Why do we track students still?

This book from ASCD has some free chapters on-line to consider tracking in our schools.

Education: Personal commodity or Universal good?

Jonathan Kozol, in his Letters to a Young Teacher, makes this comment in his discussion of vouchers:

"If education is perceived not as a universal good but as a personal commodity, and nothing more, to be consumed for personal advantage only—if this is all it is—then it's very hard to argue with a parent who sincerely thinks she's being double-billed" (p. 145, pb edition).

Then, what is education? "[A] personal commodity"? Or "a universal good"?

Op-Eds in The State

The SAT and private schools

Trashing schools for political gain

First essay—Now what do you do?

Let's brainstorm some ideas for the first essay:

• Respond to the article on A.P. courses and liberal arts education

• Respond to the Op-Ed in The State on merit pay

• Respond to my Op-Ed in The State

• Respond to Emerson's The American Scholar

• Respond to Jefferson's comments on education

• Consider what is teachable, and what is unteachable (Vonnegut essay)

• Pick your own topic related to education, democracy, or the relationship between the two

Regardless of your topic, be sure to make purposeful decisions about the GENRE/form of the essay and your intended audience.

What do you think?

Published Online: August 29, 2008

Published in Print: September 3, 2008

Commentary: Are Advanced Placement Courses Diminishing Liberal Arts Education?

By Paul Von Blum

At this time of year, thousands of academically accomplished students enter selective higher education institutions like mine, beginning their arduous journey toward bachelor’s degrees and beyond. They have stellar grade point averages, high SAT scores, and impressive records of community service. The vast majority also have completed Advanced Placement courses in high school, providing them with college credit and ostensibly preparing them for the rigorous academic work they will face as undergraduates.

Yet, my 40 years of undergraduate teaching in the humanities and social sciences, currently at the University of California, Los Angeles, persuade me that Advanced Placement preparation is overrated and may, ironically, diminish rather than advance the deeper objectives of a liberal arts education.

This may be a minority, even heretical, view among my faculty colleagues. Most assume that students’ AP experiences provide a modest advantage in their courses, through superior subject-matter knowledge and higher personal motivation. My experiences contradict these assumptions, however.

"AP participation, for many, is primarily an exercise in memorization and exam passing — the antithesis of genuine liberal learning."

Most of my UCLA courses make use of art, film, literature, and other forms of cultural expression and explore their linkages to major features of history, politics, and society. They cover content that high school students presumably would encounter in such AP courses as art history, U.S. government and politics, English literature, European history, world history, U.S. history, and others. Over the years, though, I have found a disconcerting lack of historical knowledge among my undergraduate students, an observation I hear regularly in conversations with colleagues.

Routinely, I pause in my classes when I discern that a majority of students have never heard of the major historical events, movements, or persons I offer for analysis. Then I must quickly supply them with the relevant information, so that we can move on to deeper educational objectives. This is not especially troubling; my job as a teacher is to provide basic material, including the facts I think my students should already know. But recently during these classroom exchanges, I have started asking how many of the students took AP courses and examinations in high school. Their numbers are staggering.

In conversations with students, moreover, I have found that most approached their AP courses as merely another tedious hurdle to be overcome in gaining admission to selective colleges and universities. Students’ candid remarks over many years have only reinforced my conclusion that AP participation, for many, is primarily an exercise in memorization and exam passing—the antithesis of genuine liberal learning.

Many students sheepishly admit that they forgot the AP material soon after the exam, a process they often repeat as undergraduates. Such comments suggest that their AP efforts were a response primarily to pressure from parents, peers, and institutions seeking high college-admission statistics.

The ironic result is to reduce or even eliminate the quest for authentic learning. By focusing almost exclusively on test-taking skills and examination results, too many students lose sight of what they are supposed to be doing in the first place. A subtle and insidious mind-set develops in which “results” trump the actual educational process. Such a perspective can, of course, lead to major, though limited, postsecondary “success.” But while students graduate with high honors, they come away with little feel for authentic learning and few critical-thinking skills. Résumé padding substitutes for durable knowledge and lifelong intellectual curiosity.Intrigued by this phenomenon, I have sought further discussions with UCLA students who had substantial AP experience in high school. What I’ve found has amplified my misgivings. At least in the humanities and social sciences, students report that their AP work consisted primarily of factual information. Often neglected were the subtleties and ambiguities of historical and artistic inquiry.

Yet there are more serious historical and cultural deficiencies among my students with extensive AP credit. For example, in my courses examining historical events from the perspective of people who challenge the existing social order, I see particular evidence of a vast lack of knowledge about the events and people associated with labor, civil rights, feminist, anti-war, gay and lesbian, environmental, and other resistance movements. Similarly, in art-related courses in which I highlight work by members of marginalized communities such as African-Americans, Latinos, women, and others, there is also little evidence of background knowledge.

In short, almost every person or movement I present seems to be entirely new to my students, a large percentage of whom have had substantial AP coursework in the humanities and social studies. I can only conclude that, like most high school courses in history, art, and social studies, AP efforts reflect a conventional bias that neglects large populations and discourages more-comprehensive treatment of dissenting political and cultural forces.

And then there is the matter of swapping high school credits for college experiences. Those who have substantial unit credit from Advanced Placement courses and examinations also run the risk of shortchanging themselves in opportunities for liberal education at the postsecondary level. Typically, undergraduates need approximately 120 semester units, or 180 quarter units, for graduation. If they begin college with 25 or 30 units gained through AP coursework, they reduce their opportunities for wider intellectual exploration. The effect is to substitute high school classes for college-level classes, even though the latter often provide greater intellectual breadth and depth.

With less time on college campuses, fewer students will select courses on global warming, African-American art, women’s literature, biomedical ethics, and hundreds of other subjects that might encourage them to explore new knowledge in intellectually exciting directions.

Perhaps the most provocative argument against AP courses, though, is that, with rare exceptions, the teachers teaching them are not qualified or knowledgeable enough to offer college-level instruction. The inescapable reality is that high school teachers are not at the forefront of research and intellectual discovery. Indeed, their very workloads often preclude them from even keeping up with major developments in most academic fields. The best among them do perform exceptional work in transmitting knowledge, however. Improvement at that level should therefore be the primary high school objective, rather than entering domains beyond the genuine competence of existing teaching personnel.

Finally, critics of Advanced Placement have observed that affluent school districts hold major advantages in offering such opportunities. This is a compelling view. Schools in lower-income communities, especially those with substantial ethnic- and racial-minority populations, clearly deserve higher funding and superior opportunities for their students. But simply adding more AP courses to their curricula scarcely addresses the structural inequalities and injustices. Replicating a dubious system of AP credit arrangements fundamentally misses the point.

It is unrealistic to advocate the abolition of Advanced Placement courses in high schools. AP opportunities will flourish as long as powerful institutional forces combine with the increasingly frantic efforts of privileged parents to secure high-status college and university slots for their children. Students themselves, caught up in the admissions frenzy, also demand mechanisms to set themselves apart from their peers. Accordingly, college and university admissions officials should exert more critical leadership, perhaps even declining to grant college credit or even preferential treatment to applicants with AP courses on their high school transcripts.

Above all, college and university faculty members concerned with serious liberal learning should reassert their authority as educators. They should avoid complicity in institutional schemes that process undergraduates as rapidly as possible, neglecting the basic principles of active and sustained higher education.

The challenges of the 21st century demand an educated populace with intellectual breadth and depth and the ability for critical thought and active public citizenship. Transitory mastery of Advanced Placement examinations falls tragically short of these compelling public needs.

Paul Von Blum is a senior lecturer at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a member of UCLA’s department of communication studies.

Vol. 28, Issue 02, Pages 26-27

September 5—Meet in Library

We will meet SEPTEMBER 5 in Room 041 on the ground floor of the library for an information fluency session.

Friday

Read the "Course Rationale" (see link in the left menu).

And read this:

http://www.thestate.com/editorial-columns/story/498361.html

And what do you think about merit pay for teachers?

And read this:

Teaching The Unteachable

---

By KURT VONNEGUT Jr.

ou can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. Most bright people know that, but writers' conferences continue to multiply in the good old American summertime. Sixty-eight of them are listed in last April's issue of The Writer. Next year there will be more. They are harmless. They are shmoos.

I saw one horn five years ago--The Cape Cod Writers' conference in Craigville, Mass. It was more or less prayed into existence by three sweet preachers' wives. They were in middle life. They invited some Cape writers and English teachers to a meeting one winter night, and their spokeswoman said this: "We thought it would be nice if there were a writers' conference on Cape Cod next summer."

I remember another thing she said: "We thought established writers would probably enjoy helping beginners like us to break into the field."

And it came to pass. Isaac Asimov is the star this year. Stars of the past include Richard Kim and Jacques Barzun. Twenty-six students came the first year, forty-three the next, sixty-three the next, eighty-two the next, and nearly one hundred are expected this year-- in August. Most of the students are women. Several of them are preachers' wives in middle life.

So it goes.

I congratulated one of the founders recently, and she replied, "Well, it's been an awful lot of fun for all of us. Writers lead such lonely lives, you know, so they really enjoy getting together once a year to discuss matters of common interest."

That's the most delightful part of the game, of course: the pretense that everybody who comes to a writers' conference is a writer. Other forms of innocent summer recreation immediately suggest themselves: a doctors' conference, where everybody gets to pretend to be a doctor; a lawyer' conference, where everybody gets to pretend to be a lawyer; and so on--and maybe even a Kennedy conference, where everybody pretends to be somehow associated with the Kennedys.

"Who comes to writers' conferences?" you ask. A random sample of twenty students will contain six recent divorcees, three preachers' wives in middle life, five schoolteachers of no particular age or sex, two foxy grandmas, one sweet old widower with true tales to tell about railroading in Idaho, one real writer, one not merely angry but absolutely furious young man, and one physician with forty years' worth of privileged information that he wants to sell to the movies for a blue million.

"How much sex is there at writers' conferences?" you ask. The staff members, at any rate, don't come for sex. They hate conferences. They come for money. They are zombies. They want to collect their paychecks and go home. There are exceptions, who only prove the rule.

Honi soit qui mal y pense.

I saw another writers' conference born only this past June 18. I pick that date, since that was when the Student-Faculty Get-Acquainted Party was held. It was The West-Central Writers' Conference, sponsored by Western Illinois University, which is in Macomb, Ill. The party was held in the TraveLodge Motel in Macomb, in between the Coin-A-Wash and the A&W Rootbeer stand, because there was booze. There is a rule against booze on campus.

The founder and director wasn't a preacher's wife. He was a cigar-eating young English instructor named E. W. Johnson. In the conference brochure he claimed to have been a secondhand clothing salesman, a construction worker and a professional gambler. He is also a novelist and a writer of textbooks, and the only teacher at Western Illinois who has published a book. Johnson was sad at the party because he had sent out thousands of brochures and had advertised lavishly in Writer's Digest and Saturday Review and so on, and yet only 19 students had come. They were sitting around the room, rolling their eyes moonily, waiting for new friendships to begin.

"I can't understand it," he said above the Muzak and the sounds of drag races out on Route 136. "We have as good a staff as any conference in the country."

And the staff really was at least fair to middling. There was myself, described in the brochure as "the foremost black humorist in American fiction"; and there was Richard Yates, "perhaps the greatest living short story writer in America;" and there was John Clellon Holmes "the official biographer of the Beat Generation, who has recently completed a novel entitled ëPerfect Fools,' which is written from a ëwhite humor' point of view"; and there was Frederic Will, "one of the most versatile writers in America, having published extensively (eighteen books) in the fields of poetry, non-fiction and translation."

Johnson confessed that it had appeared for a while that only five students were coming, and he confessed too, that he had never been to a writers' conference before.

I asked him how he had come to found such a thing, and he said that he sure wasn't doing it for money. All he was getting as director was his regular instructor's pay. He honestly wanted to help writers.

The party died at midnight. Everybody had gone home by then except Johnson and a couple of staff members and a girl who had been recently divorced--from an Arab, she said. We were sitting around the swimming pool, breathing chlorine and carbon monoxide.

"You know why more people didn't come?" said the girl.

"Nope," said Jonson.

"Because ëMacomb, Illinois' sounds like such a hell-hole, and because "Western Illinois University' sounds like such a jerkwater school," she explained.

The Town isn't all that bad, I guess, and the University is handsome and booming. But there isn't any water there, and there aren't any mountains there, and there is no grand hotel. If you don't have water or mountains, and you want to fond a writer's conference, you had better have a grand hotel. Bloomington, Ind., is a hell-hole, God knows, but the Indiana University Writers' Conference takes place in the student union, which contains four restaurants, a pool hall, a barber shop, a bowling alley and a bookstore, and grown- ups can drink booze in their rooms.

I taught at Indiana's conference one summer. They're starring Jerome Weidman and Gerold Frank this year. The most touching thing that happened to me there was when Harry Mark Petrakis and I admitted to each other that we had never been published in The New Yorker, and probably never would be because we lacked that certain something. We thought it might be an ethnic thing, that they didn't like Greeks and Germans.

We have been brothers ever since.

We fours stars at Macomb had all taught at one time or another in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. E. W. Johnson got his Master of Fine Arts degree there. I've quit after two years--not angrily, but feeling waterlogged. All the Workshop staffers were professional writers. Vance Bourjailly was the only one who ever got much writing done, probably because Iowa was his home. The rest of us were gypsies.

And one problem at Iowa, no problem at Macomb, was that the students were all very able writers. They were not committed to a silly week or two in the summertime. They were engaged in a two-year graduate program which was to end, ideally, with the completion of a novel of a short-story collection, or sometimes a play. They deserved help from their teachers, and there was time in which to give it to them.

"How did you help?" you ask.

Nothing is known about helping real writers to write better. I have discovered almost nothing about it during the past two years. I now make to my successor at Iowa a gift of the one rule that seemed to work for me: Leave real writers alone.

I haven't mentioned the poets in the Writers' Workshop because I don't know much about them. The poets talk all the time, like musicians, and this drives prose writers nuts. The poets are always between jobs, so to speak, and the prose writers are hung up on projects requiring months or years to complete.

The idea of a conference for prose writes is an absurdity. They don't confer, can't confer. It's all they can do to drag themselves past one another like great, wounded bears.

One thing I'm glad about: I got to see academic critics at Iowa. I had never seen academic critics before. They are felt to be tremendously creative people, and are paid like movie stars. I found that instructive.

When I saw my first academic critic, I said to a student, "Great God! Who was that?"

The student told me. Since I was so shaken, he asked me who I had thought the man was.

"The reincarnation of Beethoven," I said.

To return to the Macomb experiment one last time: I hope they get more people next year than came this year. If the conferences dies, it will be the first one that ever did. What they need to make things merrier is a sort of master of the revels, a graduate of some really great hotel school like Cornell University.

And they must stop telling staff members that they have to sign loyalty oaths or they won't get paid. Poor E. W. Johnson was humiliated when that happened in spite of all he tried to do to prevent it. A little touch like a loyalty oath can lead a visiting writer to suspect, rightly or wrongly, that his is employed by hicks.

Mr. Vonnegut is working on a new novel, "Slaughterhouse 5." A musical version of "Cat's Cradle," an earlier novel, will open on Broadway this year.