Dear Commons Community

Harpur Reed, who served as chief technology officer in President Obama’s 2012 campaign, skewered the use of big data for applications such as student tracking and modeling.  As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, during his keynote address at a State University of New York-sponsored conference on big data and higher education, Reed said

“Big Data is bullshit!”

Mr. Reed is generally bullish on the power of data. But, with apologies to the technology companies sponsoring the SUNY event, Mr. Reed skewered their industry’s promotion of the buzzwords “Big Data.”

“The ‘big’ there is purely marketing,” Mr. Reed said. “This is all fear … This is about you buying big expensive servers and whatnot.”

“The exciting thing is you can get a lot of this stuff done just in Excel,” he said. “You don’t need these big platforms. You don’t need all this big fancy stuff. If anyone says ‘big’ in front of it, you should look at them very skeptically … You can tell charlatans when they say ‘big’ in front of everything.”

Ouch!

Tony

The CUNY Administration has developed a draft “Policy on Expressive Activity,” to be considered for adoption sometime after January 1 by the CUNY Board of Trustees. You can read it here. The draft policy proposes severe limitations on how the fundamental and distinct freedoms of speech and assembly may be exercised at the City University. Anyone who knows the importance of freedom of expression at CUNY or who understands the essential character of a university has a stake in whether the policy is adopted.

Proposed on the heels of faculty opposition to Pathways and student protests about tuition increases, the policy reads as an attempt to silence dissent and to stifle protest before it starts.

As drafted, the proposed “Policy on Expressive Activity” goes beyond existing regulations on individual and collective action at CUNY. It would ban demonstrations from the interior of CUNY buildings, forcing demonstrators into “designated areas”; it would require 24 hours’ advance notice of demonstrations involving as few as 25 people; it would limit the distribution of “materials” on campus to areas designated by the administration; and it would give college presidents or their designees the sole power to determine if a demonstration is “disruptive”—and to call the police onto campus to stop it. “Freedom of expression and assembly,” the proposed policy states, “are subject to the need to maintain safety and order.” The union takes extremely seriously the University’s responsibility to maintain a safe environment for those who work and study here. But safety is not the same as “order”; safety does not require repression.

Universities should uphold the highest standards for freedom of speech and assembly.  As institutions devoted not just to the transmission of knowledge but to the production of new ideas, universities are inherently places of exploration, debate, dissent and, sometimes, protest. If CUNY is to be an intellectually vibrant university, it must recognize that “expressive activity” is a vital part of campus life, not a danger to be confined to narrow limits.

The PSC leadership believes it is important that every member of the faculty and staff have an opportunity to read the proposed policy, which we received informally this month—though not from CUNY. The draft, however, is dated June 27. The proposed policy potentially affects all of us, and our students. We urge you to discuss the draft policy in your union chapter meetings in preparation for further union action. The PSC leadership has begun to develop a comprehensive response to the proposed policy, using every possible means—including protest—to challenge it.  On October 24, the union sent CUNY a formal demand to bargain on the policy, as we believe it would have an impact on the terms and conditions of employment of the faculty and staff we represent. Union officers are also in discussion with the University Faculty Senate leadership and have asked First Amendment lawyers for their review. The PSC’s executive council and delegate assembly will fully examine the draft policy and consider resolutions in response at their next meetings.

CUNY was founded in 1847 as the result of disruption and dissent; several of its colleges have been saved from closing during fiscal crises because of protest and assembly. Chilling restrictions on “expressive activity” have no place here. I welcome your comments on the proposed policy and will update you as the union continues to act in response.

Dear Commons Community,

Harvard University’s Education Next journal released a paper this morning that investigated the academic qualifications of new teachers.  Authored by the University of Washington’s Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch,  it found that the average SAT scores have increased  over the last decade.

Goldhaber and Walch looked at teacher SAT scores in 1993,  2001  and 2008, and found that the average SAT scores of first-year teachers in 2008 was 8 percentile rank points higher than those of new teachers in 2001 and five points higher than those i 1993.  That increase makes first-year teachers in 2008 more likely to come from the top-scoring half of SAT takers.  The significance of an increase of 8 percentile points can be debated but surely can be considered a step in the right direction.

The paper commented:

“Over the past 20 years, there has been a strong policy push toward getting smarter people into the teacher workforce. Enacted in 2001, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), for instance, emphasized academic competence by requiring that prospective teachers either graduate with a major in the subject they are teaching, have credits equivalent to a major, or pass a qualifying test showing competence in the subject. Newly created alternative pathways to certification have sought to bring more academically accomplished individuals into the profession. More recently, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) released new standards for teacher training programs: among them, each cohort of entrants should have a collective grade-point average (GPA) of 3.0 and college admission test scores above the national average by 2017 and in the top one-third by 2020.”

The paper also provides interesting findings on SAT scores for STEM and non-STEM majors:

“It is not surprising that the academic caliber of teachers varies a good deal by subject area, given that STEM majors tend to have higher SAT scores than non-STEM majors. For all three cohorts, STEM majors’ SAT score average is about 100 points higher in each year than that of non-STEM majors, and a far higher proportion come from the top 20 percent of the distribution. For both the 1993 and 2000 cohorts, teachers score lower on average than non-teachers among both STEM majors and non-STEM majors, in some cases by as much as 7 SAT percentile rank points. However, in the case of the 2008 cohort, scores for teachers were slightly higher for both STEM majors (by about 3 percentile rank points) and non-STEM majors (by about 2 percentile rank points) than for non-teachers. In other words, we find that high-scoring STEM majors are relatively more likely to become teachers in 2008 than they were in earlier cohorts.”

For those interesting in teacher education issues, the paper is well worth a read!

Tony