Читать книгу The Education Apocalypse - Glenn Harlan Reynolds - Страница 7

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It has been a little over a year since the predecessor to this book, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education From Itself, was published. Yet a lot has happened in that short interval. In fact, even while completing the manuscript for the original edition, I kept worrying that my predictions would come true before it saw print – as, in fact, happened in a few cases. Since then, the pace of change has accelerated, and many things that would have seemed unthinkable less than a decade ago have already come to pass.

Those changes made a simple unrevised paperback edition of The New School seem inadequate. The result is this updated volume, complete with a new title. It’s worth noting a few of the biggest developments.

In the K-12 world, we continue to see failure in – and dissatisfaction with – public schools, particularly in large urban areas. Earlier in the 2014–15 academic year, the public schools of Paterson, N. J., managed to produce only 19 students with SAT scores (1500 out of 2400) that were deemed sufficient for college. As a newspaper story observed, “This number is truly shocking considering how large the school district is.” Well, yes. But the administrators have good news: “The Paterson school district said that they no longer use SAT scores to gauge students’ success.”¹ Okay then. Sadly, as noted later in this book, that kind of underperformance (or excuse making) is not limited to Paterson.

Of course, even public schools that perform decently on an academic level are displaying other problems that may give parents pause. Though stories of zero-tolerance abuse make regular appearances in the news, it’s perhaps worth reviewing a few. At South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pa., for example, 10-year-old Johnny Jones was suspended for using an imaginary bow and arrow. That’s right – not a real bow and arrow, but an imaginary bow and arrow. A female classmate saw this infraction and tattled to a teacher, and the principal gave Jones a one-day suspension for making a “threat” in class.

To be fair, it probably takes a lot of imagination to turn what sounds like a bit of old-fashioned cowboys-and-Indians play into a threat. But while the principal gets an A for imagination, he deserves an F for distinguishing between imagination and reality. Sadly, he’s not alone.

In Texas, 9-year-old Aiden Steward was suspended for bringing a “ring of power” to school and telling a classmate that, like the One Ring of Tolkien tales, it could make him disappear. The principal, Roxanne Greer, and the Kermit Independent School System took the position that this was a “threat,” despite Aiden’s father’s assurance that “my son lacks the magical powers necessary to threaten his friend’s existence.”²

You may have also heard about the 7-year-old Maryland boy who was suspended for gnawing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. And then there’s the case of the 8-year-old Arizona boy whose drawings of ninjas and Star Wars characters –and an interest in, gasp, zombies – led to threats of expulsion. And, of course, there’s the 6-year-old boy charged with “sexual harassment” for kissing a girl. So much for Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher.

So is this steady stream of incidents an indication of widespread mental deficiency among America’s K-12 educators? In a word, yes.

It’s already well established that education majors have the lowest test scores of any college major but nonetheless tend to graduate with high grades.³ That certainly suggests a lack of critical faculties, in more than one sense of the term. But the constant stream of stories of zero-tolerance stupidity suggests that there’s something more lacking here than just academic smarts. There seems to be a severe deficit of the very sort of critical thinking that the education industry purports to be instilling in kids. One might dismiss any of these events as an isolated incident, but when you have – as any newspaper reader can see – a never-ending supply of such incidents, they’re no longer isolated. They’re a pattern.

This is a serious PR problem for the American education establishment, but underlying the bad publicity is a serious substantive problem: when your kids attend schools like these, they are under the thumb of Kafkaesque bureaucrats who see no problem blotting your kid’s permanent record for reasons of bureaucratic convenience or political correctness.

At some point, voluntarily putting your kid in such a situation looks a bit like parental malpractice – especially if that child is a boy, since boys seem to do worse in today’s nearly all-female-taught K-12 environment. A private industry that generated this much bad publicity would be in trouble already, but even the less accountable public bureaucracy is beginning to lose students, as parents increasingly see it as a hostile environment.

Then there’s the simple rigidity of the public school system. Its fixed hours and locations were understandable in the days when fathers worked 9 to 5, mothers stayed home, and alternatives were few. Now we hear stories like that of Avery Gagliano, a 13-year-old piano prodigy whom the Washington, D.C., public schools treated as truant when she missed days to compete in international piano competitions. According to a column by Petula Dvorak in the Washington Post, “the school officials wouldn’t budge, even though the truancy law gives them the option to decide what an unexcused absence is.”⁴ As I can attest from when my daughter switched to online school, it’s only once you get out from under the thumb of the public school system that you realize how many rigidities it inflicts on you, from early waking hours to restricted vacations to limits on what your child can study.⁵ The rest of life is growing steadily more flexible, making education’s 19th century model seem all the more confining.

In an earlier era, there wasn’t much you could do about such things. But now, with homeschooling and online school steadily becoming more popular alternatives, the education establishment needs to worry that parents will be taking their business elsewhere. And it’s not just the loss of pupils that matters: if too many taxpaying parents abandon the public schools, taxpayer support will evaporate. Why, people will ask, are we paying for public schools when everyone with any sense is paying (again) to send their kids elsewhere?

Meanwhile, higher education has faced its own additional issues. With tuitions climbing and graduates’ salaries stagnant, students (and parents) are becoming less willing to pay top dollar. This has caused some schools – especially expensive private institutions that lack first-class reputations – to face real hardships. Yeshiva University’s bonds have been downgraded to the status of junk.⁶ Credit downgrades have also hit several elite liberal-arts colleges. Other private schools, such as Quinnipiac College, are actually laying off faculty.⁷ Georgetown in Kentucky cut faculty by 20 percent.⁸ Even fancy schools such as Harvard and Dartmouth have seen applications decline substantially.⁹ Citing “financial challenges,” Sweet Briar College, an elite women’s private college in Virginia, announced that it would be closing its doors in fall 2015; it is the third liberal-arts college in Virginia to close in two years.¹⁰

It’s no picnic for public institutions either. “There have been 21 downgrades of public colleges and universities this year but no upgrades,” reported Inside Higher Ed.¹¹ It’s gotten so bad that schools are even closing their gender-studies centers, a once sacrosanct kind of spending.¹² Colleges and universities are facing stagnant tuition incomes and are being forced to increase tuition discounts (disguised as “financial aid”) to attract students.¹³

The decline in enrollment seems to be slowing, but the long-term problem remains: with costs growing and postgraduation incomes stagnant or worse, students (and parents) are becoming more reluctant to take on the extensive debt that is required to attend many private – and some public – institutions. That is only made worse by the decline in higher education’s image, damage that is mostly self-inflicted. As Twitter wag IowaHawk japed, “If I understand college administrators correctly, colleges are hotbeds of racism and rape that everyone should be able to attend.”

That sums it up pretty well. Though the claim that one in five women on campus is sexually assaulted is pretty clearly bogus – as Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle notes, it includes things like sexual touching over clothes, which hardly constitutes rape,¹⁴ and comes from a two-college study whose authors say doesn’t comprise a nationally representative sample¹⁵ – it’s widely repeated, and that surely makes young women a bit less enthusiastic about attending. Then all the responses – involving, basically, kangaroo courts that strip male students charged with sexual assault of all due process protection – don’t make campuses more appealing to male students, who are already an underrepresented minority on most campuses.

There’s also the race hysteria. Recently, students at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota canceled a “Hump Day” celebration featuring a camel because someone thought the camel signified racism against Muslims. (Yes, Muslims aren’t a race, but that doesn’t matter, apparently.) We make fun of Victorians for substituting the term limbs for the tooracy word legs and for supposedly covering shapely table legs with cloth, but our own era is prone to similar over-delicacy, and campuses – allegedly centers of critical thought – seem to be the worst offenders.

Dartmouth canceled a charitable fundraising “fiesta” because one student complained that the word fiesta was racist. And going beyond race, commencement speakers, ranging from Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers to Christine Lagarde at Smith, have been turned away by rabid student protests.

From the economics to the politics, colleges and universities are looking less like serious places to improve one’s mind and one’s prospects and more like expensive islands of frivolity and, sometimes, viciousness. And that is likely to have consequences.

Administrations, meanwhile, seem out of touch. Even as higher education’s financial prospects sour, salaries at the top hit new records: 36 private-college presidents make more than a million dollars a year;¹⁶ the highest paid, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, makes over $7 million from the university, plus an additional million dollars per year from serving on various corporate boards.¹⁷ At the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, leading professor Clyde W. Barrow quit, complaining of an administration that isolates itself from students and faculty behind keypads and security doors.¹⁸

Isolation is bad. But worse still is the growing tendency of administrators to stifle critics by shamelessly interpreting even obviously harmless statements as threats. A recent example took place at Bergen Community College, where Professor Francis Schmidt was suspended and ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination over a “threat” that consisted of posting a picture of his 9-year-old daughter wearing a Game of Thrones T-shirt.¹⁹ The shirt bore a quote from the show that read, “I will take what is mine with fire & blood.” Bergen administrators apparently thought the picture, which was posted to Schmidt’s Google Plus account, was somehow intended as a threat. (Schmidt had filed a labor grievance a couple of months earlier.)

What kind of person claims that a picture of a 9-year-old girl wearing an HBO T-shirt is a threat? The kind of person who runs America’s colleges, apparently. And the Bergen administration is, alas, is not alone in its cluelessness and, apparently, paranoia.

At the University of Wisconsin at Stout, theater professor James Miller had a poster from the television series Firefly on his door.²⁰ It included a picture of Captain Mal Reynolds, a character played by Nathan Fillion, and a quote from the show: “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.”

Campus police chief Lisa Walter removed the poster, regarding it as a threat. After Miller complained to no avail, he replaced the poster with one reading, “Fascism can cause blunt head trauma and/or violent death. Keep fascism away from children and pets.”

This poster too was interpreted as a threat, which led to a visit from the campus “threat-assessment team.” After nationwide mockery (Fillion and fellow Firefly cast member Adam Baldwin joined in, as did many of the show’s fans), the university retreated and promised to change its approach in the future. Presumably, Chief Lisa Walter carries a gun, and I wonder if that’s a good idea for someone so skittish that she sees a movie poster as a threat.

And students aren’t much better. Smith College President Kathleen McCartney was forced to apologize for saying “all lives matter” when students complained that, after the police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., and the New York City chokehold death of Eric Garner, the only appropriate phrase was “black lives matter.”²¹ Meanwhile, the University of Iowa censored, then apologized for, a piece of anti-racist art by visiting Professor Serhat Tanyolacar because students misunderstood it as pro-racism. The statue was a 7-ft.-tall sculpture of a Ku Klux Klansman made up of newspapers with articles about racial violence. Within hours, the university responded to student complaints that it was “hate speech” by sending the university police to take the statue down.²² The goal seems to be to ensure that students never have to have an uncomfortable idea.

University administrators might be better occupied making sure that classes actually meet and that students actually attend. A massive scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that thousands of students over a two-decade period – mostly, but by no means entirely, athletes – signed up and received credit for courses that didn’t meet.²³ This has led faculty and alumni at other schools, like the University of Kansas,²⁴ to wonder if their own programs might have similar no-show courses. UNC even faces a lawsuit by a former athlete who claims that the university breached its contract to provide him with an education in exchange for his athletic performance. “From selection of a major to selection of courses, the UNC football program controlled football student-athletes’ academic track, with the sole purpose of ensuring that football student-athletes were eligible to participate in athletics, rather than actually educating them,” his lawsuit claims.²⁵

The concern for other potential students – and their parents – is twofold: (1) Is this sort of behavior limited to UNC, or is it, or something like it, more common? And (2) does this reflect a more general unconcern with academic standards in higher education? Is this, in other words, more than just an athletic scandal?

And as doubts about educational quality grow, there’s another problem: students are taking longer to graduate. Rather than multiplying the inflated tuition by four years, it might make more sense to multiply it by six. As the New York Times recently reported, only 19 percent of college students at public universities graduate in four years; even at more elite “flagship” schools, the number is only 36 percent. The result is that people in the field now regard six years as a typical time until graduation.²⁶ In essence, this means that you can expect your college education to cost about 50 percent more than the four-times-tuition-and-expenses formula might suggest. Plus, those are two more years when students are spending money – and often incurring debt – instead of being out in the workforce earning money, a difference that can mount up.²⁷ And it gets worse. The Times story quotes Debra Humphreys, a spokeswoman for the American Association of Colleges and Universities: “Yes, we have a huge completion problem, but we also have a problem that a lot of students graduated without learning what they need.” Well, okay then.

Community colleges are held up as a low-cost alternative to four-year schools, and for many they are a good option. But community colleges aren’t without their own problems: “In 2014,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, “only 39.1 percent of students who had entered community colleges six years before had completed a degree or certificate, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, down slightly from 39.8 percent in 2013.”²⁸ In part, the problem seems to be about poor K-12 preparation, meaning that many high school graduates are unprepared not only for college, but even for community college. (As suggested throughout this book, the crises in higher and “lower” education are mutually reinforcing.)

So to recap: college costs more, but a college degree takes longer and is worth less. And people are starting to catch on. Industries with bad reputations face declining markets and more regulation. At this rate, that’s where higher education is headed. It’s not clear at all that its leaders appreciate the depth of the problem, but one lesson may be found from a field where the bubble bursting is further along – my own field of legal education.

Not long ago, in 2010, there were almost 90,000 applicants for law school. Even lower-tier schools could be fairly selective, and there were plenty of warm, tuition-paying bodies to generate revenue for the law schools and for the universities that generally relied upon them as cash cows. But in recent years, the numbers have plummeted, and fewer than 50,000 are expected to apply for the academic year beginning in the fall of 2015.²⁹ A New York Times Dealbook interview with Northwestern Law Dean Daniel Rodriguez had him describing “hand-to-hand combat” among law schools for applicants, a major shift from just a few years ago.³⁰ Looking at the decline, another law dean, Michael Moffitt of Oregon, remarked, “I feel like I am living in a business school case study.”³¹ The New York Times reports that “numbers of first-year law students have sunk to levels not seen since 1973, when there were 53 fewer law schools in the United States, according to the figures released in 2014 by the American Bar Association.”³² Some, in fact, are comparing the law-school experience to the collapse in dental-school enrollments in the 1980s.³³

There is already spreading pain. Some are estimating that as many as 80 law schools nationwide may be at risk of closure as they go from cash cows for their universities to money pits.³⁴ At Albany, the dean has stepped down amid a 34 percent drop in enrollments and a wave of faculty buyouts.³⁵ The Thomas Cooley Law School announced the closure of its Ann Arbor campus,³⁶ and the University of California at Irvine Law School shrunk its incoming class by more than 29 percent in an effort to boost statistics and rankings.³⁷ Likewise, the University of Mississippi Law School is intentionally cutting enrollment by 36 percent.³⁸

Why is this happening? Essentially because there aren’t jobs for law-school graduates that justify the expenditure of large sums of money – and three years of people’s lives – to obtain a law degree. Despite the economic recovery, such as it is, legal employment continues to shrink,³⁹ the product of a combination of market restructuring and technological forces. As my colleague Ben Barton notes in his forthcoming Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession,⁴⁰ these are forces that are unlikely to reverse themselves in the foreseeable future.

The question is, do the experiences of law schools foreshadow similar problems for the rest of higher education? I think the answer is yes, and I note that in 2014, the University of Nebraska (not the law school, but the entire university) offered early buyouts to an astounding 30 percent of its tenured faculty.⁴¹ That a flagship state university should be so concerned with limiting payroll obligations says a lot about the shape of the future. Such changes might seem unimaginable to some, but not long ago, so did the changes in legal education that have happened over the past couple of years. While fears that law faculty may have to start cleaning law-school bathrooms are still half joking,⁴² West Virginia University already has its entire faculty taking out the trash.⁴³ The bottom line is that higher education as a whole, not just law schools, is dependent on the bottom line. To enroll, students (and potential students, and parents) must believe that the expense of a degree in time and money is justified by what they get in return. As that becomes less and less the case, the deal for faculty – and perhaps even for administrators! – is likely to become less sweet.

Yes, even administrators. I’ve noted before that while colleges and universities have outsourced more and more teaching to untenured, underpaid adjunct professors, no one has started using adjunct administrators. Well, that’s still true, but schools are beginning to focus on overhead, including the administrative bloat that I’ve described in the past. Southern Methodist University is one case in point. Concerned about its Moody’s bond rating, the school has set out to cut expenses, but it’s focusing on cutting “excess management layers,” with consultants telling it that it has “proportionally more employees dedicated to support functions, such as finance, HR and IT than other universities.” The goal in restructuring is not budget cuts for the sake of cuts, says Chris Regis, SMU’s chief business and financial officer. “It’s about trimming the administrative side of the institutions so that more funds can be directed to academics.”⁴⁴

Given that, as noted later on, administrative bloat is probably the single biggest cause of exploding tuition and fees, efforts like this represent a (modest) move toward bringing things under control. If SMU has proportionally more administrative employees than most universities, then it must be overstaffed indeed, as staff bloat is the rule, rather than the exception, in higher education.

Purdue University President Mitch Daniels has also taken major belt-tightening steps that are intended to bring tuitions under control. Daniels has frozen tuition – previously increasing at 6 percent a year – for the past three years and has paid for it by postponing raises for administrators and by instituting the kind of cost-control measures usually seen in for-profit businesses outside of higher education. The result is that the Purdue class of 2016 may graduate – assuming they do so on time – without ever having experienced a tuition increase.⁴⁵

Expect to see other schools following Purdue’s and SMU’s lead and trying to do something about bringing administrative and other costs under control.

Bottom line: As time has progressed, it’s become clear that the trends that I originally outlined in The New School are continuing, and even accelerating. As parents and students look for new alternatives that are cheaper, better, and more suited to their individual needs, both K-12 and higher education will face growing pressure to change or die. I suspect that those most willing to change will be the most likely to survive.

But enough about those trends. The analysis in the following chapters explains how we got here and what to do about it. The problems that we face with education at all levels were not created overnight, and they won’t be solved overnight.

And while the thanks in the preface to the original edition remain just as heartfelt, let me add new and equally heartfelt thanks to my research assistant, Corbin Hunter Payne, to the University of Tennessee College of Law and especially my dean, Doug Blaze, and to the many readers who wrote in to share their own experiences and observations. One of the nice things about writing a book, and about doing the inevitable public appearances that go with it, is that it brings you in touch with all sorts of people whom you might never meet as an academic. It has informed my thinking and hopefully my writing, and for that I’m very appreciative.