Delivering Educational Products: The Job Formerly Known as Teaching

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 by Texas Observer

by Robert Jensen

 

Hi, I’m Robert Jensen, a provider of educational products to consumers at the University of Texas at Austin.

I used to introduce myself as a UT professor, but that was before I attended a Texas Public Policy Foundation session last week offering more exciting “breakthrough solutions” to the problems of higher education.

At that session in a downtown Austin hotel, I learned that these very real problems—escalating costs and questionable quality of undergraduate instruction—can be solved in the “free market.” You know, the free market, that magical mechanism that gave us the housing bubble/credit derivative scam/financial meltdown. The free market that has produced growing inequality in the United States and around the world. That good old free market.

The solutions offered by representatives of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in the morning’s first session focused on ending public subsidies for higher education and treating it like any other business. These insights come on the heels of the much-hyped “seven breakthrough solutions” that TPPF has been pushing. (Read about them here, and for a satirical treatment, watch this.

Not surprisingly, both panelists spoke in the language of the market, turning education into a commodity. Panel moderator William Murchison, a conservative syndicated columnist, chimed in during the discussion, referring to “consumers of the educational product.”

I think that means students.

That pithy phrase led me to the microphone in the Q&A period, where I asked whether in this mad quest to turn higher education into a business the panelists might not be promoting efficiency so much as guaranteeing the final destruction of what’s left of real education. I said that I found it difficult to understand my teaching— which focuses on how citizens should understand concentrations of power in government and corporations, and on how journalists should respond—as “an economic exchange,” in the words of Cato’s Neal McCluskey.

Both McCluskey and Matthew Denhart from CCAP responded with more of the market mantra and didn’t seem to recognize, or care, that commodifying education might have implications not just for how we organize institutions and evaluate professors, but for learning itself. Denhart responded that the “product” doesn’t have to be solely job training, but would include instruction in “esoteric concepts.” Those apparently are the two alternatives in college classrooms: purely practical or interesting irrelevance.

That got me thinking about my favorite class, “Critical Issues in Journalism,” the large introductory course I teach in the School of Journalism. The course tries to examine—rigorously, but in plain language using clear concepts—the nature of democracy and the role of the news media. My goal is to model the critical thinking that is crucial for citizens and journalists in a world facing multiple crises (political and economic, cultural and ecological) with dwindling hopes for a smooth transition to a just and sustainable future. Rather than accept the shallow platitudes of American democracy or the self-serving claims of American mainstream journalism, I encourage students to challenge the conventional wisdom (and me).

My students can speak to how well I do that, but my interest here is in how I understand the nature of what I do. When I think of when the class seems to work best -- the moments that students seems to be most engaged with these crucial questions—it’s difficult to think of myself as delivering an educational product or of my students as consumers.

Instead, I’m happy with being a professor. I profess.

“Profess” can be used in different ways—to make a disingenuous statement (“He professed to like his boss”) or to announce religious commitments (“She professed her faith in God”). But I use it in the sense of making a public claim to knowledge, with an openness to respond to critiques of that claim. When it really works, students not only listen to professors but learn to profess themselves. When it works, I’m just an older—and, one hopes, at least slightly wiser—version of my students.

That experience can happen in vocational training as well as in courses more philosophically focused. Good journalism writing teachers, for example, know the joy of professing the love of the craft and helping students discover that joy. The presumed division between training and intellectual work occurs only when teachers accept that false divide and abandon efforts to bring the two together.

I don’t want to appear naïve; I realize that much of what happens in American college classrooms (including mine, of course) falls short of these ideals on any given day. The question is not whether we sometimes fail, as we all do, but why failure sometimes becomes routine. On this count, ironically, I agree with some of the critiques coming from the TPPF.

After 19 years of full-time teaching at the University of Texas, I’ve heard a lot of legitimate student complaints about professors who don’t care about teaching. I’ve complained myself about the irrelevance and inanity of so much of the “research” produced in the disciplines I know in the social sciences and humanities. I played that research game for my first six years to pass inspection and get tenure, but after that I dropped out of the scholarly publishing arena to concentrate on writing for a general audience. Shortly after that I stopped teaching graduate courses out of frustration with the self-indulgence of so much of the research/theory crowd in the study of media and mass communication. These days, I enjoy the challenge of connecting with undergraduates, writing about political and social matters, and speaking in public.

Let me be clear: This is not an anti-intellectual screed or an attack on systematic thinking and inquiry. I have learned a lot from the work of other scholars, which is reflected in the courses I teach, and such thinking and inquiry is more needed than ever to face these deepening crises. My writing for general audiences is rooted in research, defined more broadly. But the critics of the university have a point. Increasingly, the academic game that most professors play is so self-indulgent that ordinary people—not just reactionary ideologues with libertarian fantasies—will not, and should not, support it indefinitely. Education is not a commodity, but economics are relevant in the sense that we don’t live in a world of endless resources.

But here’s where I part company with the critics: Instead of pretending to be able to measure faculty output and draining the life from teaching, we need to embrace the ideals of the university rather than capitulate to the false promises of failed market ideology. The obsessions with measurement and testing have nearly destroyed K-12 public education, and if applied to higher education it will have similar effects.

That model may be particularly attractive to those on the right precisely because it is so effective at undermining the kind of critical thinking some of us are trying to encourage in our classes. As U.S. society has moved steadily to the right over the past three decades, conservatives have been eager to eliminate the few remaining spaces in the culture where critiques of power—especially concentrated economic power in a society marked by obscene wealth and indecent inequality—can flourish. Some parts of the modern university—especially those teaching business, advertising, and economics—are devoted to propping up that power, and much of the rest of the campus is not far behind. The corporatization of the modern university—both in internal organization and reliance on funding from corporations and corporate-based foundations—has done much to eliminate critical thinking that is connected to struggles for political and economic justice. The victory of the market model would be the end of real education, if by education we mean independent inquiry into the power that structures our lives.

I’m encouraged that UT President Bill Powers—who appeared on the second panel of the day, and had to endure the self-aggrandizing ramblings of fellow panelist and TPPF Senior Fellow Ronald Trowbridge—supports faculty in this debate and recognizes the threats to academic freedom embedded in this market madness. I have disagreements with the university administration about many things, but we faculty would make it easier for administrators in that debate if we not only press the institution to support us but engage in critical self-reflection about ourselves.

In hallway conversations, faculty members will express frustration about bad teachers (though there is not always agreement on which colleagues are the bad teachers) who are allowed to continue to muddle along. Many worry that the demands for scholarly production have become so focused on quantity rather than quality that much of what is published in academic journals is of little value, even for specialists in a disciple.

Acknowledging these systemic failures doesn’t detract from all the good teaching done in universities, nor does it lessen the value of the important research of many faculty members. Instead, it should simply remind us that we owe it to the state, our students, and ourselves to confront these issues. If we don’t, the reactionary forces that increasingly dominate the culture will take care of it for us, and instead of breakthroughs in higher education we will witness an accelerating breakdown.

Corporate 'Education Reform' is National Insanity

Tuesday, March 1, 2011 by Education Week
by Diane Ravitch

I'm beginning to think we are living in a moment of national insanity. On the one hand, we hear pious exhortations about education reform, endlessly uttered by our leaders in high political office, corporate suites, foundations, and the media. President Obama says we have to "out-educate" the rest of the world to "win the future."

Yet the reality on the ground suggests that the corporate reform movement—embraced by so many of those same leaders, including the president—will set American education back, by how many years or decades is anyone's guess. Sometimes I think we are hurtling back a century or more, to the age of the Robber Barons and the great corporate trusts.

Consider a few events of the past week:

• In Detroit, the school system will reduce its deficit by closing half the city's public schools and creating classes of as many as 60 students. These are among the poorest and lowest-performing students in the nation. Parents and teachers should be rioting in the streets of Detroit, along with everyone who cares about these children and our future. This is an outrage.
• The school board of Providence, R.I., voted to fire all of its teachers to address its deficit. Most will be rehired, but now the board has maximum flexibility to choose which ones. At the same time, Providence's leaders are humiliating every teacher, breaking the bonds of trust that are essential for the culture of a good school. Will anyone hold these reckless, heedless, unprofessional "leaders" in Rhode Island to account?
• And, in Idaho, the state superintendent of education has proposed a plan that would lay off 770 teachers over five years, banking on students taking more online courses. Do they know there is no evidence for the efficacy of virtual learning? I don't think they care. For them, this is just a cost-cutting measure. And it's other people's children who will get this bargain-basement training, not their own.

If more was needed to strip away the mask of "reform," consider the deafening silence of the corporate school reformers in response to these events. A few, like Joe Williams of Democrats for Educational Reform, surprised their confreres (and me) by siding with the teachers of Wisconsin. Most, however, complained that public employees are overpaid, have unnecessarily rich benefits, and need a comeuppance. All those who wrote such articles enjoy comfortable upper-middle-class lives; do they want to reduce teachers to penury? Some circulated spurious claims that Wisconsin's schools were dreadful because only one-third of 8th graders were proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment in 2009; I assume they don't realize that "proficient" on NAEP is far higher than proficient on state tests and is equivalent to an "A."

I was disappointed when my friend Rick Hess, who blogs for Education Week, expressed his support for Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker (I Stand With Governor Walker); in another piece, Rick reported that the average salary of Wisconsin teachers was about $52,600 in 2009-10. I wonder what the average salary is for professionals at the American Enterprise Institute, where Rick does his thinking and writing. I'm sure it's far more than what teachers earn, and that the working conditions are pleasanter, the stress level lower, and the responsibilities fewer.

The corporate reformers have done a good job of persuading the media that our public schools are failing because they are overrun by bad teachers, and these bad teachers have lifetime tenure because of their powerful unions. (See the corporate reform film, Waiting for Superman). I'm sorry to say that Race to the Top, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have stirred up a frenzy of anti-teacher sentiment that hurts even our very best teachers, by their much-publicized search for "bad teachers."

National Board-certified teachers are organizing a march on Washington this July to fight back against the vilification of their profession. Their website is www.saveourschoolsmarch.org.

In the wake of the attacks on teachers and public schools this past year, the haters of teachers feel respectable as they write their venomous diatribes and post them widely. When I recently defended teachers and their right to bargain collectively on CNN.com, I was startled by the raw expressions of rage in the thousands of comments that poured in.

So much madness on the loose. So many districts firing teachers and closing schools. So many legislators slashing education budgets while refusing to raise taxes on millionaires or allowing taxes on the wealthiest to expire as they lay off teachers.

What do we hear from the corporate reformers? Merit pay. Really? Bonuses for some, layoffs for others? Fire teachers with low value-added scores? Ah, more teaching to the test, more narrowing the curriculum.

Nothing to improve education. Just "innovation" (i.e., no evidence) and "disruption" (I.e., firing the whole staff, closing the school).

Our schools remain subject to a failed federal accountability system. We are packing children into crowded classrooms, ignoring the growing levels of child poverty (the U.S. now leads all advanced nations in infant mortality), and putting fear into the hearts of our nation's teachers. Who will want to teach? How does any of this improve schools or benefit children? Do you understand it? I don't.

Corporate Censors Flex Their Muscles

The New Morality Police

By DAVID ROSEN

A couple of weeks so ago, Jason Goldberg, founder and CEO of the soon-to-be-launched website, fabulis.com, woke to a shocking situation: Citibank had blocked his corporate bank account. As Goldberg posted on his blog, the bank’s action was done without prior notice and was imposed because of the site’s apparent “objectionable content.” And the content? Fabulis is to be a social networking and lifestyle service targeted to gay men.

A few days later, and after much indignant buzz on the web about the bank’s arbitrary action, Goldberg got a call from Citibank’s Bill Brown. According to Goldberg, “Bill runs all the New York branches. Bill seems like a good and smart guy. He is sincerely apologetic that an individual made a bad judgment call about our site.” Fabulis’ account was reinstated.

In all likelihood the blocking of Fabulis’ account was the result of a “bad judgment call.” As Goldberg reports, “Bill [Brown] will use this as an education and training opportunity.” One can only wonder what corporate “education and training” means at Citibank. The problem, sadly, seems more systemic: How is it that an individual bank employee (or small group) can block an account? What criteria and procedures does the bank use to determine “objectionable content”? These issues seem not to have been discussed between Goldberg and Brown.

Whether Citibank’s action was due to the action of a single employee or a decision by its top management, it speaks to the apparent increase in the censorship of online content now being imposed by corporate America. The struggle over censorship, over the content Americas can experience, dates from the nation’s founding. In 1711, the Massachusetts Bay Colony introduced regulations prohibiting the “Composing, Writing, Printing, Publishing, of Any Filthy Obscene or Prophane Song, Pamphlet, Libel or Mock-Sermon, in Imitation or in Mimicking of Preaching, or any other part of Divine Worship.”

Today, the battle over censorship, over the limits of acceptable content, is being fought on two fronts. The first is the formal or legal front; it involves the contestation over FCC “decency” standards (e.g., CBS’s fine for the over-the-air broadcast display of Janet Jackson’s nipple) and Court decisions (e.g., U.S. v. librarians over Internet porn).

The second front is more informal, non-legal and involves corporations selectively restricting what they offer the public. It often involves more subtle forms of censorship ranging from corporate identity or branding issues, product “quality” or technical standards, to market control factors and to unstated political or religious values. Both fronts need to be challenged with equal vigor; nevertheless, there appears to be an increase among the latter front, corporate censorship.

* * *

The battle between the Dixie Chicks and the country music establishment is the paradigmatic example of corporate censorship, both its imposition and its undoing. The Chicks appeared at a now-famous London concert in 2003 as the U.S. illegal invasion of Iraq loomed. One of the “chicks,” Natalie Maines, told the anti-war audience, "Just so you know, we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas."

Reports of Maines’ statement spread rapidly and the group faced a vicious backlash. It came from not only the pro-war right wing and the media establishment, but the country music industry as well. The Chicks found that radio stations (especially the reactionary Clear Channel network) refused to play their music, retailers refused to carry their albums, their live shows were cancelled and they suffered a plunge in record sales. They also received death threats.

As support for Bush’s imperialist folly eroded, anti-war sentiment became popular, acceptable among the political elite and corporate media. Those who long opposed the war were transformed from traitors to patriots. In 2007, the Dixie Chicks were rehabilitated, receiving five Grammy awards.

More recent examples of corporate censorship are equally political, but in a more arbitrary fashion. The Fabulis experience is illustrative. Clearly, the Citibank decision-maker(s) didn’t know their customer nor who backed his latest venture. Goldberg was a co-founder of Jobster, also started and ran socialmedian.com, which was sold to Xing in 2008. He’s a player in the web-entrepreneur ballgame. His latest venture is backed by the “Washington Post,” Mayfield Fund’s Allen Morgan and Burson-Marsteller’s Don Baer.

The experience of Goldberg’s Fabulis may well be an exception. However, Apple’s actions speak to a different form of censorship. The “New York Times” recently blew the whistle of Apple’s restrictions of applications it will run on its iPhone. Among those blocked are “SlideHer,” a videogame depicting a scantily-clad women, and “Sexy Scratch Off,” a lottery-type game depicting a woman wearing a scratch-off dress and revealing undergarments.

Apple’s iPhone supports an estimated 150,000 “apps” through its App Store and draws the line over what it considers “objectionable content.” Philip Schiller, Apple’s head of worldwide product marketing, argues that developers have been submitting “an increasing number of apps containing very objectionable content.” He added: “It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.”

What all this huffing-&-puffing fails to acknowledge is that Apple offers the “Sports Illustrated” soft-core porn swimsuit issue. As Schiller acknowledged, “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format.” At Apple, as at many media companies, corporate interests determine decency standards.

Apple’s blockage of a variety of other “objectionable content” received less media attention. As first reported on the invaluable site, BoingBoing, Apple initially blocked episodes of the South Park cartoon series. South Park announced: "We first announced our iPhone App back in October [2008], after we submitted the Application to Apple for approval. After a couple of attempts to get the application approved, we are sad to say that our app has been rejected." Apple also banned Infurious Comics' “Murderdone.” Weirdly contradictory, it is now forgotten that while Apple’s banned the juvenilia app “iBoobs,” it permitted “iJiggles” and “Wobble,” although with “Wobble,” references to "boobs" and "booty" were removed.

Apple’s arbitrary censorship practices involve more than popular entertainment. It initially blocked Project Gutenberg's “The Kama Sutra of Vatsayana,” the ancient Sanskrit text (without illustrations) on sexual pleasures. Unacknowledged by Apple, the Kama Sutra was already available through other iPhone apps. A similar pattern is evident in its restricted e-publication of David Corney’s novel, “Knife Music.” Apple blocked it because of its apparent excessive use of the word "fuck.”

American First Amendment protections (and restrictions!) cover public media not private media. Thus, Janet Jackson’s exposure of her nipple on the CBS over-the-air broadcast of the Super Bowl was a contestation between the limits of expression and notions of public decency. It involved the FCC and, ultimately, the federal Courts. However, Apple’s iPhone is a proprietary mobile communications platform; its refusal to offer Project Gutenberg's “The Kama Sutra,” like Clear Channel’s refusal to play the Dixie Chicks, does not involve First Amendment issues but the arbitrary imposition of corporate standards of morality.

Apple is not alone in using its corporate muscle to censor what it determines to be “objectionable content.” Wal-Mart has long prided itself on censoring materials it considered to violate its “family values” policy. Censorship applies to books and music, extending to not only music lyrics but also album cover artwork. But what is “objectionable” is purely arbitrary, as Wal-Mart’s own policies indicate. “Wal-Mart does not display album or song titles that contain profanity,” its online music policy states. “However, Wal-Mart may carry some recordings that some customers might find offensive, indecent or objectionable.” Some?, which ones? and who decides?

Amazon was recently outed for delisting non-pornographic gay literature, including James Baldwin’s “Giovanni's Room,” Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” and Gore Vidal’s "The City and the Pillar." After being exposed, Amazon quickly claimed it was a technical error with no anti-gay censorship intended. Curiously, Chronicle Books’ “Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds," with photos of some 600 nude women, was never affected.

CVS, the nationwide drugstore chain, has found itself at the center of a series of local censorship confrontations. In Milwaukee, it faced community objections over its decision to no longer permit the in-store stocking of the “Shepherd Express,” a local weekly. In New York, it ran into flack at its Chelsea store over the content of two Christian-themed books that called homosexuality a “cancer,” sinful and “detestable” to God. When outraged residents informed the local paper, “Chelsea Now,” and the story was picked up by the “Times,” CVS removed the two books. A CVS spokesman, Michael DeAngelis, stated, “We are committed to building an environment of inclusion and acceptance that values diversity across all areas of our business.”

AT&T has faced repeated charges of arbitrary censorship among a host of corporate misdeeds. In 2007, it faced a firestorm of controversy when the lyrics of Pearl Jam were “accidentally” edited during the webcast of a Lollapalooza concert. Lead singer Eddie Vedder had revised the lyrics of the song "Daughter" to include anti-Bush sentiments and they were bleeped out. In addition, the revised lyrics to Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" ("George Bush, leave this world alone; George Bush find yourself another home.") mysteriously disappeared from the webcast. AT&T quickly retreated, offering an apology that a programming partner had “accidentally” edited the webcast.

Last year, AT&T took a direct hand in locking access to parts of 4chan.org. 4chan is an anonymous Internet message board community that is known for its irreverence, mischief and lewdness. Specifically, AT&T blocked the img.4chan.org sub-domain used by the /b/ message board. Many web activists initially faulted AT&T for apparent censorship. AT&T claimed the blocking was a response to what is technically known as a DDoS (denial-of-service) attack and service was restored once the attack was thwarted.

* * *

Corporate facilitators are gaining increasing power to determine the appropriateness of media content. Facilitators are the middle-vendors who distribute media communications between the content producer and the (adult) audience or consumer. Such vendors include cable operators, telecommunication companies and retail chains. They are the pipeline between what is said and who gets to hear it.

The matrix of facilitators who control media distribution include AT&T and Amazon, Apple and CVS, Wal-Mart and Citibank. They exert an often-invisible stranglehold over freedom of expression. Once Americans step beyond the formal boundaries of “public” communications, be it by a newspaper, radio or broadcast television, First Amendment protections do not apply.

Corporations are anti-democratic organizations in two respects. They arbitrarily determine the content they choose to distribute, whether they function as a quasi-monopoly (like Wal-Mart) or a public carrier (like Apple). In addition, they formally restrict the rights of their employees to speak their mind.

The Supreme Court recently granted corporations greater First Amendment rights to participate in the electoral process. One can only wonder when the Court will extend similar rights to facilitate free expression through the respective distribution pipelines that these corporations control.

Why does Apple (and not the proverbial “marketplace”) determine the apps it runs? Apple’s iPhone’s use of the public airways in essentially no way different then a broadcast TV channel. Why is it not governed by the same common-carriage requirements? Wal-Mart takes full advantage of the public highway system to get customers to its doors. Why do the public’s freedoms of choice not extend into the store itself?

The deep suspicion of corporate censorship shared by web activists, civil libertarians and the public itself is well taken. To overcome such suspicion, the arbitrary, non-transparent and anti-democratic control that corporation facilitators have over content distribution must stop. If corporations are rewarded with greater influence (if not control) over the political process, they should at least be required to cease all attempts to control what free people can say or hear or see.