Massachusetts eyes plan to improve diversity among teachers

Does Boston really want dummy teachers just because they are brown?

The fact remains that IQ and related tests give the best prediction of subsequent educational performance.  So to hire as teachers people whom the test identifies as academically deficient is to ignore a very old warning indeed:

"If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit" — Matthew 15:13-14

Asking teachers who have failed a literacy test to teach literacy is a very good example of what that scripture warned against


For more than two decades, the exams Massachusetts teachers and administrators must take to secure their professional licenses have been marred by gaping racial disparities in pass rates, driving a disproportionate share of educators of color out of the profession while raising questions about potential racial bias in the exams.

But on Tuesday, education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley will formally propose a potential fix: He is seeking to allow teachers who repeatedly fail their exams to receive a license based on their actual work experience — vetted by an expert — instead of their test scores. His proposal would also allow educators in some instances to take another licensing test offered in 26 other states.

The changes, if approved by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in the coming months, would be in place on a trial basis for three years.

“We are trying to see if there is a better way to identify potentially great teachers,” said Riley in an interview Monday.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks on the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure has been the communication and literacy skills test, which most aspiring teachers must pass before the state will even review their licensing application. While 83 percent of white candidates passed that test in the 2017-18 school year, a little more than 60 percent of Black and Latino candidates did, according to the most recent data.

Riley is proposing the changes as many districts statewide have been struggling to build a workforce that reflects their student populations. In Boston, for instance, people of color account for 85 percent of student enrollment, but only 42 percent of the teaching force, and in Springfield, students of color represent 90 percent of school enrollment, but teachers of color make up only 19 percent of the workforce, according to state data.

Many educators have long argued the testing requirements for a license further restrict an already narrow pipeline for recruitment — one fed by teaching colleges that are overwhelmingly filled with white students.

Under the state’s 22-year-old licensing system, most educators must pass two exams — a communication test and another tied to their area of expertise — to gain a license. However, the state allows a limited number of unlicensed educators to teach under waivers for a year or longer if the school district can prove difficulty finding a better-suited licensed candidate.

So far, Riley’s proposal, which will be subject to a 60-day public comment period, has received mixed responses.

In Boston, where 128 educators have been terminated over the last five years because they were unable to secure professional licenses, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius viewed Riley’s proposal as a positive step forward. About half those let go were Black or Latino.

“Knowing that a single standardized test doesn’t always guarantee quality, I support strategies that remove barriers and help us meet our goal of recruiting and retaining an excellent and diverse teaching corps,” Cassellius said in a statement.

But Jamie Gass, director of the Center for School Reform at Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank, said the proposal could ultimately weaken teacher quality.

“The state’s MTEL teacher test and licensure guidelines have long been a model that led to historic gains on virtually every national and international measure of academic achievement,” Gass said in a statement. “It’s disgraceful that Massachusetts policy makers would even consider dumbing down expectations for teachers, which will only further accelerate the state’s now decade-long academic decline on the nation’s report card, not to mention widen achievement gaps.”

Across the country, many states have been re-examining their licensing systems in response to evidence suggesting testing requirements might be keeping too many educators of color out of classrooms. The issue has taken on more urgency in recent years as a growing body of research has shown that achievement can rise in classrooms when students of color are taught by teachers of similar demographics.

In California, for instance, the Legislature is weighing a bill that would replace its communications skills educator licensing exam amid concerns of racial bias.

Riley’s proposal is part of a broader effort to help districts diversify their workforces, which includes creating grant opportunities for recruitment initiatives and programs to entice high school students to pursue teaching careers. State higher education officials also are working on efforts to increase the diversity of teacher-training programs.

Thomas Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, said he supports Riley’s efforts to temporarily loosen the educator testing requirements. “We know there are a lot of bright kids who don’t do well on standardized tests,” he said.

Tyler Fox, an attorney who represented a group of minority Boston teachers who unsuccessfully sued the state a decade ago after they could not pass the licensing exams, said it was good to see the state finally acknowledging a problem with the tests, but that the proposal doesn’t go far enough. Permanent change is needed now. “It seems like they are being tepid about it and trying to read the political waters,” he said.

Merrie Najimy, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, also faulted the proposal for being too limited. She would like to see reliance on the licensing exams permanently scaled back or eliminated, noting that supervised classroom experience is more informative, especially in determining whether a teacher can handle disruptive students. “A test is the wrong way to measure the quality of an educator’s work and their competency to become a successful teacher,” Najimy said.

SOURCE 





The Mess That Is Science Publishing

Researchers have been grumbling about the state of scientific publishing for years. Now, rumor has it that the Trump administration (yes, those science-haters!) may be trying to fix at least one problem: access to reports of government-funded research.

The rumored proposal will require free, immediate access to all reports of government-funded scientific research. The rumor is credible enough that an association of 210 academic and research libraries has written to the president in support of the idea. The research-publication system is a mess, and open access would be one small step toward a fix.

History

But first, a little history. When scientific publishing began, scientists were few, many were amateurs, being a scientist was not a career, and publishing costs—copyediting, printing, distribution—were high. In 1800, only about thirty scientific and medical journals existed; by 1900, the number had grown to 700. Now, there are estimated to be more than twenty thousand. And they cost! Not the $100 or so per annum you can expect to pay for People magazine or Scientific American, but sometimes thousands of dollars. Although the most prestigious science journals, the weeklies Science (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science) and Nature (published by Macmillan) cost less than $100, more obscure journals can cost much, much more. The Taylor & Francis Journal of Co-ordination Chemistry (just what is that, one wonders?), for 24 issues, costs $18,041 per year. That is an institutional rate. Many Elsevier journals do not even advertise rates for individuals and their website makes it pretty clear that the institutional rate often involves negotiation.

Examples may help. For more than two decades, I edited the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal Behavioural Processes. The audience for the journal is small: experimental psychologists and behavioral biologists. The annual subscription is a hefty $4,479. Any institution will think twice before subscribing to Behavioural Processes. (Duke University no longer does). Yet, presumably, enough of them do to make it profitable for Elsevier. Partly in response to costs like those, the University of California in 2019 ended its subscriptions with Elsevier because the publisher was unwilling to go to free open access. (Elsevier, and some other commercial publishers, have many peer-reviewed—but pay-to-publish—open-access journals.)

The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior is another small, but relatively prestigious, journal devoted to learning (“operant conditioning”), mostly in animals. Founded in 1958 by a group of researchers at Harvard and Columbia all trained in the single-subject (no statistics!) methods of B.F. Skinner, the project was self-funded, aided by seed money from pharmaceutical firms interested in this type of research. Now it is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and retains its original modest subscription rate (< $50 annually).

Both those journals target similar audiences; they have similar production costs. JEAB has a larger subscription list because of its history and its price. Indeed, I doubt whether BP has any personal subscribers at all. If it cost as little as JEAB, it might acquire a few. But, presumably, it has hooked enough academic libraries to allow it to continue.

The spread in subscription rates, the vast and still growing number of journals and the natural reluctance of commercial publishers to go to open-access without a pay-to-publish fee, point to several factors that have changed since the days when there were just a handful of scientific journals and a modest number of mostly vocation-oriented scientists:

The enormous growth in the number of career scientists since World War II.

The rise of quantification spurred by bureaucracies that need numbers to evaluate employees: Number of publications helps administrators evaluate career scientists, even though it is a corrupted measure (doesn’t adequately reflect differences in the size of the field or order of authorship, not to mention the quality of the work).

Hence, there is huge pressure on researchers to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

The influence of external research grants, which provide funds to pay for publication, allowing the creation of numerous pop-up journals[1]which offer easy pay-to-publish.

The rise of the internet, allowing researchers to self-publish at almost no cost. There are several publication sites, such as ArXiv, which is completely free, and others that allow free posting but charge for premium services (who is reading your papers, citation counts, etc.), such as Academia and ResearchGate. Researchers can also post their work on their own institutional sites.

Those changes leave us with the $64 billion question: Who needs those expensive print journals? Why do we have them at all?

Vetting and Search Cost

The answer is search, vetting—and history. Researchers need some way to narrow down their search for relevant papers, papers they need to consult and cite as part of their own research. The internet by itself just provides unfiltered, unsorted access. And science bosses, from academic deans to industry executives, almost always lack sufficient detailed knowledge to evaluate accurately the science done by their employees. They need some way to judge the importance of published work.

The cry goes up: Is it peer-reviewed? The big science publishers—Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Springer, Macmillan, etc.—publish journals with respectable lists of editors, associate editors, and (presumably, since these names are usually not revealed) the peer reviewers the editors choose. Hence, they retain their position and are able to charge swingeing costs for journals on niche topics. The cost and open-access problems persist.

It’s not clear that there is a top-down solution to those problems. Nature and Science will retain their historical eminence as “positional goods”—like elites in other spheres. Whether they can be coerced to allow open access remains to be seen. Many other prestigious journals are also pretty secure.

New Journals: Barriers to Entry?

Professional associations usually publish journals and make a nod or two toward open access. The American Psychological Association, for example, allows authors to post their own work on personal websites. A wider distribution is possible for a fee of $3,000; the parallel Association for Psychological Science offers similar arrangements. (Some readers may feel that $3,000 is an excessive if not greedy amount to ask in return for rights for which the original owner was paid nothing, but such are the ways of the publishing industry.) Other scientific associations are making cautious steps toward open access.

Perhaps university presses will create online, open-access journals, a mission that may counterbalance their current tendency to favor otherwise unprofitable, and sometimes unreadable, race and gender “studies.”[2]

The production costs for setting up a new journal are much lower than they would have been thirty years ago. Peer reviewers and editorial board members have rarely been paid, and even editors receive only modest stipends. And now authors can do digital typesetting and copyediting—once the responsibility of the publisher—with a little help from their home institutions. Cost is not an obstacle to online publishing.

It would also help if institutions themselves followed the hoped-for government-funding lead and only recognized publications in open-access journals. Promotion and tenure would be based on articles meeting these criteria and no others. If a group of elite institutions (the AAU membership, for example) proposed such a policy, many others would surely follow.

The scientific community has taken a few baby steps toward open publishing. Whether the baby will grow up remains to be seen.

SOURCE 







Foreign students flock to some Australian university courses

FOREIGN students have filled at least three quarters of places in key university courses, after international student numbers soared 12 per cent in a year.

As Queensland school leavers sweat on university offers, The Courier-Mail can reveal that overseas students have taken 82.4 per cent of places in information technology courses at the University of the Sunshine Coast, and nearly two-thirds of IT places at James Cook University (JCU) and the University of Southern Queensland.

At the prestigious University of Queensland, which pockets $250 million a year selling places to Chinese students, foreigners outnumber local students in IT and management and commerce courses.

Cash-hungry universities are offering more places to fee-paying foreigners than to local students in 64 courses nationally, data obtained exclusively by The Courier-Mail reveals.

Nationally, the number of foreign students in Australian universities soared 12 per cent to 427,610 in 2018 — with nearly 10 per cent studying in Brisbane. At Central Queensland University, the proportion of foreign students studying management and commerce soared from 54 per cent in 2013 to 70.2 per cent in 2018, the latest Education Department data for 2018 reveals.

CQ University acting vice-chancellor Alastair Dawson said 40 per cent of students come from other countries. "Due to the successive decline in funding from government to universities, in order to build our programs and ensure a sustainable academic offering we've realised the opportunity to pick up our international market," he said. We don't cut domestic places to suit the international market — you would take as many domestic students as you can."

In agriculture and environmental studies, 61.3 per cent of students at JCU are from overseas. "Domestic students are not missing out on places in these courses because of international student enrolments," a JCU spokesman said. "All students — international and domestic have to meet strict entry requirements and academic standards to be enrolled."

International education is a $22 billion business for Australian universities. Australian universities have enrolled 152,591 students from China, 71,857 from India and 28,233 from Nepal.

Foreigners, who are charged $15,000 to $33,000 for a basic bachelor degree, make up a third of the 1.5 million students enrolled in Australian universities.

The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) has warned that some universities, including UQ — where Chinese students clashed with Hong Kong protesters last year — are too reliant on Chinese revenue.

CIS Emeritus Professor Steven Schwartz, a former vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Sydney and Murdoch University in Perth, said foreign students flock to courses likely to lead to jobs and permanent residency, such as IT and management

"Permanent residency is one of the main motivations to study in Australia," he said. "If suddenly permanent residency was given to people who study poetry, it's likely they'd all be doing poetry."

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 27 January, 2020