Last week I shared the information that Texas pretty much dictates what goes in K-12 textbooks—scary thought.

But change is in the wind—an amazing change that’s been a long time coming.

Math and English instruction in the United States moved a step closer to uniform – and more rigorous – standards Wednesday as draft new national guidelines were released.

The effort is expected to lead to standardization of textbooks and testing and make learning easier for students who move from state to state.

The support includes the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers so it may actually happen.

Unlike typical efforts that are diluted by politics and ideology, the new standards are fact savvy.

According to Chris Minnich, director of standards and assessment for the Council of Chief State School Officers, the foundation of the standards is hard research, instead of negotiation.

Unlike most efforts to revise standards at a state level, this document was not built on consensus, “We really used evidence in an unprecedented fashion.”

48 states are participating; three guesses which states opted out and the first two don’t count.

Right, Texas and Alaska. (Why am I not surprised?)

“Texas has chosen to preserve its sovereign authority to determine what is appropriate for Texas children to learn in its public schools,” Scott wrote in a letter to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “It is clear that the first step toward nationalization of our schools has been put into place.”

Happily, this should break Texas’ de facto control of textbook content as well as those dreams of taking control of the government via a brainwashed next generation.

These standards were created with an eye to having kids ready for work or college, which is very different than just having them graduate.

The draft report also addresses the debate over how much should be expected from immigrants who are just learning English. An introduction to the standards explains that English language learners should be held to the same standards but should be given more time and instructional support to meet the requirements.

Students with disabilities should also be challenged to master as many of the standards as they can, the document argues.

It’s also different because Federal funding is involved, not just an edict.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) has the entire draft up; read it and then add your thoughts.

These standards are now open for public comment until Friday, April 2.

Get involved. Have a say in the future. Do it now.

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Starting last June a college professor, who goes by CandidProf, has been writing a series of posts based on his first hand experiences with students and administrators.

Recently I was asked why I included them in Leadership Turn; it isn’t an education blog and what exactly did the topic have to do with leadership. To be honest the question floored me.

The only thing I can think of that has more to do with leadership than education is parenting.

Both require serious leadership skills, but beyond that their focus, kids, are leadership’s future.

CP is on hiatus for now, but that doesn’t reduce the need to focus on what could become the greatest leadership void ever faced.

Not the positional leaders who posture and strut, but the real leaders who step up in that instant when initiative is required and retire when the situation moves on. In other words, the thousands of regular folks on which every business and society depends—“…leadership is for instances. How people react to the things that happen around them—that’s the crux of life.”

Parents are the first and foremost source of leadership skills, not because they actively teach them, but because ‘monkey see, monkey do’. Unfortunately, as a whole, the job done leaves much to be desired.

Now we’re facing a gift-giving season in the worst economy in decades. You would think this was a great chance to teach children that they can’t have everything; that instant gratification isn’t guaranteed; that they aren’t entitled.

But it’s not happening. In article after article parents, especially moms, say the same thing. That they plan to cut everything—except the kids presents. “I want her to be able to look back and say, ‘Even though they were tough times, my mom was still able to give me stuff.”

Financial experts, such as Michelle Singletary, disagree, “By discussing with them that money is tight, you are admitting that at times you can’t do or get what you want. You are teaching them you can’t spend what you don’t have… Make the choice not to spend if you can’t afford it this year. Love your children like never before, but don’t go shopping out of guilt if you don’t have the cash.”

Even better than the economic lesson, which in itself has great value, you will start your children to understanding that not everything is within their control (or yours); that they aren’t entitled to have their every wish come true; that ‘instant’ isn’t their birthright, ‘gratification’ doesn’t always happen and that they really won’t die if they don’t get <fill in the blank>.

Who’s right? All the sacrificing moms or the minority like Singletary and me?

What do you think?

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NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof comments that we finally elected an unabashed intellectual to the Presidency (it’s definitely worth reading), but what resonated more with me was the part that ties so closely with that CandidProf has been telling us.

“We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.

Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country.”

• I’ve met people who think that the “Middle East” is a country;
• a nurse once explained to me that the war between Serbia and Bosnia wasn’t racial because both sides were Caucasian;
• a business type told me that Arkansas and Kansas were next to each other like North and South Dakota;
• CandidProf says that his students don’t know that round means spherical, so they think the Earth is a disk;
• something like 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate.

I’m actually grateful for Palin’s error because it highlights the level of ignorance that has become acceptable and the condition of education in this country.

I’m not saying that it’s necessarily great in other countries, but I don’t live in them either and they don’t bragg about being the world’s leader.

Perhaps it’s time to turn our focus from being the ‘leader’ in fixing the world’s problems to being the ‘leader’ in fixing our own.

The stupidity exemplified in the No Child Left Behind law that has led to a lowering of already low standards in the name of receiving funding is criminal.

We need educational reform that isn’t test-based, but focuses on real learning including critical thinking and is adequately funded.

Funding that shouldn’t be the problem once we stop spending $70 billion a month on the war—not that I think much of it will go towards education.

The stupidity of parents in brainwashing their kids into believing they are special and entitled to good grades and good jobs merely because they exist is tragic.

This entitlement stupidity is likely to carry on to future generations, unless it gets good and stomped down when it comes in contact with reality.

What ignorance can you add to the list above?

What ideas do you have for combating the problems?

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By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.

Today’s generation of college students grew up with things handed to them.  Granted, that is not true for all of them, but it seems to be true for the bulk of my students.

Parents don’t want things to be as tough on their kids as growing up was for themselves.  Schools don’t want parents complaining.  So, the kids get everything just handed to them.

If they don’t work hard, then that’s OK.  They’ll still pass classes.

Do bad grades make them feel bad?  Well, then the solution is to simply do away with bad grades. A local school district several years ago did away with the grade of D because it had negative connotations.  So, now the lowest grade that a student can get is a C.  Other school districts quickly followed suit, since they looked bad for having lower grade point averages.

The Dallas School District even went so far as to revamp its grading policies to make it practically impossible for students to fail or to get low grades.

So, it is no wonder that students come to college without any work ethic.

Last week, we had a speaker come to campus who works as an engineer designing the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the spacecraft that is going to replace the Space Shuttle.  She was amazing.  She was energetic, enthusiastic, and was very excited to be working with real spacecraft.

She gave a presentation where she emphasized how important learning is to succeeding.  She pointed out that all those classes that you think that you will never use have a tendency to teach you things that eventually turn out to be useful.  She is quite young, only a few years older than most of my students.

She has two bachelors degrees, and she is working on two masters degrees.  She is working full time and going to school nearly full time.  She is excited about what she does. She absolutely loves the space program and finds working with NASA to be a dream job.  It is FUN for her.  As she sees it, she is getting paid to have fun. So, she doesn’t mind working extra hours, taking on extra tasks, and working weekends, evenings, holidays, etc., if needed.

I was hoping that her enthusiasm would rub off.  So, this week, I asked my students what they thought of her talk.

One student said that she sounds really boring. Huh?  Boring?  She gets to work with spacecraft.  She gets paid to do things that she finds exciting and fun.  She gets to watch Space Shuttles launch.  She gets to use the simulators that the astronauts use.  She travels all over the country for her job.  She’s boring?

Another student said that she didn’t seem to understand that some classes are hard. Huh?  She has degrees in aeronautical engineering and astronautics.  She is working on degrees in spacecraft systems and human physiology (she is interested in how the human body works in space).  Hey, those are not easy subjects.  She has taken classes far more difficult than anything that my students have ever taken.

Another person said that she can’t understand how anyone could stay in school for so long, commenting that the speaker would probably have six degrees by the time that she is thirty.  So?  What’s wrong with that?

You get ahead by hard work. Many of my students come from fairly affluent upper middle class families, and they have had life just handed to them.

The speaker came from a family where her parents had to work hard and she didn’t have things just handed to her.  She learned to work for things.  That is why she is where she is.  Not everyone is going to get a job working with spacecraft.  She is, indeed, quite young.  But she has a very important job, with lots of responsibility, because of her hard work.

Someone like my students would not get her job.

I told my students that they don’t really have to work as hard as the speaker.  After all, we need people to be assistant managers at fast food restaurants.  They will rise to the appropriate level.

If they work hard, they will become leaders.  If they refuse to work hard, they will be followers all of their lives. I don’t think that they were very happy with me or what I told them, but that’s OK.

If only one of them listens and decides to work hard to get ahead, then I’ve done my job.

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Or is it a pyramid?“A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves promising or paying abnormally high returns (“profits”) to investors out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from net revenues generated by any real business.”

“A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, without any product or service being delivered.”

This is what came to mind after reading CandidProf’s post yesterday; I finally decided that’s it’s both, making is a pyra-Ponzi scheme.

As CP described the situation it’s definitely a pyramid, his college is funded based on how many students are enrolled as are most K-12 schools in this country. Further, lowering standards and focusing only on retaining students in order to continue funding certainly fits the no service being delivered description of a pyramid.

The Ponzi element is seen in high promises from such initiatives as No Child Left Behind, which has done nothing to stem the downward spiral of learning—in fact, it has made it worse.

NY Times Op-Ed Columnist Bob Herbert quotes from a study published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society that states, “The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.”

He ends by quoting “An article in Monday’s Times spotlighted some of the serious problems that have emerged in the No Child Left Behind law. Among the law’s unintended consequences, as Sam Dillon reported, has been its tendency to “punish” states that “have high academic standards and rigorous tests, which have contributed to an increasing pileup of failed schools.”

After reading CandidProf’s post, my Russian business partner, Nick Mikhailovsky, commented,

“Actually, the average education quality has significantly degraded over here as well. Although the reasons are different the outcome is the same and applies to both basic and higher education.

Our reason is simpler—low salaries in education.

Everyone who needed money or couldn’t bear living in poverty has left education. After 15 years of that, there are almost no good teachers or college professors left.  The old ones retired, and young people aren’t willing to live in poverty when they have plenty of other opportunities and all their life in front of them.”

Hmmm, Russia seems to be dumbing down by salary, but considering the salaries we pay our teachers we’re trashing US education from the top down and the bottom up.

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By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university, shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.It’s all about the numbers.  Sadly, that is how many college administrators see the students: as numbers.

The college has an enrollment figure.  In my state, one of the key measures that they are now implementing to rate college performance is the increase in enrollment figures.

For a long time, as a public institution, we have been funded by how many students are enrolled, so the administration has been actively recruiting students.  It has not mattered whether or not the students are ready for college.  That was not important.  It did not matter if they had the skills to succeed.  That was not important.   Whether or not they enrolled was important, not whether or not they learned anything while here, nor even if they passed any of their classes.

Another key measure for the state is in access of college to minorities and Hispanics.  We are advertising in Spanish.  The college’s web site can be viewed in Spanish.  The registration can be done in Spanish.  But all of the classes are in English.

Students who don’t know English are up a creek.  They have little hope of passing the classes once they get here.  No matter.  They enrolled, they were counted by the state, and that was all that mattered.

Going hand-in-hand with enrollment is retention.  College administrators go to conferences with other college administrators, and they all talk about retention policies.

The idea is that getting students to enroll is not sufficient.  They want them to enroll again next semester.  So, if they flunk out, then they won’t be enrolling again.

The first strategy used by many colleges is to simply change the rules on what constitutes flunking out. When I was a student, a single F or D, or too many C’s, was sufficient to get a student put on academic probation.  If you repeated a bad semester, then you were placed on academic suspension.  That wasn’t meant so much as punishment, but rather to give you time to reassess your educational goals and strategies.  I never had to go through that, but I knew some students who did.

Now, you can fail a class every semester, and have a whole semester of D’s and C’s, and keep that up for semester after semester.  A depressing number of our students graduate with a GPA of less than 2.0.  But the students keep signing up for classes and that is all that counts.

The next step in retention is to put pressure on faculty to give higher grades.  After all, the administrators reason that if students get too many poor grades, they might get discouraged and drop out.  If they drop out, then they won’t be registering for classes and that means, of course, that there will be less state funding for the college.  So faculty are encouraged not to grade too harshly and to give higher grades.

This has been going on in the K-12 education for years, but it is now becoming more common in colleges. I have a number of colleagues who are teaching in a climate of that sort.  Many faculty just give up and quit upholding standards.  They just give out grades.  The students don’t learn. We have a few part time faculty here who do that, too, because that is expected at other places in the area where they teach part time.

But students who take the classes of a faculty member who just gives out grades without the students learning seldom do well in the follow-up classes.

Worse, this strategy makes a college degree pretty much worthless.

Holding to standards is hard, particularly when others don’t hold to those standards.

Holding to standards is hard when funding is tied to numbers that can be improved by relaxing those standards.

But an effective leader will hold standards, even if it is the hard thing to do.

I see this getting worse.  My state is now looking to change the funding formula for its public colleges and universities.  Rather than giving money for the number of students enrolled at the beginning of the semester, they are looking to fund the number of students enrolled at the end of the semester.

That changes things.  It means that simply getting students to sign up is not enough.  Now, we need to keep them in the class all semester. It is pretty obvious that there will be extreme pressure on faculty to limit the students dropping.

That means making the classes easier.

That means giving up on tough and difficult standards and setting the bar as low as possible to make it easy for students to pass without ever having to do anything.

That means giving up on teaching.

And this is what is coming down the pike from state legislatures all over the country.  They have done this sort of thing in K-12 education, making a high school diploma pretty much worthless.

Now they are working to make an undergraduate college degree worthless as well.

A lot of faculty are planning on retiring when these changes are made.  I have a few years to go until retirement, and I am not looking forward to what I see in our future.

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By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.

“If I don’t make a good grade on this test, I am going to hurt myself.  If you understood my background, you’d be worried about me.”

This is a statement made last week to one of my colleagues by a student who had already been identified as being unstable.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is something that faculty face from time to time.  All sorts of people go to college and many are not mentally as stable as others.

Also, we have students come to college who have been coddled all their lives.  They’ve never been allowed to fail.  But, when they get to college, suddenly things change.  They are no longer the star student.  No one is there to make sure that they don’t fail.  They have to take responsibility for their missteps.  And for many that is hard to do.

For many students this is a very difficult time.  I feel that what we’ve done is, in part, move some of the awkwardness of growing up from the early to mid teenage years into the late teens early twenties.

The problem with that is that many of these students are no longer living at home, and parents can’t do as much to help (assuming that the parents are not too busy with their own lives to worry about the kids).

Now, the higher education doctrine of “in loco parentis” applies.  We wind up being the counselors and parents for these young adults.  The problem is that faculty are not trained for this.  Colleges have support staff for the students.  This includes counselors trained in dealing with these sorts of issues.

The student support service staff often have some training in how to look out for these problems.  Faculty, though, are trained primarily in only their fields.  Physics faculty learn about how to do physics.  History faculty learn all about history.  Psychology faculty may know what is going on, but not necessarily Business faculty.  We learn what we need to about how the college works, how to submit grades, etc.  Sometimes colleges offer seminars on effective teaching.  I never hear about seminars on dealing with suicidal students. Yet, I’ve had to deal with three of them in my years teaching, one being a quite serious case.

But this raises another question.  Was this student that I mentioned at the beginning of this post really suicidal or was this a very childish attempt to manipulate her professor into giving her a higher grade? Do we forward the matter on to higher ups?  Do we refer the student to the counseling center?  Do we need to call the police to report a possible suicidal student?  Or do we just tell the student to grow up?

If we refer the matter on to student services, then this incident becomes part of the student’s permanent record at the college.  If we notify the police, then it becomes a permanent police record, which are not as protected by confidentiality as student records.  How do we know what to do?  After all, faculty are not trained in dealing with these sorts of things.

The matter is not as easy as simply saying that it is better to be safe and report it than to be sorry and not report it.  Students have sued faculty for forwarding on disturbing papers and writings. Our campus attorneys have trouble keeping up with current legal interpretations.

• Before Virginia Tech, we were advised not to report students who have disturbing writings.  After all, if we report a student for writing an essay about going around shooting people, the student can sue saying that the essay was nothing but his freedom of speech and artistic license.

• Before Virginia Tech, that may have been upheld.  But the shooting incident at Virginia Tech changed things.  Faculty there got into trouble for not reporting the shooter’s troubling works.  Those faculty that did report it found that nothing was done because the administrators were afraid of doing something that would get them into trouble.

Now we can get in trouble for not reporting such things.  Unfortunately, we can still get in trouble for reporting things too quickly.  That puts us into a difficult position.  And, again, we are not trained to deal with these sorts of things.

Do you see a pattern?  We are continually put into positions of dealing with issues that we have never been trained to deal with.

That is not unique to college faculty, though.  Anyone in a leadership position will have to adapt to new situations that he or she has never seen before or even contemplated.  It is how we respond to these situations that separate good leaders from those who simply happen to have a supervisory job.

So what was our solution to the situation with this student?  (I say “our” since I am serving in a temporary administrative roll at the college.)  Since we already knew that this student has been seen at the counseling office, we called them to have an informal consultation.  They did not seem too concerned.  We also knew the department in which the student is actively pursuing a program of study (psychology!), so we called the department chair to inquire about the student.  It turns out that this particular student is seeing a psychologist, has done this sort of thing to instructors on a regular basis and the people with the training feel that the student is not really a risk for suicide, but rather has learned that some professors yield to this sort of pressure.

The head of the psychology department tells the student to simply grow up when the student does this sort of thing.  So that is what my colleague did when the student began crying after the test was passed back.  The student quit crying and began to pay attention for the rest of the class.

There have been times when we’ve had to deal with actual serious mental health issues.  And, of course, most of the time we don’t know whether or not a situation like this is serious.  In this case, the student was known, and the behavior had been identified by professionals in the mental health field as manipulative not suicidal, so we went on their recommendations.

But what would we have done in the event that this student were not already known to be one who pulls this sort of thing on a regular basis?  Well, at this point, we would have had to make a judgment call and either passed it on to the police if we deemed it an imminent threat of safety to the student or to the counseling center otherwise.

These are the things that make the job tough.

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CandidProf is dealing with the aftermath of Ike—he’s fine, but has family in Houston; hopefully he’ll be back with us next week. (Read all of CandidProf here.)  In the meantime…Last week, CandidProf cited new rules by the Dallas School District that, essentially, eliminated accountability from the classroom—“…students who flunk tests, blow off homework and miss assignment deadlines can make up the work without penalty…”

Hilariously, an article yesterday on the dismal state of grammar and spelling said “the State Board of Education in May adopted new curriculum standards, including greater emphasis on grammar instruction in Texas schools.” I wonder how that will match up with Dallas’ no accountability standard.

The article focuses on the spelling in signs, “cheep gas, No in-and-out priviliges,” and student writing.

• “There is nothing wrong with my writing, maybe it is her that doesn’t know what she is doing.”
• “After writing numerous papers I feel I have improved existentially.”
• “He should not have taken that for granite.”

But don’t sit there and smugly assume that this is a Dallas or even a Texas problem, it’s global.

“A university lecturer in England says teachers should accept their students’ errors – Febuary instead of February or speach instead of speech. “Either we go on beating ourselves and our students up over this problem, or we simply give everyone a break,” Ken Smith wrote last month in the Times Higher Education Supplement.”

That lecturer would feel right at home in Dallas.

“Educators say these bungled words are a symptom of a deeper problem: Students aren’t learning grammar.”

Duh. Based on the writing I’ve seen both in and out of business, they haven’t been learning it for decades.

I guess this is what’s meant by a pebble turning into an avalanche.

Do you think that the Federally mandated no child left behind and associated funding cuts are improving the situation or do they inspire “just so they pass” rules similar to those from the Dallas Board?

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By CandidProf, our regular Thursday guest author. Read all of CandidProf here.

I have been teaching college students since 1984 (starting as a TA in graduate school).  I have been at my current institution since 1994.  In 24 years of dealing with students entering college, the quality of preparation for those students seems to fall every year.

I see parents and schools setting students up for failure in college, and this worries me.  Entering students do not know how to study.  They do not know how to do work outside of class.  They do not know how to use outside resources.  They have such a poor vocabulary that many words that are routinely used in technical fields go completely over their heads.  They have such poor math skills that nearly 75% of them are required to take remedial mathematics before they can even take their first college math class.  Worse, we now offer three math classes for college credit that are below the level of the lowest level math class (offered as a remedial class for no college credit) that was available when I began college.  And, students expect that they will pass a class by simply showing up for it.  How did this come to be?

Part of the problem is that parents and politicians put pressure on schools to make it easier on their little darlings. In a rather sad case, an unpopular math teacher was dismissed from a suburban high school where I live because parents complained that she was far too tough on her students.  She gave them way too much homework, and her tests were much tougher than the other math teachers’ tests, forcing her students to study for hours each week outside of class.  Interestingly, her students also scored the highest on state mandated standardized achievement tests as well as higher than other teachers’ students on the quantitative portion of the SAT and on the math AP exams.  Still, she was tough, so they fired her.

Recently, the Dallas school district implemented new policies aimed at preventing dropouts and making sure that students have a better education.  At least, that is what they said the new policies are for.  In my opinion, they are setting students up for failure.  The new policies require teachers to accept late work without penalizing students.

Does this teach the students that they have to meet deadlines?  When they get a job, will their boss allow them to complete jobs when they feel like it instead of meeting a deadline?  Homework can only be counted towards the students’ grades if it does not lower their grade.  So, there is no incentive to actually do homework.  There is no penalty for not doing it.  And teachers are not permitted to give a zero on any assignment or exam that is missed without personally speaking with parents and offering personal assistance to the students to assist them in doing the assignment.

Of course, teachers are not paid to provide assistance to students who don’t want to do the work, so how many are actually going to take time to do that?  They’ll just turn in something on the student’s behalf and get the whole matter behind them.

If students get a grade on an exam that they don’t like, they have the right to retake the exam and keep the higher grade.  A clarification to the rule that came out later indicates that the rule is meant to allow students to retake the same exam (with the same questions) as often as they wish and to keep the highest exam.

So, they can not study, take the exam, find out what questions are on it, go study them, retake the same exam (with the same questions), and then if they still didn’t get the answers right keep on taking the same exam.  And, according to district policy, no grade lower than a 50 is permitted.  After all, a failing grade harms the students self esteem.

This policy teaches students that they don’t need to work or study.  It teaches them that there is no penalty for not doing what you are assigned or for not doing it in an acceptable manner.  It teaches them that deadlines are optional.  It teaches them that learning is optional.  It teaches them that they have to take no responsibility at all for their learning. So, what are they learning that will help them when they get a job or go to college?  Basically, it is ingraining in them habits that doom them to failure.

There is so much wrong with this that I don’t know what to say.  It is defeating as an educator to see this sort of thing coming along.  Of course, some of these students may take my classes.  I maintain standards, so they will try to just show up and expect to pass the class.  They will fail.  It will make me look like a bad instructor to administrators and people outside the college who don’t know what is going on.

I can not teach an entire K – 12 curriculum and still cover college level material.  But if I lower my standards, then I am doing a disservice to those students who do want to learn.

If too many of us in college lower our standards, and I see college faculty all over the country lowering standards because that is the easy thing to do, then that will ultimately make a college degree as worthless as a high school diploma from one of these school districts that adopt these policies that are so counterproductive to learning.

It is no wonder that so many of the best and brightest teachers are leaving the profession.  It is simply too discouraging to know that what you are doing is pointless.

I guess, though, that holding your ground, even under outside pressure to do the wrong thing, is one of the things that separates a good leader from a bad one.

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Yesterday CandidProf wrote about what he’s expected to do as “reasonable accommodation” for his students with disabilities.

Many of these struck me as totally UNreasonable. For example, the additional 18 hours a week for just one student is ridiculous—even more so because the work is expected to be done gratis in addition to a normal professor’s workload. No corporation could get away with that.

And CandidProf’s situation applies in the majority of universities, colleges and even high schools across the US.

I realize that in many lofty universities, such as Stanford and Harvard, there are rock star professors who teach only a few classes and spend their time and reputations acquiring grant money to fund research, which, in turn, attracts more alumni donations and an ever larger endowment fund. And although much of that research is valuable and needed, that’s not the issue here.

The issue is the choices being forced on our educators in the name of politically correct and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—but not on the educational facility.

Our educational system is continually being dumbed down in the name of “fairness,” initiatives such as “no child left behind” and laws like the ADA, with compliance tied to ever scarcer funding.

All mandated by the Powers That Be—mandated but never paid for. So the actual cost is pushed down from Federal to State to local to individuals, with, as usual, those who care, who haven’t been burned/burned out by the system, footing the bill through unpaid hours of work.

The more I read CandidProf’s posts the more depressed I become. I wonder how long he, and others like him, will choose to continue teaching, continue being put in the position of doing more and more for which they weren’t trained, aren’t paid for,  and never dreamed would be required.

What is “reasonable” when it comes to education? And how reasonable is it when that accommodation can have a ripple effect? Do you want an accountant doing your taxes who achieved professional status through a series of accommodations? How about your lawyer or doctor. Would you want your house wired by an electrician whose training was eased over because he had difficulty reading schematics?

How fair is it to the students who do all the work to achieve the same status as the disabled student who was “accommodated?”

Is it even fair to the disabled student? How fair is it to take that student’s money, tell them that they are qualified only to have the world and the law tell them that they aren’t?

Finally, before you tear into what I’ve said—

There are teachers in my family. My niece taught English and history in middle school for several years. Burned out from the constant battles with parents demanding better grades for their children and children talking about suicide as their only choice she returned to school for a MS in Library Science. As a librarian, she can focus on nurturing a love of reading. Her husband teaches college-level economics to high school honor students and runs afoul of the same problems as CandidProf.

As to myself, I have an 85db hearing loss—the typical hearing aid is designed for losses below 65 db—specifically in the consonant range of the human voice. Normal noise, coupled with today’s ultra-fast speech patterns, has eliminated my ability to do much out in the world. It has been years since I’ve attended a function and actually taken an intelligent role in the conversations; and forget podcasts and videos (unless they’re closed captioned). Even in a quiet conference (or living) room I can’t understand the back-and-forth talk between people. That’s why I switched my consulting to coaching via phone, instant messaging and email.

I can tell you first hand that it’s enormously difficult for people to modify their speech patterns and the majority don’t want the bother, which I can understand having been on their side in communicating with my mother.

What truly amazes me is that in spite of all this there are still people who want to teach.

What do you feel is “reasonable accommodation” in an educational situation? And how should it be paid for?

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: star-one  CC license