits cost the university, GDU could have hired FAs to teach eighteen sections, and still had $945 left over. Most adjuncts teach the required lower-division scutwork courses, especially freshman composition, a hugely work-intensive writing course.
So, a large portion of the FAs are to go, but some will remain. Those who do remain will be required to teach a hundred and fifty students. That’s 75 students per writing course, since GDU limits part-timers to two sections per semester. A full-time adjunct, who teaches four-and-four, would be teaching three hundred students each semester in writing-intensive L-1 courses.
By way of pretending to accomplish this impossible task, the university will recruit undergraduate students to work as “peer reviewers.” These kids, whose job will be to “review” but not to grade papers, will be trained by the director of composition. In other words, they will not be true teaching assistants, but just one more responsibility for the adjunct to have to deal with.
One full-time adjunct on the West campus has already announced she’s walking, unemployment being a far more attractive option than slave labor of this magnitude. She told friends the work was crushing her…and that was before this announcement came down.
Such a short-sighted and merciless scheme came about because the state’s extreme right-wing legislature, while it’s busily engaged in passing laws that engender one costly lawsuit after another, in suing the federal government over health-care reform, and in fulminating that President Obama should prove (to their satisfaction) that he was born in the U.S., is killing the beast by cutting education funds to virtually nil. State funding for the community colleges was cut 85 percent this year, and you can be sure they’ll do something similar next year.
Students come into my classes from the public high schools better prepared (maybe) than they were a dozen years ago, but only by dint of ridiculous standardized tests that put them into ticky-tacky boxes so they all come out looking just the same. They can recite a few facts and they can organize a standardized three-paragraph or five-paragraph essay. But they still can’t formulate a logical sequence of thoughts on their own, they still can’t discern a reliable fact from raw baloney, and they have become artists at gaming the system.
This semester I decided that instead of knocking myself out riding herd on two or three dozen learning exercises and quizzes, I would take a leaf out of the University of Phoenix’s book: don’t grade the things. The UofP, according to a friend who teaches there, inflicts the same kinds of quizzoids and exercises on its lower-division comp/communication students that I do, with the same purpose: to focus attention on the high points of reading and lecture material. But instead of motivating students to do these exercises by paying them in the currency of the classroom (grades), the UofP tells them that the exercises are there for the students’ benefit. If you want a decent grade in the course, students are advised, you’ll do the exercises. If you don’t do them, you run the risk of getting lower scores on the assignments that are graded. And then: the only graded assignments are the actual, required writings.
For the English 102 sections, this cuts my workload from 23 graded assignments to nine. I’m still scoring drafts and peer reviews, since we’re required to teach writing as a “recursive process.” Drafting and peer reviewing is part and parcel of this theory of composition pedagogy. If that were not the case, making the students responsible for their own learning process would cut my workload to three graded assignments.
Okay, so this semester we’re seeing exactly how the new strategy works. Over the weekend I reviewed their responses to an exercise asking them to apply some new knowledge (i.e., stuff they should’ve learned in the fourth grade but didn’t) to some specific examples.
The exercise went online in one of Blackboard’s pseudo-blogs, which allow students to post material in a format that appears on the instructor’s end as long toilet-paper pages containing everyone’s work. The program eliminates the endlessly time-consuming task of downloading, opening, and re-uploading file after file after file. They can see each other’s work in the “blogs”; BB just changed providers for this program, and I can’t find any way to block students from viewing other students’ posts (as the previous program would do). I’m told it would do this, but apparently it won’t do it retroactively in “blogs” that were created before the program was {snark!} “updated.”
Of 50 students, 27 posted responses. And get this: a bunch of them cheated!
No joke. They copied each others’ work and posted it, for an assignment that bore NO CREDIT.
How do I know?
They copied and pasted the same typos. As in “the car cab goes from zero to 60….” They meant can, not cab. Or at least, the person who first wrote it meant that.
And how did they do on the fourth-grade work with which they were presented? Well, they had 20 questions. One of these snared 17 wrong answers from students (out of 27 respondents!). One had 13 wrong answers, and two had 12. These figures aren’t surprising, considering that they’re copying and pasting each others’ errors. What is surprising is that as they’re copying and pasting, they don’t spot typos and obvious bêtises. The only thing you can conclude is that a significant number of them aren’t even looking at what they’re pasting.
Cheating at solitaire…
Well, my friends. Those of you who work in HR, who run businesses, or who expect to do so in the future will soon have these fine young job applicants at your doorstep.
And that is why the future of America looks dimmer and dimmer.
Did you know that only 37 percent of white Americans have bachelor’s degrees? Those who do are getting them on the strength of this kind of work. By short-changing our schools, colleges, and universities, we’re short-changing ourselves and short-changing our country.
We are, in a word, screwed.
I only skimmed this–too depressing to read carefully. I’ve gotten papers from majors in upper level courses with big chunks copied and pasted. And no, the students hadn’t read what they turned in. (I asked a student why there was a 7 page plagiarized section in the midst of a 3 page paper: “Was it 7 pages?” he said!)
As for adjuncts: I think this is how tenure is going to end: not with the abolition of tenure, but tenure for a very, very few. Most courses will be taught by adjuncts with the required terminal degree.
@ frugalscholar: Yes, I agree: at least in our generation, a few tenured people will remain (after they’re gone, though, I think that will be the end of tenure).
If, however, all institutions of higher ed follow the UofP model, staffing virtually all courses with adjuncts earning less than minimum wage with no benefits, there won’t be anyone left with the terminal degree.
Right now, English and history departments are starving for graduate students. Why on earth would you spend six or eight years pursuing a Ph.D. when that is the shape of your future? It would be madly self-destructive. Anyone with an ounce of sanity and common sense would get an AA in radiology or respiratory therapy, land a job that will put food on the table, and use the time off work — which will not be filled from before dawn to after midnight with grading student papers — to read and write on their own.
I guess I don’t understand how the ‘right-wing’ legislature is completely to blame here. I have seen this blog take a political stance of this nature more than once and I guess that sort of bothers me a bit. Not because of any particular leanings that I might have, but because it’s playing right into the entire ‘draw the line in the sand’ party politics that has devolved this nation’s politics over the past couple of decades. The ‘blame game’ and ‘everybody vote on party lines’ haven’t gotten us anywhere, so I don’t see where you assigning blame and blaming along political lines is going to accomplish anything.
What I see, when I think of Arizona, is a state that’s probably just as screwed as Michigan is right now (where I live). Both states have seen job loss. Both have seen revenue loss due to decimated home values. Both spent most of the last decade, before the recession hit, not ever believing that the good times could end, so no rainy day funds were built, no contingencies were put into place, and no worst case scenarios were put into place.
From the sounds of it, the money simply isn’t there. Now are there better ways to divvy up the shrinking pot? Probably. Education should be a higher priority, I truly believe that, and there are most likely other areas that could be affected to keep educational funding in better shape than what you’re describing. Personally, every part of your post made complete sense to me except the part where you wrapped up the ‘blame’ into one neat little package, where I really doubt it’s that simple. I think anytime there are cuts it’s a painful process for sure.
Egads …. this should be news to me but it isn’t unfortunately. I have four kids, all in college although the first of the four will graduate soon with each successive kid graduating one by one annually after that. The stories they tell me!! I can only shake my head and wonder how many of these students are going to manage in the workaday world and many of them do indeed game the system by way of collecting financial aid and then dropping the classes, only to rinse and repeat the next semester. That’s just part of the overall picture however.
Based purely on what I’ve seen and based on some of those friends of theirs that I know personally, I think the root of the matter is that many of these kids have raised themselves. They don’t have actively involved parents and they NEVER have, from grade school on up. Sorry to say, but the fact that many of these kids’ parents viewed elementary school as free babysitting cannot be denied. With no one to instill good study habits from an early age, these kids just drifted through. I was astonished at how some of them even graduated high school in the end. It was ridiculous to expect the teachers to deal with such an ever expanding range of social ills, especially as many of the teachers I came across were substandard themselves and didn’t have the inclination to understand such a lack of work ethic. They would just pass these kids through, from grade to grade. I became so dismayed by what I witnessed at the middle school level (in our particular town because it’s not the same everywhere of course) that I took all my kids out of the public school system and went private. I felt that by not doing that, I was failing them. How else can I justify leaving them in an overcrowded classroom of 50 13-year olds being taught by a rookie 55-year old substitute teacher with zero teaching experience and zero class control? Ahhh, but the school district didn’t have to pay her as much of course!
I could go on and on, especially when it comes to the legal implications. I did take action before I finally decided to take my kids out of the system but it’s too lengthy to go into detail here. I would imagine that to see such disregard on the part of the students for the amount of work that you put into each semester lesson plan is quite disheartening.
@ Quest: Yes, we did the same with our son. Even the best public schools here leave a lot to be desired. Graduates who go on to better colleges and universities do so by dint of a lot of one-on-one teaching from their parents, who have to identify and then make up for the lacunae in their kids’ education.
But that’s probably true no matter what the quality of the schools: kids do best when their parents are fully engaged in their lives. Dropping them off at an institution to be babysat all day and thinking that’s “education” is sadly misled.
And…LOL! Some of my little boingers do behave as though they were raised in a barn. In just two and a half hours, I’ll be laying down the law to a knot of nonstop yakkers in the back of my first-hour classroom, letting them know they have two choices: listen quietly while I’m speaking or drop the course.
@ MoneyBeagle: Frankly, to be told I can’t lay blame where blame is due is tantamount to being pressured to abdicate my freedom of speech because someone else doesn’t agree with me. You need to be here, I suppose, to see what these folks are doing. Since your site amply demonstrates your extraordinary common sense and intelligence, I suspect that if you were on the ground here watching the current legislators’ activities, you might take a more jaundiced view of their thinking. Such as it is.
Yes. The state is in dire financial trouble. By some measures, we’re actually worse off than Michigan, which is suffering terribly. But…when a household or a business is financially stressed, does a wise manager deliberately file and deliberately invite expensive lawsuits that are guaranteed to go nowhere and that are put into gear for no other reason than to make a point? My guess is, you’d answer “no.” So, why should a state’s elected representatives do so?
Does an intelligent household or business manager purposely take steps that will drain the budget and chase business away for no other reason than to make an ideological point? Here, too, the answer probably would be “not bloody likely.” So, why has our legislature done exactly that?
When a household or business is struggling financially, does a smart manager allocate resources to the most important functions, not forgetting that long-term functions may be even more important than short-term ones? Most of us would answer “why, sure.” Why, then, does our legislature pull resources from vital functions while continuing to spend on special interests and wasteful functions?
Does an ethical household head or business manager simply shrug his shoulders when someone dies because of his decision? One would hope not. Yet we have seen our governor do just that.
Is recognition that education is crucial to the future of this country the special province of “liberals”? Obviously not. Why, then, does a legislature dominated by tea-partiers, birthers, and people who think kids, faculty, and staff should be carrying concealed guns to campus seem oblivious to this simple fact? Possibly their short-sightedness is not attributable to their extreme conservatism (and that, my friend, is exactly the term). But it’s difficult not to draw a connection.
True, stupidity and mean-mindedness are not exclusive to far-right conservatism. But what these people are doing in our state is, no question of it, blindingly stupid.
If that’s divisive, I’m sorry it’s divisive. But I will not apologize for calling a spade a spade and a moron a moron — even if that moron happens to be in the state legislature.
Funny, I was never suggesting that your opinion was ‘wrong’ or that you weren’t allowed to state it. Those things are all certainly within your right. I think where I was trying to go was to just point out that it may not be as simple as blaming one set of politicians.
Michigan had, until the end of last year, a governor that I couldn’t stand. She watched indecisively as factories shut down, residents moved away, college grads left the state immediately after getting their diploma, etc. etc. all while addressing the problem by pointing blame at ‘the other side.’ Her answer to balancing the budget was to use stimulus money, sell tobaco settlement money, and other short term fixes that did nothing to address structural problems. Now, she’s gone and someone from ‘the other side’ of the party is in charge. I guess my point is that I never thought that all of the problems that we had would have been avoided had the previous governor been in office, nor am I naive enough to think that because she’s gone, every problem will get magically solved.
I agree that it sounds like there’s a bunch of idiots in office there, just like here and everywhere really. But, even if all of the ‘tea partiers and birthers’ were swept out of office and replaced with people more to your ideological line of thinking, do you really, truly think that these problems would get solved and solved in a way that didn’t cause harm to someone or reduce some group’s level of happiness? I love how much you love and appreciate and push for solid education, and I know you understand more than me and probably most of your readers how important education is, but I just don’t see where saying ‘The educational system here is broken because of the right-wingers’ is really giving the problem due justice. It’s probably one that has been forming for many years, decades even, and involves a lot of people across many parties and many interests. That’s all I’m saying.
…As for the political aside – clearly the incumbents, no matter what the flavor, are making poor choices. Everywhere.
As a former “Faculty Associate:” Wow. 150 students. I can’t imagine how that has any value for the student other than to “fulfill” the “requirement.” I don’t see how it could possibly teach them to write at a college level.
This is a problem that is cultural – we can no longer take the long view or see the big picture. Example,” I don’t want to pay more taxes to support schools because I no longer have children at home.” However, these same people are more than likely anticipating that many citizens are going to work (and pay taxes) when they are retirement age to provide them social security income. How do you fix that?
I agree with money beagle. It’s your blog, obviously, and you can say what you want. But weren’t you just railing against students for not reading and assessing material to see if it made sense? Seems to me that’s exactly what MB is doing.
Doesn’t sound like the state is being run responsibly, for sure. But irresponsibility is rampant on both sides. California is so pro-union we’re cutting everything in sight (schools, welfare, disabled aid, parks) but can’t touch the woefully unbalanced pension system…meanwhile, apparently professors at Berkeley are suing the state for their right to 400K/year and larger pensions, and city managers that are guilty of felony mismanagement are still legally entitled to similar sums. I’d blame most of that on the left wing, myself.
You were also railing against income tax increases a while back too. I know you’re on the pro-immigrant side, but did you ever think that maybe if the system were fixed, the people doing your yard work and brewing coffee at Starbucks would be paying their fair share into the system and lightening your load a bit? Could be that’s part of what the state legislature is working toward. As an example the property tax system isn’t designed on a model where eight families are crammed into a single SFH. It’s hard to deal with a setup where you have more service recipients (I’m not even talking welfare; I’m talking people that use roads, schools, police services, fire services, etc.) spilling across the border every day and a finite and shrinking pool of resources to pay for the services they’re using.
Politics are complicated, and there’s two (or three, or eighteen) sides to every story. I too think it’s overly simplistic to blame it all on the right wing. That’s all I’m sayin’.
Well, I live in Scottsdale and graduated from Scottsdale Community College before going to the U of A, and I can sure say that many students at both schools don’t have much book-learning. They can’t spell, or write grammatically, and they say some of the oddest things you ever heard. At the U, one person thought Belgium was part of Germany, and another one told a whole class that Catholics are not Christians.
Our state leaders have neglected education for many years. The sad state we’re in isn’t just on account of the recession and it isn’t just the fault of the bunch who are in office now, schools have been so weak for so long. So you can’t blame either set of wing-nuts.
For me, I’d just like to see some ordinary middle-of-the-road folks in our legislature. The people in there now make Barry Goldwater (remember? Mr. Conservative, “in your heart you know he’s right”? I did a term paper on him) look liberal.
I would not let my own daughters set foot on a college campus where people are packing heat. But the legislature is about to pass a law making that okay, fine, and dandy. The girls are little now. But after this crazy new gun law passes, we will have to start thinking about moving to some other state where they can go to college as residents, because we can’t afford to pay out-of-state tuition. In this economy, it will take my husband and me a year or two (I hope not more) to find jobs somewhere else. But we WILL find them and move.
I wonder if our lawmakers really intended to drive Goldwater conservatives out of the state. A lot of our friends have already moved, the ones who were foreclosed or who were renting and not stuck in an upside-down house. The bigots here keep yelling hate about Mexicans. But maybe they don’t know or don’t care that they’re sending the white middle class away, too. Who will be left to make this state’s economy “recover”?
You might find this interesting:
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133310978/in-college-a-lack-of-rigor-leaves-students-adrift
It’s taken THIS LONG for GDU to hire undergraduates?
In the late 1970s I was an “undergraduate teaching assistant” in comp sci; and yes, I graded programming projects and exams.
Oh, and I was paid ten cents per hour above minimum wage.
LOL! Well, Arizona is always about 20 years behind the rest of the country. Some people think that’s part of its charm. 😉
Believe it or not, today your job would be illegal. It’s against federal law for students to see other students’ papers–FERPA. A university might skirt the law by claiming these random undergraduates are “peer reviewers” (snark!) or “teaching assistants,” but it’s very unlikely that the law stretches to allow peer reviewers to grade student papers. Only those with a legitimate educational interest in a student’s progress (i.e., faculty and administrators) are allowed to see student papers and grades. This does not include the student’s parents, and it most decidedly does not include her or his contemporaries.
And there are precious few undergraduates who could be trusted to grade an English paper, at least not in Arizona, where students are not taught basic writing skills.