Diversify Faculties, But How?

Image from and available at Inside Higher Ed

The protests that have occurred on college campuses this semester have included demands that institutional leaders take steps to create environments that are more sensitive to the needs of students from various racial and ethnic backgrounds.  In recent weeks, some of these demands have grown in number and complexity; some to the point of making students the targets of criticism if not derision.  One demand, however, seem consistent from one institution to the next – that faculty reach particular racial percentages within a specified period of time.  The University of Louisville’s President made such a commitment in the wake of an ethnic offense of his own making.  Similarly Brown announced recently that it would double the number of its faculty from previously underrepresented groups by the 2024-25 academic year.  Such commitments are laudable and other higher education institutions likely will make similar pledges if they have not already done so.  Yet, I am left to wonder from where are eligible faculty candidates to fill all of these new opportunities supposed to come given the historically short supply of qualified candidates.

The National Council for Educational Statistics reports that African Americans represent only 7.4 percent of the PhD’s awarded in 2010.  That number is only slightly better than the previous 10 years, when African Americans represented only 6.6 percent of awarded PhD’s.  The news is similar for Hispanics and Latinos who account for 5.8 percent of awarded PhD’s in 2010, which is only slightly better than the 4.7 percent figure from the previous decade ago.  These percentages remained essentially flat despite the fact that, according to the NCES, “the number of doctor's degrees awarded increased by 60 percent for Hispanic students and by 47 percent for Black students” from 2000 to 2010.

I think it is admirable that universities are committed to reaching particular percentages of black or Hispanic faculty by certain dates, but it seems to me that they all are going to be beating the same bushes to find only a few eligible candidates.  In responding to student demands to diversify faculties, some institutions have highlighted the problem of the so-called leaky pipeline of minority students from undergraduate to graduate school.  That is, many of these students do not contemplate academic careers as undergraduates and thus do not pursue post-baccalaureate education.  Some colleges and universities have made promises to try to fix the leaky pipeline, but that ignores a more fundamental problem of getting minority students to college in the first place.

In my home state of Illinois, blacks and African Americans are 17.5 percent of the school-aged student population while Hispanics and Latinos are 25.1 percent.  In the meantime, the University of Illinois, the state’s flagship public university, reports  that out of its current overall student population, 4.9 percent are African American while 8.1 percent Hispanic.  Admittedly this is not an according to Hoyle scientific statistical analysis, but I think it suggests a larger yet relevant issue, namely students need to succeed academically in their K-through-12 education in order to matriculate in and graduate from college before they can begin a graduate school program or contemplate a career as an academic scholar.

Colleges and universities are going to have to start facing some harsh realities about where future academics come from if they are serious about diversifying their faculties.  A more holistic approach that includes improving K-through-12 education that involves institutions of higher education is needed, otherwise any efforts toward faculty diversification will be little more than window-dressing that helps none of the populations colleges are trying to serve.

Chicago School Chief Shows Little Understanding of What Constitutes Good Teaching

Last week, Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett unveiled a new Interdisciplinary Latino and Latin American Studies Curriculum (ILLSAC) for the city’s kindergarteners through 10^th graders.  According to CPS’ press release, this curriculum “focuses on the history, arts and culture, and contributions of Latinos and Latin Americans, along with the cultural diversity of the Americas, including Central and South America and the Caribbean.”  Bennett stated in the press release that these diverse populations’ “triumph over ignorance, prejudice and discrimination is the quintessential American story – and finally that story will be told in every grade and in every school across CPS.”  The curriculum consists of individual units of study and “launch lessons” aligned with Common Core standards.  The new curriculum is expected to make CPS a “pioneer.”  “This is huge,” Bennett told The Catalyst, adding, “We copyrighted it so we can sell it.”

Image from Chicago Public Schools
Available at http://cps.edu/Spotlight/Pages/Spotlight362.aspx

While the inclusion of previously underrepresented populations into school curricula is a positive development, CPS’ new ILLASC unfortunately represents what is wrong with current educational reforms.  The top-down development and dissemination of prepackaged curricula from administrators to the classroom is the worst form of teaching, demonstrating a lack of awareness of students’ academic abilities and intellectual needs.  There are several reasons why this is.

First, disseminating a prepackaged curriculum of lesson plans, instructional materials, and assessments assumes what students already know and are able to do.  Good instruction should be based first on teachers’ assessments of their students’ knowledge and abilities in order to tailor instruction for their students’ cognitive and academic needs  Students cannot be expected to get to point “C” unless their teachers know if they have been to points “A” or “B” to begin with.

Second, prepackaged curricula like the ILLSAC advance a homogenization of students’ knowledge and abilities.  Teaching an out-of-a-box curriculum with predetermined lessons, supporting materials, and assessments not only assumes all students know all of the same content and possess all of the same abilities, but also assumes that all students can and should progress along the same learning curve towards the same outcomes.  The fact is that each teacher’s classroom contains a multitude of students who possess a variety of skills and different levels of content knowledge.  This holds true for teachers across the city as well as for teachers within a particular school.

The irony with this of course that in devising a curriculum that promotes awareness of and appreciation for diversity, Bennett ignores students’ diversity of skills and knowledge.  When speaking of diversity, administrators, policy makers, and politicians tend to speak solely in terms of race and ethnicity.  What often left out are other forms of diversity, such as language abilities, cognitive abilities, gender, and socio-economic status to name a few.  Granted some students do receive additional supports in the forms of special education or bilingual education, but recent treads of shrinking financial resources supporting those with differentiated instructional or language needs does not inspire much confidence, nor does the fact that some of these other aspects are not addressed at all.

Finally, Bennett’s declared intent to sell this curriculum should raise concerns among all educators.  The lack of explanation of how the ILLASC will be sold and who will reap the profits of such sales is problematic indeed.  More so, however, is what I have outlined already.  Bennett’s implicit assumption is that students outside of Chicago will benefit from a curriculum designed for the students of Chicago.  As such, the city’s schools chief assumes that all students – regardless of location, educational backgrounds, or other aspects of their existence – are just like CPS students in what they know, what they can do, how they learn, and how they develop educationally.  This is an unfortunate assumption Bennett and her ilk have made about contemporary teaching and learning, representing the worst kind of education.

In Memoriam - Michael B. Katz, 1939-2014

The intellectual community lost a giant last week.  Michael B. Katz, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Research Associate in the Population Studies Center in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania passed away on Saturday, August 23^rd 2014 after a long bout with cancer.  (It has been a particularly tough couple of years for Penn’s History faculty, when one considers the recent losses of Sheldon Hackney and Robert Engs, each towering figures in his own right.)

Michael was a pioneer and helped make the history of education a viable field of study with the publication of The Irony of Early School Reform (1968), a book that remains as relevant today as when it first was published.  He was a prolific scholar, and his later works examined urban history and the history of poverty and the welfare state.  Indeed, Michael enjoyed renewed attention in these areas recently with the release of a revised and updated edition of his The Undeserving Poor (1990), which coincided with growing interests in income inequality among the mainstream media and in the public discourse.

Image from the University of Pennsylvania

Several moving tributes to Michael as a scholar and as a person appeared almost immediately following his passing, for example here and here.  The immediacy of these memorials demonstrates the tremendous loss Michael’s passing represents.  For me, the loss is not only professional, but also personal.  Michael was my adviser for seven years and oversaw my dissertation when I was his doctoral student at Penn.  I have several stories and memories about Michael, two of which I wish to share with you now.

The first is from the Spring of 2008.  I was part of a panel of graduating doctoral candidates who had completed Penn’s Graduate Certificate in Urban Studies, a program Michael helped create.  This annual event highlights the work of graduate students as emerging scholars.  Michael presided over the panel, offering commentary and leading the Q-and-A session.  I noted at the time that the panel marked the first time that I shared a dais with Michael, saying it was all the greater of an honor as it was the only time that we would appear together as adviser and student.  Michael’s comments and feedback on that Spring morning to my fellow panelists and me demonstrated the deep interest he took in his students.  His guidance throughout my dissertation writing particularly showed the high expectations he held for his students to do their very best work.

The second is more recent, coming during the final months of Michael’s life.  Periodically throughout my career as a junior academic, I have reached out to Michael via e-mail, either to update him on my progress or to ask his assistance or advice with the trajectory my career was taking.  Admittedly, most of these would come when I was feeling particularly low about how my career was not developing as I had hoped or when I was contemplating abandoning academia all together.  Among his last replies to me was a rather lengthy e-mail message, one that reveals someone who not only was fully engaged with the state of the profession but also acutely aware of the changing demographics of education generally, and how those changes would influence the future needs of higher education in particular.  Michael’s astute observations of those needs - and what I could contribute to meet them - were as encouraging as they were inspiring.  Even towards the end, Michael was engaged with and interested in his students and the profession.

I treasure these and so many more memories all the more now that Michael is gone.

I know I am not alone in mourning the loss of this wonderful person.  My thoughts and condolences go out to Michael’s family and his many colleagues and friends.  I hope they find comfort in knowing that his spirit lives on in the teaching, research, writings, and other work of his many, many students.

The Pastness of the Past, or the Past in the Present?

Among my professional responsibilities is teaching a methods course for aspiring secondary history teachers.  I customarily use the opening weeks of each semester to engage my students with open-ended, abstract questions, including “What is history?” and “Why study history?” believing that unless my students can answer these questions for themselves, they cannot help others – especially their own students – answer them.  To that end, I assign particular theoretical pieces for my students to read, helping them formulate their own responses to these abstract questions.  In preparing this semester’s syllabus, I was surprised to discover that this month marks the 80^th anniversary of the publication of a piece that has had a great influenced my own thinking about these questions.

Charles Beard’s essay, “Written History as an Act of Faith” appeared in the American Historical Review in January 1934.  Granted, this was the published version of his Presidential Address to the American Historical Association from the year before, but it is highly unlikely that any of today’s practicing historians heard that original speech, and so I choose to mark the anniversary of the essay's publication (AHR, 39:2, pp. 219-231.)  Despite the milestone, it seems that the 80^th anniversary of the publication of “Written History as an Act of Faith” seems to have passed with little fanfare.  That is too bad given the essay’s importance, which rests not only in Beard’s observations about the nature of history for the professional historian, but also for the layperson.  Beard successfully demystifies history to some degree and in so doing makes the discipline accessible to more than trained academics.

Charles A. Beard
(Image from Wikipedia)

In his essay, Beard argues for, “History as past actually [which] includes, to be sure, all that has been done, said, felt, and thought by human beings on this planet since humanity began its long career.”  Beard deconstructs that totality of the past first as “record…the monuments, documents, and symbols which provide such knowledge as we have or can find respecting past actuality,” and then “history as thought…thought about past actuality instructed and delimited by history as record and knowledge.”

In understanding the relationship between record and thought, Beard argues for three broad conceptions of history.  “The first is that history as total actuality is chaos,” Beard writes, suggesting further that people may not be able to understand or interpret that chaos, either objectively or subjectively.  “The second is that history as actually is part of some order of nature and revolves in cycles eternally,” such as the season of the year, election cycles, or similar rotating occurrences.  “The third is that history as actually is moving in some direction away from the low level of primitive beginnings, on an upward gradient toward a more ideal order...”

Beard qualifies each of these constructions, writing:

“The hypothesis of chaos admits of no ordering at all; hence those who operate under it cannot write history, although they may comment on history [original emphasis].  The second admits of an ordering of events only by arbitrarily leaving out of account all contradictions in evidence.  The third admits of an ordering of events, also by leaving contradictions out of consideration.  The historian who writes history, therefore, consciously or unconsciously performs an act of faith, as to order and movement, for certainty as to order and movement is denied to him by knowledge of the actuality with which he is concerned.… His faith is at bottom a conviction that something true can be known about the movement of history and his conviction is a subjective decision, not purely objective discovery.”

For Beard, then, “any selection and arrangement of facts pertaining to any large area of history…is controlled inexorably by the frame of reference in the mind of the selector and arranger,” or as he had stated earlier in his essay, “any written history inevitably reflects the thought of the author in his time and cultural setting.”

Such an assertion has led critics to accuse Beard of being a relativist.  I think this is an unfair characterization.  To demonstrate this point for my students, I use the example of U.S. history textbooks.  One could chart the development of such tome though their treatment of blacks, Hispanics, women, or other historically marginalized groups within their pages.  Clearly such texts provide evidence of how written history is informed by its authors' cultural times and settings.  (Two worthwhile defenses against charges of Beard as a relativist that I encountered recently are Jack W. Meiland’s “The Historical Relativism of Charles A. Beard,” History and Theory, 12:4 [1974], pp. 405-413; and Ellen Nore’s “Charles A. Beard’s Act of Faith: Context and Content,” Journal of American History, 66:4 [March 1980], pp. 850-866.)

For as much as I appreciate “Written History as an Act of Faith,” I am embarrassed to admit that I did not encounter Beard’s essay until my first semester of graduate school, in the Fall of 2001.  Such an admission suggests that I had graduated from Loyola with a history major and had been teaching high school history devoid of this fundamental understanding of the nature of history.  I have a better understanding now, however; and while I cannot change the past, I can use it to better inform the present for my students and their students yet to come.