Right Wing Nation

Sit around the fire and let me tell you a story — a true story, by the way — from an academic conference I attended some time ago. For those of you who have never attended an academic conference, it’s exactly as you imagine: Hundreds of egghead academics gathered together to present egghead academic papers while the egghead academics in the audience take notes and ask questions. Some of the papers are interesting. Most are not. Then, Sturgeon’s Law applies to academics as much as anything else.

For reasons that should be obvious, names have been changed to protect the stupid.

“Wait,” I hear you protesting, “What does this have to do with education?” All will me made clear. Trust me.

I found myself late one morning wandering into a room where a presentation on “Neuroscience and Learning” was to be given (there was, of course, a cryptic subtitle, but I don’t remember what it was). I was avoiding the “qualitative research” papers, of course, and this was the only “quantitative” paper being given at that time.

The presenter, a sickly-looking dishwater blonde who looked like she hadn’t eaten in several days (I’m sure she was a vegan) stepped up to the podium. I’ll call her Jeanne-Marie, because she spoke with a very phony French accent, which she said she had picked up in the six weeks she was vacationing in France.

I should have left then. But no. Like a dummy, I sat there.

Jeanne-Marie’s paper had nothing to do with neuroscience, as it turned out, except for the one sentence in which she claimed that neuroscientific research (she gave no citation) supported her findings. Her paper was about “modes of learning” (the currently fashionable term is “learning styles“).

I must admit that my ears began to tune out the incessant meaningless edubabble, and I zeroed in on her handout. “Surely,” I thought, “This can’t be right,” as I read her methodology and data collection page. So I forced myself to listen, and I could no more believe my ears than I could my eyes.

The presentation was over — Jeanne-Marie’s study had found “conclusive support” for a plethora of different “modes of learning.” Most of the eggheads in the room lapped it up; the questioners spouted “diversity” and “inclusivity” and other such buzzwords as much as she had during her presentation.

I tried very hard to just leave and keep my mouth shut. I really did. Sometimes I’m successful, but I’m just not very good at it. I asked for clarification on her data collection and methodology. Unfortunately, she repeated what she (and her handout) had said.

Here’s what Jeanne-Marie had done. She had, somehow, gotten three teachers to agree to participate. Each teacher had one class in the study. Teacher A taught using “only one mode of learning,” whatever that meant, and teachers B and C taught using “multiple modes of learning” (again, whatever that was supposed to mean). Twenty-some students in teacher A’s class agreed to participate (rather, their parents), and thirty-some students in the other two classes agreed to participate. Students were given an exam, designed by Jeanne-Marie, at the end of the study, and the scores were recorded (and Jeanne-Marie claimed analyzed).

Did I mention that these three teachers were in different schools, with different curricula? No? Did I mention that Jeanne-Marie asked these teachers nothing about what they were covering in their classes, or the curriculum? No? And did I mention that Jeanne-Marie wrote the exam all of the students in the study took? Yes?

You see the problem, right? But it’s much worse than that.

Jeanne-Marie reported the number of students in both groups who passed her exam. Because more students in the experimental group (that would be the “multiple modes of learning” crew) had passed the exam, Jeanne-Marie proclaimed the Universal Truth of Multiple Modes of Learning.

She calculated no means. She ran no statistical tests. She merely reported raw numbers. This, I suppose, is what made it “quantitative” research.

“Yes,” I said, “But there are more students in the experimental group than in the control group.”

Her reply I found impossible to parse. She said something like, “But there were more who passed than there were more in the group,” and I asked her to clarify. What she meant was that because the difference in pass scores between the two groups was greater than the difference in the number of students between the two groups, it supported her hypothesis.

It was garbage from beginning to end. She had tested nothing, and she had demonstrated nothing.

But she had a PhD. And she’d had this garbage accepted at an academic conference.

I was therefore not at all surprised to see this heartening piece of news from New Jersey:

Teacher Magazine tells us that only 58% of candidates for teacher certification in the state of New Jersey passed the required math exam.

There have been so many recent examples of the decline of research that I despair of writing about it (but I may — I have those examples bookmarked). I have discussed this decline before, and yes, I know, it’s boring and you don’t care. But I’m going to tell you why you should care, because it’s why this had a direct impact on education.

Trickle-down.

Here’s what happens. You have an old guard on your local campus who do high quality research. But the old guard either have retired, or will be retiring shortly, and they are replaced with “qualitative” researchers, along with a handful of “quantitative” researchers, like Jeanne-Marie. In many of these departments, “qualitative” faculty have taken power and are hiring exclusively those who do the kind of research they value and understand. Consequently, in the next twenty years, universities will crank out an even higher percentage of garbage as research than they have in the past.

These are the faculty who are training your children’s teachers. And your children’s teachers will be even more academically stupid in the future than they are now.

Are you seeing the connection with education yet? Are you seeing why you should care?

As mathematically illiterate faculty train graduate students in equally illiterate research, and as illiterate research (and faculty) train future teachers, illiteracy further contaminates the schools — and your children’s educations. And it perpetuates itself, because school students will become university students, and eventually, some of them will become researchers and faculty.

It’s a recursive loop.

Politics on campus isn’t the primary problem. It certainly feeds the garbage-as-research problem since it drives studies, designs, methodologies, and outcomes (particularly in “qualitative” research, where the desired outcome and only the desired outcome determines the methodology), but the primary problem is ignorance. This isn’t specific to education or teachers. I could just as easily have used examples of, say, people getting degrees in English lit without ever having to have read a word of Shakespeare, or people getting degrees in history without knowing why Waterloo was important. And yes, there are more than a few of both.

This isn’t an academic trend. This is ignorance. Trends solve themselves because they are trends. Ignorance only begets more ignorance. But to get an educated academy, you have to have educated students, and education begins in the elementary schools.

A language arts teacher commented on Matthew’s article and asked why he, as a language arts teacher, should have to pass a math test. I said for the same reason a math teacher should have a basic understanding of Shakespeare.

A well rounded education.