The Remedial Disconnect

By Professor Doom

     The people doing the actual teaching in higher education know that the biggest problem is in remediation. Simple statements of fact: more than 90% of community college work is at the high school (i.e., remedial) level or lower. More than 90% of remedial students fail to get at least a 2 year degree within 3 years. Those are only two dots, and yet administrators and educationists are simply unable to connect them. 

     A large percentage of community college students fail to perform academically, almost certainly because they’re at the school simply to get a check. Just a bit of effort to cut down on fraud would go a long way to fixing this glaring problem.

      A recent article at Insider Higher Ed just glosses over these facts, and instead suggests the way to deal with remediation is…wait for it…wait for it…to pour more money into the system. Despite being written by an educationist, the article is fairly coherent, although quite ignorant of the reality of what’s going on in higher education.

     Let’s have a bit of a dissection of what’s said:

“require that they address non-academic issues that may prevent students from succeeding,”

     This is an important problem; many of the students in my remedial classes had to deal with legal issues (often drug related, but sometimes actually criminal, like…scamming for government checks), or were pregnant, or had multiple infants to take care of. The article doesn’t offer suggestions, and I just don’t know how to address students that have to spend time in jail (or at least the courts) during the semester. I’ve always been willing to work with students that have tiny children to deal with, but ultimately, the material has been watered down to the sub-high school level, and assignments are basically non-existent. Content free, assignment free courses are the norm at many schools, and that should go a long way to facilitating success. What else is there to do?

 “improve the quality of instruction at all levels,”

Certainly this is a nice, obvious suggestion. Seriously, is anyone advocating reducing the quality of instruction? The educationist here seems to be unaware admin is very motivated to pay as little as possible (every dollar not spent on instruction is a dollar available for administrative salary, after all), and knows they can pay much less when they hire dubiously qualified instructors.

“ revise financial aid policies, “

“Revise”? Holy crap, even mainstream media acknowledges as much as 25% of student grant money is given fraudulently, and my own eyes would put it somewhat higher (but still somewhat below half). This is the only hint in the whole article that, maybe, the problem with remedial students failing is because…they’re not there to learn.

“provide better advising to students at risk,”

Again, I’m glad to see the educationist isn’t advising to provide worse advising, but I have to admit, for an educationist to even state what is obvious to normal people is pretty good. Thing is, years ago, students had to see an advisor before they could sign up for classes. Now, in many institutions, students can just take whatever, as long as the course has no pre-requisites, and most courses, especially the courses admin likes to offer, have no pre-requisites. So it’s quite common to have students with many dozens of hours of introductory courses, and with no actual skills that anyone is willing to pay for.

Administration killed the advisor system, because without advisors students could hurt themselves throwing away vast sums of loan money on pointless courses. How does the educationist not know this?

“ integrate instruction and support services,”

Again, no kidding. It’s funny, attempts to do this have been completely disastrous. How does he not know this?

“teach college success skills,"

Good advice…but if you’d just get rid of the scammers, that would do far more good than adding yet more empty credit hours in worthless “college success” courses that will be of no value when it comes time to get a job.

“invest in professional development"

Oh, please no. Year after year, I’ve been subjected to professional development by educationists and diversity specialists. It gives me great anecdotes, but I’d belong in Hell if I actually bought into that crap material.

Having actually taught remedial courses, it seems so obvious to me: just get rid of all the scammers, and you’ll see massive improvement in passing rates, and you’ll see it quickly.

Let me demonstrate. Let’s suppose we have 100 remedial students. Basically 50% pass the course, the other 50% don’t try (and are almost certainly there for the check). Let’s say 10 of these 100 students will actually get a degree within 3 years (I emphasize, this is better than what real data says what will happen). That’s a 10% graduation rate.

But get rid of the obvious scammers right away? Now you’ve got 10 of 50 students actually getting a degree. That’s a 20% graduation rate. Hey, I’ve just doubled the effectiveness of remediation, and that’s without changing a thing.

The only reason 50% pass remedial is because standards have been lowered so far that students can literally accidentally pass these courses; put real standards in and make the courses legitimate, identify the fraudsters more easily, and there will be further improvement.

But, for some reason, the article never mentions this stupid-obvious thing to try.

Instead, the article goes on in some detail about all the ways we could spend more money on an education system that is mostly bogus, on hiring more administrators to enforce more bogus standards, and on having more evaluation methods of the bogus remedial courses.

As is so often the case, what an educationist has to say is massively disconnected from the reality of what’s going on. Get rid of the fraud, and you’ll do far more for education than yet another hi-falutin’ untested theory.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

A picture sure is worth alot of words....

The above map, from here, really demonstrates how completely insane higher education has become.

That's a map of highest paid public employees, by state.

State by state, every state, the highest paid public employee is in higher education. Not the governor, not a senator, not some life-saver...but someone in higher education.

Yes, most of it is coaches, so I guess the time for me to talk about the immense fraud of college athletics draws nigh...but the fact remains, higher education is a system of plunder, devoid of integrity. All the money poured into higher education has not gone to education, or to educators.

And the picture tells the tale.

Administrative Avarice is Unlimited

By Professor Doom

In earlier articles, I addressed the Pell Grant scam, wherein administrators use very poor record-keeping to illicitly rake in loot, “growing” the institution by getting fake students to sign up for classes. Admin gets the pay boost for running a large institution, and the fake students get a check for whatever is left over from the Pell Grant from tuition.

I want to point out: the Pell Grant was supposed to be a way for anyone to go to college, with enough money to both pay tuition, and to cover some living expenses. 

Libertarian theory, for what it’s worth, says that this system of grants will only increase the costs of college, but that’s just a kooky theory, completely at odds with Keynesian/government philosophy.

Anyway, this scam has been going around for years, and it’s obvious to anyone in the industry that it’s a huge, huge scam:

As many as 25 percent of Pell recipients at community colleges fail to make “satisfactory academic progress” in a typical semester.

--25% is a very generous measure, this is the percent that, without any doubt whatsoever, are scammers. If we reduced the standard to “preponderance of the evidence,” it might be above 50%. I’ve taught many community college courses where over 30% of the students were obviously just there for the check.

Now, the above refers to community college, a place notorious for minimal difficulty, where I’ve shown before that less than 10% of the coursework is at the college level, and much of it is at the 7^th grade level or lower. A student not making progress here is either not trying, or simply not capable…either way, the path of integrity would be to simply get rid of such students.

Registrar: “Due to a glitch in the system, a number of students were accidentally registered for courses of which they were unaware. 2/3rds of them got an F, so we got a flurry of complaints to fix grades.

Me: “What did the other students in courses they didn’t know they were in get?”

Registrar: “They got A’s. They still complained, because they didn’t want to pay tuition for the course. It cut into their refund.”

--seriously, it’s not that hard to get by in community college. I bet everyone with an unexpected “F” complained, but the other way around? I suspect some students, upon getting a free A, would not complain, so 33% would be a low estimate of the proportion of community college courses that are bogus. Imagine if accreditation checked to see if courses were legitimate…

Anyone can put minimal effort into the courses of community college and succeed. Outside of mental disability, it really isn’t possible for a legitimate student to be able to not pass here.

Admin: “If this school experiences a 10% drop in enrollment, we may have to close. Make every effort to keep your students in your courses!”

--Every institution I’ve been at has said something to this effect. If “only” 25% of students are bogus, then that means that much of the higher education industry is currently running strictly via fraud.

Even more amazing, scamming students, even if found to be scamming, can “appeal” to get aid for two, even three more semesters, more if the student puts effort into it. I can’t make this stuff up. After years of this, the Federal government has decided to stop it, limiting the scam to only three semesters:

“That will change July 1, when new Education Department rules go into effect requiring colleges to cut off aid after a third semester of failure with no more appeals.”

I can’t make this stuff up. They’re finally putting it into law to stop the scam at three semesters. Writing such a law could only be justified if there were a great number of students scamming for 4, 5, or more semesters. Why do you think administrators allowed the scam to continue past 3 semesters?

Now, passing a law to put a cap on scamming after three semesters is nice, I guess, but there are ways that a system with integrity could do something about the first three semesters of scamming:

First, I’ve mentioned before that these grants should be restricted to people that actually show an interest in education. Instead of doing no-background check signups, just give scholarship grants to people that can demonstrate an interest in scholarship. Demonstrations of knowledge, of skill, or maybe even waiting until after one semester of success would be easy things to try.

Second, a system run by people with integrity would simply get rid of scammers immediately, instead of knowingly let them run the scam for semester after semester after semester, while admin takes their cut.

Finally, integrity means holding the true criminals responsible. Make the administrators responsible for the fraud actually pay back the money they’re stealing (right now, the institution has to pay back the money admin steals, a big factor in why the scam is so huge, as the thieves get the loot, while the institution gets the bill). Send admin a bill for their thieving, and see just how many semesters they’ll steal.

The above are three easy paths that institutions run with integrity could take, to fix this scam. The regular reader of my blogs knows that none of these options are on the table.

Rather than take a course of integrity, administration will simply take a bigger cut of the loot:

House Speaker Joel Robideaux has introduced a bill in the new legislative session that would allow the technical colleges to raise tuition to capture more of the Pell Grant, reducing the incentive for people to enroll for the refund.

I pause for laughter at the word “capture” being used here, openly showing how higher education has turned into a system of plunder. Would a thief willing to take $4,000 not settle for stealing capturing only $2000 instead? How about a bank, upon realizing thieves are stealing capturing customer accounts, deciding to just steal capture all the money for itself? Would that be as legitimate?

That’s the thinking here.

My guess is the student thieves will simply get a smaller cut, but now the admin thieves will get even more loot, incidentally screwing over all the legitimate students in the process—the legit students will be paying higher tuition, too, in this horribly misguided attempt to reduce the fraud. Realize that the majority of students in higher education could still be legitimate, but admin would much rather hurt legitimate students than engage in any action that would look like integrity. Would it be too much for me to say “I can’t make this stuff up” one more time?

Time and again, “expenses” is used as the reason to raise tuition. I’ve followed the money in higher education, and those expenses are primarily from a bloated and highly paid administrative caste. Alas, they’re not satisfied with creepy high pay, they want MOAR.  The next tuition raise will be justified because “we’re going to take more so that you get less.”

Could there be a larger, more glaring, sign of the lack of integrity in the system? Much like with my previous post, I ask: why would you want your children anywhere near a system run by monsters people like this?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Administrative Idiocy is Unlimited

By Professor Doom

Administration: “The National World War II Museum is not a legitimate institution. Any time you volunteer there cannot count as volunteer service at an educational institution.”

Me: “It’s supported by the same Federal government that gives our student loans, and is one of the top museums in the world. I was approached by their education coordinator; they have student rooms for, well, students.”

Administration: “You’re being insubordinate. Stop now.”

     Often in my blog I’ve indicated the awe-inspiring stupidity and ignorance of many of the administrators running our institutions of higher education. I sprinkle my rants with select quotes of some of the amazing things they’ve said, out of fear that my own writing is sometimes dull.

Administration: “There’s no such thing as mathematical game theory, and frankly I’m a little bit angry that you would try to trick me.”

Me: “…”

--I wouldn’t dream of like, offering up a book on the subject that admin says doesn’t even exist.

      Time and again I’ve bumped into people with advanced administration degrees that I simply don’t understand how they got them. I’m not talking 95 year old senile people, I’m talking people working full time jobs, but repeatedly demonstrating an astonishing lack of knowledge, and an astonishing lack of capability to gain knowledge.

Administrator: “Yes, the policy says use of documentation is mutually exclusive in any application, and that the documentation can’t be used to apply credit twice. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use the documentation to apply credit more than once.”

Me: “…”

       The examples above are just what I’ve seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, and although I’ve provided other eyewitness accounts of what the rulers of higher education truly know, the following should make it clear that I’m not exaggerating:

Game of Thrones quote from professor = threat to shoot up the school?

     The title does a very poor job of explaining the story. A quick summary from Inside Higher Ed: a professor posts a pic on Google+ of his young daughter doing a yoga pose. Harmless enough, except that the little girl is wearing a Game of Thrones t-shirt, emblazoned with house insignia and the phrase “I will take what is mine through fire and blood.”

     Let’s make sure we all see what was done here: the professor posted a pic of his little girl doing a yoga pose, while wearing a legally licensed t-shirt for a popular book/show. Popular amongst humans, that is…perhaps not so popular amongst administrators in higher education.

     A deanling saw the pic, felt threatened, cried havoc, and let fly the dogs of war!

“…security official said that “fire” could be a kind of proxy for “AK-47s.”

…he’s serious.

     Immediately, the deanling summoned the offending professor to a meeting with two other administrators over the “threatening e-mail.” I’ve mentioned before how there are far too many administrators, but one would hope that with three of the goobers at the meaning, there would be enough common sense in total to let the matter drop, but, well, hell no.

      Because the three administrators agreed the threat was credible, the professor was placed on unpaid leave, and would not be allowed to come on campus until he received a psychiatric evaluation.

Administration: “In response to your concerns, we’ve appointed a committee to decide if ‘consensus’ and ‘average’ mean the same thing, and are interchangeable.”

Me: “For what it’s worth, this could be resolved in a matter of seconds with a dictionary. We could clear up the complaint regarding this very quickly, and avoid a lawsuit.”

Administration: “Your lack of collegiality is not appreciated.”

--because their power is unassailable, the only thing most faculty say to admin is “yes”. It really is a good strategy, not sure why I keep trying to use common sense, instead.

To be fair, I’ve only given the basic facts. The administrators have their own insane side:

"The referenced incident refers to a private personnel matter at Bergen Community College. Since January 1, 2014, 34 incidents of school shootings have occurred in the United States. In following its safety and security procedures, the college investigates all situations where a member of its community – students, faculty, staff or local residents – expresses a safety or security concern."

--be sure to check the vote at that link. Over 99% of the voters felt the picture was not a threat, to give some idea of the disconnect between administrators and humanity (keep in mind, THREE administrators agreed it was a threat, basically 1 in 1,000,000 odds, based on the poll, to give some idea of how far administration is removed from humanity). Nothing wrong with investigating, mind you, but such investigations should probably be done by thinking human beings.

      Recall before that admin couldn’t properly investigate decades of complaints about an active pedophile on campus (and I’m not talking Sandusky), to get some idea of how bad it is in higher education right now.

      Only upon reading deeper does one find out that there are two other issues involved besides simple idiocy on the part of administration.

     First, the victimized professor had filed a grievance against admin for being denied a sabbatical; I don’t know if he had it coming, but I’m more than willing to buy that his unpaid leave and psychiatric evaluation are simple retaliation, the typical bullying of administration.

     I’ve been victimized by administrative retaliation, so I find this a likely explanation. Time and again I’ve quoted other faculty who criticize admin under a pseudonym. The pseudonym is quite warranted, as administrative pettiness and vindictiveness can be quite extravagant, I promise you.

     Second, administration is unpopular at the campus because they’re rewriting the rank and promotion rules to give themselves more control. The faculty have given the usual and impotent “no confidence” vote in response to the changes. The president of the institution:

“…has replaced elected faculty members on the Promotion and Tenure Committee with appointed members, against policy…followed previously at the college. The same goes for department chairs.”

--admin always ignores policy if it helps the faculty in any way, and I’ve written before how it’s not a good idea to give admin control over promotions. Making department head administrative appointees is, likewise, a disaster, as I’ve endured.

     The second reason gives an even better explanation for administrative idiocy here: it’s a show of force. The message is clear here: if your child is wearing the wrong t-shirt, admin has the right to suspend you without pay. And admin gets to decide what is “wrong” with a t-shirt.

     If suspension without pay is the penalty for a child wearing the wrong shirt, faculty are quite capable of realizing that the penalties for trying to stop administrative abuse will be very bad, indeed.

     This raises an important question about administrative idiocy: are they so idiotic that they seriously believe that t-shirt was a threat, or are they so idiotic that they believe the public and the law will actually accept their story that a child’s t-shirt was a threat?

      Either answer does much to explain how higher education has fallen so far in the last few years. Again, I ask: why would you want your children near any system controlled by people like these?

     

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Common Core Problems, Part 4

By Professor Doom

There is another issue to Common Core, possibly even more dangerous than making addition and subtraction so complicated that students will learn to become afraid of it long before they learn how to do it. The language is being changed, with a marked tendency towards lack of clarity and added complication. A Cheat Sheet, translating old phrases to new, is provided.

Let’s look at the changes:

“word problem” is now a “math situation”

I’m serious. First, note how the “old way” is three syllables, and the new way will use five syllables—high-falutin’ language is a sign of eduspeak, and this really emphasizes the theme of added complication for negligible benefits.

The whole point of word problems is establishing the relationship to the way we usually approach reality (word problem) to abstract world of mathematics. Calling word problems “math situations” actually breaks down this bridge, a big step backwards into making math into just math…with no relationship to the real world.

“Carry the one” is now “Regroup ten ones as ten”

Again, more words for the same concept. I’ve already addressed in the previous essay how the new method adds complication as well as separates the parent from the child. Neither of these are desirable.

“Borrow” is now “take a ten and regroup it as ten ones”

Again, more words for the same concept. Incidentally, the correct phrase should be “…break it down to ten ones”, since you’re breaking the ten apart. More syllables have been added literally for the sake of adding more syllables here.

“add” is now “increase”

Again, more syllables for no reason.

“subtract” is now “decrease”

I guess they couldn’t find a more complicated word for “subtract.” Perhaps “dis-addify”? I poke fun, and I admit that “increase” and “decrease” do at least sound more related than “add” and “subtract”…but I don’t see the net gain for the change in vocabulary.

“More than/Fewer than” is now “Compare”

It may seem like here we have a simplification, but the new word rather muddies the issue, and isn’t really a direct translation. “I have more than you” is meaningful. “I have compare you” doesn’t work, and even if it did, it doesn’t convey if I have more, or less, than you.

“How do you know?” is now “Evidence”

Again, this strikes me as a confusing translation. I just don’t see the point here, although of all the changes, this one, despite being confusing, is probably the least wasteful.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough how devastating it will be to separate the children from the parents like this.

“…When literacy was first abandoned as a primary goal by schools, white people were in a better position than black people because they inherited a three-hundred-year-old American tradition of learning to read at home by matching spoken sound with letters, thus home assistance was able to correct the deficiencies of dumbed-down schools for whites. But black people had been forbidden to learn to read under slavery, and as late as 1930 only averaged three to four years of schooling, so they were helpless when teachers suddenly stopped teaching children to read, since they had no fall-back position…”

“…Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:

After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren’t faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then…”

I very, very, strongly encourage the dedicated reader to check out this source.

     Much like the passage above, there’s considerable evidence of the devastation possible when children are separated from their families, so that only the teacher in the public school can “help” the child. This will be the true disaster of Common Core; already Americans are basically innumerate in many things, when these new “standards” come up, there will be no fall back for most families, to teach their children the necessary things (like basic addition) that will no longer be taught properly in schools.

      So far, I’ve identified three ways Common Core fails: by making the simple into something complicated, by minimal practice, and by devastating a generation of children by further separating them from their families. Alas, it fails in yet another way.

     Using a longer words for the same concepts is foolish, and perhaps this will be the one time in history separating children from parents will be a good idea, but what about simple practice of skills? In looking over the worksheets, I see there is minimal rote practice…what little skill building is in Common Core is minimally reinforced, further dooming the student. Even if he somehow figures things out, he’ll have no opportunity to truly learn.

    It’s almost as though the people involved with this don’t have human children: a human child needs to be told most everything many times, and repetition is a key part of learning. Repetition is not a part of Common Core, as near as I can tell; that’s a shame, because that means learning will not be a part of Common Core.

     But wait, there’s more.

 

     The last failure is trying and failing to teaching all this underlying theory to small children is going to delay things quite a bit. Just as much of higher education today is simply high school material repackaged for a higher price (over 90% of community college courses are identical or weaker than what is taught in high school), so too will the middle school material of Common Core simply be what used to be taught in the first few years of school, just delayed. What used to be taught to 6 year olds will now be delayed until they’re 8 years old, literally throwing away those critical formative years. I don’t know if throwing away those formative years will be the biggest crime, but those years will be thrown away.

I’m not kidding:

Under the Common Core Standards, students will not learn traditional methods of adding and subtracting double and triple digit numbers until fourth grade. (Currently, most schools teach these skills two years earlier.) The standard method for two and three digit multiplication is delayed until fifth grade; the standard method for long division until sixth.

Schools are already notorious for teaching very little considering how much time they imprison hold children. Common Core will subtract decrease the amount they’ll be teaching by TWO YEARS or more (note how “decrease” is the more appropriate word here than “subtract”, although Common Core says the words are the same).

Just as the overly theoretical method for fractions has created a generation terrified of fractions, delaying their ability to learn much math until college (if ever), so too will Common Core’s emphasis on theory first delay our children’s ability to perform basic math until college (if ever).

I realize I should just keep my mouth shut about this, since the disaster that Common Core will inflict on our children will provide ample job security for me in the future. But, it’s the right thing to do to try to prevent this disaster, even if doing so is not to my benefit.

Plenty of other educators are also taking the high road here…but not enough. What would happen if all the real teachers simply walked away from Common Core? Unfortunately, I fear it wouldn’t stop it. There are too many Educationists more than willing to sacrifice children for personal profit, and many of them are already in the schools.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com