Reforming (K-12) reform; stepping outside the box

Preface 

Intending repositioning of edunationredux to issues of higher education reform, public K-12 challenges continue to rattle cages.  The latest, initial confirmation of a perspective reflected in this blog’s critiques for over three years; the roles played by collegiate education for education in reform of public K-12 systems.  This week’s Washington Post focused on one aspect, linked here.  The study still missed other key ingredients in tackling an overall still underperforming and defensive system of US public schools.

One is the extension of that study’s focus to management education for K-12 school administration, arguably a more convoluted mess than even alleged for our teachers.  The extension of that failure is a complicated structural enigma, spanning how administrators are sought and chosen frequently by ad hoc committees or boards lacking the competence to do the chore, possible organization obsolescence, overzealous focus on local egos, followed by the consequences when self-centric and corruptible administrators are put in place with virtually zero oversight.  Far fetched?  Mid-America’s public systems are saturated with the breed, effectively neutralizing many legitimate attempts at learning improvement and adoption of relevant technologies.

The bottom line is that all of the reform rhetoric, from extremes of for-through-against, has been naively focused on a small list of factors, that equally naively, are assumed capable of changing the game and performance.  The common sense depiction of the failing is tunnel vision.  The more accurate roots of the behaviors are ignorance of the concept of systems, and an intellectual failure to assess the issues as complex, systemic, longitudinal, and that cannot be addressed by randomly seeking even a six-pack of silver bullets that will magically reform public K-12.

"The Answer Sheet," the Post's daily messenger about all things public K-12 reform, has almost uniquely been outstanding in addressing most of the reform issues.  It is also keyed to single issue revelations, and veers toward attack of the present reform movement, only rarely addressing a question that merits reflection:  If public K-12 overall has been doing such a magnificent job for the last quarter century, why do they need to be reformed with the hammers being used, and advocated by both liberals and conservatives?  This additional post on public K-12 reform addresses the top lines of issues that still need the light of day.

Reforming (K-12) reform; stepping

outside the box

"The Answer Sheet," Diane Ravitch prominently, and a cast of media, collegiate and occasional K-12 critics have been hammering on present test-based reform as a not-very-bright approach to correcting learning progress in US public schools.  But the passion accompanying that critique at the onset of the worst of testing imposition may need adjustment.

There has been effect:  Education gurus, parents and systems are now questioning the wisdom of the narrow approach; some of the most strident advocates have proven demagogic and self-centric; the Obama Administration appears willing to run the risk of compromising a major societal system without a plan B; there is embryonic evidence narrowly targeting our K-12 systems' teachers and students has produced little real progress in learning beyond transitory rote effects; the principal beneficiaries of the reform agenda have been testing company bottom lines and bloated state education bureaucracies; and the pedagogical sterility of the reform mode may have if anything deepened the chasm between K-12 output and higher education's preparation expectations.  The latter is deeply ironic given the Administration's marginally thought out and simplistic conviction that all should aspire to a collegiate education.

Has present reform and a loyal opposition accomplished lasting positive change?  Conditionally, yes.  Many public K-12 systems with dismal learning values and zero accountability have been brought to heel, with positive effects on classroom rigor.  (Parenthetically, however, system administration and boards lacking a viable concept of learning have made “reform” just another unthinking act of bureaucratic plugging with muted effect.)  Our testing companies have now been forced back to the drawing board to construct better tests.  An alleged common knowledge base (CCSSI) not ready for prime time has been slowed, and may get needed review, along with perhaps commitment of smarter and less ideological resources to develop a next generation.  Even some state governments that ideologically or mechanically bought the reform Kool-Aid in exchange for dollars are rethinking; what is real reform?

  

Some things have not changed.  The present reform motif may be morphing into something more palatable if one is optimistic, but the Obama Administration appears dogmatically committed to the belief that only the present strategy can modify educational inequality. Paradoxically, the Obama-Duncan version of remediation is also a form of extremism backed by the power to buy off or coerce its recipients.

The rationale for many of the attitudes and beliefs that inundate present reform are simply amplifications of the 50 or so forms of cognitive error and distortion.  Are its practitioners aware of these logic flaws?  To cannibalize a major press' feature, there is probably room for debate.  On the side of benefit of a doubt, the menagerie of testing advocates simply can't be that stupid about how real learning happens, and is translated into sustainable capacities for problem solving and creativity.  Better angels say they must be better than that?  That debate may be relevant, but the reality is that the present reform thrust will not change under this Administration, nor will it abate.

Stalemate?  Very likely, manifesting an agonizingly slow unfolding of more testing, more ideological righteousness, more gaming for self-promotional position, punctuated by episodic minimal relief when the model threatens to provoke real revolt.  The obvious question, is there any opening for real, needed reform of a public K-12 system with constituents dug in and defensive, or as obsessive or myopic as many of the alleged reformers?  Perhaps there is.

One scenario hinges on anti-testing advocates accepting that the model is not going away, and that it may actually increase public system accountability and instills a narrow form of public K-12 education rigor.  Change the game plan, from protest to proactive advocacy making the rote components of reform maximally productive with every technology assist practical, and minimal resources, then focus on using better knowledge components to install as another layer a rich learning model.  To keep this from simply being Alice's rabbit hole, other major reforms would need to descend on our collegiate schools of education, and testing for advanced learning would need an evolutionary leap.

Another powerful argument is reconciliation, or perhaps major repositioning of present public school missions versus the environment of post-secondary education.  These two systems have been passing like ships in the night for most of their joint existence, with measurable deficits in higher education outputs and student drop outs at the baccalaureate levels of that venue. Arguably, public K-12 failure contributes to those performance deficits.  A true revolution might create a national effort to over time propose a better composite model of US education that recognizes what the nation will be and need by 2025 and beyond.  In parallel, extract the de facto role of defining knowledge from the corporate sector, and make that the exclusive province – along with related testing – of joint ventures between our collegiate system and K-12 public education.

All of the above suggest another revolution, recognizing that research on learning at all levels has been shorted for a century, only slowly gaining purchase because of the breakthroughs in neural science in the last decade. These are also developments that are literally opaque for many of our public K-12 education system because of that flawed education and the knowledge gap it has perpetuated.

Lastly, there is no way of avoiding the issue of challenged local oversight of most public schools.  The elective school board model as effective leadership and oversight of schools has been broken for possibly its entire life, too often fostering ignorance and self-promotion rather than studied assessments and administrative guidance. It has resulted in human resources lacking the competence to even know they may be wrong or destructive. Minimal state requirements for board candidacy, lazy and popularity-based voting, and virtually no requirements of training to serve are as devastating to public K-12 quality as incompetently educated administrators and teachers.  Fix?  One concept is linking boards to states’ higher education resources, for both vetting of boards and required training.

If the US was a nation at educational risk almost two decades ago, it is arguable that NCLB, RTTT, an academically flawed CCSSI, substitution of ideology and greed for wisdom in pushing charters, and pedestrian concepts for motivating a nation’s teachers and learners, have made the original titled "A Nation at Risk" massive understatement in 2013.

Higher Education Reform for Dummies

There is angst in advocating reform of our colleges and universities while public K-12 is in throes of either intellectual devolution, or soaring to new levels of rote achievement, depending on perspective and ideology.  But, one, there is an intimate connection between K-12 change and higher education’s future; and two, our post-secondary institutions are tracking vectors leading to a cliff.

'Tis the Season

The love-hate relationship with our colleges and universities by its students, parents, private and public sectors absorbing its output, and critics, waxes and wanes with the seasons.  When graduation looms optimism and favorable attitudes blossom, buoyed by parental pride and the eloquent but generally meaningless rhetoric of ceremonial speakers; and perhaps the hope that the end of large cash outflows is imminent (discounting subsequent decades of loan repayment). Shift to the glories of autumn, where college application, matriculation and funding challenges give way to the football season. American competitiveness and escapism again elicit good feelings for our institutions, followed by March Madness. Behind that facade of twisted appreciation of the US academy, the real higher education beat goes on.  Is optimism justified, or is virtually every version of cognitive distortion acting to postpone or divert the need for core change in collegiate direction?

Comparing and contrasting reform of public K-12 versus post-secondary, major differences are immediately evident.  With the exception of the bursts of publications excoriating the teachers’ unions, and defending (or damning) test-based alleged reform, there is little material addressing the long standing issues with the public K-12 bureaucracy that produced the present reform movement.  In contrast, there has been an outpouring of critique of our collegiate institutions, reaching as far back as the first Presidential Commission on Higher Education (Mr. Truman’s), and now ubiquitous in both higher education journals and seemingly endless blogs.  The difference, the latter critique has deflected few of the alleged excesses overtaking US higher education.

Change Needed?

Current critique of the academy increasingly prompts headlines such as “radical reform of higher education is inevitable,” or “higher education is in crisis;” the latter spirit reflected even in survey of higher education administrators, with high percents of agreement.  Nevertheless, our collegiate presidents are going where few academic leaders have previously ventured.  That is:  The aggressive pursuit of not just dollars, but of major campus diversification veering away from the classroom; decision styles that conflate academic with corporate management; more bricks and mortar; higher administrator salaries; slack learning accountability; expansion of non-teaching human resources; and insensitivity to the calls for major tuition reduction, faculty productivity analyses and improvement, even deflection of the question whether four years of college are producing minimal learning as inferred from research by Arum and Roksa.

A recent ACT study demonstrated a major disconnect between K-12 educator, versus collegiate educator assessments of student readiness for college:  Of K-12 resources, 89 percent asserted their students were “well prepared” or “very well prepared” for college level work; for those responding in our colleges, the number was 26 percent. One implication is that higher education has failed to perceive the K-12 linkage that impacts their own success, another that our public K-12 systems are wading in cognitive bias.

The question also bores down on not just the academic culture, but into its major disciplines.  Are our collegiate schools of education responsible and accountable for the shrinkage of public K-12 learning performance that precipitated present reform?  Are our B-schools responsible and accountable for the values and ethics that marinate our corporate behaviors, and for the behaviors of our financial institutions?  Have the liberal arts simply dug a hole and crawled in to avoid critique and deny change?  Has a more than century-old organizational model of our academic disciplines ceased to deal with advocacy and assessment of actual learning, and impeded or blocked adoption of technologies that integrated into classroom models can improve that performance?

Have collegiate classrooms become “endowed,” coupled to reduction of accountability of faculty via traditional tenure?  Has the traditional depiction of collegiate learning driven by lecture and sometimes professor-student interaction become so entrenched that productivity change is frozen?  An organizational issue, has a faculty as a source of veto power on administrative change simply hardened into the inevitable roadblock?

Recent developments in online learning suggest change may be forced onto the academy by learning methods bypassing traditional channels and orthodoxy – MOOC, decline in dependence of job sourcing of graduates based on traditional credentials, and continued evolution of private and community post-secondary programs. The generally conservative leaderships of our collegiate enterprises, even while adopting some of the growth strategies of the private sector, did not typically get to those positions via managerial apprenticeship and success; they frequently fail in strategic positioning and leadership.

Are any of the present trends on traditional campuses sustainable?  Can a trillion dollars of collegiate student debt just be written off?  Has Federal funding of higher education without controls actually precipitated the academy’s ills by enabling tuition inflation?  Will token tuition decreases stop critique?  Will collegiate leaderships emulate the doctrine of “too big to fail,” or perhaps, “too smart to fail,” or experience some of the other perceptual failures that lead managements to defer needed change until capacity to intercept markets is too little too late? 

A trenchant, albeit futuristic scenario is depicted in EPIC 2020 from a TED presentation titled “2012 The Tipping Point.”  Our colleges and universities may be impotent to intercept change that is emerging entrepreneurially from outside the academy, excepting only the handful of “A+” institutions that can likely survive any generalized post-secondary denouement.  Deniers may write it off as fantasy:  Reality is that Taleb’s “Black Swans” happen; US financial giants can collapse; GM did declare bankruptcy; Khan Academy endures; Coursera, Udacity, and edX have launched; and public K-12 education allegedly had such a secure monopoly that privatization couldn’t happen?

There seem some pretty robust arguments that US higher education must adapt.

The Shape of Reform?

The elements of reform are not a surprise.  The National Association of Scholars in a post offering “One Hundred Great Ideas for Higher Education” conveniently addressed them.  Augmented with additions, they run the gamut:

• Comprehensively privatize non-teaching functions.
• Creatively invest in productivity change.
• Scale missions back to education and essential research.
• Change the criteria for promotion and tenure from low value research and publication to classroom performance.
• Make faculty and classrooms accountable.
• Reform tenure.
• De-emphasize the most corrupted collegiate sports.
• Focus on learning instead of buildings.
• Recruit and hire more effective senior management.
• Reduce or eliminate non-instructional headcounts.
• Set higher standards for grading; reward rigor.
• Teach graduate students teaching how to teach.
• Teach faculty how to teach.
• Adopt value-based budgeting, versus incremental budgeting methods that retain the status quo and invite organizational gaming.
• Move more quickly to research, qualify and implement digital technologies that can augment the classroom.
• Update curricula where many (especially professional) schools’ concepts of relevant knowledge are still rooted in the last century.
• A veritable explosion of tactical changes related to how teaching is planned, executed and assessed.
• Find a model of communication, involvement and compatible values to bridge the chasm between K-12 and the pedagogy of higher education. 

They also challenge accomplishment because of the reluctance of higher education leaderships to acknowledge the need for change, or failure to see change in realistic terms.  An example was the assessment of a well-known educator, Chester Finn, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  Dr. Finn’s prescription:  “Less booze.  Less sex.  More Studying.  Problem eased if not solved.”  With respect, demonstrating the distinction between normative and pragmatic solutions, the probability of that solution set getting traction is roughly equivalent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner exchanging valentines, embracing each other, and linking arms to anchor the politically-centric dream team.

The Process of Reform

The reality of US higher education reform may mirror in jeopardy and sweep the Voyage of Ulysses.  Higher education’s institutions, though fractionally less than five percent of public K-12’s, are a level of magnitude more diverse and complex. Those public have evolved in order to survive drastic reductions in state funding, but that autonomy begets hubris.  Additionally, growth linked to external and sports funding may now seem irreversible.  Accountability is even more of a challenge because oversight is frequently with politically-sourced trustees, and because their chancy tenure drives more tactical than strategic problem solving.  Methods of faculty creation, career evolution and performance assessment may be too entrenched, and research and publication too linked to external organizations to be easily transformed.

There are also contradictory effects and land mines in any reform agenda.  What-if, some of the same forces and motivations that have produced test-based public K-12 reform take root?  For example, a frequently cited element of reform, elimination of tenure, may be counterproductive, because tenure may be the last line of defense against the imposition of test-based attempted reform of collegiate classrooms.  Another, the speculation that the reform mode in public K-12, with its rote indulgence, will when it expresses in future college readiness, vastly increase the chasm between secondary education and collegiate learning values.

The above just skim the challenge of higher education change.  It is a no-brainer to articulate the non-prioritized “should be” that link to and could modify higher education, but charting the critical paths that reform must take to either achieve anything, or avoid tipping a still working system into turmoil is clearly “not for dummies.”  The irony of this reform venue is that it will take layers of creativity, wisdom, servant leadership and some extraordinary courage to either change the existing infrastructure, or fashion some non-destructive institutional bypass solutions for needed post-secondary change.

Lastly, all of US education is standing on pillars of questionable thinking, and false dichotomy.  K-12 education and higher education are two tectonic plates, sliding past each other with neither recognizing the interdependence.  Equally debilitating, even our core concepts of education look like Swiss cheese.  Reflecting the item that usually heads the list of cognitive distortions, “all-or-nothing-thinking,” where is it written that one can’t be an educated welder or plumber or technician or service worker, et al.?  Does the name Eric Hoffer trigger some recall?  America has slouched into a paradigm where a job has come to define who we are and basic values; compounded by, as the New York Times’ David Brooks noted in a recent opinion piece, we become those who surround us.

American educational leadership at every level needs to rethink the assertion that the ultimate goal is (present) college for all, versus training qua education that supports sustainable careers and civic intelligence.  On the table as well, what an “education” really means, and whether our present stratified systems need to be subjected to hard analysis and review, and creatively repurposed for potential economic and social futures those strata seem to have myopically ignored in a race to their respective short run utopias.

Why Is US Collegiate Change a Non-Starter?

If the last post was missed, the premise advanced was that change in the strategies and policies of America’s higher education institutions is overdue. 

Expressions of that position have now accumulated in the public square, coming from such diverse places as the White House in the last SOTU, from the US corporate sector, from the discordant mutterings of parents viewing collegiate tuition, from our new graduates and their predecessors saddled with one trillion dollars in collegiate debt, and now interestingly even from collegiate administrators. 

The most telling citation was from the 2012 TIME and Carnegie Corporation of New York sponsored poll of a sample of senior college/university administrators:  A key finding – 96 percent of the sample of administrators said “higher education is in crisis.”  That number was seven percentage points higher than responses by the public sample to the same question.

Perhaps one can marshal some arguments to the contrary, but the mass of economic indicators, along with qualitative assessment from being in the academy make the case clear if not irrefutable. 

Our colleges and universities are with few exceptions run by very smart people; so why, facing a barrage of critique, and factual data that indict, are our higher education leaderships reform laggards?  The question is even more puzzling given the volume of explanation on the record.  Compared with US public K-12 education, where the cultural and psychological explanations for resistance to change are obscured whenever possible (though deducible), the bucket of hypothesized causes for higher education’s intransigence runneth over.

Top Lines

Based on having lived in the academy during the heart of the 20th Century, it seems that dominant reasons for resistance changed over a quarter century.  In the decade post WWII, universities struggled but entrepreneurially worked to cope with the influx of mature students enabled by the GI Bill.  Post-secondary work took on an aura of seriousness and with a mission, to prepare students to take on civilian responsibilities of economic growth. 

The next decade saw expansion of masters and doctoral programs, those apostles employed to cope with soaring student teaching loads.  Then parts of the private sector began to question curricula still wedded to pre-war days.  A case in point was America’s B-schools, critically evaluated and found still steeped in the descriptive lore of the ‘30s.  The case was reinforced by the emergence from WWII’s “whiz kids” what was then termed “operations research,” suites of mathematically based decision tools that quickly found postwar adoption in alert businesses. 

Two subsequent studies, funded by the Ford and Carnegie foundations, forced our B-schools to scramble to retool business principles, teaching, and research to embrace basic disciplines, and seek explanation and prediction as missions.  (Parenthetically, this change was not all positive, sending B-schools detached from market reality on excursions into theory for its own sake that frequently became the mission, versus a marriage of that science applied to real world problem solving.  A half-century later America’s B-schools are still wading in esoteric ramblings, long overdue for another wave of needed change.)

The next epoch was seeded by both a liberal thrust combined with economic demands being placed on our states, resulting in reduced support for higher education, but simultaneously creation of a slug of regional campus programs launched to broaden the base of post-secondary work available to all.  Both trends had unintended consequences.  Reduced public sector funding ignited universities to go entrepreneurial to seek to ensure their survival by becoming less dependent on public sector funding, the deficits made up by tuition, endowment dollars, and Federal research funding.  The result was decreasing felt responsibility to adhere to states’ oversight.

  


Simultaneously, the noble but utopian vision of college for all resulted in creation and rapid expansion of a collegiate cottage industry, community colleges and vocational to medium tech programs, with unproven or unknown academic provenance.  Many of these programs found their political bootstraps before finding their intellectual and curricular footers.  The result was frequently lobbying by these marginal programs to have their credits accepted by major schools, a basis for marketing their programs.  This less than noble perversion of legitimate academic values further contributed to degrading learning even on state flagship campuses.

An additional economic effect was the rise of inter-university competition for students and external funds along with the metamorphosis of universities’ primary mission as education into a diversified enterprise.  Academics may bristle, but the academy became a big business, pumped up by sports dollars, more easily found dollars for non-academic bricks & mortar, and programs that would either raise money or enhance reputation and recruiting.  Not unexpectedly, if one studies history, these changes in priorities induced various dollar-driven excursions from ethics.  A case in point, the practices that resulted in the relatively recent departure of Miami University’s Farmer School (B-school) dean.  Also, not surprisingly, transparency in higher education in Ohio suffered another hit with this saga.

In parallel, few universities have been led by resources chosen for demonstrated managerial excellence, versus academically proficient or even renowned resources who also became politically proficient and migrated into administration.  Pragmatically, universities became big businesses managed by amateurs, but with little change in the organizations’ decentralized and loosely coupled structure, and goals and objectives that were complex, diffused, and soft versus the reasonable clarity of the corporate mission.

The Take-Away

The campus has become an assembly of quasi-independent academic enclaves, with faculties more likely to view themselves as independent contractors, further exacerbated by academic tenure. Faculties, almost invisible when innovation is sought, quickly become defensive about any initiative that might intrude on the privacy of their classrooms, or disrupt a privileged professional life style.  Simultaneously, traditional teaching excellence continues to regress as the core of many institutions' priorities and resource applications has retreated from learning to serving other constituencies than students, generating dollars, or avoidance of controversy.

Examples:

• The failure of intellectual integrity of faculties raising roadblocks to any opportunity for higher education updating is illustrated in the May 2, 2013 story about Duke University.  By an incredible two votes (16-14), a Duke Arts & Science faculty group forced that university’s withdrawal from a major MOOC effort.  Perhaps this group of forward-looking academics was put off by the company they would have to keep; low class universities including Northwestern, Washington University, Boston College, Brandeis and Emory?  Or perhaps they felt competition with the MOOC program EdX demeaned their potential effort, that competition schools with such low academic standards as MIT and Harvard?  Or more likely, the Duke enclave was just demonstrating that self-centric and retro faculty do in fact litter our universities, reflecting a previously cited presidential commission conclusion.

• The only performance more anti-intellectual than the above faculty regression is the yellow stripe running down the backs of Duke’s leadership.

• The above example also illustrates another change complication, universities’ “loose coupling” of decision centers, the result of decentralized and ritualized distribution of power over organizational decisions, with veto power over especially major items.  Loose coupling of clusters of resources with differential demands makes small changes relatively easy, but major change becomes a challenge.

• Change is simply dogmatically resisted:  “Active resistance includes being critical and finding fault, perhaps ridiculing the whole idea. It might include the typical psychodynamics of guilt, blame and shame. A second type of active resistance is the various forms of manipulation, including sabotaging an idea, and might include distorting facts or being deliberately threatening or ambiguous. Consider, for example, a Dean who expresses support for change in one forum only to return to their Faculty and suggest to their academic colleagues that it is something that need not be taken seriously; that it is a passing fad or something that they simply do not do where they are.”

• Increasingly expansion and loose oversight in our institutions allowed bureaucratic resources to explode, to both manage the expanded list of non-education functions, to support an increasingly “endowed” faculty eschewing chores perceived as non-academic or just the concept of work, and to cope with the explosion of Federal and other bureaucratic reporting requirements loaded on the institutions.

The sad reality is, by the end of the third quarter of last century, traditional collegiate faculties at other than our niche institutions still governed by learning values had with some notable exceptions become overpaid, underperforming refugees from the real world.  Arcane journal minutiae replaced much needed research except in the sciences, and a pampered faculty continued to practice in the classroom with zero transparency, and with little or no performance measurement.  In our B-schools, most traditional faculty would strain to successfully manage any contemporary enterprise, and be entrepreneurial novices.  Based on some empirical research on students’ actual learning after four collegiate years, many faculty in the social sciences and professional schools might be beneficially replaced (with both performance enhancements and cost reduction effects) by some large LED displays and wholesale MOOC.

Sometimes candor emerges from unexpected places.  The May 5 issue of G. B. Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic strip displays (in admittedly exaggerated form) another unfortunate truth about the debilitating trajectory of much US education; check it out.

Organizationally, our campuses ultimately developed a level of complexity and diversity that rivals or exceeds the demands for management in a comparably sized technically complex business; that diversification and complexity tracks the classic ratchet effect, it only evolves in one direction. America’s higher education leaderships missed the tipping point in that institutional evolution.  The academy became a hybrid; part increasingly bureaucratized education sacred cows, coupled to dollar generating diversification and sports addiction, but with the at least topside recognition that it had become big business.  The issue is that attempted managerial style is encumbered by a trailing organization little changed under the surface in half a century, as well as provoking a conflict between the core values of education versus commercialization.

Thus university leadership in turn becomes very corporate, demanding the monetary returns perceived as due the assets being allegedly managed.  Not unexpectedly, servant leadership recedes, and a form of arrogance seen in parts of the private sector emerges.  Too big to fail becomes a mental set.

More Reasons for Resisting Change

The above barely scope the roster of roadblocks to higher education change that have been advanced over the last couple of decades.

The UK’s Higher Education Academy (tellingly, offering assessments not found in most of the US literature), an organization devoted to assessing UK higher education, has assembled a roster of the additional reasons those institutions resist change.  The list is presented in an accompanying Appendix A.  Dig into it at your own risk; of starting to equate America’s lesser colleges’ and universities’ leadership attitudes with a polite version of our present US Congress.

A Bottom Line?

Based on the above, and even without Appendix A captured by your neural nets, the futility of intercepting the present US higher education trajectory seems almost intractable.  America’s higher education universe may actually now be too big to fail. But arguably, analogous to the theory that all expansionary systems move toward entropy, they may not be too big to simply become a major societal cost without offsetting performance, anchoring increasing mediocrity.

Can that trajectory be nudged?  A paper issuing from that UK Academy says it so well there was no point in seeking to rephrase the view:

“Coercion rarely works as people quickly find covert ways to ensure the change is thwarted or seriously diluted.  So what can an educational developer do? Obviously, the opposite of the things identified in the reasons for resisting change cited so far. Clearly, what these represent is a failure to manage change effectively and properly. For some scholars of change management it is a question of values and beliefs. For example, it is a common belief that the introduction of on-line learning will lead to a reduction in teaching staff. Similarly, the core value of academic freedom is often challenged by the suggestion that there should be some method of quality assuring on-line learning materials. For others there is reference to the innate conservatism of organizational culture and, arguably, a romanticized view of academic life that has probably never existed outside the pages of ‘campus novels.’

It is common sense that not all change is positive and not all resistance is negative. Looking at the reasons why people resist change we can see that there are times when change is inadvisable; where the preconditions have not been satisfied and where there is no clear articulation of what the outcomes might be. ‘Blocking a decision that has good short-term but bad long-term consequences’ might be a good solution. So what can we do to manage change effectively and deal with resistance to change when we need to?”

Exploring change strategies in US higher education is the topic for the next post in this series.  But out there as low-hanging fruit are some of the changes that have been advanced repetitively by presidential commissions but dismissed by academy leadership:

Rethink the role of the traditional tenured faculty member – is it finally time to acknowledge that the original purpose of tenure has expired, and that options to traditional tenure be assessed along with how faculty classroom performance is measured;

rethink the present organization of most universities – if the Duke experience cited above doesn’t conjure a vision of a coddled tail wagging the flaccid dog it should;

in light of major changes in technology viewed as what they are, basic changes in how human perception, communication, and learning can be modified, rethink whether “Baumol’s disease” can now be treated to increase learning productivity and change post-secondary cost accounting – this comprises far more than just the present debates about online learning, asking whether reactionary views of technology are consistent with the philosophy of higher education;

start asking questions – what is being offered in our carefully cloistered college classrooms, and what is being executed institutionally to assess its learning effects; and

open the windows and let in some light – make transparent and comparable the data parents and potential college students need to choose the right post-secondary experience – as our colleges and universities have resisted even this most obvious example of servant leadership and responsible marketing.

The Leadership Dimension in Higher Education Change


The last change venue cuts to the chase, but is not pretty; some on-the-record examples of performances by those allegedly managing our institutions. 

One example, the joint ineptitude illustrated in the naïve performances of the University of Virginia’s president, matched for dysfunction by the star chamber performance of that institution’s oversight.  UVA briefly became a media event when its president was deposed by board manipulation, then reinstated; the brouhaha broke through the usual facade of benign and forthright higher education administrator-oversight cohabitation.  Both UVA factions, if there were real higher education accountability, would be looking for new horizons.

A second example is the in-your-face hubris and ethically questionable machinations of the present leader of The Ohio State University, a travesty for an institution that allegedly recruited and hired this administrator to “institute reform” rather than magnify its need. Almost as egregious was Mr. Obama’s election of this human resource to chair the present administration’s presidential commission on higher education when there are ethical and innovative US collegiate leaders that might have better represented the venue.  

Ironically Mr. Obama addressed the May 5 OSU graduation ceremony, concluding with: “I promise you, it’ll give you a tough skin. I know a little bit about this. President Wilson once said, ‘If you want to make enemies, try to change something.’ ”  Paradoxical issuing from our POTUS.  Try changing the public K-12 standardized testing reform path of NCLB/RTTT now being challenged across the nation for its dysfunction and inequities, regularly but hypocritically defended by the President, and being flogged with equivalent double-talk by Arne Duncan to the cheers of Gates, Broad, Walton, Rhee, and the managements of the cabal of corporate testing companies reaping bottom line contributions.

Not discriminating, this writer’s former stomping grounds, Indiana University, should be nominated for an Emmy – for the recent and best last century rendition of how to grow an educational bubble.  This is now a tactically well, even brilliantly managed university at the top, but building an overhead-heavy bubble in last century's spirit of dynamic growth and an optimistic expansionary credo.

That mission definition is arguably a retro 180 degrees off the needed future higher education vector:  Major tuition reduction; less bricks & mortar and greater core learning focus; reform of tenure; balancing theory and applications that support job creation; priority privatization of non-academic functions; aggressive cost reduction and productivity sourcing in both classroom and support operations; and conscious and major thinking about what higher education sustainability will entail by 2025.  (Parenthetically, this university has in this century blown more dollars in buying off administrators and coaches who have failed than it would take to fund a system-wide self-assessment exercise.)

Lastly, the May 5, 2013 New York Times featured a story less than inspiring from one perspective:  That the last refuge of many of our high profile disgraced politicians and others who have crossed societal red lines is now professorship and our higher education classrooms.  What an inspiring menu to offer our formative young adults?  There is certainly a counterargument, that the gig may be a chance for personal rehabilitation, and those appearances constructivist learning about how not to do the job, but one has to wonder if there isn't a better venue than the formative setting of higher education?


Next

Reform of US higher education makes reform of public K-12 appear almost benign.  But speculating, just suppose national disgust with higher education’s soaring tuition, posturing that the genre is above critique or needn't recognize current societal challenges, sports excesses, and frustration with these institutions’ resistance to change, ignites some of the same odd-fellows’ efforts that presently vex public K-12?  What would the fallout from that look like?

The next post will look at what might be beneficially changed in US higher education, recognizing the largely ignored prior three-score and six years' parade of national higher education reform commissions.

APPENDIX A

REASONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONAL

AND CONSTITUENT RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

– UK HIGHER EDUCATION ACADEMY

– DISCUSSION PAPER 6

Homeostasis; stability is the natural order; resistance to change, therefore, is a natural response.

Inertia; it takes considerable force to get a large body to change direction – the cliché analogy is of changing the course of a supertanker.

Satisfaction; most people are satisfied with the status quo in comparison with what an alternative future looks like (or they hanker after a status quo that never really existed; they are nostalgic for a ‘golden age’ of universities).

Lack of ‘ripeness’; the necessary preconditions for change have not yet been met.

Fear; we have an innate fear of the unknown:  ‘better the devil you know...’.

Self-interest; change may be good for others, or even the organization as a whole, but unless it can be demonstrated that it is good for me I will resist it.

Lack of self-confidence; change threatens one’s self esteem. New conditions require us to learn new skills and abilities, even values and we lack the confidence to engage with new challenges.

Future shock; there is only so much change that we can cope with at any one time. With e-learning; new funding models; re-structuring; and implementing PDP all before 2005, I cannot cope with anything else that is new.

Futility, cynicism and human nature; these combine in the view that any proposed change will be cosmetic; that we are all selfish and since change requires a degree of altruism it cannot work and we must suspect the motives of anyone proposing change. “Isn’t it the case that Vice Chancellors routinely propose change in order to conceal mistakes and keep people on their toes?”

Lack of knowledge; we do not know how to change or what to change to.

Ego; this alludes to people in powerful positions having to admit that they have been wrong. Within the context of change in higher education we might be more charitable and allow for rapidly changing external influences. It does raise the question, however, of what those influences are and how many of them our university executives were not able to predict.

Collective fantasy; this is a group response that ignores the direction that reason points to and is based on an inability of organizations to learn from experience. It is linked to chauvinistic conditioning which holds that the way we do it is correct and they are wrong.

Fallacy of the exception; there is nothing we can learn from others because we are different.

Change has no constituency; this is a Machiavellian notion that the stake that a minority of individuals have in preserving their power is far stronger than the stake that the majority have in bringing about an uncertain alternative. This includes the followers who espouse the notion that the people in powerful positions have the ability to steer us on the right course and we should not question their leadership.

Purpose of change not made clear; change brings uncertainty, confusion and mystery that induce fear.

Not involved in planning; in current ‘management speak’, this is about ‘taking ownership’. We are more likely to be committed to change if we are able to participate fully in the decision-making process.

Appeal is based on personal reasons; personal and institutional loyalty are variable but even the most loyal colleague may come to doubt the need to change if the sole or predominant rationale is based on ‘because I say so’.

Lack of trust; a lack of trust, respect and confidence in the proposers of change is often cited as one of the principal causes of resistance.

Fear of failure; this becomes particularly acute with academic colleagues undergoing change and maybe expressed as a fear of embarrassment, loss of status, or the fear of incurring the disapproval of a senior colleague.

Excessive pressure; the scholarly literature on change management is unequivocal when it comes to compulsion. Compulsion often occurs when there is a failure in planning change, in communicating change and when the organization’s leaders are unsure themselves about the change.

US Higher Education: Too Big to Fail; Too Endowed to Be Nudged; or Too Tracked to Be Sustainable?

Today’s post starts a series on what reform of US higher education might be if the current public K-12 reform mania starts invading the former venue. 

Even using the word “reform” applied to higher education requires some chutzpah. Our colleges and universities have historically been the envy of other parts of the world; society and corporations genuflect, parents assume major debt to place their progeny, alums throw endowment dollars at them, they are big business, and change is a word that evokes something between distrust and condemnation.  An old academic joke resonates:

“Q.  How many academics does it take to change a light bulb?

  A.  Change?  Change?  Who said anything about CHANGE?”

What could precipitate such a reform movement?  Consider some of US higher education’s evolved current numbers for starters:

• The cost of a US college degree has increased 1,120 percent (almost 12 times) in the last three decades, since records began.  Higher education’s total cost has risen in the same period from one to three percent of US GDP.

• Related change in cost per student has been five times the rate of inflation, and twice the increase even in medical spending.

• Tuition to reach a degree can range from $10,000 (Texas Governor Perry’s wish list), to $15,000 (Western Governors University), even less for a community college, to over $215,000 (Harvard).

• National student debt is now over one trillion dollars.  That number is equivalent to almost six percent of the total US deficit, and greater than 2013’s estimated Federal deficit.

• But “you gets what you pays for?”  While a degree still carries the much promoted salary premium versus a high school diploma, in that same three decades salaries of college graduates in real dollars haven’t increased.

• Over the same period, higher education productivity – the ratio of degrees granted to total sector expenditures – has declined by over 50 percent; while mean non-faculty and administrative human resources employed per faculty member have almost doubled.  The explanation is bureaucratic growth and collegiate expansion into non-education functions.

• Add that it is estimated that tenure-track faculty now teach as little as a quarter of US collegiate course work.

• Lastly, the generally authoritative McKinsey consultancy estimates the nation will need one million more college graduates per year by 2020.  At the present cost of creating a graduate, that would represent an additional $52 billion per year on top of present total annual cost of higher education of approximately $300 billion.

Putting together the latter two factors, adding the other financial trajectories, would appear to translate into something best described as mission impossible without wholesale higher education change.  A needed research effort is an econometric analysis of these various post-secondary cost and performance trajectories through 2025 to try to verify the threshold where present US higher education policies may become unsustainable.

In spite of a being a 5 percent fraction of public K-12’s institutions by count, US higher education expresses as much heterogeneity as K-12 systems, perhaps more; and higher education has become even less constrained in operating styles because of the retreat of public funding.  Estimates are that public sector support of American higher education, once over 50 percent of funding, now approximates 20-22 percent.  That retreat, of course, also precipitated today’s present crises in parental/student funding, consequentially tuition and related debt inflation, as well our institutions’ capacities to ignore calls for reform.

None of this is new news, but our public’s acceptance of higher education intransigence for over a half century seems still something of a mystery.  If “intransigence” seems too loaded a word, reflect that starting with President Truman’s creation of the first Presidential Commission on Higher Education, there have been six similar commissions.  That includes the President H. W. George Bush mystery commission, purged from the record, its findings literally buried because they were politically unacceptable.  Few of the recommendations of any of these commissions, including the Truman commission, have ever seen full adoption by America’s colleges and universities.

Parenthetically, the never released report of the H. W. George Bush commission (seen in draft form), that included at least five Nobel laureates, stated in its concluding paragraph:  “…America’s colleges and universities are riddled with dry rot.”  The blatant censorship of that commission’s findings was explicable, albeit not a merit badge for the integrity of that administration.

However, that public acceptance of higher education’s self-centric leadership may be changing.  In 2012, TIME and Carnegie Corporation of New York sponsored a poll of both a sample of the public, and a sample of senior college/university administrators, posing identical questions.  Narrated without the full qualifications of sampling variances that can occur, the results were still illuminating:

• A key finding – 89 percent of the public, and 96 percent of the administrators, said “higher education is in crisis.”

• Referencing average student debt load in 2010 of $25,250, 74 percent of the administrators said this was “reasonable,” versus 38 percent of the public.

• To the question of whether college is now worth the cost, 80 percent of the public respondents said it was not, versus 41 percent of the administrators.

• On the issue of capping tuition, 73 percent of the public said there should be Federal price caps, versus 16 percent of the administrators asserting that.

• To the core of the issue, 90 percent of the public sample respondents stated that colleges/universities aren’t doing enough to improve affordability.

• Then two currently highly material findings:  On whether funding should be tied to how much students learn in college, 61 percent of the public respondents said yes, while the same percent of administrators stated the opposite; and whether teaching on campus can be replaced by online courses (MOOC), 68 percent of public respondents said yes, versus 22 percent of the administrators.  In the famous words from the classic movie, Cool Hand Luke, “…what we have here is a failure to communicate.” 

Aside from the above differences, another finding was very troubling.  On the role of a college/university education, only 26 percent of public respondents ranked as “first” or “second,” “to learn to think critically.”  While 62 percent of the collegiate administrators did rank that value accordingly, the glaring contradiction is that it was only 62 percent.  Perhaps the greatest threat to the future of higher education is the undiscriminating unfolding of layers of intrinsically competent post-secondary learning, but without the careful discrimination of what the missions and learning paradigms are for each of those strata.  To further complicate the discussion, our class one research universities perform functions beyond churning out degrees, and the amalgam of teaching versus research roles further roils the debates. 

The prior paragraph is code of sorts for a contemporary core higher education issue that gets divisive very quickly:   What is the purpose of US post-secondary work?  Is it getting an entry level job?  Is it to support a higher salary?  Is it simply a four-year introduction to a good life for those who can afford the experience?  Is it to acquire HOTS?  If that acronym eludes you, back to school to acquire some.   Coincidentally, today’s New York Times featured an op-ed by NYT columnist Frank Bruni that addressed that question, linked here.  Interestingly, the stimulus for the post was Texas, where extreme reactionary Governor Perry is being challenged by his own legislature for trying to dumb-down collegiate education, and challenging Texas’ excessive K-12 standardized testing influenced by Pearson, linked here.

The collegiate issue, however, is even more complex than Bruni’s interpretation.  US post-secondary offerings are experiencing major diversification, from classic university education, through high level online work (MOOC), for-profit traditional collegiate work, career intensive work, to community and technical (not necessarily STEM) colleges.  Along with that diversification have come built-in differences in the quality of instruction.  Is that course from a MIT tenure-track professor (or a Big ten university) equal to the same title from Anyplace Community College?  This question goes way beyond the emotional issue of egalitarian values; to be developed in a subsequent post, an almost universal property of post-secondary teaching is that regardless of level it has thus far been endowed with a classroom independence and freedom lacking performance measurement.  As collegiate level work has been democratized, and moved outside the “academies,” the quality of faculty has changed markedly.  One example is in community colleges, where many “faculty” are moonlighting high school teachers, or professionals lacking terminal degrees and classroom experience.

Diversity of teaching resources is only one of the higher education challenges.  A half-century ago economists William Baumol and William Bowen identified the higher education productivity problem later dubbed, “Baumol’s cost disease.”  It states that education is “…a profession where labor productivity was not amenable to improvement through technological advance.”  Baumol’s disease was likely applicable to higher education (as well as to public K-12 education) for decades following their observation.  But contemporary understanding of neural biology, communication theory, and the explosion of digital tools since the onset of the 21^st Century have changed the game.  What has not changed, even in higher education that should be leading the charge, is that overall venue’s unwillingness to commit to changing what are becoming unsustainable campus parameters.

What was likely not missed by the reader from the earlier reported survey – that the public’s belief that funding should be tied to what is learned in four years of college is analogous to what has occurred in the alleged ongoing reform of public K-12.  Federal, states’, and the Gates Foundation‘s propaganda, that standardized testing, VAM, and state’s school grades actually represent valid learning measurement, has convinced too great a fraction of the public that is reality.  If the now solidifying professional understanding, that significantly different testing needs to be created to measure real learning is imperative for improving K-12 performances, then the issue of how to do this in the far more complex setting of collegiate courses and teaching is an even larger problem.  The public may be totally wrong in assuming that such performance measurement is either a given or an easy acquisition, but a movement supported based on that theme and belief set would be a major threat to intransigent collegiate leadership.

The sum of these observations leads self-evidently to the politically incorrect question:  Why are so many of our collegiate leaderships so committed to blocking needed change in US higher education?  Any answer to that is as complex as higher education that has become more massive and diverse.  Contributing is that colleges/universities are inherently managed in a decentralized fashion, and increasingly insulated from many prior sources of institutional oversight. 

The next post will seek to summarize the answers to the above question from a large contingent of higher education watchers and critics.  Subsequent posts will summarize the recommendations over six decades of the Presidential Commissions, to sort what has been adopted but mostly dismissed, look at possible organizational reforms, and speculate how technology might leverage the future academy.

_______________________________________

  

A footnote:  Addressing higher education’s challenges and possible reforms in this blog is without question a bold venture, competing with mushrooming press interest in the issues.  But it is rooted by a quarter-century in university classrooms, as an administrator, as a researcher, in assessing other faculty and administrators, and as a contributor to academic curricula design and assessment.  Then the academy was also seen from a totally different perspective, from an additional dozen years in senior private sector management where collegiate products were recruited and diverse senior academics were hired for consulting inputs.  That was capped by additional years serving in an advisory capacity to university resources.  Observations over this series will reflect the awareness of being, for a major part of a career, on the inside and hands-on higher education roles.  RPW