House of Eratosthenes

Well, I have personal reasons for stopping to read news like this. We live in an accredited world. You have to have a diploma to get work…at pretty much anything. When your father’s father became a man, people told him the same thing, and they were right to. Get that diploma, son. And so back then, success depended upon sheepskin…nowadays, it likewise does…it just seems logical to assume, every single day in between it was the same way, right?

Well, of course there is that problem with the early eighties, when we got an entire industry going by a bunch of college drop-outs. And the industry actually gave us stuff. That worked. That we use. That defined what a career really was, for millions of people, including me.

Some say I have formed a personal bias from a skewed perspective. They’re right. I’ve learned some things that I just can’t ignore. Back in the olden days, I was a high school graduate…and a “champion.” Not, as in, best of the best of the best — not that by any means. I’m referring to the old-school definition of champion. The Middle English version. You want your side to prevail, you pick a knight, and you declare victory or suffer defeat, based on the victory or defeat of that knight. I was that knight. Employers would dip into their savings accounts to give me paychecks, and to earn those paychecks I would sit down in front of a computer network and make it do what it was supposed to do. I was the “best bet,” college degree or no. And I set out to make sure it was a winning bet.

And so while I do have my personal biases, my real concern is what I’m seeing happening to business. I come from a time when those who made the decision to hire, had a personal stake in seeing things come out right.

Look what we got going on nowadays…

Are highly educated teachers worth the extra pay?
Those with master’s paid more, but studies cast doubt on benefit
06:53 AM CST on Monday, January 15, 2007
By ANDREW D. SMITH / The Dallas Morning News

Dallas-area school districts spend nearly $20 million a year on extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees.

The payments make intuitive sense: Advanced training must help teachers teach better.

But scores of studies show no ties between graduate studies and teacher effectiveness. Even among researchers who see some value in some master’s programs, many urge dramatic reforms and an end to automatic stipends.

“If we pay for credentials, teachers have an incentive to seek and schools have an incentive to provide easy credentials,” said Arthur Levine, a researcher who once headed Columbia University’s Teachers College. “If, on the other hand, we only pay for performance, teachers have an incentive to seek and schools have an incentive to provide excellent training.”

Count James R. Sharp Jr. among the defenders of the programs. The first-grade teacher in the Garland school district says his recent graduate studies at Texas A&M-Commerce in Mesquite improved nearly every aspect of his performance.

“I learned to maintain discipline. I learned to manage time. I learned to communicate better,” he said. “It was a tremendous experience.”

Yet a large body of research casts doubt on the value of master’s programs, of any kind, in the classroom. A roundup published in 2003 by The Economic Journal, a publication of the international Royal Economic Society, unearthed 170 relevant studies. Of those, 15 concluded that master’s programs helped teachers, nine found they hurt them, and 146 found no effect.
:
“We teach practical matters: curriculum, law, reading, classroom management,” said Madeline Justice, [Texas A&M] interim department head for educational leadership. “Students tell us wonderful things about our program.”

Asked if she knew of any studies that showed systematic benefits of master’s degrees, Dr. Justice said her school was conducting a study of its master’s degree students but that data had yet to be tabulated.

William Sanders, who pioneered many analytical techniques while at the University of Tennessee, has found no clear benefit of master’s degrees from any education school.

“I did one study that compared graduates from 40 different schools of education, everything from tiny no-names to national powerhouses,” Dr. Sanders said. “Each school produced great teachers, mediocre teachers and lousy teachers in roughly the same degree.”

Look, I’m not going to sit here and type in something to the effect that a Master’s Degree doesn’t mean anything. It seems like a given that someone who has one, has achieved something that has not been achieved by someone who does not have one.

But at the same time, it’s pretty easy to see how the Dallas-area school districts got here. The requirement for a formal education, is a requirement that tends toward absolutism. In other words, you insist this position over here be filled by someone with a degree, you have to insist that position over there also be filled by someone with equal credentialing. And then you insist on the same thing for that other thing over there too. Before you know it, everyone has to have the same degree.

And position after position after position is filled this way, with no one ever called on the carpet to account for how this helps to accomplish the job at hand. Yeah, the certified people are going to be performing at-or-above the level of the non-certified people…more or less. But from working with highly educated people, I’ve noticed something over the years: A problem one of them can’t solve, tends to be a problem many of them can’t solve. Their backgrounds tend to overlap to the extent that it becomes an occasion when someone “brings something to the table” that hasn’t already been offered by someone else.

Kind of like giving your children a narrow gene selection by marrying your sister.

But of course when the higher-education folk can do everything asked of them in their positions, that is fulfilled by someone without the same credentials, is that so wrong? I suppose maybe not. The article makes mention of some $20 million allocated for teachers with Master’s Degrees. I guess whoever’s paying that $20 million would be in the best position to answer that question.

But I think that explains my concerns. There is cost; there is lack of diversity. Real diversity, as in, diversity of backgrounds and diverse personal capacities to competently confront challenges that come with the position. Thing I Know #40 is “We are a tribal species, although we’re loathe to admit it, and when people extoll the virtues of “diversity” they tend to talk about skin color and nothing else.” Obviously, I’m talking about something else, and this goes unsatisfied when a department is packed full of people with degrees, when their positions don’t actually demand them.

And finally, there is the marriage between those who make the decision to hire, and those with a stake in having the requirements of the position filled well. Performance goals being met or exceeded. The unthinking insistence on degrees that may or may not be related to the demands of the position, tends to drive a wedge between those two parties.

For example, in hiring a zookeeper, most people would be unable to articulate just how a candidate’s application could be bolstered by a degree in…let us say…astronomy. But, hey. It’s kind of technical to deliberate that issue, isn’t it? We can’t burden our human resources guy with the chore of figuring out if astronomy has something to do with hosing shit off the floor of a bear cage. Maybe there’s some overlap. Maybe there isn’t — but we know it takes something to get an astronomy degree.

So once the job offer goes out to the guy with the astronomy degree, can the human resources guy who made the decision, really bet that he’ll make a good zookeeper? That’s the question. And the answer is…well, nobody knows. You see, the human resources guy isn’t betting that. What he’s betting, is that if the candidate turns out to be a lousy zookeeper, he will not be blamed. It won’t be his fault. See, he hired someone with a degree.

That’s a ludicrous example, since of course zookeeping is a far cry from astronomy. But it’s not that distant from…botany. Or climatology. Shift the degree to those, and it becomes more realistic. And the ramifications remain the same. The human resources guy, is effectively outsourcing the vital decision-making that he’s earning good money to do. He’s leaving it up to an outside source, in the form of the degree-criterion. It’s human nature to do this. You have to make decisions day-to-day, you find ways to take the decision-making out of it.

That isn’t to say I think higher education is meaningless. But I think it’s fair to say that sometimes, we get a little too caught up in confusing “certification” with “having accomplished something related to the job at hand.” So I’m not surprised that some studies have gone out looking for payoff from hiring teachers with Master’s degrees, and have come up a bit empty.

After all, you probably don’t have too many people ready, willing or able to say, “THIS is how a teacher with a Master’s degree is going to do a better job than a teacher who doesn’t have one.” Yeah, you’ve got James R. Sharp. And I’ll wager everyone in his position, is going to say the same thing. He’s simply saying he had an experience that makes him better at his job. Hell, I’ve had lots of experiences that made me better at every job I’ve ever held. That’s what experiences do…formal ed, or other.

That doesn’t mean a prospective employer is going to come out ahead, by insisting every candidate have the same experiences. If they were to do such a thing, an honest study would come to the conclusion that employer had effectively been wasting money. And it looks like that’s what has happened here.

But there’s more…

“America has 3.2 million teachers who together make up the nation’s most powerful political lobby, and more than half of them hold master’s degrees. They’ll fight for that money,” said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based nonprofit that funds and reviews education research. [emphasis mine]

Ah…there ya go. Read back up at TIK #40. We are a — what? Tribal species, although we are loathe to admit it. It’s demonstrated that a big chunk of this “money for people with degrees” thing, is nothing more than “I want everyone to be exactly like me, and if they aren’t I just want them to go away.”

Again, it’s just how we work. Human nature.

Creeping credentialism, I believe it’s called. Very common in education, but also, for instance, in journalism. Not so long ago, you didn’t need a degree to be a reporter or an editor. A habit for strong drink might have been the best credential. Later, it was okay to have a liberal arts degree, although a degree of some sort was coming to be expected. Nowadays, it’s a journalism degree or no job. That’s one reason the MSM sounds so much alike. They all come out of the same educational background, all credentialed, with similar, if not exactly the same, political attitudes inculcated in the getting of their holy journalism degree. It’s sad.
- dstanley777 | 01/15/2007 @ 23:01

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The Vast Power of CertificationMonday, January 15th, 2007

The Vast Power of Certification
Monday, January 15th, 2007