Learning Outcomes by John Crocitti
THE ABSURD BECOMES LOGICAL
John J. Crocitti, Professor of History, San Diego Mesa College
November 2009
As you are probably aware, there is push to impose assessment, a la No Child Left Behind, on higher education. At our community college, this is known as Student Learning Outcomes (SLO). So far, the SLO movement at my college has focused on collection of data to quantify whether students achieve general goals such as critical thinking, multicultural awareness, and ability to communicate ideas. As a member of my college’s SLO Committee, I have always chafed at this added responsibility for overworked faculty. At our community college, tenured faculty members already carry a five-section load each semester without benefit of a teaching assistant. Adjunct faculty members, who earn much less, frequently teach as many as seven sections per semester. Devising numerical measures of subjective abilities such as critical thinking and multicultural awareness, administering SLO evaluations, collecting the data, and then entering the data into a statistical program constitute an added workload for already overworked faculty. Instead of burdening me with added responsibilities that have little relevance to my classroom, people concerned with higher education might reduce my teaching load so that I might read and write more about the history that I teach. Moreover, I argue that the exams, writing assignments, and readings incorporated into my history classes already measure student learning in the form of letter grades ranging from A to F. The emphasis on SLO implies that my current evaluation of student learning is somehow unreliable, perhaps even bogus. Ultimately, the drive toward SLO also constitutes an effort by politicians, business people, opportunist professors and bureaucrats to deskill and control academic labor in the manner that management applied Taylorism to industrial labor during the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, trends at the state and federal level, for example the call for teacher assessment issued by Arne Duncan who is President Obama’s Secretary of Education, indicate that the political momentum currently favors the dubious attempt to numerically measure subjective abilities.
Although SLO certainly provides grist for debate, the motivation for writing this essay derives from this month’s meeting of the SLO Committee, a 90-mininte minute encounter that left me scratching my head. As usual, the proponents of SLO reminded us that failure to collect data on SLO would result in the loss of our college’s accreditation. The administration and faculty proponents have consistently assured us that the accreditation agency, which is theoretically independent but in reality politically driven, does not care about what the data shows. They simply want any data according to the mantra, “There is no good data, there is no bad data, there is only data.” At today’s meeting, I challenged this assumption, stating that no one in a right mind would collect data simply for its own sake. I speculated that the accreditation agency must have a benchmark, and that failure to reach the benchmark might be used against faculty, and specifically tenure, or to pull our college’s accreditation. At the very least, the data might become part of a publicized ranking of colleges, similar to those appearing in US News and World Report. I insisted that faculty know the benchmarks before implementing any assessments and data collection related to SLO. Of course, the committee’s leaders insisted that no benchmarks existed. I expected nothing better from them since these arguments have already been made ad infinitum.
After the meeting, I had a private conversation with my Chair, who is active in campus affairs and our local teachers union. He recommended that I drop my line of dissent, stating that it was better to keep things vague. Then, if the accreditation agency cited our college or the faculty for failure to reach a benchmark, the union would take them to court for violating state law and breach of contract. For the time being, he recommended that everyone do the minimum to satisfy the accreditation agency regarding SLO even though the data was absolutely meaningless and had no connection to improved education.
It was the conversation with my Chair that troubled me. I had already discounted the accreditation agency and its allies as political hacks. My Chair’s comments worry me on both tactical and emotional grounds. Tactically, I think that he is overconfident about the viability of a lawsuit. In California where my college is located, it is currently illegal for administrators to evaluate faculty in higher education by means of SLO. The same was true regarding primary and secondary schools until the California legislature and the governor recently approved revision of the law. Now, standardized tests and rubrics may be used to evaluate faculty in primary and secondary schools. I anticipate similar revisions to California law relative to faculty in higher education, and especially relative to community college faculty since our system was originally part of the K-12 system. Thus, statutes might not protect us from SLO in the future.
The politicians, accreditation agencies, and administrators can also argue that SLO do not evaluate faculty, but instead evaluate institutions. I don’t believe that my Chair or the union can guarantee a court ruling against such an argument. Even if faculty and the union are legally correct, will our local union have the financial resources to fight a costly court battle consisting of many appeals, especially as dues are reduced because of faculty cutbacks during this financial crisis? I have seen this tactic used by industrial firms against industrial unions that were more powerful and better funded than our teachers’ union. After several years of fighting protracted court battles as membership dwindled, industrial unions lost their ability to contest management decisions in court.
On an emotional level, my Chair’s recommended tactics trouble me even more. He advocates participation in a process that few faculty members believe in. I know only a handful of faculty who see a connection between SLO and the classes we teach. Hardly anyone believes that SLO will improve instruction. Most faculty members view SLO as absurd. A few, such as my Chair and I, see SLO’s ridiculousness as veiling an attack on tenure and faulty unions. Yet, my Chair, who is a strong union advocate, believes that participation in this absurd process is the logical means to protect faculty from SLO. Hence, the absurd has become the logical. We now live in Alice’s Wonderland.
My Chair, whom I respect for his dedication to education and the union, fails to account for the emotional toll caused by such a tactic. I spent eleven years of graduate school honing my ability to think logically and to deconstruct orthodoxy. Now, I am encouraged to go along with the immanently illogical so as to protect my job from the accreditation agency’s ax. Professional pride and career fulfillment quickly give way to cynicism and alienation under such circumstances. My Chair, and perhaps the union local, does not understand that after a period of acquiescing to administration mandates, even if part of a master union strategy, people begin to question the union’s effectiveness as a shield against management. From there, it is only a short walk to the union’s decertification. This is exactly what I saw when I worked in industry.
What do I recommend instead? Obstruction. More than ever, California needs community colleges. California State University (CSU) is turning away students as a result of budget cuts. The University of California (UC) is for the lucky fraction that had a decent high-school education and can afford rising tuition. For-profit colleges charge more than even the UC and, therefore, are out of reach for most people except when the taxpayer intervenes with generous subsidies such as student loans. More than ever, the taxpayers and desperate students see community colleges as the only viable educational alternative. We are cheap and provide instruction that, according to my students, is equal or superior to that offered at CSU and the UC. Let the politically motivated accreditation agencies pull our accreditation after we ignore SLO. I dare them. Then, listen to the uproar as 23,000 students at our college alone lose affordable education. Let’s play this game of chicken with the politicians and the union-busting, anti-tenure neoliberals.
I learned in industry that sacrificing the logical for the absurd, as both industrial labor and management often did, is a poor strategy for saving jobs and preserving working conditions. In the end, despite all kinds of absurd twists and turns, factories still closed and once indispensable, respected laborers were left in the cold. Academic labor will fare no better if it accepts the absurd as logical.
Inserted on ‘Flow of Ideas’ website on 17th November 2009