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June 3, 2019 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

A New Millennium – The Same Old Story, Part I

Many in American Higher Education were looking forward to the 21st Century, hoping it would bring back the good old days. Unfortunately, after the cork was popped, the new drink fizzled. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In spite of the high hopes and great expectations of many in American Higher Education, the end of the 20^th century and the beginning of a new millennium brought little relief to the beleaguered systems of AHE. In my previous post The First Age of Disruption in American Higher Education we left American higher education in a precarious situation. It was buried under numerous train wrecks brought on by many training storms or crises. Unfortunately, the incessant crises have not stopped during the first two decades of the 21st century. Not only have they continue unabated, but the frequency of their occurrences has also increased.

The future outlook for American Higher Education is dire! Another scandal rocks AHE! The image is the author’s interpretation of current events in AHE. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Instead of the period of recovery hoped for by the academy, the new millennium brought an unrelenting season of storms and turmoil to American Higher Education. A cursory examination of the reports and articles out of the general public and higher education media outlets during these first two decades of the 21st century yields an abundance of fuel for the argument that American Higher Education remains in deep trouble.

Just what I need – another project! Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The following list highlights some of the various crises that have made headlines in the 21st century. I have labeled many of them using academic code words. The task of explaining all the academic jargon associated with these code words would fill a book which I may write (Just what I need another writing project! – Is there anyone out who wants to help me?). In the meantime, to bring the project within manageable limits for this blog, I will provide a reasonably short synopsis of my take on each crisis and its immediate effects on AHE in separate posts which will follow.

The crises hit AHE repeatedly and rapidly. There was no time to rest. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

For those too anxious to wait for my follow up, I am providing an example of a commentator or the media’s interpretation of the crisis. The list is in chronological order according to the appearance of the media article that I reference. I have chosen to list the topics in this manner to show the rapidity and pervasiveness of crises in higher education which were occurring during these two decades.

I will have more to say on this topic later when I have time to reflect on the matter. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The particular article I have selected may not necessarily be the first time the topic is addressed in public. However, I believe the articles selected are repesentative examples of the treatment which the topic has received. In some cases, the article referenced reflects my views on the topic. In other cases, it doesn’t. I will reserve my comments until I have the time and space to more fully explicate them.

Adjunctification of the faculty threatens academic quality across all of AHE is a theme that began appearing in higher education circles in the 1980s. It has exploded with much force in the new millennium. Gabriela Montell begins her December 15, 2000 article A Forecast of the Job Market in English in The Chronicle of Higher Education with the conflicting statement: “It would be an overstatement to say the job market for faculty members in English is booming, but scholars have reason to be mildly optimistic…” Later in the article, defining the term adjunctification, she notes that “Many professors also say they are concerned about universities’ reliance on part-time and temporary faculty members…the great worry…is adjunctification, which could keep students from getting the proper tenure-track jobs they clearly deserve.”
Faculty Reward Systems and Faculty Priorities are subjects of internal and external heated debates. Three researchers, Cathy A. Trower, Ann E. Austin, and Mary Deane Sorcinelli, collaborated in the study Paradise Lost: How the academy converts enthusiastic recruits into early-career doubters. This paper “captures the sense of dreams deferred as well as the tension between ideals and reality that young scholars face as they move through graduate school and into faculty posts … if they move into faculty posts.” It appears in the May 2001 issue of the AAHE Bulletin.
The Academic Lattice is the seemingly constant expansion of administrative support structure to handle tasks and duties seen by many as not directly related to teaching and learning. It is very frequently blamed for unneeded increased costs. This phenomenon is often derogatorily called “administrative bloat”. The study The Cost of Prestige: Do New Research I Universities Incur Higher Administrative Costs? by Christopher C. Morphew and Bruce D. Baker seems to say it does apply to some institutions. However, it leaves the question open for others. The paper appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Review of Higher Education, Volume 27, Number 3.
Basic questions concerning College Admissions which have been around for hundreds of years remain tauntingly unanswered: “Who should go to college?” “How should a college decide to whom they offer admission?” Ross Douthat addresses one particularly sticky question in his article Does Meritocracy Work? His article concerns the fierce competition among prospective students to gain entrance into elite institutions, and the extensive pressure on elite institutions to enroll a more diverse student population. The article appears in the November 2005 issue of The Atlantic.
Since the Reagan tax revolution, many public higher education officials and commentators have debated the issue of whether the privatization of the academy threatens public higher education. In 2005 Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, published the white paper The Perfect Storm and the Privatization of Public Higher Education, a version of which appeared in the November 2005 issue of Change Magazine. Ehrenberg argued that the privatization of public higher education and the shrinkage of public support threatened to do irreparable damage to public higher education. In a November 2009 blog post Reality Check: The Privatization of Public Higher Education, Travis Reindl partially rebuffs the Ehrenberg arguments. In the decade since Reindl’s post, public support of public higher education in terms of government funds have continued to decline. So where are we?
Sweeping demographic changes are altering the face of AHE. These changes began in the last half of the 20th century with the entrance of women and some minority students into our colleges and universities. However, they have picked up steam heading into the new millennium. Rob Jenkins sketched the new “traditional student” in his October 2012 article The New ‘Traditional Student’ in The Chronicle of Higher Education. This new student is married, living at home, and working. Within a few years, the majority of students will be over 25 years of age and a person of color.
Scandal after scandal rocks AHE and drags its reputation through the mud. Prior to the dawn of the new millennium, AHE was not immune from scandalous activities. However, as social media access has accelerated the news cycle, information about scandals has become more available, more quickly. A Google search for “college scandals” took less than 1 second to produce over 75 million results. One of those results was a Harvard Business School Working Paper The Impact of Campus Scandals on College Applications, which was published in 2016. The abstract of this study by Michael Luca, Patrick Rooney, and Jonathan Smith begins with the provocative statement: “In recent years, there have been a number of high profile scandals on college campuses, ranging from cheating to hazing to rape.” In their paper, the authors attempted to answer the question “With so much information regarding a college’s academic and non-academic attributes available to students, how do these scandals affect their applications?” The authors looked at the top 100 American universities ranked in the 2015 U.S. News and World Report, “Best Colleges.” They then constructed a database of reported scandals on these campuses between 2001 and 2013. They found that during these dozen years, 75% of the top American universities reported at least one major incident. Since their databased cut off in 2013, they didn’t include recent major scandals including the Michigan State gymnastics incident (2014), the Baylor football scandal (2016), University of North Caroline cheating scandal (2017), the fraternity hazing death of Timothy Piazza at Penn State (2017), the Ohio State sexual abuse scandal (2019), and the Varsity Blues Admissions fiasco (2019). It also doesn’t include the Louisville basketball scandal (2017), Temple falsification of USNWR data (2018), or the implosion and collapse of ITT (2016) since these schools were not in the top 100 universities on the USNWR rankings.
Are athletics taking over the academy? Many including Richard Vedder, the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, think so. He presents some ammunition for his opinion in the op-ed piece Athletic arms race hurts academics, which appeared in the December 31, 2013, edition of the Omaha World-Herald.
The Academic Ratchet tightens its grip on AHE. The automatic response of many within the academy to solve every budget or enrollment deficit is to seek new students via the addition of new programs and faculty, or an increased effort by the admission, recruitment, and fundraising offices. “To solve our problems all we need to do is rachet up our efforts, programming or personnel.” The obvious problem with this solution is that for most institutions it just doesn’t work. There aren’t enough funds, faculty, and students to satisfy all of AHE. In addition, institutional personnel doesn’t have the time nor expertise to do all of the necessary work. To help alleviate the academic rachet problem, in the late 1990s Robert C. Dickeson developed a process he called Program Prioritization. He outlined it in a 1994 book which was later updated in 2010. It is titled Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services: Reallocating Resources to Achieve Strategic Balance, 2nd edition. Over the next 25 years since Dickeson’s process was first released, more than 500 institutions attempted program prioritization. Some were successful in achieving a strategic balance. Many were not. In January 2014, Alex Usher, a consultant with Higher Education Strategy Associates, wrote a blog post Better Thinking About Program Prioritization critiquing the Dickeson plan.
As Academic Arms Races heat up in all segments of AHE, the burning question is “What is the price of prestige?” Kevin Iglesia attempted to answer that question in his 2014 Seton Hall University dissertation The Price of Presitge: A Study of the Impact of Striving Behavior on the Expenditure Patterns of American Colleges and Universities.
The question: “Is virtual teaching a replacement for the traditional classroom?“ has perplexed higher education since the University of Illinois created an Intranet for its students in 1960. It was a system of linked computer terminals where students could access course materials as well as listen to recorded lectures. It evolved in the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) system which at its height was operating on thousands of computers all over the world. By the time we entered the new millennium, millions of students were not only using computer-aided instruction for supplemental course work, but they were also taking entire courses and even degree programs online. Faculty members and universities were asking the question of whether these students were getting a quality education. Along the way, faculty began to worry about whether they were becoming viewed as superfluous. Universities became concerned about whether their brick-and-mortar palaces would be ghost towns replaced by a new costly virtual infrastructure. In a June 23, 2018, blog posted on the eLearning Industry website, Allistair Gross asked the direct question Is Virtual Teaching A Major Threat To Teachers?

For the past two decades, have educators been running from crisis to crisis trying to save American higher education? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Having reached 10 crises and running out of room in this post, I have decided to save another 10 crises for a Part II of A New Millennium – Same Old Story. Tune in next week for more troubles, calamities, cataclysms, emergencies, and disasters in 21st century American higher education.

October 9, 2018 By B. Baylis 2 Comments

Repurpose or Build Anew

How should we improve or fix a broken structure? All images in this post are courtesy of Presenter Media.

This is the initial post in my Point versus Counterpoint thread. The proposal that I wish to address is the following: “When faced with the profound challenge of making significant changes to an existing program, facility or policy, what is the best approach for an institution to take?” Should the organization remodel the existing structure, or tear it down and completely rebuild a new structure from the ground up?

What happens when the pieces don’t fit together just right? You get a lot of pushing back and forth.

I have seen battles over this question severely divide more than one campus. Many times within education, these battles degenerate into classic clashes between traditionalists and disrupters, between evolutionists and innovators, or between the old guard and the young Turks.

In the quintessential debate approach of Point versus Counterpoint, it would be incumbent upon me to select a side on the “Repurpose or Build Anew” question. During my 50 years in the academy, I have been known as a traditionalist who studied and revered the best aspects of education’s rich history.

During 35+ years as a college administrator, I also had a reputation as being an approachable leader who listened carefully and made thoughtful decisions based upon all the evidence. These two characteristics might suggest that I should assume a role as a supporter of the “repurpose” side.

However, throughout my career, I have been acknowledged as an educational entrepreneur. I have been recognized for my ability to think outside the box while still accommodating those inside the box. Often I championed new and different approaches to problem-solving when the old methods were not working. I have been known for pushing for innovation and change when change is needed.

On the Rogers Adoption/Innovation Curve most of my former colleagues would place me in the Innovator or Early Adopter segments. I have always been known as someone who was eager to find new solutions to long-standing problems and pushed the limits on how the technology could help. These characteristics would suggest that I should assume the role of a supporter of the “build anew” side.

Even though I have had a 60+ year love affair with education, I am deeply concerned about its future. Given my recent work on the financial models of education and my research into the demise of more than 1600 American colleges or campuses since 1950, I see so much that is broken in American higher education that I often wondered where it is heading.

Since this is my blog, I will take an owner’s prerogative and assume the compromise position of favoring “Building Anew, Except in Very Limited Cases, When Repurposing Is Appropriate and the Most Feasible Approach.”

Why do I believe that “building anew” is the best choice for American higher education? Let me count the ways that I believe American higher education is in trouble.

American higher education has lost its lodestar. Where is the inspirational, values-based, principled leadership that developed the most advanced, highest quality system of higher education in the world?
The three segments of American higher education (public, non-profit private, and proprietary) treat each other as enemies and competitors rather than allies.
The basic financial model of American higher education is broken. How can a system survive that relies on billions of dollars annually from endowment and donors, and complains when those donors ask for something in return? How can a system take billions of dollars from public coffers and then balk at questions of accountability? How can a principled-system saddle its consumers (students) with more than $1.3 Trillion in debt load?
The internal structure of most institutions of higher education in American consists of isolated silos which have little to no communication with each other. Within most colleges, the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing.
American higher education has seemingly pushed the individuals who should be the most important persons in the system, the students, to the periphery. Investors are only interested in their Return on Investment (ROI). Administrators and faculty bicker constantly, bitterly accusing each other of sabotaging the enterprise and only looking out for their own self-interests. Students and parents complain incessantly that no one is listening to them.
Many students, parents, and politicians act as if education is an entitlement rather than a labor-intensive, responsibility. Debates on whether students should be given the rewards of education without the expending the hard work to earn them are waged privately across campuses and publicly in the media.
American education has fallen into the trap of the “Procrustean Bed” thinking one form of education fits all students and one measuring stick is sufficient for all institutions.
Society rallies around the banner of American higher education raised as the clarion call for social mobility. Community leaders then throw their hands up in despair when the data show it is not working. They conveniently forget that history suggests and the data show that education institutions tend to be excellent reflections of our society and not particularly effective change agents. Yes, there are individual victories. However, there have been too few to change our society as a whole.

Do you have a piece of the puzzle that I have missed. Please let me know what it is.

Readers, it is now your turn to engage in this conversation. Are there problem areas that I have missed? Please let me know now. In future posts, I intend to individually address each of the above areas. Readers, if you have a different take on those areas, you will an opportunity to weigh in on those areas at that time.

My next post, scheduled for Tuesday, October 16, will begin to address the issue of the lost lodestar of American higher education. Thank you for joining this journey. Enjoy your coffee and the conversation.

September 11, 2018 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

What Happened to By’s Musings?

What happened? Where’s my blog and website? They were just here! What am I supposed to do now? Image courtesy of Presenter Media

What happened to By’s Musings?” and “What went wrong?” are two questions that have been bugging me for eight months. In late December 2017, my blog and website both crashed.

It can’t be a 404 Error. I just used that page! Image courtesy of Presenter Media

I discovered the damage just after New Year’s when I attempted to go to the login page of my site to compose a draft of a new post. I got the dreaded 404 Error Message: The requested page is not available. I felt like screaming at the computer screen: What do mean “NOT AVAILABLE”? I used this page two weeks ago.

I hadn’t checked my blog or site for two weeks because it was the Christmas and New Year’s Break. How could the site be unavailable for only three people, me, my webmaster and his assistant are supposed to have access to it.

Emergency! Emergency! Please answer the red phone now. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

I immediately called my webmaster, he said he would check it out and get back to me. When he did respond, his initial assessment was not encouraging.

Sometimes, you just want to cry. This was seven years of work down the drain. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

Everything on the website and blog that had been done between June 17, 2017, and December 17, 2017 had been wiped out. It had all vanished into Cyber La La Land. The electronic gremlins which inflicted this damage had also destroyed all links and formatting on everything done prior to June 17, 2017. This meant that nothing on my website or blog was working properly, or at least in the manner that I had intended it to work.

It will be alright. We have backups of everything. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

My webmaster sensing my deep frustration and mounting desperation immediately tried to console me with the soothing words, “But we have backups of everything.”

My webmaster and I are both backup fanatics. I have more than 50 years of files on two external hard drives and another copy stored at an offsite location through a backup service. My webmaster has a whole row of backup drives servicing his web clients. I even kept paper copies of all of my previous blog posts, just in case.

Sometimes you can’t escape the dominoes once they start dropping. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

I felt a little more secure until the next domino dropped. My webmaster tried reloading my posts and pages from his backups. But Murphy’s Law struck again. They wouldn’t load correctly. Nothing that was done after June 17, 2017, would load at all. For posts and pages done before June 17, 2017, the only thing that would load was the text. Most of the illustrations, pictures, or links would not load properly. What were we to do now?

Further investigation indicated that software updates to three separate components of this project were all done at essentially the same time, possibly creating mass confusion and conflict. In addition, we found that the formatting and loading processes that we used in the early posts were now incompatible with the new software.

We’ve had to reconstruct By’s Musings from the ground up. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

We came to the agonizing conclusion that the only way to rectify the problem was to essentially reconstruct the website and blog posts one at a time and to relaunch a new and improved version of By’s Musings and the Higher Ed By Baylis (HEBB) website. Some of those hard copies were going to come in handy after all.

As we prepared to do this relaunch, we came to the obvious conclusion that this would be the best time to update and redesign them. Thus, we are getting ready to roll out several new features on both the blog and the website.

What’s on the menu? You will have to wait for my post on October 1 to see the changes. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

I will highlight those new features in my next post which I plan to publish on Friday, September 14.

To whet your appetite for what’s coming, I will just say that the new site and blog will integrate more social media aspects and will be more interactive.

Surprise 50th Anniversary Party for Elaine & By Baylis. Note: Two shirt pockets are an absolute necessity for a buffet – one for pen and notepad (you will never know when an interesting idea will strike you), the second for napkin and flatware. All of the dishes look so good. Which one is the appetizer and which one is the entree? What should I try first? Where are the desserts? Image courtesy of our daughter, Theresa Burgard

Please stayed tuned for what I believe will be an exciting ride. One of the basic tenets of my philosophy of education is that education is both an individual and a social activity. It’s like a pot-luck dinner, where each participant brings something of value to the table. I trust you will enjoy the travels and the bountiful buffet. Give of yourself to help others, while helping yourself to the tantalizing offerings of others. I hope you will contribute your knowledge, expertise, and skills. Participate fully to the benefit of all of us. Bon appetit.

June 7, 2017 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

Education’s Big Lie, Part V: Every Student Is Important! No Student Should Be Forgotten!

I began this series of posts on Education’s Big Lie more than three months ago with the post Education’s Big Lie, Part I – Introduction. In attempting to make my first point I highlighted Procrustian’s aphorism “one size fits all.”

Caricature from 19th century German satirical magazine “Berliner Wespen” (Berlin Wasps) – Title: Procrustes. Caption: Bismarck: As I see, Lady Liberty is somewhat too large – we want to change this immediately to her contention. (He chops away her legs.) – Inscription on the bed: Socialist Law. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; in Public Domain

To address the question of whether the American systems of elementary, secondary and higher education are forgetting or ignoring students, I turn now to Henry David Thoreau, Albert Einstein, and Lyndon Johnson. This extremely disparate group of individuals might seem to be an unusual choice of spokespersons.

Thoreau was a 19th-century American writer and transcendental thinker. He is probably most well-known for his book “Walden; or, Life in the Woods“, a treatise on the simple life and self-sufficiency. The key tenets of transcendentalism included the inherent goodness of nature and individuals. Followers of this world view believed that our culture, society and its institutions had corrupted the purity with which each of us was born. To return to our best, natural state, we should withdraw from society.

Henry David Thoreau, 19th-century American artist, writer and intellectual (1817 – 1862) This image is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1923.

Thoreau is reported to have made the following comment concerning a child’s potential:

Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.

I picked Thoreau because he could see the future in the eyes of a child playing with a jar of paint. Most people only see the child making a mess. To Thoreau, that child was envisioning a masterpiece on the epic scale of the Sistine Chapel.

This photo of a baby playing with yellow paint by Dutch artist Peter Klashorst is entitled “Experimental”. Image courtesy of Peter Klashorst and Wikimedia Commons. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

In December 1999, Time Magazine named Albert Einstein the Person of the Century. The editors proclaimed him to be a “genius, political refugee, humanitarian, locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.” They further explained their somewhat controversial choice by saying, “He was the pre-eminent scientist in a century dominated by science. The touchstones of the era–the Bomb, the Big Bang, quantum physics and electronics–all bear his imprint.”

Albert Einstein German-American scientist (1879 – 1955), lecturing in Vienna in 1921, the year he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Photo by Ferdinand Schmutzer. Image in Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons”

Einstein often spoke of the importance and significance of the individual. The following quote is generally attributed to him: manner:

The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever seen before.

Solitary hiker on virgin snow. The photo was taken March 23, 2014, by Tapas Biswas near Sandakphu, West Bengal’s highest peak. The image is licensed by Biswas under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Image courtesy of Tapas Biswas and Wikimedia Commons.

I picked Einstein and this quote denigrating the process of following the masses because Einstein was a person who set out on his own most of his life. He separated himself from the crowd and concentrated his attention on what he saw, heard and thought. These were things that people who took the shoveled path never saw.

Lyndon Johnson was elected Vice President of the United States in 1960 when John Kennedy won the presidency over Richard Nixon. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Johnson became the 36th President of the United States. Under Johnson’s leadership, a series of domestic legislative programs called the Great Society and the War on Poverty were enacted. They included Medicare and Medicaid, and a significant increase in federal spending on education, the arts, urban and rural development, and public services. There was also a dramatic increase in governmental attention to the civil rights of individuals.

The signing ceremony on April 11, 1965, for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) at the Former Junction Elementary School in Johnson City, Texas. Lyndon B. Johnson is seated at a table with his childhood schoolteacher, Ms. Kate Deadrich Loney. The President took the opportunity to deliver prepared remarks about educating American youth. This image is the work of Frank Wolfe, White House photographer, an employee of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U. S. federal government, the image is in the **public domain**. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In President’s Johnson prepared remarks he said,

By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than five million educationally deprived children.

We put into the hands of our youth more than 30 million new books, and into many of our schools their first libraries.

We reduce the terrible time lag in bringing new teaching techniques into the nation’s classrooms.

We strengthen state and local agencies which bear the burden and the challenge of better education.

And we rekindle the revolution–the revolution of the spirit against the tyranny of ignorance.

As a son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty.

As a former teacher–and, I hope, a future one–I have great expectations of what this law will mean for all of our young people.

As President of the United States, I believe deeply no law I have signed or will ever sign means more to the future of America.

To each and everyone who contributed to this day, the nation is indebted.

What an awesome responsibility to place on one law:

Bridge the gap between helplessness and hope
Put new books and libraries in our nation’s schools
Reduce the time lag in bringing new teaching techniques into our classrooms
Rekindle the revolution against the tyranny of ignorance
Provide a valid passport from poverty
Give young people great expectations for their futures

In the half a century since ESEA was signed into law, there have been a few victories. One of the first to occur in the late 1960’s was the concept of magnet schools. These schools were introduced as an educational reform model of public school choice as a way to address educational inequity. Magnet schools are based on the premise that students do not learn in the same way or at the same rate; that if we find a unifying theme or a different organizational structure for students of similar interest, students will learn more in all areas. In other words, if a magnet school voluntarily attracts students and teachers, it will succeed because, more than for any other reason, those in attendance want to be there. They will have chosen that school. These schools usually have superior facilities and staff and offer a specialized curriculum designed to attract pupils from any school throughout a city or district. Magnet schools have been created centered around STEM fields, the arts, and the classics.

Students at Parkland Aero Technology Magnet School in Rockville, MD are shown using a device called a Sunspotter to track sunspots. Talking to the students is Research Scientist Daniel Mueller. He is explaining what they are seeing. Mueller from the European Space Agency is working with the Solar and Heliosphere Observatory (SOHO) of NASA. The photograph was taken in June 2016 by a NASA employee. *This image is in the **public domain** in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. Image courtesy of NASA and Wikimedia Commons.*

A number of school districts have been very successful at putting new books and new technologies into libraries and the hands of our students. For example, the Port Charlotte school district on the Gulf Coast of Florida, approximately half way between Sarasota and Fort Myers, has a new combination library and media center that rivals many college facilities in its equipment and attractiveness. Its mission reflects the goals of President Johnson and the EASA legislation.

The Mission of the Port Charlotte High School Media Center is to encourage our students to develop a love of reading, to appreciate the many kinds of literature available, and to ensure that students become effective users of ideas and information. We aim to provide a comprehensive program of service, print and non-print materials, equipment and technology that will help meet the students’ academic and leisure needs. Our resources and instruction support the educational goals of Port Charlotte High School.

Port Charlotte High School Media Center in Port Charlotte, Florida. This image was posted to Wikimedia Commons by its author, identified as PCHS-NJROTC, on May 12, 2010, It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Image courtesy of PCHS-NJROTC and Wikimedia Commons.

Before we get too excited and get the idea that most public school libraries look like this, we must take note that Port Charlotte is a wealthy suburban district where the median price of homes in mid-2017 is over $235,000. It was ranked as the 15th best public school district in Florida by NICHE, a small firm that is comprised of data scientists, engineers, and parents, who are passionate about helping people discover the schools and neighborhoods that are right for them and their children. The total 2016 fiscal year budget for the Port Charlotte School District was $247million, of which $30million was appropriated for capital improvement projects.

There are many other successful school districts across the United States. However, the failures have far outnumbered the successes. To find examples of these failures, all one has to do is read the daily or weekly news reports coming out of Washington and many other cities and towns around the United States. In my next post, I will highlight some of those failures. Having been a participant in and observer of education for more than 65 years, I have seen at least six types of students who have been and are being ignored by American public K-12 education as a system and by individual teachers within the system. In subsequent posts, I will highlight these types of students and make some suggestions concerning what I believe needs to be done to bring these students into the mainstream.

October 12, 2016 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

Broken Business Model of American Higher Education, Part VII: Exponential Growth Will Require Disruptive Action

In the most recent post of this series, Broken Model of American Higher Education, Part VI: Incremental Growth Will Not Be Enough, I left American Higher Education (AHE) hanging on the edge of a cliff by its fingernails. In that post, I claimed that American higher education will need exponential growth to meet the demands and expectations of those in the economic, political and higher education arenas, as well as the American general public.

I also implied that historically, exponential growth has only occurred in American higher education as a result of disruptive actions, either on the national or international stage. In other words, exponential growth hasn’t occurred naturally. It has required a little help from our friends (or enemies).

As I continue to fight off the remnants of a battle with mild aphasia, I was using the word disruption in a positive way. My initial reaction was that the word disruption wasn’t necessarily a negative term. Thus, in my mind, I was having a full-fledged battle over the idea that disruptive innovations were automatically bad. I was envisioning a number of positive results from the numerous discontinuities that I saw coming. From what I could remember, I thought disruption was a term that just meant a break in a continuum. However, as I researched the word I found that it has a much darker and more violent past. The word is derived from the compound Latin word, disrumpere, which comes from the Latin prefix dis- which means “apart” and the Latin verb rumpere which means “to forcefully break.” Thus, the word disruption implies an emphatic, hostile action on the part of someone or something. Therefore, I will admit that labeling something as a disruptive innovation is tantamount to throwing it under a bus or on a trash pile of junk.

With that background, I am beginning to see why the word disruption has recently engendered as much negative press in higher education and political circles as it has. In higher education and political circles, disruptions are seen as major threats to the status quo. When you are part of the status quo, disruptions are particularly annoying and bothersome. Throughout history, disruptive individuals have been compared to gadflies, those persistent, irritating insects that rove around biting humans and farm animals, stinging sharply, sucking blood and transmitting diseases to their victims.

Drawing by Pearson Scott Foresman, placed in Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the earliest written reference to gadfly may be the prophet Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 46:20 in the King James Version, we read “Egypt is like a very fair heifer, but destruction cometh; it cometh out of the north.” Where is the gadfly in this verse? In the New International Version (NIV), this verse reads “Egypt is a beautiful heifer, but a gadfly is coming against her from the north.” The Hebrew word : קֶ֫רֶץ , transliterated as qarats, which is translated as destruction in the KJV, occurs only this one time in the Bible. Somewhat surprisingly, the KJV does use the verb gad one time. It is in Jeremiah 2:36, as part of the word of rebuke that the Lord had given Jeremiah for the people of Israel. Jeremiah asks the Israelites, “Why gaddest thou about so much to change thy way? thou also shalt be ashamed of Egypt, as thou wast ashamed of Assyria.“ However, the English translation “gaddest about so much to change thy way” is really לְשַׁנּ֣וֹת מְאֹ֖ד תֵּזְלִ֥י in Hebrew. The transliteration lə·šan·nō·wṯ mə·’ōḏ tê·zə·lî literally means “you go about so much changing your ways.” Thus, this reference is is not directed at the gadfly, whose sole purpose is to cause problems. It refers to an individual who roams from place to place in an irresponsible manner, without a fixed physical or ethical mooring.

From non Biblical sources, in addition to the connotation of extermination or utter destruction, qarats may also be translated as nipping or biting, hence the translation “gadfly.” Another ancient reference to the gadfly occurs in Plato’s Apology where Socrates describes himself as a social gadfly that flies around and stings the lazy horse that is Athens. Socrates was trying to speed up the stalled change that he thought was absolutely necessary if Athens was to maintain its place as a world leader. Where is the modern day Socrates, prodding the seemingly intractable American higher education into action so that it can maintain its place as a world leader? Does the above make those of us who are saying that American higher education must change if it is to maintain its place as a world leader and the agent of social improvement into gadflies? If so, I am ready to accept that mantle.

In some circles within American higher education the concept of disruptive innovation has almost become synonymous with the picture of the heinous, atrocious, and monstrous and despicable leper who must be banished from the clean society of tradition-bound higher education. In Ancient Israel, lepers were required to warn “clean citizens” of their presence and the danger that they represented. Lepers were isolated from clean society so as not to infect the general population with this insidious condition. In the 17th Century woodcut below depicting the cleansing of the ten lepers by Christ, the lepers are shown with warning clappers, letting everyone know that they were unclean. Were these clappers the precursors to today’s trigger warnings, which many in educational circles find aggravating and totally unnecessary?

Woodcut of ten lepers with clappers approaching Christ and His disciples; image in public domain and is made available from the historical holdings of the world-renowned Wellcome Library, the images are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

In a number of recent conversations I have complained bitterly to friends that society and culture are pulling words “right out from under my feet.” I thought that disruption was going to be an excellent example. However, I was mistaken and I must apologize to those friends with whom I argued. It wasn’t society that was changing or evolving the definition of words. My mind was playing tricks on me. If I can’t use the word disruption, what term can I use? My search for a replacement has been arduous and without much success. The best alternative that I have so far is discontinuity. So instead of disruptive innovations, going forward I will talk and write about discontinuous innovations. However, I am not completely satisfied with this choice. It almost sound superfluous and doesn’t have the ring of disruptive innovations. Readers, do you have any suggestions?

In looking at the history of American higher education, what were the innovations or events that created discontinuities in the fabric of American higher education? When the United States federal government instituted land grant colleges in the last half of the 19th century, that created a huge discontinuity in traditional, liberal arts education. When the unemployment rate in the United States shot up from less than 5% in 1928 to more than 20% in the early 1930s, that was another discontinuity. When the United States entered World War II, that caused another tear in the continuum of American higher education. When more than 10 million soldiers returned to civilian life after World War II, looking for jobs, that was a discontinuity. The G.I. Bill providing them the wherewithal to go to college was an innovation that created a huge discontinuity that had lasting effects for years.

Are there pedological changes and technological advances that will challenge the stubborn fabric of American higher education? The rise of the for-profit educational sector, online education, and andragogy have opened the eyes of a large segment of Americans, seemingly forgotten by traditional American higher education, the non-traditional students which are in dire need of education. It has created a pented up demand for educational opportunities previously unavailable and seemingly withheld from these individuals. This has opened the door for another possible huge discontinuity in American higher education.

The Barnes & Noble College report Achieving Success for Non-Traditional Students: Exploring the Changing Face of Today’s Student Population predicts that between 2016 and 2022, there will be an 8.7% growth in traditional students, but a 21.7% growth in non-traditional students. The report goes on to suggest that non-traditional students are two times more likely to prefer on-line courses over the face-to-face courses preferred by traditional students.

The Barnes & Noble (B&N) study defined at risk students as students who met at least one of three conditions. The conditions were: 1) a low sense of connection to the school; 2) low confidence of completing the program; and 3) negative feelings about current situations at school. The B&N study found that 29% of current (2015) non-traditional students were at risk while only 17% of traditional students were at risk. This difference was statistically significant.

The B&N Study also suggested that schools could maximize their effectiveness in helping all students complete programs if they would address six key challenges. These challenges were: 1) know your “at-risk” students;” 2) increase access to affordable materials/learning solutions; 3) offer expanded career counseling support; 4) offer services that will help students deal with their stresses; 5) act as their support system and help engage more deeply; and 6) provide clear, proactive communication and information about the support services offered. All of these challenges make eminent sense. Schools that best mitigate the challenges of at risk students will help more of them complete programs.

The one startling fact that I found missing from the B&N report was any reporting of the current rates of success of students completing programs. From studies by the American Council on Education (ACE) and the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), we know that the national average of traditional students completing programs is about 55%; while the average completion percentage for non-traditional students is about 33%. If B&N found 17% of traditional students and 29% of non-traditional students were at risk, but we know that at least 45% and 67%, respectively, are not completing programs, why weren’t there 28% more traditional students and 38% more non-traditional students at risk? I would suggest that there are at least this many more current traditional and non-traditional students who are at risk. The difficulty is that we don’t know how to identify them. If we can’t identify them, we certainly can’t help them.

However, identifying these obvious candidates for improving the educational picture in America will not necessarily be the panacea to solving all of our problems. The University of California system of higher education is a prime example of more of the problems within American higher education. The California system says that it is overloaded. With current facilities and staffing, the system claims that it can’t adequately serve the students that it now has. If we have more students completing programs, where will we “teach” these students and who will teach them? If the system doesn’t have the funds to hire more teachers or build more classrooms, where will the state or institutions get that money? I have already offered my take on the idea of how acceptable raising tuition will be with prospective students and those responsible for the tuition bills of these students.

If you are within higher education, be prepared for the coming discontinuities. You may even have to be prepared for disruptions. Without changes, we can’t and will not meet the coming demands and expectations.

April 22, 2016 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

Public Education: Public or Private Good?

In American education and political arenas, this question has unquestionably been front and center under the bright, spot lights and cameras during the recent presidential debates. In the P-12 scene it has also been a focal point of many contentious state and local election discussions and contests. I found the history of this hotly debated question very fascinating. This is not a new political or educational argument in America. It has been an issue for America’s schools since the 17th century.

The question “Public Education: Public or Private Good?” is very simply stated. However, it is really an extremely devious and furtive question. To begin to answer the question, we must have a firm handle on the five important concepts that comprise the heart of the question. These terms and concepts are: 1) Public; 2) Public Education; 3) Goods; 4) Public Good; and 5) Private Good. We will begin to parse these five terms in this post. Once we have a grasp on these concepts we will continue the discussion in future posts, attempting to unravel the tricky nuances that are fraught with danger. In so doing, we will immediately find that we have jumped into a snake pit of poisonous vipers, which have intricately woven themselves into a sliverly web worthy of any Indiana Jones movie.

I hope we will not be like the unsuspecting pilgrim trying to find the mother lode of inexpensive, high quality education, who comes upon a tree loaded with delicious looking Granny Smith apples. One of these green apples is especially appealing. It is hanging from a low branch, just in the reach of our intrepid seeker of truth. This potentially, prize-winning apple is crying out to the unsuspecting traveler, “Pick me; eat me. I am delicious!” However, as soon as the hand reaches out to touch the prize apple, it feels the fangs of the green snake hiding among the leaves.

Returning to consideration of our five concepts, let’s begin with the question:”What do we mean by public?” There are two primary answers to this question. The first is a more formal answer. Public refers to the collective whole, or the state. When we use the term state, we usually mean the government, whether it be at the local or national level. In the United States, we have a problem with this term since, we have divided up our land and people into a large unit which we call the country. We then subdivided that large unit into smaller units which we call states. States are further subdivided into units which are usually called counties, cities, and towns. Most of the time when we use the term public to refer to one of these units, we are referring to the governing body of that unit. The second answer is more informal. In this usage, we will refer to the people that compromise the unit as the public. How do we distinguish which definition we are using? It depends upon the context of the situation. Public law is concerned with political matters, including the powers, rights, capacities, and duties of various levels of government and government officials. A park that is owned by the state, and open for use by anyone is called a public park.

What is “Public Education”? The quick answer is that it is education under the control of and financed by the state. At the primary and secondary levels, this definition usually suffices to distinguish public from private educational entities. It is more complicated at the post-secondary level. We will work on breaking out and explaining the intricacies of this conundrum in a subsequent post. However, for the sake of this post, let us assume that we can distinguish between public and private post-secondary institutions.

“What is a good?” In economic terms, “A good is a material or service that satisfies a human need or want, or provides utility to people.” “Public Goods” are those goods which are controlled or dispensed by the general public, usually in the form of the government. “Private Goods” are those goods which are controlled or dispensed by individual, private citizens.

In trying to formalize and tighten up the analysis of the role of the government in dispensing public goods, the first economist who attempted to define “Public good” was probably Dr. Paul Samuelson, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Economics. His world famous textbook Economics was initially published in 1948. In all its various editions, it is one of the top ten best selling book of all times. It is currently in its 19th edition. When I took Economics during my sophomore year in college, my professor had selected this classic as the textbook for the course, because Samuelson had been his instructor in his college days.

An academic paper published by Samuelson in 1954 may have one of the greatest pedantic titles of all times. The title was “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure”. The paper appeared in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol 36, No. 4. In his paper, Samuelson suggests that his predecessors neglected the very important point of optimal public or government expenditure in their economic analyses. To remedy their omissions, Samuelson defined two categories of goods:

Private consumption goods: goods which are distributed according to individual preferences, primarily focusing on the consumption side, but also including the preferences of the individual producers and providers
Collective consumption goods: “goods which all enjoy in common in the sense that each individual’s consumption of that good leads to no subtraction from any other individual’s consumption of that good,”

Subsequent economists labeled Samuelson’s “Collective consumption goods” as “Public Goods“. They broke Samuelson’s description of the definition of collective or public goods up into two distinct characteristics:

Non-excludability: “..enjoy in common” meant that It was impossible for the government to exclude non-payers from consuming the good.
Non-rivalrous: The “no subtraction” concept was translated into the idea that consumption by one individual does not exclude any one else from consuming the good.

Today’s economists employ national defense and clean air as two standard examples of public goods. One of the basic illustrations of the principle of non-excludability involves national defense. The federal government can’t reasonably deny an individual national protection, and adding one more individual under the protective umbrella of the military doesn’t subtract any protection from anyone else. It should be clear that pure public good and goods that are strictly private are mutually exclusive. The difficulty comes when we begin to see that there are very few pure public or private goods. This is a topic for another post.

Samuelson considered the concept of a public good as the most essential component of his economic analysis in the allocation of governmental resources, and central to his theory of an optimally functioning welfare state. He did admit that people would be “tempted” by their “selfish desires” to revert to acting on their private goods appetite, thus making it very difficult to come to a point of optimal public consumption. When he formulated this theory in the mid-20th century, he conceded that there was no “magical adding machine” that could do all of the calculations necessary to solve the mathematical, optimization problem at the heart of his theory. However, he wishfully added that huge strides were being made in the realm of computing machines, which he hoped one day would arrive at a solution. We’ve come a long way in the past 70 years in computing capabilities. However, we still haven’t found Samuelson’s silver bullet. The perfect welfare state, utopia, is still an illusion. However, on the other side of the coin, the state governed by peoples’ selfish desires is a maelstrom of gigantic proportions. Is there a solution somewhere in the middle where we live and thrive together?

Returning to the question that began this discussion: Public Education:Public or Private Good? Many commentators since Samuelson’s ground-breaking work have tried to force public education into the category of a public good. They argue that providing everyone a free education “has to advance society.” Unfortunately, public education does not meet the two uncompromising characteristics of a public or common good. Public education does meet either the non-excludabilty or the non-rivalrous criteria. Why is this the case?

An individual can be excluded from receiving an education at the public’s expense in many different ways. Some of these ways are subtle, and others are very blatant. To enter the temples of learning, you have to be an “authorized person.” What keeps people from being authorized? In one word: Discrimination. Before you go running off, crying FOUL!, there is legal and illegal discrimination. There is ethical and unethical discrimination. There is proper and improper discrimination.

Discrimination is just the process of separating things into two or more categories. When colleges admit some students and reject others, they are discriminating among students. It is an educational truth: Some students shouldn’t be accepted into some colleges. Even with an abundance of assistance, some students would not be able to do the work to succeed at Harvard University. The DoE actually encourages colleges to discriminate on the basis of academic ability. For a given student to receive federal or state financial aid, the college must demonstrate that the particular student has the ability to do college level work at that given institution, and can benefit from the degree program in which the particular student might enroll. As a student progresses through their college career, they must maintain satisfactory progress as defined by the DoE, or their given institution if the institutional criteria are stiffer than the federal criteria. There are three parts to the federal satisfactory progress criteria. The first criteria is that students must have a grade point average of at least a “C” or its equivalent by the end of their second year of enrollment. The second criteria is that students must complete their degree or certificate within a maximum time frame measured by attempted credits equal to 150 percent of the number of credits required for their primary degree program. The third criteria is that a student complete (earn) a minimum of 67 percent of the credits they attempt in order to remain eligible to receive student financial aid. If a student fails to meet any one of the above criteria, that student is denied federal and state aid. For many students, denial of federal or state aid is tantamount to dismissing the student from the institution.

Students are excluded for academic reasons from every institution of higher education, even those that label themselves “open admissions.” If a student does not have a high school diploma or its equivalent, then that student is routinely excluded. Other forms of exclusions may not be for academic reasons. Students adjudged to be a danger to themselves or others may be prohibited from enrolling. If they have already enrolled, they may be dismissed. At many public institutions, sexual offenders or sexual predators may be prohibited from enrolling, and again, if they have already enrolled, they may be dismissed.

By definition, rivalry could be considered a form of exclusion. If consumption by one individual prevents another individual from consuming the product, the second individual is excluded. College enrollment is obviously rivalrous. There are only so many spaces to be taken. When all the seats in a given class are filled, the class is closed, and no more students are permitted to enroll. This is the way that colleges have operated for many years. This has particularly been the modus operandi since the middle of the 20th century. In many states, this is a big problem. Students need certain classes to fulfill the requirements for their programs. The students believe that the college has “promised” to offer those classes, according to schedules laid out in the college catalog or advising manuals. When the students try to register for the classes, they discover that there are not enough spaces for them. What are the reasons for this form of discrimination and exclusion of students? This also will be a topic for a forth coming post.

So what do you think? What’s your definition of public good? Is there really such a thing as a public good? If so, is public education a public good? Should it be available to everyone without charge?