Central Falls Implications for Community Colleges

In February 74 teachers and 19 staff members were fired by the superintendent at an underperforming Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. The decision has received a good deal of media attention and a significant amount of praise around the country. (Even President Obama has publically agreed with the measure as a move toward greater accountability in education.) While it is too true that the school has been a consistent underperformer, in the national media the story is mischaracterized. In reality it is, of course, not a story of callous teachers who do not bother to do their jobs or care about their students. The school was filled with professional teachers who worked very hard to help their students achieve. It was also not about a school that was making zero progress. The school’s test scores had improved over the last two years although to be fair the increases were slight. It was not that the teachers were unwilling to change the structure of the high school program. Structural changes such as moving from a comprehensive high school to one with upper and lower divisions had already been approved. In the end the unresolved issues that caused the superintendent to make the radical move seemed to be more about the requirement for teachers to work harder and longer for what their union regarded as inadequate extra pay.

This apparent national confusion about the reason the teachers were fired has implications for those of us in higher education. The problem is about the teachers accepting changes to their employment without what they believe to be fair pay. The perception is that they do not accept performance measures and are failing in their jobs

We, the community colleges, share a stronger bond with our high school educator colleagues than most traditional 4 year colleges. We must educate an increasingly greater percentage of the high school graduates and returning nontraditional students in order to keep the country globally competitive. Furthermore, we have been more willing to build programs that do more than provide a good liberal arts foundation but rather increasingly provide direct job skills which may even more lead to industry-style standards of measurement of performance. After all, a sizeable proportion of our students are looking not to transfer and certainly not just enlightenment, but rather for transferable and marketable skills. It seems manifest that at some point there will be a greater demand for us to be held accountable for our students’ performance.

I know that all my colleagues, faculty and administrators, in college are dedicated professionals who care about their students and their student’s futures. However, once the kinds of standards that have stabbed dagger-like into the status quo of compulsory public school have been imposed on community colleges, how will we fair? The answer is likely split. Some parts of our colleges, such as our nursing and technology components, are accustomed to performance measures. Both born out of public necessity and applauded by local government and industry for their ability to improve each region, the programs were initially structured in a way that performance measure is part of their infrastructure. While it has strong ties to our colleges’ liberal arts tradition, distance learning, due to its continued scrutiny and foundation in technology, seems more readily accepting of performance measures. Other more traditional parts of our colleges, those that are more focused on a traditional view of the liberal arts college (not necessarily traditional in the community college sense) will undoubtedly have more difficulty adjusting.

Performance measures and our acceptance of them cannot solve a Central Falls kind of problem. The performance measures are only a way to provide the institution with data. The way that the institution interprets the data and the proposed solutions form the locus of problems. Without knowing many more of the details of the Central Falls superintendent’s proposal than I have outlined here, it is difficult for me to say how fair the proposed changes were to the teachers or if the union should have accepted them. Knowing our mandate to provide college opportunities to all, if our colleges’ data showed we had a similar problem, I am not sure that dedicating more faculty time to the problem would help us. I also cannot imagine college deans and presidents taking such extreme measures to achieve what will likely be only marginal increases in overall college achievement. Until we arrive at that place in time it is not clear how we should respond. Unfortunately, the right time to contemplate the issue for community colleges is when the problem does not yet exist. The right time is now.

Helping Students Understand Plagiarism

Two of my esteemed colleagues, Pamela Carroll and Peter Patsouris, presented to the academic division on Friday. The topic was plagiarism. The exercise involved dividing those in attendance into relatively random groups and providing them with case studies. The case students contained detailed accounts with shadings of suspected plagiarism in each. This outstanding exercise revealed to us that we have no detailed consistent policy  for handling such cases, that there are three different ways that we are handling plagiarism, that we each see the offending students in different lights, and that the stakes vary depending on the course and/or program of study.


Our exercises did not address distance learning but since this is my niche at the college, I began to think how cheating online generally plays out. Our courses, which are the standard heavily text-based variety, require students to post answers in text to a discussion board, assessment or assignment. Our online student, feeling the pressure of deadlines, work and family obligations, and perhaps the additional pressure of educational developmental weaknesses, take a short cut by copying, pasting and failing to attribute. Typically, the online student is given a zero and not allowed to make up the score. The student also is usually admonished and reminded of the stated policy for academic honesty in the syllabus. Then if this was not the final exam we move forward, assuming that the matter is settled. But is it? Did we just make the point, or perhaps a better question, did we teach the student anything about the consequences of cheating?

Our students in particular come from differing backgrounds with differing attitudes about how to get ahead in life. They have been exposed to images and events in the media and politics that suggest that cheating works if you are clever enough about it. I don’t know that you change this kind of perception by exacting even the heaviest penalty, failure of the course or dismissal from the program. It may even be somewhat unfair to some of our students who may not be articulate enough to explain their rationale to us, the educators. Because of the way we work online, it may be even more impersonal and the student again may be learning nothing about personal integrity and honesty.

Perhaps in the past at the college level we have not been traditionally in the role of instilling culture as our high schools colleagues but the growing enrollments and a growing concern with the practice of teaching at the college level is perhaps signaling that change is nigh. Maybe it will be some sort of stepped approach aided by a software application—I don’t have the answer—but I do believe that we need to develop methodology for moving a student down the path of academic honesty and ensuring that they understand that it is foundational to many other aspects of successful adult life.

Prep Pandemic Classes Online

Another large storm moved up the east coast threatening to bury every town in its wake with snow this past week. This after a storm that crippled the mid-Atlantic states with feet of snow the weekend before. The first storm missed Connecticut when it turned out to sea but the forecasts predicted that on Wednesday we would not be so lucky. In preparation colleges, schools, and businesses announced their closures as early as a day before. Parking bans were put into effect. Those businesses that did open Wednesday morning closed early. The governor worked with major employers to stagger employee releases so that the highways were not clogged and that everyone had the opportunity to get home safely. However, the storm on Wednesday was seen by many as a bust as most of our towns received only a few inches of snow, which prompted many of us to wonder if all of efforts were warranted.

It reminds me of the issue we faced with preparing our colleges for the H1N1 flu. Last summer in our institutions there was a great deal of discussion about contingency plans in the event that many of our students suddenly were not able to come to classes. Although there are other good reasons that should provide impetus to have solid contingency planning, primarily, we were attempting to prepare for a potential H1N1 outbreak. We did not want to have our students severely set back in their educational goals by losing a semester. We dealt with the pieces of the problem we thought needed to be addressed in our prep work. We discussed probable numbers of classes that could be affected. We looked at the numbers of faculty and staff members that could be affected. We developed updated our contingency plans for moving course content online in a short period. We developed training workshops to prepare our faculty to conduct at least part of their classes in Blackboard. We attempted to work affectively to convince our staffs and faculty that the planning was worth the extra energy.

Although the year is not complete it appears to be far enough along that much like the storm that missed, H1N1 appears to have missed us this academic year too. Some are saying that their extra effort was in vain or that their lack of effort to prepare was justified. Some suggest that the man-hours of all the intelligent, educated professionals could have been better invested resolving some of the numerous issues facing our colleges.

In general I feel that prep-time is never wasted. In this case, we should like at the larger picture. Preparing for H1N1 has improved the technical knowledge of our faculty. Preparing for H1N1 has forced us to make sure that we are contractually and technologically ready to handle larger numbers of students online. Preparing for H1N1 has given us a better contingency plan that we can use regardless the cause that students are not able to come to the physical campus. Over the last couple of years schools and colleges in Connecticut have closed due to regional electrical power failures, water main breaks, grieving of tragic happenings, investigations into health of conditions, and violent events. For the most part we have been able to cope reasonably well when bad things happen but the work that we have done has prepared us for the worst.

Social Media & Preemptive IT Security

In an episode of 2006’s the Masters of Science Fiction television series, called “Watchbird,” flying devices similar to our Predator drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs) are programmed with an algorithm that allows them to detect the intent of the an assailant. By doing so, the drones can act preemptively. As long as the Watchbirds were only being deployed away from our shores, everyone lauded their performance. When they were brought home to fight domestic crime, of course, things went awry.

Preemption is always a tricky business that harms innocents and dirties the hands of those who are placed in charge of its deployment, whether the dilemma is war or criminal justice. Now in our colleges we are somewhat unconsciously bringing the concept to education by imposing preemptive information technology security on many of our computer systems and restricting the use of those systems.

On the one hand, we have those who believe that security online must trump everything we do or attempt to do online. Regulations from federal (FERPA) and state laws are frequently interpreted in ways that seem to suggest that we need tight control of online security. On the other, we have those who like me believe that social media, open source software, email, and other Internet tools are so valuable that the occasional difficulties we suffer are simply the cost of doing business in the Information Age. Obviously, we need to comply with all laws but I remind my colleagues that these laws were not created recently and thus not with technologies in mind. Just as obviously, a system that prevents the use of social media, blocks the downloading of Internet materials, restricts the use of email to internal official business, locks out non educational web sites, allows only established database access, and allows only a small amount of designated users is extremely secure. This kind of locked-down system, however, fails us by ignoring our mission, educating our students. If we are not using all the relevant tools at our disposal to educate our students then we are failing our society and undoing hundreds of years worth of progress in education. When we know that our society demands a better educated workforce, when we know that this means educating young and old as well as extending the education of many already in the workforce, how can we in good faith think so preemptively? If we continue down this path, of course, things will go awry.

Linked Data fo the Future of Student Research

I encourage everyone to view Hans Rosling’s amazing presentations, this one showing his new insights into world poverty and life made in Monterey, California in 2007. His worked exemplifies the kinds for presentations that should be available to everyone via the web if Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data becomes a reality. Currently, you can find all sorts of data on the web but information you can use is not so readily available. His idea is that everything, not just the conventional web pages, should have an address. For example, there should be a page containing data about you as an individual not just your pictures, games, and random thoughts but real data with statistics. This could contain the places you have lived, your credentials, work progress, earnings, family information, etc. but further those individual pieces of information should be available with or without information about you. Being able to disaggregate this data from your page allows anyone to create on the web or from the web information about the average credentials of people in your state, how people of your ethnicity move through jobs, etc.

The implications for educators are that we can our students get useful data on the web. Perhaps without subscriptions to specialized databases our students can get relevant, accurate, and reputable data. Perhaps we then shift from discouraging research on the web general to teaching our students how to select the most appropriate data for their work.

Currently, Linked data has a PR problem. Berners-Lee who is always visionary is not always the best candidate to express his own vision. He has expressed the concept at several venues over the last couple of years but so few organizations and individuals understand and have embraced the concept. Berners-Lee stated that his employer ignored his idea for hypertext markup language. We cannot afford to miss what he is saying now.

Performance Pay for Distance Educators

Performance pay, educators more for more positive academic results, is not new. It is a concept that has been tried in isolated ways in the United States for several decades. These efforts usually are limited to grade school and usually are short-lived. According to Donald B. Gratz, author of "The Problem with Performance Pay,” most attempts to pay educators based on performance are founded on flawed logic including 1. That educators are unmotivated, 2. That the institution overall is failing, and 3. That measuring the academic achievement of the students is all that matters. Each of these assumptions, according to Gratz, can easily be refuted with evidence. Most educators care about their students. Our schools and colleges produced the society that has created the world of computing, the Internet and convergent cellular phone technology. The society demands that students are literate and understand math, yes, but also that they learn to appreciate the arts, interpersonal communications, and that they become productive citizens, things which are not measured on standardized tests.

At the community college level I also feel that my colleagues care about their students and do a good job of educating them. However, President Obama’s belief that community colleges are a key part of the economic well-being and growth of the nation will likely mean greater scrutiny of student success on-ground and online. I have noted that educators in distance-learning often believe that they should be paid more for developing and conducting distance-learning courses and programs than if they were doing a comparable thing on ground. However, this doesn't seem to be in any way based on student performance. The belief is that teaching online requires more work and more time than teaching on ground. I am puzzled that efforts to garner more pay are not connected to performance. It is not clear to me that an individual should be paid more merely because it takes more effort or time to teach. If that was the case, should we pay more to a person on ground if they took more time to develop a course? Individuals should be paid more if the results are significantly better than the results in a traditional face-to-face class. In college we tend to look at two primary measures of success, grades and retention. Currently, in our online classes these two measures are statistically the same as face-to-face classes. So as of now these cannot be the bases for performance pay. However, what if we begin to look at other measures of performance? Do students online retain knowledge longer or better? Does the predominant cooperative, collaborative, and discussion-based style of the online class increase interpersonal skills which makes for a stronger workforce? Admittedly, these types of things can be hard to quantify. Yet they are likely the exact kinds of measures that if totaled could justify performance pay in distance-learning.

Rubrics & the Fudge Factor

Rubrics ensure fairness in grading the work of students. I was talking to a colleague once who did not want to use a rubric because it did not allow her to use the “fudge factor,” assigning a grade based on what you know—or feel you know—about a student rather than wholly upon the student’s actual performance. She thought the “fudge factor” was an equalizer helping to ensure students got what they deserved not just what they earned. I was horrified and took it as my mission to help her understand how not using the rubric was innately unfair to the majority of her students in a class in which the essay was the major method of assessment. With a diverse student body, many kinds of biases could creep ever so quietly and unknowingly into the grading process. Ethnicities, language, social status, styles of clothing, hairstyles, etiquette standards or lack thereof…and just the good old fashioned disdain much of the young have for older adults and authoritative types mean that, despite how hard you try, the way you see the student (in a ground class) plays into their score, in mostly subtle but perhaps sometimes in very large unconscious ways...even online. The fudge factor works against us by allowing us to reinforce subconscious biases. The only way to manage our own subconscious skewing is to use rubrics.