Have we maxed out on online education? « Kay Steiger
A new survey from Eduventures (the terrible punny name is not my fault) comes via Inside Higher Ed and finds that though the number of adults entering into higher education as non-traditional students continues to increase, the percentage interested in taking all or most classes online has roughly stayed stagnent. The survey found 38 percent were interested in taking all or most of their classes online compared with 37 percent in 2006.
“We feel this is the watershed moment,” said Richard Garrett, vice president and principal analyst for Eduventures and the report’s author told IHE. “After years of endless growth, we’re definitely coming to more of a plateau situation.”
This is from Kay Steiger, who has a web site that deals in a thoroughly intelligent manner with education and other issues. She’s clever and often eloquent. I recommend you visit the site.
I find the findings quite interesting. You would think from reading the web and the news that online education is spreading across the nation like some Medieval plague. If the phenomenon has maxed out; if online education maxed, then we have arrived at a balance between online and in-class teaching. This is important to me, for one thing, because I teach both traditional classes and online. But I have another issue, I love the whole idea of self improvement and higher education. I am delighted by spacious campuses, earnest undergraduates talking about major issues, people trying to think, and, above all, teaching. I like the environment and I believe for many people, it is their opportunity to think new thoughts and become different people, different than the expectation imposed on them by family and high school. Online education has many advantages but it cannot create an environment of hundreds, often thousands of fellow learners trying to understand what is important.
So it would appear from the study that physical campuses still make sense and have a future.
Wrong profession? Lost perspective? Just another whiny, self-absorbed wool-gatherer? Guilty as charged. Hey, I’m a card-carrying, fellow-traveling union member! But I do have one suggestion for civilians. As a public school teacher, I considered myself a public servant, like cops, firemen, food service workers and other “heroes” who are willing to do difficult, thankless, vital jobs for very little pay and not much more than the scorn of their fellow citizens. Thus, the door of my classroom was always open to parents, administrators, politicians, journalists and passers-by. But I waited in vain for company, for visitors were scarce. All the jibber jabber about public education these days seems to be based solely on idle speculation, memories of a Golden Age and the bilge that the LA Times publishes in lieu of objective journalism. So please stop by a classroom sometime. You might be surprised. And you’re paying for it.
There’s a good reason that American slaves were forbidden to learn to read: Literacy is freedom. Free, high quality, accessible, equitable education is the bedrock of a free society. That’s not just Tea Party flag-waving; it’s the Incontestable Eternal Truth. Sadly, in the final analysis, historical and political forces are at work that leave us, the teachers and students, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. People, people, people! Can’t you see that The Man wants us ignorant? Unite, my friends! We have nothing to lose but our … ohferchrissakenevermind!
But remember, if you’re there when the last dog reaches the last hill: Lost causes are the onlyones worth fighting for
The teaching profession is an endangered species. A learned and difficult profession is under attack with the apparent intent of reducing its pay to something akin to a hamburger flipper. The ideas of the “reformers” seem to consist not of putting money into public schools but removing teacher protections. Teachers are now portrayed in popular movies and “reformer” financed documentaries as evil or incompetent obstacles to educational success. Teaching is an institution laboring under the ridiculous burden of No Child Left Behind, a barrage of often bizarre state mandated rules and governed by administrators who at times seem to be focused on driving out every vestige of independence and enthusiasm. We destroy the teaching profession at our peril. It is an institution that has served this country well.
Make no mistake. The public school teaching crisis will have real casualties not just among the faculty. Without teacher opposition, school boards will have much more power to create rules and policies without interference.* They are the main line of defense against the threat of privatization, a pet project of a good number of billionaires and largely a failure at improving test scores.** But the simplest and clearest danger is that many teachers will leave the profession. After all, in a nation that believes “you get what you pay for,” many have decided teaching is worth but little.
James Pilant
*Don’t take my word that school boards do strange things. Run a simple search, school board controversy, and then have fun wading through the entries.
Policy Brief: The Evidence on Charter Schools and Test Scores
December 2011
(This is a brief excerpt from the much larger report which I recommend you download and read yourself.)
This discussion on charter school evidence will focus almost entirely on test-based outcomes. Testing
data provide an incomplete picture of student and school performance, while other outcomes, such as
graduation rates, parental satisfaction and future earnings, are no less important. This review focuses on
testing results because they are the outcome used in most charter studies, whereas analyses positing
alternative measures are more scarce.
That said, there is a considerable body of evidence that corroborates CREDO’s findings. For instance, a
2009 RAND Corporation analysis of charter schools in five major cities and three states found that, in
every location, charter effects were either negative or not discernibly different from regular public
1 Effect sizes can be interpreted in different ways. For instance, some researchers argue that even very small testing gains are
associated with substantial increases in economic growth (e.g., Hanushek and Woessman, 2007). In addition, achievement is
cumulative, which means that single-year effects can understate the total impact of schools.
| 3
schools’ (Zimmer et al., 2009). As one might expect, charters tended to get better results the more years
they had been in operation.
Similarly, a 2010 report by researchers from Mathematica Policy Research presented the findings from a
randomized controlled trial of 36 charter middle schools in 15 states (Gleason et al., 2010). They found
that the vast majority of students in these charters did no better and no worse than their counterparts in
regular public schools in terms of both math and reading scores, as well as virtually all the 35 other
outcomes studied. There was, however, important underlying variation – e.g., results were more positive
for students who stayed in the charters for multiple years, and those who started out with lower scores (as
mentioned above, CREDO reached the same conclusions).
A number of state-specific studies buttress the conclusion of wide variation in charter effects.
A paper published in 2006 found slightly negative effects of charters in North Carolina (Bifulco and
Ladd, 2006); CREDO’s results for North Carolina were mixed, but essentially uncovered no difference
large enough to be educationally meaningful (CREDO, 2009).
Booker et al. (2004) found a positive charter impact in Texas after 2-3 years of attendance, but the effect
sizes were very small. Gronberg and Jansen (2005) reached the same conclusion for elementary and
middle but not high schools, while CREDO (2009) found small negative effects overall.
A published analysis of charters in Florida showed negative effects during these schools’ first five years
of attendance, followed by comparable (with regular public schools) performance thereafter. The reading
impact was discernibly higher, but the difference was modest (Sass, 2006). It’s also worth noting that
CREDO’s (2009) Florida analysis found a small positive effect on charter students after three years of
attendance, while a 2005 RAND report on California charters revealed no substantial difference in overall
performance (Zimmer and Buddin, 2005; also see Zimmer, et al., 2003).
Lastly, a 2006 study using Idaho data showed moderate positive charter effects (Ballou, et al., 2006),
while students attending Arizona charters for 2-3 years had small relative gains, according to a 2001
Goldwater Institute analysis (Solmon, et al., 2001; note that, once again, CREDO found the opposite).
Finally, most recently, Mathematica and CRPE released a report presenting a large, thorough analysis of
charter management organizations, or CMOs (Furgeson, et al., 2011). In order to be included in the study,
CMOs had to be well-established and run multiple schools, which meant that the schools that were
included are probably better than the average charter in terms of management and resources. The overall
results (middle schools only) were disappointing – even after three years of attendance, there was no
significant difference between CMO and comparable regular public school students’ performance in
math, reading, science, or social studies. Some CMOs’ schools did quite well, but most were no different
or worse in terms of their impact.
In an attempt to “summarize” the findings of these and a few other single-city studies not discussed
above, the latest meta-analysis from the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) concluded that
charter and regular public school effects were no different in middle school reading and high school
reading and math (Betts and Tang, 2011). There were statistically discernible positive impacts in middle
school math and elementary school math and reading, but the effect sizes were very modest. The primary
conclusion, once again, was that “charters under-perform traditional public schools in some locations,
grades, and subjects, and out-perform traditional public schools in other locations, grades, and subjects.”
This lines up with prior reviews of the literature (e.g., Hill, et al., 2006).
I feel strongly that cyber ethics education is a must. Students tend to react more positively to discussing right and wrong behavior when they are personally invested. After all, it is difficult to discuss with youngsters the ethics of some Congressional representative; they can’t relate; they have no frame of reference. However, using computers to steal information or bully others is front and center in their consciousness.
Dr. Marvin Berkowitz of St. Louis University conducted an analysis of the behavioral development factors that must be considered in searching for an optimal age range for instruction of cyber ethics. Dr. Berkowitz concluded that the 9-12 ages was a “very reasonable” age to target for a first time strategy of cyber ethics instruction. Several factors led to this conclusion. This age range is considered a “gateway” age and has been used by other groups to begin message delivery; e.g. substance abuse and sex education. Absent hard data on the age at which children actually begin to go on line, we can generally assume that by age 13 children have routine access to the Internet. The 9-12 ages is also the point in development where children begin to understand abstract values, for example, privacy rights, and can begin to evaluate the consequences of their actions. It is important to be able to think abstractly, particularly when working in a medium that is routinely described as “virtual.”
I also feel strongly about this issue. Ethics training should begin in the schools as early as possible and the article is absolutely correct. Dealing with real current issues is completely superior to hypothetical scenarios.What is happening in your life now is almost always more important and more relevant then what might happen. Hacking and cyberbullying, also referred to as cybercrime, are gateway crimes. I believe they can lead to more serious crimes because they make unethical behavior more acceptable and more routine.
I believe that we strengthen our ethics and moral stance by our choices in our life experiences. You can choose to limit television viewing to programs that have strong themes of morality and justice. You can choose motions pictures based on whether or not the film conveys messages of kindness and healing as opposed to wanton killing and theft. You can choose to surround yourself with art, culture and literature choosing to become a fuller and better human being instead of relying on consumerism to make you content in the narrow sense.
Ethics is not just a class in college. It is a lifetime pursuit of the what Greeks called the “good life.” The earlier we begin ethical training and the more relevant it is, the better to begin that internal conversation that builds judgment and wisdom.
There is no doubt in my mind that this society at this time in history needs more judgment and wisdom. We are in the midst of an ethics crisis. The great financial institutions of this country have engaged in trickery and deceit on a massive scaled as well as engaging in the most reckless kind of speculation with other peoples’ money.
Concentrated around Washington and its environs, is a relatively small number of opinion leaders known as “very serious people” or the Washington Elite or the “villagers.” They believe that standardized tests solve educational problems, that cutting the benefits that feed the helpless and keep the elderly out of poverty have to be cut in a time of economic recession and high unemployment. They seem to have no idea how the great mass of Americans live and little curiosity about them. We live in the richest nation on earth and we are unable to maintain our infrastructure or feed the poor. This is immoral. Exalting greed is immoral. Evading taxes by moving money overseas is immoral and unpatriotic. Making corporations already profitable even richer by tax breaks is immoral.
We should start moral education early and if we do so, we see real effects with a little luck in our lifetimes. It is obvious that there has been failures in the moral teaching delivered to this generation.
I wrote a three part series (part 1) (part 2) (part 3) on the latest study showing that college students are not learning critical thinking skills. I pointed out that the study was another in a series of little publicized media events. In truth, the public, the colleges and the business world have little desire for critical thinking.
But what do students learn in college?
A faculty member once had a class of students who were not wealthy, not even close. Not all of the students in his class were able to afford textbooks. So, given a choice of textbooks for the next year’s class, he chose one that cost about seventy dollars. The next year, all of his students had the textbook. The very next semester the price of the textbook rose to one hundred and ten dollars. And then two more years slid by and it went up to one hundred and fifty dollars.
This is not an unusual situation with textbook prices. It is, in fact, the common, everyday experience of teachers and students in colleges and universities all over the United States.
Students may not be learning as much critical thinking as some would like, they may not get that much cultural literacy, and they may have only the vaguest concept of the term “civic duty”, but they do know about pricing. I get it in class essays, “You charge as much as you can get.” To them, it is an ethical rule – You must pursue the highest return possible under any circumstance. The students don’t know any other rule. The deeper philosophical concepts of just price and two thousand years of contrary philosophy are not factors here.
I believe I am a good teacher but there is no amount of teaching skill that can equal the cutting edge of another textbook price increase every year. They may not grasp the “statute of frauds” in my business law class but they understand the phrase, “what the market will bear” with perfect clarity.
What are we teaching our students? Is there any lesson more naked about the nature of the American idea of free enterprise than what students endure each year at the bookstore?
The newspapers (and our blog) are full of unethical politicians; the sports pages full of rule-breaking players and parents; the business news full of sleazy companies and greedy CEOs; the education pages full of students who cheat on exams. What’s a person to think? Perhaps you really do have to cheat to win. Perhaps you need to shade the truth to get ahead. Good people hear that “everybody does it,” and wonder.
Student loans are how most American students finance their education. They seldom have any other choice. This article I am quoting comes from Edufactory. It is interesting web site. It looks at the world from the vantage point of a college student, more European than American. But I like to hear what Europeans have to say about U.S. issues. I find the common thought pattern of the “beltway boys” or the “very serious people” to be irritating. This is a very large article. This is the opening paragraphs.
Debt has had a crushing impact on the lives of those who must take student loans to finance their university education in the US. For tuition fees that have been so notoriously high in private universities now are rising in public universities so quickly they are far out-pacing inflation. Student loan debt in the US has been much higher than in Europe (with the exception of Sweden), though recent developments there would indicate that this gap may soon no longer exist (Usher).
We should also take into account the fraudulent way in which the loans have been administered by the banks and the vindictiveness with which those who have been unable to pay back have been pursued by collection agents. The most frustrating aspect of student loan debt being the legally toothless position the debtor is in, because government policy has relentlessly vested all the bargaining power in the hands of the creditors.
Student loans are a strange philosophical creature here at the beginning of the 21st century. Daily, the newspapers and television are filled with talk about the need for highly educated workers. States with low ratios of college graduates to the general population are considered poor sites for new factories and development. A nation’s competitiveness, perhaps in the long term, its very existence, may depend on the level of education of its population.
So, how does discouraging people from going to college make sense? Isn’t that a form of slow societal suicide?
And what is the effect on those who bear that debt for decades? It’s pretty obvious it forces students away from any job that isn’t well paid. That debt makes sure that the debtor works all the time, year after year. It never stops. There is no opportunity to write that novel, travel or simply live a life free from constant financial pressure.
Why do we finance education this way? The philosophy of secure investment and low interest rates, a product of the Chicago School of Economics, epitomized by the policies of the International Monetary Fund are the root cause. To make investments maximally secure, government spending must be minimized and wage pressure limited. Spending must be limited because taxation, any taxation, for any purpose is inimical to maximum profit. Wage pressure produces inflation which reduces the value of debt. If debt decreases in value, once again, investment security is threatened. Therefore expenditures on education must be carefully limited.
Of course, from a banking stand point, subjecting millions of Americans to continuous debt during the entire course of their lives with the full support of the federal and state government to collect the money might seem advantageous.
Many of you have already realized the problem with this. In the long term, investments in a nation with a gradually decreasing educational level endangers investment. That is easily explained. You are only damaged by a poor long term investment, if once you have maximized profit you can’t move your investment elsewhere. When the United States becomes unprofitable, the money will simply move. By then the process can go on in, perhaps, Russia or some country in Western Europe.
Americans to preserve their country’s international standing, future prosperity and in the long term the existence of the nation might want to consider how to maximize the graduation rate as well as prioritizing the fields where we want graduates. Training tens of thousands of students each year in broadcast journalism when there are only a few openings does no one any good except those holding the educational loans.
Let’s read a bit more from the article –
As typical of “invisible” movements, statistics fail us in drawing its proportions. We have no estimate, for instance, of how many have been driven to suicide or how many have been forced to go into exile due to their student debts. Nor do we have a measure of the social impact of the growing de-legitimation of the student debt machine. We can only speculate about the consequences of disclosures concerning the collusion between the university administrations (especially in the case of “for profit” institutions) and the banks, now commonly acknowledged in the media as well as in congressional investigations. For sure, blogs and web-groups are forming to share experiences and voice anger about student loan companies like the biggest one, the Student Loan Marketing Association (nicknamed “Sallie Mae”). On Google alone, there are about 9,000 entries under the rubric “Sallie Mae Sucks,” and another 9,000 under “Fuck Sallie Mae.” Browsing through the chat rooms, with their harrowing stories of wrecked lives and mounting frustration against the operations of Sallie Mae, makes it clear that the potential for a debt abolition movement is high. So far, however, most attempts that have been made to give an organizational form to this anger have largely demanded the application of consumer protection norms to the management of the debt.
Student loans may well be justified as part of the mix that pays for education. But it should be determined at what level it deters significant numbers from college. It should be determined when it goes to institutions primarily set up to collect that money with little benefit from the education paid for. The proportion of the educational expense paid for these loans increases year by year. Is that healthy for the educational system in the long term or for the citizens in this country?
It takes intelligence to make good decisions about what we as a nation need from education. It takes intelligence to measure the effects of this debt on the society as a whole. It takes intelligence to challenge the strange doctrines of the Chicago School and its many adherents.
I don’t see our leadership rising to the challenge.
I want to welcome you to this class. I always consider these joint endeavors in which both you and I trying to learn something in a complicated and exciting field.
Studying criminal justice is illuminating. It is a difficult field for many reasons. It deals with subjects that may have personally affected us. It deals with injury and death, often with the most unseemly of human actions. It also deals with psychological problems of the most serious and disturbing kind.
Please be aware that much of what you have seen on television is rank nonsense to those educated in the field. On television and often in movies, the law is often interpreted incorrectly, serial killers are portrayed as geniuses moving effortless through the population killing at will, and forensic crime solving is portrayed as well funded and almost always successful in finding the perpetrator. We will learn better.
Criminal justice in America is executed through thousands of law enforcement agencies in a bewildering set of jurisdictions often governed by contradictory and controversial laws. That it works at all is surprising and that is that it has serious problems a given.
You are going to be the future of criminal justice. As professionals, you will advance to become decision and policy makers. The understanding you acquire now may very well change the lives of thousands in the course of your life time.
I salute your willingness to engage in this difficult area of study and a lifetime of service to society at large.
His current article, The Future of Learning and Education… tells of his thoughts on the future of education. He’s pretty imaginative, but I don’t think he’s wrong. I have been telling my Criminal Justice students that our ability to modify human genetics, alter human behavior with chemicals and change the structure of our bodies with implants is going to radically change the field. I think they only half believe me but the changes are coming anyway.
I am particularly interested in the experiments with brain chemicals that appear that appear to raise intelligence. The average intelligence in prison measured by IQ is about 70. That’s not much. What if we could raise that intelligence to that of an average citizen? Studies show that criminals suffer from poor judgment. One set of studies show that the process they use to make judgments is only partial the pattern used by law abiding citizens. Could we radically reduce crime by increasing inmate intelligence? We are likely to able to use this kind of technique not in some science fiction future, but probably in five or six years. It will be the first wave in new treatments for criminality not by prison but by altering the way their brains work.
The future may also hold direct transference of data from computers to the human brain. That might make much of college teaching obsolete. I can tell you I’m not looking forward to this, I’m a teacher and I enjoy it. However, I suspect the changes may be just far enough ahead for me to close out my teaching career with some dignity.
Both chemical treatment to raise offender IQ’s and direct transfer of information both present moral problems. However boosting intelligence in prison populations is hard to criticize ethically unless you can make a good case that an increased intelligence is a detriment some way. I think it is more akin to providing exercise facilities to build muscles than a punishment.
Direct transfer of information is going to be much more of an ethical dilemma. Will the machine evade the judgment centers of the forebrain and deliver the information without any moral screening? Will humans simply become skill bundles with only a limited humanity? What exactly are we putting in and how does it affect the whole system? As long as it is theory and their are no facts to work with, questions over what is right or wrong become more numerous the more you think about it.
I think raising intelligence by chemical means will be common in the next thirty years. I do not forsee direct knowledge transfer until minimally fifty or sixty years. But technology is not as predictable as when I was a child in the sixties, so we will have to see.
I think that the No Child Left Behind law had severely damaged character education, critical thinking and issue awareness among the young. An ability to take multiple choice tests, true false, or completion tests is not a useful employment skill. Yet that has become almost our sole measurement of educational achievement.
But the inaction of the middle class, whatever it’s cause, is critical to the success of the rich in shifting the tax burden.
James Pilant
The rich won the class war by depriving the middle and lower classes of education: history, civics, political education, and training in how to think critically. As a result, their mouthpieces can spout nonsense and the relatively uneducated voters now swallow it clean. The antidote, until we get a real education system back again, is for those of use whose eyes are open to educate those around us who cannot see what is going on. We need to devel … Read More
The data on students in charter schools is mixed. Most schools do about the same or worse than the public schools they supplement or detract from. While the data strongly suggest that there is not even a wisp of a panacea here for poor schools in city districts, I’m unaware of any data at all that says these schools should be used in rich high performing school districts. When a charter school moves into that area, it would seem to be evidence of what many have claimed all along, that this is more of a privatization movement than any attempt to help students, a way of converting a public good into a private profit.
James Pilant
Charter School advocates have expanded their desire to "corporatize" and privatize education to the suburbs, even pursuing establishing specialized Charter Schools in well to do areas with excellent school systems. Unlike in poor areas where parents have little political clout – suburban residents are pushing … Read More
This is from Kay Steiger, who has a web site that deals in a thoroughly intelligent manner with education and other issues. She’s clever and often eloquent. I recommend you visit the site.
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