The wellspring of grade inflation

I hate to discourage teachers (we need them!), but there’s a problem in teacher education.

Well, guess which students earn the highest grades? It’s future teachers. According to a new study by Cory Koedel published by the American Enterprise Institute:

Students who take education classes at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in every other academic discipline. The higher grades cannot be explained by observable differences in student quality between education majors and other students, nor can they be explained by the fact that education classes are typically smaller than classes in other academic departments.

This is despite the fact that education majors have the lowest high school grades and standardized test scores of all college students.

(Also on Sb)

The fish rots from the head, the tail, and every place in between

Here’s an educational opportunity for everyone!

The Community College of Rhode Island [CCRI] has proudly announced that this fall, a “reiki master” will be holding a seminar on “crystal and mineral healing” at the college. This, we’re told, is

…a type of alternative therapy that involves laying crystals or gemstones on the body. Each student will experience a crystal therapy session and get a really good idea about how it changes your energy and rebalances you.

This instructor at CCRI also does “Cranio Sacral Therapy,” and uses such advanced quackery as “Bio Magnets,” “Light Life Tools,” “Dowsing,” and “Pendulums” She assures students that she is also a teacher and practitioner of many other alternative healing methods, and says that crystals have their own “intrinsic energy,” and will “interact with points on the body’s energy field, known as chakras, to promote balance and well-being.” “Each crystal has its own properties and attributes when laid on the body with a specific chakra,” she says. This collection of talents puts her well up in the tree with the top woo-woos, but she’s teaching at CCRI.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Colleges all over the place are peddling this nonense, and you can tell how administrators are thinking: it’s not about providing a good education, it’s all about what the students will pay for…and if they’ll pay for cheap, meaningless crap, so much the better for short-term profitability. Oh, and long-term damage to the school’s reputation? Let the next chancellor or president or board worry about that.

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Into the maelstrom

Today is the day I get together with all of my new advisees and tell them how to survive the next four years.

Tomorrow, the new semester begins — once again, I’ve got an 8am course to teach on developmental neurobiology.

The madness begins.

But at least this year I’ve got a new tie!

(Also on Sb)

A victory for reason and good education

A California school teacher, James Corbett, called creationism “superstitious nonsense”, and was dragged into court by a student claiming that was a violation of the separation of church and state. The verdict from an appeals court has come down and they disagree — they sidestepped the whole constitutionality question, and instead made the reasonable decision that it is the teacher’s job to question dogma.

“In broaching controversial issues like religion, teachers must be sensitive to students’ personal beliefs and take care not to abuse their positions of authority,” Judge Fisher wrote.

“But teachers must also be given leeway to challenge students to foster critical thinking skills and develop their analytical abilities,” he said. “This balance is hard to achieve, and we must be careful not to curb intellectual freedom by imposing dogmatic restrictions.”

Here are the kinds of things Corbett was saying in class:

“Aristotle … argued, you know, there sort of has to be a God. Of course that’s nonsense,” Corbett said according to a transcript of his lecture. “I mean, that’s what you call deductive reasoning, you know. And you hear it all the time with people who say, ‘Well, if all this stuff that makes up the universe is here, something must have created it.’ Faulty logic. Very faulty logic.”

He continued: “The other possibility is, it’s always been there.… Your call as to which one of those notions is scientific and which one is magic.”

“All I’m saying is that, you know, the people who want to make the argument that God did it, there is as much evidence that God did it as there is that there is a giant spaghetti monster living behind the moon who did it,” the transcript says.

Corbett told his students that “real” scientists try to disprove the theory of evolution. “Contrast that with creationists,” he told his students. “They never try to disprove creationism. They’re all running around trying to prove it. That’s deduction. It’s not science. Scientifically, it’s nonsense.”

I’m on record saying that teachers should not use the public school classroom to proselytize for atheism, any more than they should be proselytizing for Christianity. But that’s not what Corbett was doing: he was doing something that a science teacher must do, assessing hypotheses against the observable facts and in the context of reason. When people use their religious ideology to make counterfactual claims, a teacher should be able to point out that those claims are wrong.

I am very glad that the court came down on the side of allowing science teachers to teach science, even when it exposes the fallacies of religious claims.

Foobaww first!

A former Texas public school teacher has sent me some stories from their career there. It’s not pretty. The situation is what I also recollect from my long-ago days in a Yankee high school, though, so I don’t know that we can just blame Texas, but it’s true — the system is often set up to give athletes (including cheerleaders) academic privileges that other students don’t get. Student athletes were expected to always pass their classes to maintain eligibility, no matter how poorly they did, and teachers were chastised if they compromised athletic eligibility.

Here’s a letter that was sent out to all teachers at a Texas high school, gently reminding them of what they must do — either pass students or give them an incomplete — so that the football team doesn’t suffer.

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