The First Nations, and why we need them

On Friday, I was driving East on highway 16, to attend Rose Borunda’s Indian Curriculum fundraiser. The evening sun baked the round hills to golden brown. Sparsely placed green trees were promising shade. It looked like a fairy tale country. I was thinking about people who walked through this landscape some 19,000 years ago. Canadians have found exactly the right word for them, the First Nations; it is a much more poetic term than Native Americans. There is something incredibly profound about seeing all this beauty for the first time ever, be the first human being to enter this part of the world, to give names to these hills, these rivers and valleys, without also taking previous names away. It is the discovery that is not yet polluted by conquest.

Then I made a mistake of turning on the radio, and my thoughts quickly turned to the theme that I was preoccupied with for a few weeks now. The surge of xenophobia in the US and in theу world is something new. It is not your old racism at its last gasp. The alt-right is related to the old racism like Agent N (which is a biological weapon) relates to the ancient Anthrax bacteria. It is the same bug, but manufactured in quantities on purpose and distributed through new technological channels. The bacteria is the same, but the effect is very different.

The argument I am working on is that we cannot defeat the new threat with more education, and more critical thinking. This is not the place to lay out the full argument, but the gist it is this: the paranoid mind on which the new racism feeds, is a form of perverse critical thinking and is immune to logical argument. So we need to build an arsenal of spiritual, emotional, cultural memes to fight this war. And where do we find those things? The major source of these ideas is the communities that practiced survival under oppression for centuries, the communities of color in the US, and other marginalized groups throughout the world. Their cultures have developed the cultural immune systems, or, if you like, the stocks of cultural capital that fights domination with solidarity, empathy, and spirituality.

This is not just theory. Just remember how homophobia in the US has been defeated – not by rational arguments, and not by critical thinking. No, it was because the gay community made a strategic decision to enter the mass culture through TV. Similarly, the African-American culture’s impact on the global culture did more to combat racism than many efforts to educate the rational minds. Those things work; we just need to find a way of accessing the stocks of cultural capital and use it in education. We need Multiculturalism 2.0 to combat the racism 2.0. It is an arms race, and we need the troops and materials. And yes, you should donate to Rose’s project; it replaces the 4th grade mission project with Indian-approved curriculum. It is not just about telling the truth, but about telling the emotional truth.

A non-eulogy for Dima

On Friday, my former colleague and friend Dmitry (Dima) Semenov died in a car crash in Thailand. He was 31, an accomplished scholar and leader, and one of the kindest and smartest people I know.

Eulogies mean to offer lessons from the person’s life, as if it was a story told to us. That is difficult; or rather, I am not good at it. People live their lives without trying to teach us anything. Instead, what I do is to remember one or two particular pictures about the person who passed away. They have no larger meaning and are not parables; those are simply symbols that indicate where other memories are stored. For example, my father’s symbol us when we walk together to get some milkshake in the neighborhood store; I am about five. Here is my grandfather teaching me how to split firewood. There is no way to reduce the entire person to one or two flashbacks, and yet having them helps.

I remember we were sitting down to eat at Yura’s and Tanya’s home in Sokolniki. I think it was their son’s Lenya’s birthday. Dima was his godfather, Svetlana is the godmother. It is sunny and very quiet. Dima smiles like Buddha, and says, “About this time on Sunday, it is exactly the right time to have a bit of vodka.” We all oblige, and that is my little token of Dima.

Why do we all feel the need to remember those who die? I am sure anthropologists have all kinds of theories about it. But we do, that is for sure. Death has a way of reminding us about itself. Mortality is a strange gift we received from the creator, according to Tolkien. It was his way of unbinding us from the physical world. Elves, more beautiful and immortal, did not receive it. Perhaps, but it is still a bloody terrifying gift. This is why we want to send the messages to those who cannot receive, as if to say, “you’re not all gone.”

The mainstream's borders have to be patrolled

The very existence а political life depends on the distinction between the mainstream and the fringe politics. Debate and disagreement among political groups may be vitriolic and irrational. However, debate with the fringe is impossible; the very act of debate with Nazis and racists is dangerous and counterproductive, because it legitimizes their existence. Wear a swastika, and you become what Russians call “Non-handshakeable,” nerukopozhatnyy. The boundaries have to be more or less clear, and ought to be patrolled, otherwise debate within the mainstream becomes impossible. The history of democracy shows how the inability of major groups to engage politically leads to dictatorship or civil war. The Weimar Republic could be one example, Spain before its civil war is another.

The danger of the fringe groups is not in their size – the White supremacists in the US are a tiny group – it is in their ability to erode the boundaries between the mainstream and the fringe. Let us assume someone on the Right breaches the unspoken taboo, and reaches out to the white supremacist for any reason. That would compromise their ability to engage with the more centrists or the liberal politicians. The non-handshakeability is contagious, and it can eventually erode the very space for the political debate.

Most people intuitively understand the dynamics. For example, the Fox News anchors, after a brief initial hesitation, eventually called the racists what they are. Despite all their rhetoric, they want to stay within the boundaries of the civilized society. After all you can only be effective if you are taken seriously. Almost all Republican politicians easily make the same calculation. The US had not left-wing political violence for a long time, but I am sure, if it gets to that, the liberals will do the same – quickly distance themselves.

However, our President somehow failed to make the very simple rational move. And yes, Pence is right, it does not look like a big deal on its surface. Trump left the door to engaging with the white supremacists only slightly ajar, just in case. What they both fail to understand are the rules of the larger political space. It is a contagion situation – a 1% of legitimization given to the fringe may contaminate 100% of your owl legitimacy. The risk is huge, the returns are really small and uncertain. How many votes does he think he will get from Nazis? The inability to calculate selfish reasons is worrisome because it indicates the general weakness of rational thinking. I am sure this is a concern for the Republican leadership.

Of course, the boundaries between the fringe and the mainstream shift. Relatively recently, racism was a part of the mainstream American politics. This is why the racists still hope to claw their way back to respectability. They saw Trump as their best chance in many decades, and they are taking it. I don’t think it is going to work for the reasons I cite. The stakes for the rest of the political field are too high to allow it. The borders have to be patrolled.

Technology vs. the Organization

I have spent a great deal lately of time to figure out our graduate admissions. This is a case in organizational studies. The information technology platforms have brought us great efficiency over the last 30 years, and yet they introduced a completely new set of constraints on the organizations that did not exist before.

Here is a short version of the story, without most of the technical details. The CSU system has implemented a new online application platform, CSUApply. The rationale for introducing it is compelling: applicants can select more than one campus to apply, and the system promised to get away with the supplemental applications (these are an extra step, sometimes on paper, and they look embarrassingly low-tech). Because of the ambitious implementation deadline, there was no time to work closely with all campuses. And each campus has some sort of an admission workflow, linked to its internal CMS (which is really, the People Soft, an Oracle platform). There were no protocols for importing the data from CSUApply to these workflows. Well, campuses’ IT people had made a heroic effort (they always do), and created an OK protocol. It still has three major glitches: 1. The CSUApply is very difficult to modify for each program, which renders the last, modifiable portion of it useless. 2. The vendor who sold us the program has never worked with whole systems. They forgot that each campus needs to assign an applicant a unique campus ID to admit them. CSUApply cannot do that, so you almost have to do the supplemental application anyway. Oops. 3. Document uploads still do not transfer to CSM. Theoretically, it is possible, but in practice, we have run out of time, and the IRT folks designed an elegant patch. Thank god, we have very little Spring admissions, and the whole patchwork will work for now.

There was also one major kink in the size of the application. I counted 135 fields a teacher credential applicant must complete in just the common CSUApply portion. Again, this is no one’s incompetence or ill intention. The system has a legitimate interest in collecting all kinds of data. That we value data accuracy over the user experience is another issue well above my pay grade.

Organizations evolve as living organisms. Many things appear as a responses to changing conditions. Organizations are not designed by some intelligent designer. There is no watchmaker. This is something people unfamiliar with organization studies often fail to understand. If you see something seemingly absurd and counter-intuitive, and easy to fix, it is only because you see just a small part of the beast, and because you do not know its history.

For example, in response to the past conditions, our Office of Graduate Studies have implemented a rule: applications are released to the programs only when applicant’s GPA is calculated, and when official transcript is received. It was done to put a hard barrier to incomplete applications, which create a number of problems. However, our (COE) timelines for orientations, field placements, and faculty availability make it almost impossible to admit students on time. So, our part of the organization adapted one more time, and we now require, in effect, a parallel application, disguised as a supplemental application. And yeah, we want it in paper, because it is easier to work with, and in a way, more secure. It is a case of mimicry, also well known in evolutionary biology.

If you want to know how your dean is spending his summer, this is how. To intervene in the works of a naturally evolved organization, one needs to have an understanding of the ecosystem, and a sufficiently high level of access. Even my level does not offer a high enough vantage point, because we’re dealing with a 23-campus system at one end, and a receptionist in our 401 office at the other end. To figure out a real solution, we had to have several meetings, the last one with 12 or so people. We have an idea on how to half-solve the puzzle in time for Fall 18 admissions. It has to do with where exactly in the workflow the hard barrier is enforced. However, I am still not sure if there are other rules and policies that evolved for unrelated reasons that will prevent it from working. Therefore, we have to have plans B and C. These are serious matters, especially for programs with low enrollments. Just a small negative nudge can put them out of existence. In organizations, it is still the survival of the fittest. While whole universities never die, their smaller parts like departments, programs, colleges – do die, dissolve, get eaten by others, flourish, and mutate. And yes, there are such things as invasive species and epidemics… These are for another time.

The shortages of the noble profession

Even the excellent 2017 report on teacher shortages in California stops short of asking a fundamental question: Why teacher salaries do not rise? В. Carver-Thomas and L. Darling-Hammond, the authors of the report, make a point that wage competition disadvantages poorer districts, because wealthier districts poach good teachers away from them. They more or less concentrate on the supply side of the equation, while also noting that enrollment in teacher preparation programs are at all times low. But why is the enrollment low? Why so few young people want to enter the profession?

In the end, the only way to ensure labor supply is to increase the wages, and improve working conditions. However, everyone acts as if it is impossible, and that there is some magic way of to increase the supply by offering shorter, and cheaper alternative teacher preparation programs. Note, no other industry thinks about their labor supply in a similar way. If you are short on software engineers, well, you either pay them more or import less expensive ones from abroad. Teacher imports do not work for a variety of reasons, but we do not even discuss the wage increases across the board.

Of course, districts would not compete for the same few qualified teachers, if their salaries would not depend on local property taxes. No one wants to see how bizarre really is the school funding system in the United States, and how, over the years, it contributed to residential segregation, as well as educational inequality. A politician, who would even bring up an idea of taking over the school finance by the State, will be signing his or her political death warrant.

I am not a politician, so I am bringing this up. I think, we need to be honest with the middle class. I know we all want something better for our own kids, this is why we bought these houses we cannot really afford, so our kids could go to better schools, and taught by better-paid teachers. However, in the long run, it is an unsustainable, self-defeating position. The other people’s kids are still here, they will become your neighbors, your employees, your colleagues. They deserve everything your child deserves. And yes, good education costs more money, and you should pay more taxes. We need to socialize education. In fact, teachers who work in more challenging social and economic localities should be paid more, not less.

Of course, we have been through this conversation before. There was a number of court cases against states, with mixed results. Again, in the end, court activism only gets you so far. We actually need to convince voters that equal finance of schools is the right thing to do.

Instead, we allow the talk about teaching as the noblest profession. What does it mean, exactly? Is it an appeal to work for less money, because, well, it is so noble? I think lawyers are a noble profession, and so are doctors and engineers. A software engineer is a darned noble thing to do, a calling, really. Yet we pay all those people as much as the market can bear, so there is no need to get all syrupy and sentimental. The discourse on teacher shortage will never change, if we as the profession will continue to feed it with sugar. We help perpetuate these distorting memes, because it feels good to be noble.

To pay or not to pay, that is the question

I will declare the next year the year of curriculum. For a variety of reasons, we have accumulated curriculum revision needs. Some programs just need a face-lift: a minor adjustment, sexier course titles, add or remove a course or two. Others need to be converted into the online form. Still others need to be completely reconfigured in terms of scheduling, sequencing, and switching to a cohort model. We also need to develop several new curricular products, like certificates and full programs. We are also considering at least two brand-new degree programs: A Youth Development BA and a Maker Education MA. All of these changes are needed because of the competitive pressures, and with changing patterns in demand. Our competitors are many and growing: other regional universities, online universities (both public and private). California also has a number of non-university providers, like County offices of education, CalStateTeach, that is run out of the Chancellors office, district-run programs, etc. Some of our competitors beat us on flexibility, and convenience; we still have an advantage in name recognition, price, and, most importantly, in faculty quality. Some of our graduate programs for in-service educators, suffered during the crisis, and never quite recovered. Therefore, it is an all-hands-on-deck situation. We just have to update, and delays are no longer feasible.

How do you do this? Curriculum revisions take significant work: first conceptually, as a list of courses, and their sequence, then each course and program requirements, the catalog entry – all had to be discussed, and put on paper. Because of the curriculum approval process on campus, and in many instances, at the Chancellor’s Office level, all of these tasks have to be accomplished in about two months – September and October. Otherwise a program risks to miss the catalog deadline.

On one hand, the curriculum development is traditionally a faculty service to the institution. The contract says something like that. So, the mean part of my mind tempts me to say to faculty: “Hey, if you want to save the program and teach in it, you should work on it as a part of your service. After all, curriculum is a faculty responsibility!” On the other hand, my more rational and compassionate part says something different: at least some of these projects are quite substantial. Faculty at CSU teach 12 units per semester, plus we have service and scholarship expectations. It is just hard to add this extra effort on top of everything else. If you expect quality work, you need to find a way to give people time. And there is no point revising, if you are not producing the absolutely the best, the most creative, a world-class program.

Back to the one hand – we really do not have the resources to pay to everyone, or release too many people from teaching. In the end, assigned time is also money, but also the program quality and reputation. In addition, if you compensate one group, but not the other, there are equity considerations. Plus, don’t forget the power of precedents. Once you set an expectation that all curriculum revisions deserve assigned time or a stipend, that becomes the norm. Precedents do not remember the nuance; they do not remember that there was an exceptionally hard project, or that the person in charge was very busy. The precedent remembers the naked fact.

Ok, now back again to the other hand: the projects are not all equal. Some are more of a minor tweak, others require ten brand new syllabi in subjects we have never taught. Some projects are very likely to be successful, and bring us students, glory, and revenue, while others are a lot riskier, and will really of interest one or two faculty here. If they want to do it, great, but not on the College’s dime. In some of them, chairs and program coordinators, who already have assigned time, can be central or help a lot, while others will be done by faculty only. Some people are more organized, while other do unnecessary work, talk a lot about scheduling the next meeting, argue endlessly about the titles, etc. Finally, some faculty think it is their work, and are interested, while others think the dean should revise all the programs, and their jobs are safe no matter what. The multiple overlapping considerations make a consistent approach very difficult. Therefore, I may have to resort to individual negotiations, which are not the best of solutions, but perhaps is the best in this circumstances. Now, individual deals tend to create suspicion and resentment among faculty, because they are not transparent. Is this too high a price to pay?

To make a larger point, most of the projects and problems that I deal with on my job are like that, messy. There are two or more sides, a good deal of uncertainty. Almost every move has a potential cost. In the end, you often have to take a leap of faith and decide on something without ever being sure it is the best solution. It is not like you can always follow clear principles. Or, rather, you can, but then you have to ignore other principles, and you won’t get anything done.

Having said all this, I am very open for suggestions. I have at least 17 potential curriculum development projects on my list. How do we do it?

The hiring mind

The simplest and the most profound idea about hiring people is that no one is perfect. While it is trivial, our mind often resist accepting it. The way we evolved makes us biased judges of people. Our hominid ancestors had to select a friend quickly, in a hostile environment, among a limited set of choices. It goes like this: our brain does is this: we select unconsciously whoever we like, and then the rational mind keeps finding more and more appealing features in whoever we have selected already. By extension, our rational minds keep finding faults with people we did not select. Anyone who has ever served on a search committee knows how mind-boggling the conversations can get. We tend to play with fact, emphasize strengths, exaggerate weaknesses – all, more or less, to justify whatever unconscious choices we have made already. If there are “real reasons” for our decisions, we are often unaware of those. And then we try to discuss those things collectively.

In fact, all the HR procedures, deep down, have the same fundamental purposes – to check our subconscious minds against some sort of structured objective process. In addition to those formal (and very important) procedures, all managers have their own bags of tricks, their private mind games, some strategies to force their own brains see more, dig deeper. My bag is no better than the next person’s but here are some of the tricks.

I always ask to tell a story or to give a specific example. Somehow, the stories are a lot more informative than the questions asked in the abstract. When someone says “I like to help students,” she or he has always something specific in mind, an image, a story. But I may have a very different image in mind, so stories help align the understanding of a concept.

When a specific skill is required, I always find a way of testing applicants for it. For example, when I needed a bilingual editor, I had to design an editing task. People who came up on top would have never had a chance in an open competition. Their competitors had much more charisma. But the skill is either there, or not there, and some of them can be tested for. If not, it is still very important to assess whether an applicant has the fundamental skills needed to be successful.

I also try to imagine the person in front of me doing her or his specific work in a day-to-day environment. Does this person look organic at the task? Sometimes it becomes clear, this person is really great, but would really get bored with the kind of a job we are trying to fill. In other words, I have to separate the “strong in general” from the “good for this job.”

I always check for the sense of humor, if it is a people position. Folks with a weak, very idiosyncratic, or overly sarcastic sense of humor rarely make good team members. They still could be great at solitary work though.

Then I always re-examine my own reactions. It is not just “I (dis)like this person,” but “why do I feel I (dis)like this person?” We all are hostages of our past. People can trigger a memory about an episode they bear no responsibility for; people bring back memories, good or back, but it is not their fault or virtue.

Unfortunately, the tendency gets stronger as we age; it is the tendency to recognize “I have seen this before.” That is a very troublesome side effect of life experience. I always try to weed out those thoughts to the extent possible. The troubling part is that experience both allows for very useful shortcuts, and increases understanding, but also imposes a kind of blindness to the new. A note to self: if I ever lose the capacity to recognize the newness, it is time to get out of leadership.

The Giant Sequoias and the Universities

Thanks to a vacation trip last week, I have learned that giant sequoias that inhabit the Calaveras Big Trees State Park, have evolved to live through forest fires. They have a thick layer of bark, and their branches are high off the ground. Some of the trees are thousands of years old. Their size, age, and adaptability are awe-inspiring. Yet those giants used to be all over the Northern Hemisphere and now they survived only in a few places in California. They could withstand forest fires, but not the Ice age. I am not sure why that is the case, but pines, maples, and oaks did just fine. Not as majestic, and relatively short-lived, they dominate both northern continents.

Universities have been around for a long time, and they survived wars, depressions, revolutions, change of regimes – everything. Moreover, they have been growing, including more and more people in more and more countries; see Martin Trow’s theory of university massification. The only glitch is that no one can figure out how to pay for the last stage, the universal higher education. It is just too expensive. Countries that chose the exclusively public financing have to limit the growth, or they break their budgets. Those countries that use mixed financial models, and rely mainly on tuition, risk creating a financial bubble of unsustainable student debt. The source of funds does not really matter; it is just very expensive to allow the majority of the population to have a full college experience. One unfortunate consequence of this cost dilemma is that students from lower classes tend to receive poorer quality experience. For example, Russia have one of the most universal higher education systems in the world, but half of its students study in a low-quality correspondence/online programs. Instead of equal opportunity, universities can reproduce inequality. The same thing happened to elementary and secondary education in the past – initially intended as equalizers, they became vehicles of inequality.

I am wondering if massification is the universities’ Ice Age. As far as I know, no one has a credible solution. For a while, high hopes were pinned on information technologies. Some hotheads like Clayton Christiansen predicted a total victory of online education. Such predictions were without merit. What most people value in their educational experiences is the human relation. It is the the economics of rationality that creates the enormous cost. There is and will be a huge demand for higher education, and it may or may not be connected to labor market. People just want college for their kids, period. And they will find a way of financing it. The open question is whether the existing universities will be able to figure out a way of meeting the demand, or it is going to be pines and maples, and oaks of some sort – also pretty, but not as majestic.

Education markets and Betsy DeVos

As many ex-Soviet people are, I am suspicious of big governments, social engineering, and believe in free markets. Russians of my generation just saw their fair share of the socialist economy, and authoritarianism that inevitably follows a utopia. However, as an educator, I see clearly that education markets are different that other kinds. Of course, people in health care economics can put together a convincing case that health economy market is also different. And the utilities markets are different, and airlines is different, not to mention pharmaceuticals, and of course, the agriculture. And did I mention the labor market, so-so different? What are they different from? There is no one classic market model; what we have instead is a set of very unique industry-specific markets, each operating within its own set of constrains, sometimes poorly understood.

Here lies the problem of market ideologists like Betsy DeVos. Their belief in the universal power of markets is at the ECON 101 level. They do not understand the economic segments deeply, and operate at the abstract level of the “classical” economic theory. Less regulations, more competition – is all they know. Hence, for example, the recent decision to roll back regulations aimed at curbing the college loan bubble fueled by for-profit colleges. I am not an economist either, but know enough to be dismayed. So, you want to roll back a policy, fine, but how do you intend to address the problem the policy was set up to address? John Akerlof, for example, has shown back in 1970 how markets can quickly degrade with the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers. Higher education is exactly the kind of the credence good that creates the problem. Deregulation plus loose borrowing rules is exactly what brought the higher education to the brink of another bubble, threatening the economy. The same story is school vouchers: they should have worked in theory Milton Friedman developed. But they do not work, because Friedman underestimated the specifics of the school markets. He thought schools would compete not on price, but on innovativeness, and ultimately, quality. It turns out, innovations and quality gains are very hard to achieve without student selection. And the message of quality is subject to the already mentioned Akerlof’s “Lemon Law.”

Like any ideology, market ideology is deaf to nuances, and ignores the messy state of our knowledge about how markets work and do not work. Ideologues all need to go back to school, and learn enough specifics before they can make federal policy.

The end of the educational reform?

Here is my report from AACTE’s Day on the Hill event. Democrats are in a defensive mood; their priority is to preserve whatever education funding they can in response to the administration’s aggressive cuts proposal. The legislative branch in general seems to have lost appetite for educational reform. The only new initiative comes out of Jack Reed’s office. It is a bill to reform the Title II of the Higher Education Act. Some improvements to the TQP program, report streamlining, incentives for states to close down poor teacher preparation programs. This is hardly revolutionary, or even ambitious. The era of big by-partisan reform efforts seemed to culminate in the Race to the Top and NCLB waiver programs. The administration voucher initiative is unlikely to receive support among democrats and many Republicans. The idea is not new, have been thoroughly researched and found ineffective, and just politically hard to implement because of the states’ control over much of educational funding.

The pause can be explained by a combination of two things: The President does not have education as his priority, unlike the four Presidents before him. And even if he had ideas, the administration seems to be paralyzed anyway. However, I think there is a second, much more profound reason: no one has ideas anymore.

In the last half-century, there were only three big ideas for education: choice, technology, and accountability. All three turned out to be duds (For more detail, see this book, when it comes out). The school choice concept had all the markings of a brilliant economic reform. However, have no evidence it works. The positive effect is at best, minimal. The accountability may have some limited positive effects on student learning, but again, not nearly of the scale the reformers were hoping for. In addition, it has significant side effects, including the suppression of grass-roots innovation, which are hard to measure. The information technology does not yet seem to affect the academic achievement. The global education community has tried the three reforms in various combinations, with about the same negligible result. What is next? - Literally, no one knows.

Correction; the ideas people have seem to be a bit plain, a bit boring, a bit common sense. For example, in educator preparation, we have known teacher induction to be the weak link (the economics of it does not work). Well, try to push a massive education bill through the House and the Senate, focusing on induction. Good luck. We also have learned from well performing countries that teachers do better if they have independence, more control over their work, meaningful professional development, opportunities for team work. OK, how do you legislate that? Pass a law to respect teachers? Mandate getting rid of useless PD, and replacing it with good PD? Somehow, none of these seem politically feasible. The other large chunk of the real agenda is addressing children’s lives beyond school – poverty, chronic stress, health, nutrition, family support, residential desegregation. Yet no one had at the federal level had an appetite for such things for a long time. In fact, all the educational reforms were implemented in hope that the government won’t be doing the hard things.

I am not pessimistic. The challenges we have are actually exciting. How do you improve education without the Federal government? How do we formulate ideas for change that don’t just make sense to educators, but also engage wider political forces? How do we make education an agenda item?

These are times to think big, to think fresh, to shape the future.

How can education drive city development?

For years, the thinking in mayors’ offices (and chambers of commerce) was straightforward: Increate test scores in K-12 schools, and your population will stop leaving for suburbs, and the city economy will grow. Such logic seemed unassailable. Among other things, it created a vicious cycle of hiring strong, charismatic superintendents. To be hired, they had to make unrealistic promises of quick fixes, and dramatic increases in test scores. Within a couple of years, boards become disillusioned, unions put up a fight, and everyone is looking for another charismatic hero, who will have the magic.

There is no magic. Test scores are very stubborn thing; they take years and years of slow, invisible work to budge. They are determined largely by the demographics of student population. All miracle cases have to do with gentrification; all collapses have to do with middle class flight to the suburbs. Reforms, accountability, school choice – all а these have only marginal, almost invisible impact, at least in the short run. I wish it could be different, but it is not. Some people out there, like Eric Hanushek, are still looking for another silver bullet; in his case, it is the idea of firing poor performing teachers. Others like Betsy DeVos, are still hoping against all evidence that vouchers will deliver radical improvement. Both are very much mistaken.

I was thinking all this while listening to West Sac mayor Christopher Cabaldon’s powerful speech last week. I was invited thanks to Steve Lewis to their State of the City event. I think he is on the right track with the Homerun initiative. If you read it carefully, it focuses not on schools, but on everything else that goes into student performance.

One more thing he and other mayors should consider is the innovation dividend. Tests we use in public education are very powerful, but incredibly narrow measures of student success. The further we move towards the knowledge-based economy, the less adequate they become to measure the work force readiness. While many research groups work on measuring the 21st Century skills measures; none is yet good enough and cheap enough to impact instruction. While we wait, the next best thing I to stimulate the low-level, grassroots innovation among educators. Such innovations are no more likely to increase the standardized test scores than the top-down reforms. However, the very engagement in experimenting, in trying something new is likely to be passed on to students. We can expect students of an innovative teacher to be a little more open to change, more creative and innovative, more able to communicate, to collaborate with each other. While I cannot yet prove this claim empirically, this is the best direction for the K-12 education I can see right now. The grassroots innovation is actually fairly inexpensive, if you compare it with staggering costs of accountability reforms. They go well with teacher professional development and induction, which remain the weak link in the school improvement efforts. Mayors and superintendents everywhere should think about it. There is no need to give up on schools; you just need to try a different approach.

Parents make school choices, and ultimately, residence choices not only on test scores, but on overall reputation of a school and a district. Are they interesting? Innovative? Good for children? Have something unique to offer? Such reputation is built with grassroots, wide-spread innovation. T also tends to make teachers happier, more in control of their work, and more likely to stay. 

Paranoid Mind + Social Media=Trumpism

Many people on the liberal side of American politics imagine Trump wrongly. They imply that this is simply the last ditch surge of the primitive consciousness; a rear guard fights of the traditional enemy – racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia. However they underestimate the newness of the phenomenon, which I for simplicity will call trumpism (there is a number of very similar things across Europe, including the latter years Putinism).

The paranoid mind existed for a long time. For a broad historical overview, see the influential Richard Hofstadter’s essay (1964). However, the radical democratization of information offered the old virus a new and extraordinary efficient vehicle, the social media. Conspiracy theories have always existed in obscure books and magazines. As Ivan Smirnov, a doc student from Moscow had noticed, the cost of producing a lie is much lower than the cost of rebuking it. To verify his claim, just search for seth rich death in your Facebook. You will see what kinds of sharing power to conspiratorial claims have. Search Google for clinton pedophile ring and you will get 1.5 millions of hits – on a completely fictional story. The economics of the paranoid mind are vastly different now.

In addition, the Russian intelligence have exploited this new economics of paranoia to weaponize the social media. After 2014, their choice was either to erect a Russian equivalent of the great Chinese firewall, or try something different. They succeeded in severely curtailing the anti-government discourse in the domestic social media through a combination of fake news and paid trolls. Everyone who lived in Russia in 2014-16 could see it happening. The Russians created multiple memes mocking liberalism, feminism, democratic institutions, multiculturalism, and picturing the general demise of the Western civilization. Many of those memes they appropriated from the Western right-wing political discourse. They won by flooding the social media with huge volumes of informational crap, with millions of supporters gobbling it up and spreading it further.

Almost at the same time, the Russian intelligence exported the new infowar techniques to the West. RT, the TV propaganda channel, received many millions of dollars in additional financing. If I recall correctly, in about 2014 their budget increased seven-fold. It became an anchor generating and spreading fake news, arguments, and memes. It is unclear whether the Macedonian shop had Russian connections, or it is independent. The Russian enterprise for undermining democratic institutions have found eager supporters among American and European Alt-Right types. It is debatable how much influence did the Russian intelligence really had on American elections; I cannot imagine it was much. However, the Russian intelligence community can certainly claim much credit for invention of the new vehicle for the old paranoid virus. I have to admit, begrudgingly, it was a brilliant move; it is much more sophisticated – and dangerous - than the Chinese wall technique.

Russians aside, the mainstream conservative establishment in the US has woken up to the opportunities of new weaponry. They are learning quickly, Seth Rich story being a recent example. The liberal side remains blissfully unaware, to the large extent. Liberals still try to fight the old mass media wars, with limited success. In general, they underestimate the newness of the challenge, believing, falsely, that this is still the old enemy.

The response cannot be symmetrical. Liberals cannot produce their own kind of conspiratorial garbage. First, because it does not work on liberals who tend to be more critical thinkers. And second, because it smells bad. A huge responsibility lies with the social media and search platforms themselves. Google started to do something, while Facebook and Twitter are just beginning to realize how they have been hijacked and used. They need to wake up and develop an immune system, so the virus does not just spread freely.

To be honest, we do not really have an answer to the new challenge yet. At least, I have not seen one. This is where our intellectual resources should go – we must figure out a response, otherwise trumpism wins. I only know that the old and proven things like more education, more rational discourse, more honest mass media, more critical thinking – they do not work. In social media, we tend to isolate ourselves into our neat liberal islands, and have no idea how to affect those other islands where the paranoid mind virus is raging.

California is the world’s future

That’s what I was thinking while shaking hundreds of Sac State’s graduates’ hands on Saturday. This is not my idea, and is somewhat of a cliché, but we discover the truth of each cliché individually. Let me say this again – if you want to know how the world is going to look like in the foreseeable future, come visit the Golden State. It is multicultural, multiracial, tolerant, energetic, and colorful. It is not a utopia; far from it. There is still inequality and poverty, conflict and homelessness. However, it is also comfortably liberal, environment-conscious society, with the broad acceptance of social safety net. It is a place, where people don’t blink when a man at a party introduces his husband, and a woman introduced her wife. Nobody tenses up when she hears my accent. “Where you are from” is a curious, but a small detail about you; it won’t define you, unless you want it to define you. That may be perhaps a fifth question in a first conversation, if it comes up at al.

We do not really have a good word for the non-White population. “Minority” does not really do it anymore; not just because of the numbers. It is no longer the game where White people include, or tolerate, or embrace, or celebrate the others; where they are the agents of doing something to or with the others. Nope, the White folks found themselves to be just one of the tribes, along with several others - just as strong and capable - and are not quite sure what to do with that. Just an FYI, after Hawaii, DC, and New Mexico, California has the lowest share of White population – 39% versus 62.6% nationally.

California is going through a massive social experiment. President Nelsen asked all those who are first generation in College to stand up, and it looked like half of graduates got up. The experiment is in moving large and diverse underclass into the middle class by the means of education, mostly. It may seem like too high, but still, community colleges in California are the least expensive in the country. 4-year colleges’ in-state tuition is in the middle of the list, but California is the third wealthiest state by median household income. The State had built a vast and effective educational social lift. As I was listening to the names of our graduates, I tried to place each name by its ethnic origin. It represents the entire planet. The list of names itself is a powerful futuristic document, almost like the Star Trek’s list of characters. For many families, teaching is the first step in the multi-generational ladder to success, and it feels good to be a part of the epic move.

Yes, I know, I did not mention the Silicon Valley – I think the scope of the social changes is much larger and much more important than the scope of technological changes. These two are connected, because in the future economy, the uneducated lower class has very slim chances of success. However, on Saturday, I was impressed not by cellphones, but by the kids that hold them.

Faculty, Not for rent

Every semester, the equivalent of at least three full-time tenured faculty members are released to work on various grants and projects. Only a small number of these is officially “ours.” We receive no indirect revenues, and very little recognition for such projects. Many others work on overload or in summers: on other colleges and organizations’ grants, as individual consultants, etc. In theory, this is a positive thing for us. Our name gets recognition, we cultivate relationships, help the community in many ways. Yet the situation is far from ideal. It looks like we’re renting our faculty out for cheap, and do not capitalize on their work. Faculty is by far the most valuable resource we have, and we need to find a way of leveraging it. In very simple terms, we need to build a brand in the world of consulting services, and build a revenue stream that can be used to further invest in faculty.

Here is what should happen. When someone asks you to help (consult, train, evaluate, speak), you would say – talk to my business manager. We will negotiate a higher rate for you, take care of financials (so you don’t worry about your taxes), link your project with others, and let you use existing resources and materials, use the project to promote the College’s brand, to build a wider client base, and sell other services to it. We will also figure out a way to convert your one-time gig into a product that can be offered to a wider market.

Of course, we will always have projects not for fame or money, but because we want to help. This is totally fine. However I have discovered that sometimes another organization actually does receive significant funds, does get the recognition, does enhance its image, and we’re just helping them (and the public) altruistically. We can be altruistic to underprivileged children, but not to a consulting firm, or to a publishing house, or to another state agency. What I have learned over the years is that if someone can get you to work for cheap, they will thank you, but won’t respect you.

To get there, we, of course, need to build such a capacity, to develop the incentive for faculty to go through the College, rather than go it alone. However, we will also need a change in faculty attitude. Because, let’s be honest, you are invited to consult in part because you work at Sac State, not just because you are so brilliant. And I have a hunch that most of you have little business acumen, and don't really know what your services are worth, or how they can be sold differently. We may have to forgo some really cheap gigs in favor of more advanced, more complex, and more expensive services. However, to get to that kind of reputation, we need to band together, be strategic, and play hardball.

Every grant we’re involved in must be more than just a pass-through. From every one of them, we need to retain something tangible and valuable: a curriculum project, a consulting product, a publication, a new measurable expertise, an opportunity to promote our College, something.

The House of Cards Syndrome

Over the years, I have found a couple of simple tests to find people who I can ask for advice and who make good leaders. The most important is this: can you support an idea what comes from someone you dislike? The other side of the same test is similar: can you oppose some ideas that come from your friends, or from your boss?

Here is how it goes: I speak with a perfectly reasonable, and intelligent person; we are having what appears to be a rational conversation. Then I suddenly realize that all the reasoning, all the suggestions and objections are this person’s attempts to support her friends and punish her enemies. I just want to say, would you please relax a little, this is not the House of Cards; we are simply trying to figure out the best solution for a small problem. No intrigue, and no political strategy is needed, OK? Bad people may have good ideas, and good people may be wrong, and the way you divide people into good and bad is flawed. Can we just concentrate on the task at hand? I never say any of this, because the person is afflicted by the House of Cards syndrome and is not going to see it. She or he is just fine otherwise, and could be a delightful colleague in every respect. I would just never ask her or him for advice, or ask to be polite only. Nor will I ever support this person to be in a leadership position. The HC syndrome disqualifies from leadership, unfortunately. I am not passing any moral judgement here; but we all have limitations, and I have a plenty of my own. However, if you are color-blind, you cannot be a pilot. If you’re too tall or too heavy, you cannot be a jockey. If you lack in empathy, you should not be a teacher. This is the same kind of a limitation – perhaps not fair to you, but fair to others. So, we still like you, it is just you cannot be in the lead.

All our judgements are always colored by relationships with others. We tend to support people we like and oppose the people we dislike. However, most of us routinely get over the bias, and discuss ideas and actions on their own merit. It takes an effort, but we do it all the time. If you have the HC syndrome, you are simply unable to do that. Every step is a move in a great chess play for you, the struggle for power and influence. And you may not be yourself power-thirsty, no, you just see other people in that light. The weird symptom of the HC syndrome is that you suspect everyone has it. You see the world through this particular lens. People are divided into friends and enemies, and nothing good can come out of the enemies, while a friend can do no wrong.

If you a leader with the HC, your management is poor – you almost never make good decisions, because you consider the political implications only. You will sacrifice promising projects because their success may make the “wrong” people stronger. You will support weak initiatives, because they allow you and your supporters look better, even for a short time. If you got the HC syndrome, you will spend all your time spinning intrigue, so some of the basic functions will inevitably suffer from neglect. You just won’t have the time for work, because all your time is spent compiling materials evidencing that so and so is an incompetent person. You will also slow down any development and growth, because you cannot tell a good idea from a bad one.

You may thrive in a truly political environment, but we are not a political body. We are a university. Hundreds of thousands of kids and their parents want a good teacher, a counselor, a psychologist, and we make sure of it. We cannot lose that perspective.

I cannot say for sure where the syndrome comes from, why some people are affected while others are not. Nor can I give any examples where people got rid of it – perhaps I simply do not know of any.

The procedural micro-barriers

I have always hated bureaucratic inefficiencies. Everyone who spent one’s formative years in the Soviet union, does. The First Socialist State was remarkably inefficient. For example, to get a new passport, you would have to take a bus to an office A only to pick up a form and find out that it works on odd days, before noon. Than you would take the form for the clerical intake, quite often to be told that you do not have all the paperwork needed. For example, you should go get a clearance from your neighborhood’s office that you paid the rent on time. On your second, successful try, you be given instructions on how to pay for the service, at a state-owned bank, a few stops by bus, and where to get a photo, another few stops, in a different direction. Then you would gather the receipt for payment and your photos, which of course, would be ready only in three days, and then come back to the passport office. Stand in another line for an hour, and voila, you get your passport with a very sad and tired looking photo of you. Since then, Russians actually had made a remarkable progress in their state bureaucracy; unfortunately, their universities are still pretty bad, even the best ones.

Now, most American universities have undergone a remarkable transformation of student and faculty services that I witnessed. I remember filling out a bubble sheet to enroll at the University of Notre Dame in 1991. We had to stand in line for about an hour, I think. We also had to register for classes through a campus phone, which was only hard because we were international students and had no idea what the machine was talking about. By early 2000-s Banner and People Soft integrated the essential services into one online access system – bursar bill, registration, schedule, etc. Yet at the fringes of university operations, we still have these small pockets of stubbornly archaic procedures. For example, we have these paper forms that need 2-3 signatures, and have to be carried from place to place, and logged in every place, so you do not lose a track of them: Transfer courses equivalencies, Major/Minor Course Substitutions and Waivers, Change of Major, Change of Minor, Add/Drop Petition. Similarly, on the faculty side, I have found this intimidating list of forms.

The problem with these archaic pockets is two-fold. First, they represent what Eric Johnson called “micro-barriers,” which disproportionally affects first-generation, diverse students and faculty. Second, they require extraordinary amount of work, primarily for our staff, but also for faculty members. I have already written about the first problem. The second one is less visible, because staff just do what needs to be done. I am keenly aware though, that unless we decrease routine work for staff, we won’t increase our advising resources. We cannot hire any more people, so we need to do less of clerical, routine work.

The University’s IRT works hard on implementing a whole set of new technological platforms that will make our lives a little easier. It is a new admission platform, a new advising platform, a travel claims processing product, a new learning analytics platform, a new LMS, etc. I am a bit worried that they may stretch a bit too thin. But ultimately, the work routines on campus are too complex, and the needs of each college are too unique to count on large integrated platform solutions. It is not the technologies that we’re lacking. Almost all such problems are organizational. For example, when we developed the new request for travel procedure, we had to take a faculty committee out of the process, because it takes too long to process, and because we may have enough resources to be less stingy. No software can do this; it is a policy decision, an effort to streamline the organizational workflows. The teacher credentials compliance is a problem everywhere, because it involves many non-course requirements. The Registrar’s office is not equipped to deal with them, so it takes a lot of work to monitor compliance. You can tweak the registrar’s data bases to do the trick, or you can develop a bolt-on for your main integrated database, or design a stand-alone system. None of these solutions are perfect.

It is especially wasteful to have faculty members do clerical work. Faculty is the most important, the most expensive resource we have. In fact, salaries are north of 99% of our budget. Every time a faculty is carrying a paper from one place to another, or playing with spreadsheet to keep track of students, my heart aches. I am thinking what they are not doing instead – not preparing for classes, not writing scholarly papers, not talking to each other about program improvement, not resting and recharging.

Many program requirements that faculty establish take little or no notice on how labor-intensive would be to implement them. For example, checking every student’s GPA every semester takes a lot of work, and I am not convinced it is that critical. Why not put the burden of self-policing on them? OK, we may have one or two upset students, but save many hours of staff work, so they can help other, more responsible students. Those are not simple decisions; it is always a balancing act. But we really need to pay attention to our labor expenditures. I cannot do it alone; I need help. We’re lucky to have our own IT specialist, but he is not going to examine every requirement and every procedure. This work should be broadly distributed.

The relational labor

Recently, I had a coffee with one of the retired faculty; he filled me in on the history of our College. One thing he said was both simple and profound. He said that people should realize they need to work on relationships. Relations are work. He did not mean to say that like in family therapy we need to talk about our feelings. No, he simply meant to say that we need to provide space and occasion for social interactions. We need parties, get-togethers, celebrations, discussions, rituals, traditions – all the normal things human societies invented to lubricate the social machinery. We do not have to be all friends, and some level of politicking is inevitable. However, we should create a place that is collegial, friendly, and focused on common goals.

Years ago, a group of philosophers of education that included me was working on the theory of relational pedagogy. I regret we never quite finish the work, although our edited volume got many citations. Well, a few hundred – for philosophers it is a big number. Our premise was that in education, relations are primary, and actions and curriculum are secondary. And the layer of relations among educators does affect the quality of relations that we are able to develop with our students. For example, successful schools always have a strong sense of collegiality and solidarity among teachers. Collectively, they project an image of the good kind of relations. Individual teachers are able to tap that potential, and build better relational patterns with their students.

It is not only about schools, of course. It is the same thing with colleges. It is not really a matter of choice: if we want to be a strong teaching institution, we ought to build a strong, coherent community among ourselves. And it takes work. After a hard semester, and a ton of graded papers, who wants to drag one’s ass to yet another pointless party? Who wants to support another colleague at a community event? Who has time for lunch with someone you won’t necessarily hang out with? Who has the strength to smooth over some past misunderstandings? Well, because actions are small, they are no unimportant. These are the acts of relational labor that is so critical to our well-being and success.

Can we reduce our teaching loads?

Nothing could do more for our College than a transition to the 3-3 teaching load. We could build a stronger scholarship record, do more to improve programs and develop new ones, and try more innovative things. While the CBA contract specifies a 24-unit per year load, nothing in it prevents us from funding additional release time with our own money. The mechanics of such a program have been tried in many universities: a faculty member would apply yearly for reduced teaching load and promise a specific deliverable to advance the glory of the College – a paper sent to a good journal, a grant application, or a completely new program. If you do not fulfill the promise, you’re not eligible for another reduced load until you do.

We have about 77 faculty members in tenured and tenure-track positions. Let’s assume only 50 of them would want to apply for reduced load. That is about 100 extra courses a year we need to reassign to our part-timers to teach. I think we pay our temporary faculty about 5K per course, plus some benefits; the cost of one reassigned course is roughly $6000. In other words, to do this, we would need about 600,000 a year. The program can start small – with probationary faculty, or with the best proposals, so we do not have to find 600K right away. Also, remember, these are very rough estimates.

Is $600,000 a lot of money? Yes, especially if it is an annual expense. On the other hand, just one off-campus cohort of 20 masters students should generate at least $60,000 the College, however you share the profits with CCE and with the University. Five of such cohorts will get us half the total we need. We can probably increase our fundraising and grants activities as well, and sell some applied research services. In other words, 600K a year is attainable. It could take us 4-5 years to get there, but it could be done. How is this for a vision? 

Your nose is a time machine

As I walked on the river trail along the American River today, its smell took me back about 45 years or so. I am walking to fish with my brother and our grandfather. We enter the green strip of the Karasuk river, with our wooden fishing rods, and jar with grasshoppers, our bait. We also have a few earthworms, for another kind of fish. The river smells of wet grass, dirt, and water. Grandpa says: “If you take a bucket, won’t get any fish. If you don’t take a bucket, there will be a lot of fish to carry.” We have no fish bucket. The catch will be carried home on thin willow branches, going through fishes’ gills. I remember hundreds of details - how the hook is stuck in the rod to prevent the line from getting lose; that I have a jacket with pockets; how the river banks are, one tall and one low, how grasshopper chirp, etc., etc.

I wonder – what is the purpose of these memories? Why does human brain store all this useless information, and is able to recall it at a whiff, with all its entirety? Nothing is wasted in nature, so why so much memory space is committed to it? Of course, we do remember stuff that has significant emotional component – like everyone remembers where they were on 9-11. That is understandable – emotions are like computer tags for importance; they make protein bonds among neurons stronger. But I have not have a particular emotional high when we went to fish – it was something pleasant, but hardly critical. And yet I cannot remember what the University’s RTP policy says about the formation of primary evaluation committees, and what is the last name of the candidate we just interviewed. In fact, I still struggle to learn all my colleagues’ names.

Perhaps in childhood, the memory selection process is not yet developed, or it may work differently. This is why childhood memory have such significance for artists, film directors, and writers: they seem to be random, unexplainable, and excessive. They are needed to activate creativity – not because they are useful, but because they record the patterns of everyday life, like canvas is needed for a painting. I am thinking about people whose childhood memories triggered by smells, sounds, and word cues are painful, and ridden with anxieties. I have sine а that too, but overwhelmingly, my memories are rather pleasant. Isn’t this the main work of childhood – to build a stock of background memories that can be then used throughout life to paint more pictures on them? How’s that for an educational aim? Which standard is it going to be written in?

Should we rethink multicultural education for the Trump era?

If prejudice was an infectious disease, we would be talking about the new drug-resistant strand. It has appropriated the rhetoric of victimhood and of the resistance to “political correctness.” It adopted the viral techniques through social media. How does one explain rise of the European nationalism, and Trump’s victory in the US? An economic explanation blames the Great Recession. It might be true, but I can’t help thinking – incomplete. The vision of the good life that motivates me and most of my friends includes the great diversity of human faces, cultures, accents, and beliefs, all engaged in a great polyphony of global community. Let’s not kid ourselves – this dream failed to attract millions of people. They are not quite the majority, but we’re still talking hundreds of millions of Americans and Europeans. Those are very big minorities. Those people have their dreams elsewhere: we may think in the non-existent utopian past where everyone was similar. It does not matter why, but the dream of multiculturalism is not their own.

Intellectually, we have not answered the two biggest challenges posed by conservatives. One is that some non-Western cultures hold values incompatible with a liberal democratic society, and therefore, there should be limits to inclusion. And the other is the challenge of righteous intolerance, the old flaw of the Left. The easy answers are readily available: (1) The Western cultures also have stuff incompatible with liberal democracy, and (2) All normative systems include intolerance to something; why should multiculturalism be an exception? But the more difficult answers would have to be strong in a less abstract, more practical ways to convince the great minorities.

However, the greatest challenges for us are not intellectual. The right-wing nationalists/populists (perhaps not without the help from Moscow) have weaponized the social media. The simplistic memes of prejudice now spread with a lightning speed, in various forms – from the alt-right propaganda to fake news, from political trolling to various conspiracy theories. It is not just an intellectual debate; it is an all-out war. The war cannot be won with multicultural fairs and social justice curriculum. Neither can it be won with traditional mass media. We really need something stronger, something different. I don’t know what it is, but we better start working on it.

I hate to say this, but we’re not winning the social media war. Liberals are a lot less prone to creating and spreading fake news or churning out conspiracy theories, (they do both, just incomparably less). Moreover, using the same weapon devalues our own convictions and principles. There is a chance that Trump administration will unravel on its own, just because of sheer incompetence of unprecedented scale. But in the long run, it would not solve the problem. The real problem is that mass consciousness is vulnerable to hacking by destructive racist memes, and we have no effective immune system in place to fight the disease.

Thou shalt not worship data, because much of it is no good

Here is what happened: we (higher ed/researchers) oversold the public on the idea of data-informed (or evidence-based) improvement decisions, and are now paying for it. While I see lots and lots of data being collected, the decisions made with the collected data as critical piece of evidence are rare. When we have problems, for example, in teacher preparation, we know about them before data is available to corroborate. When data contradicts the anecdotal evidence, we tend to distrust it. In those rare occasions where data is reliable, timely, and complete, it is more often than not correlational, and thus tells us little about causality. For example, you may find that class size correlates with failure rate. So what? It is very likely that there is a confounding variable that explains both, and you could not or did not think of measuring. If, for example, you find that there is no correlation between student evaluations and grades – yes, this busts the myth that grade inflation is fueled by student evaluations. While correlation does not imply causation, the lack of correlation usually mean the absence of causation (or a measurement error). Similarly, if you find no correlation between the scores on your math placement test and student performance on subsequent courses, your placement test is no good. However, if you do find a correlation, it does not mean the test is good. So, before collecting anything, the simple check is – what are you going to do with it, exactly? Don’t collect just because it is there, and hope it will bring some useful knowledge – it won’t. And if you’re an accrediting agency – don’t ask for data that will not result in any decision.

My basic claim is this: an organization has to evaluate the usefulness of any data like this: i=R/U, where R is resources expended to gather, analyze, and keep the data, and U is the potential usefulness of it for real decisions. One very important stipulation is this: R should include time expenditures. Sadly, it is often the case that all the time is spent on collecting and crunching, so no time or strength is left for using it. My best guess is that in the overwhelming majority of cases i is greater than 1. In other words, we’re wasting a lot of valuable time.

Of course, much of data is collected because various accrediting bodies tell us to do so. However, they also have no idea how exactly the data is going to be used, and if it is any good. For example, NCATE asked us to measure impact on student learning that teacher candidates make. So we all figured out some sort of action research thing for our candidates, with pre and post-test, figuring out the effect size, etc. we complied with the requirement to measure impact on student learning, but that is simply bad science. We could never teach teacher candidates even how to build valid measurements. An instrument simply cannot be validated after a one-time use. Or else, NCATE made us measure candidate performance as we observed in the field. But those observation rubrics often produce flat, uninteresting data, because they are not reliable, and don’t measure what they intend to measure. Even more rigorously designed instruments like Danielson framework, show only modest correlation with teacher quality as measure by student achievement. But in the field, with dozens of supervisors who change constantly, who has time or money for interrater reliability training?

Everyone looks at colored charts, happy, pretending those numbers mean something. And we pretend that oh, yes, we looked at this, and made this specific decision. I don’t want to accuse everyone, but in most cases it is not true. Notice, I am not saying it is never true – the good examples are too rare to justify the enormous time and effort.

Many of us got a case of what I call “the compliance disease.” It feels good to be proficient t something, and we find clever ways of collecting data, aligning it to standards, and presenting. The process itself takes a lot of skill and creativity, so we forget that it is less than useful in the end. This is a common phenomenon – people get better and better at figuring out how to comply, and stop questioning what they have agreed to comply with.

There is a class of data that has direct significance: how many students do we have, what are average class sizes, which groups succeed more and which tend to do drop out, where are the bottlenecks, etc. It is just the measures of quality, derived from performance standards that remain elusive. And it is after at least 30 years of trying. Measuring quality of higher education is still an aspiration rather than reality. We can measure quality of K-12, but very narrowly. It is like looking at vast landscape through a keyhole of standardized testing. But in higher ed, we cannot see much at all.

The data technology is still primitive. What we have now is really quite basic hand tools that require a lot of human labor and subjective judgments. All I am saying is that brains are more needed to improve things we already know need fixing, than on collecting mountains of data we have no time to do anything with. We should only do things that move us forward.

I am not suggesting we give up on the idea of data-informed decision-making. The alternative is pure guessing, or gut instincts – all notoriously unreliable means of decision-making. The alternative is going back to the dark ages. Many people, including me, are hoping that the next generation of data tech, based on naturally occurring digital traces, in combination with the neural networks and predictive analytics will change everything. In the meanwhile, modesty is virtue.

Do we have a choice about our visions?

The answer is – probably less than one may think. It would be completely foolish to dream big dreams without considering the two existential threats to educator preparation at state universities. One is the continuous downward budgetary pressures. The second is the increasing competition from for-profit, online, alternative programs. In California, we should also add various district-based and county-based preparation programs. While we are in a good shape now, the long-term trends look very worrying. You do not need the SWOT analysis exercise to see that. The defunding of public higher education is a national trend, driven not as much by politics, as by the economics of mass higher education. Keep in mind, we remain competitive only because of the public subsidies, and some limited brand loyalty. That is, we compete mainly on price. We tend to lose on convenience, the user-friendliness, and on marketing, and very often - on responsiveness to employers’ needs.

These two threats imply a certain strategy, and I don’t see how one has much of a choice about it.

1. We must learn how to make money, which means developing additional revenue streams. 
2. We must become more flexible, less bureaucratic, and friendlier to students. 
3. We have to become sophisticated marketers. 
4. Finally, we must participate in regulatory politics. If we allow significant deregulation or meaningless accreditation to happen, it may open the flood gates for low-quality competition. Because of the famous Akerlof’s “Lemon Law,” this creates the race to the bottom phenomenon, typical for non-experiential good markets. 

The last thing is too big for each institution; it is a cause for larger professional groups. The first three, however, are the responsibility of each college of education. No one is going to do it for us. Most visions I have seen deal with some sort of growth in reputation, like we will become a premiere institution, or we will be known nationwide, etc. I was thinking along the same lines. However, perhaps we should try something more pragmatic. For example, we can say that we will become financially secure, and have some money to invest in development. I think we can become known for being not just personally, but institutionally friendly to students. We should not proclaim the abstract goals of endorsing diversity and equity – everyone does that. Instead, we can say that our programs and logistics will be tailored for the needs and expectations of minority and first generation, as well as working adults. Finally, we can have a vision of developing a robust marketing machine comparable to some of our best-known competitors.

Perhaps I am missing something, but just want to offer this kind of more pragmatic, less pompous way of envisioning our common future here. I believe we should meet out key challenges head first, with all we've got, and that becomes the shared vision.

Complexity and Justice

At a typical American university, we create insanely complex rules, and then waste enormous resources explaining them to students. Just consider, for example Sac State’s Gen Ed requirements. First, it is 48 credits plus the language requirement. The national norm is closer to 40, or about 1/3 of a BA degree. Plus there are layers of overlapping rules, which should be applied simultaneously. Those are rules of residency (so many should be taken at CSU), the rules about upper and lower division, and the rules of distribution (areas of A, B, C, D, and E). On top of it, there are graduation requirements, such as American History, American Institutions, Intensive writing, English composition, Race and ethnicity, and foreign language. In other words, every course choice should be checked against the five or six sets of rules. Those decisions have to be made by 18-22 year olds, a lot of whom just transferred from community colleges, and have a whole set of issues with equivalent courses, some of which are articulated, while others are not. Only few faculty on campus actually comprehend the rules and even fewer can explain them to students. So we have to have several professional advisers, and train older students to help. It takes years to actually master the working knowledge of curriculum. And with this level of logical complexity errors are absolutely inevitable. The complexity of rules requires the maintenance of three separate technological platforms: the course planner, the registration system, and then the data analysis system. The latter is needed, because we have no idea how many sections of which course will be needed in the next year. I am not just picking at the gen Ed; the same can be said about majors, teacher credentials, and everything else.

Now, if you have a mom and dad with a college degree, you can call them up, and ask to interpret the catalog for you. If you are a first generation in college, and your parents speak another language at home, you may not know what is the upper division and the lower division. So, the complexity affects different people differently. We always proclaim the values of diversity and inclusion, and yet our own indifference to student experiences is partly responsible for drop-outs and forces students to stay longer than they would like, to incur extra debt.

All of this is done with the best intentions, to make sure we educate the kids well. OK, let me take this back – the system evolved because of trivial turf wars, where every department is concerned about its status, its enrollments, and its workloads. The wars are fought with the rhetoric of best intentions, usually, so the combatants re confused where is the real motive, and where is the high-minded rhetoric. A significant part of the problem comes from various mindless bureaucratic decisions done outside campus, too – in various accrediting, and state government bodies. It really does not matter who we are to blame. The bottom line is that chasing complexity with various technologies is an arms race we cannot win. It is not a solvable problem. Yes, we should provide students with good advising and technological tools. But the problem is not solvable without some movement in at least partial simplification of curriculum.

The radical solution is well known: it is cohorting. It works in many cases, for working adults, for professional degrees, for non-traditional students. Some students are willing to give up choice in exchange for stability and the guaranteed timeline. In fact, this is how most of Russian and Chinese students go through college. I would not support the radical solution across the board; there is enormous value in the ability to choose one’s learning path, and in the flexibility of the non-cohorted environment. The rigidity of a cohort system also has exclusionary qualities; it does not accommodate for all life circumstances. Instead, we must simplify the admission and graduation requirements, and other processes by the order of magnitude to actually walk the walk of justice. There is no evidence whatsoever that more complex rules add anything to the quality of education. For example, Brown has abandoned the general education requirement altogether, which did not have a demonstrable negative effect on its graduates. There is no evidence that, say a 72 credit major is more fruitful than a more typical 40-credit major. Only a few of prerequisites actually have pedagogical sense; most are there to force students into a more manageable path.

The main funding of the entire fiel of behavioral economics is this: if you want to encourage people to do something, make it easy. So if we want more diverse population in our student body, if we want to more teachers of color, we have to make it easy, less intimidating; not less rigorous or less demanding; just easier in the process. Let’s move the rigor out of our processes into our classrooms.

The Long Email Combat Ritual

Among the tribes of the Academia, a small minority engages in a strange combat ritual. The weapon of choice is the long email. It is usually reinforced with a tail of previous long emails, and with multiple CC recipients. The warriors may adorn their weapons with brightly highlighted lines, intended to point out how obviously wrong or incompetent the other person it. Some have their desk drawers full of printed out emails as trophies of previous glorious battles, and in anticipation of the Judgment Day.

A battle often begins innocent enough; the exchanges look like simple business-like conversations. However, with time, they become longer, more detailed, and include more and more elements pointing out at the other party’s faults and omissions. At that time, they usually acquire more recipients, including me. The anthropologist in me is fascinated by the elaborate ornaments. The manager in me wonders how much time they spend writing these things.

OK, now seriously: Email is a terrible medium for resolving any problem, much less a conflict. It is cold, emotionless, and always sounds harsher than intended. Moreover, once you are past two exchanges, it is not even productive – it is time to meet or at least talk on the phone. I have learned this rule of thumb from my friend and mentor Eugene Sheehan. We write emails in order to save time for planning a meeting, right? But after four e-mails, you have reached the point of diminishing returns. The sad thing is that the medium itself lends to being weaponized. It does not enhance social cohesion, but may actually corrode it.

So, the grown up thing to do is to get up and meet someone you disagree with, or whose points you do not understand, in a face-to-face situation, or at least give one a phone call. When we do that, we activate psychological deterrence mechanisms that are hundreds of thousands years old. It is more difficult to say something nasty to someone’s face. The psychic cost is much higher, so we normally avoid doing it. It is because we evolved as species attuned to interpersonal communications. Email is too new for us to adapt.

Another great trick I learned from someone is this: if you receive an irritated email, a challenge, really a provocation to fight, answer it with the deadliest of all weapons – silence. A non-reply is a great answer in some circumstances, and it is amazing how many people feel compelled answer every e-mail. Again, the CC recipients create this urge – if you do not answer a publically wielded falsehood, you may look guilty by the virtue of non-responding. But give your audience more credit – they will more likely interpret your silence correctly. A nasty email is like trolling on social media. The wisdom of teenagers – do not feed the troll. Any response is a gift to the troll. The more you sound like you’re hurt, the more successful is the trolling attack. We teach young kids to walk away from the impending fight, but so often don’t know how to do this in our own world.

The psychometrics of simplicity

I am not a psychometrician, so my friends who actually are will probably laugh at me. It’s OK, bring it on. Lack of expertise has never stopped anyone from expressing an opinion. I just want to make a case for simple instruments against complex instruments, in the context of teacher preparation.

Please take a look at an observation form I helped design, with my colleagues at University of Northern Colorado. It was years ago, and I still like it. And take another look at the nine page, 32-items form COE at Sac State currently uses. It is very good, clearly worked on for years, but is still too long. And just for kicks, here is the document on 77 pages, describing the Danielson framework, perhaps the most dominant teacher evaluation platform in the country.

The longer, more detailed rubrics are, in theory, more reliable. They do not just name a domain, but contain specific behaviors or other observable indicators that are associated with skills or competencies. Students either answer questions, or not. A teacher either has stated learning objectives or not, etc. The short rubrics I like tend to be holistic, more subjective, and more difficult to justify. 

However, the context of use is everything. Those are not laboratory instruments. Supervisors and cooperating teachers use them in the field, where they observe someone’s lesson. These are situations where you have to keep your eyes really open for tiny nuances of interactions, and at the same time one has to go through a long checklist. It’s very basic: the observer runs out of brain resources.

What we have noticed for ages is that data coming from longer rubrics tends to be flat, uninteresting. If you have a four-point scale, everyone will be about at 3 in the beginning, and 3.5 at the end of student teaching. It is because human being are unable to make multiple evaluating decisions over short periods of time. Supervisors and cooperating teachers tend to make up their mind holistically about the way someone is teaching, and then simply justify their overall impression through the rubric. Most of them are experienced, wise people. What sets an expert apart from a novice is exactly the ability to make non-analytical, synthetic, holistic judgments. One can debate whether their image of good teaching is accurate, but that is how they form opinions. Novices go through check-lists, because they are not yet able to quickly synthesize. So we force experts behave like novices.

It is often done on the premise that an evaluation rubric is a pedagogical instrument, and that it intends to remind pre-service teachers about what is important. But I am not sure if the argument works. We should encourage our novice teachers to develop the ability to think holistically, to synthesize knowledge. The checklists create the false impression that if you only do all those things, you will teach well. Well, either the checklist has to be a hundred pages long, or it should not exist. There are just too many possible indicators. An isolated action does not have meaning outside of the relational context. Yes, as a rule one should not give long lecture to six graders. But man, I have seen such brilliant exceptions. A hostile classroom atmosphere is not always the fault of the teacher, and therefore, not a reflection on his or her skills. Etc., etc., etc. For a hundred page checklist we can provide a thousand page list of exceptions.

Another consideration is economic. For something like Danielson-inspired instrument to work, one needs significant resources committed to constant training and retraining of evaluators to ensure the inter-rater reliability. If you have a large teacher preparation program like ours, it is almost impossible to do. Supervisors are many, and they change often, cooperating teachers are a multitude, and they are busy and change constantly. Whatever precious resources we have are better spend on PD at higher levels, for example, on co-teaching models or on cognitive coaching. Training them to use the rubrics correctly feels like a waste of time.

With a short holistic rubric, we embrace the strength of holistic assessment, and avoid the negative side of indicator-rich instruments. One can easily keep in mind the four-five main domains, and give an honest expert opinion on how a teacher candidate is doing. The shorter rubrics also give more time for qualitative feedback, which is always more important. You have the time to write “pay attention how you move around the classroom; it may be distracting children” or “some children did not understand the assignment,” or something like this, because you don’t have to run through 45 indicators. We also do not observe a good number of items at all, because they are not all evident on every lesson. But we feel compelled to enter some random number, so the cell is not empty.



In my opinion, it is much better to have better subjective data than poor objective data. It is especially true because the indicator-based, objective and detailed rubrics are not really validated by research, contrary to what Danielson and others claim. In other words, we do not really know that if a student teacher have written, for example, the unit learning outcomes as “related to “big ideas” of the discipline,” that it will really help kids learn. We may have a professional consensus about it, but we do not know it for a fact. The studies on value-added measures of teaching effectiveness are in their infancy. And even theoretically we are unable dis-aggregate the teacher behavior to small indicators to show the relative weight of, say communications style vs. mastery of material vs. the careful planning of instruction. Underneath all the sophistication - is the same gut feeling that we acquire with experience. OK, it is a collective gut feeling, but professionals were known to be wrong collectively. Just to remind the hard-line psychometricians: the semantic hypothesis is still a hypothesis.

Another practical consideration for short holistic rubrics is this: teacher preparation programs do not have time to look at all data we generate. The more items you have, the more work it takes to process and interpret data. The fewer are the data points, the better it is to comprehend. Data usually supports or contradicts suspicions we already have. It cannot do much more with technologies we have today. When we develop AI, the neural network technology, let’s talk again. For now, we may be better off admitting that we use very limited data collection techniques and our dreams of data-informed continuous improvement process may be a bit premature. So we need to bring the expectations to where the technology is, otherwise we produce a lot of needless work and unprocessed data.

Taking stock of the good things

I spent some time last week working on several student complaints, and some of my colleagues felt sorry for me for doing this in my first couple of weeks on the job. I am thankful, but student complaints are unique learning opportunities that present a sharply focused view of the organization’s culture. Dealing with the unhappy ones presents the view from behind, so to speak. Like an army platoon’s speed is the speed of the last straggling soldier, the least happy students show what is possible, what works and what does not. I came out of these situations in high spirits. The system definitely works, and it works very well overall. Students are given second and third, and forth chances, they are treated fairly, the expectations remain high, and the rules are flexible enough to accommodate the diverse student body. The errors we make are minor and not systemic. Faculty and administrators spend a lot of time on individual students’ problems, and the solutions are reasonable. I feel really good about the College, and its faculty and staff.

Consider the phenomenon of the general complaint – the discourse of dissatisfaction that permeates any human society. The intensity of the general complaint is not related to the actual health of the organization. For example, at the university A people are nonchalant about half of all students skipping any given class. At the university B people are greatly upset about a discrepancy between a syllabus and a handbook. If you take the level of complaint into consideration, A is better than B, while in fact B is light years ahead of A. This is why it is unimportant how much people complain, but what do they complain about is important. There is a Russian proverb “For some, pears are too small, for others – borscht is too thin.” I am sure there is an English equivalent, but I cannot think of any right now. I hope it makes sense that the three student complaint cases made me rather happy. The College has figured out most of the structural problems that exist at any place like this. In professional preparation, we sometimes have to tell people “No, you cannot go forward,” which cannot please. That is inevitable; how we deal with it can vary greatly. There are also inherent issues with field placements, communication with field mentors – all colleges of our size have that, and such tensions have purely economic underpinnings. Yet some deal with them with more grace than others. We do a good job.

Of course, I am not blind and see the shortcomings, the bottlenecks, the weak spots. In fact, people tend to focus on the problems, because they are so immediate and pressing. We all get quickly used to the good things, which is why I value the “new eye” experience so much. To move forward, it is extremely important to keep the awareness of the tremendous achievements you have. To move a ship, one needs to take stock of the whole thing – the beauty, the structural integrity, - the integrative characteristics. One cannot just focus on the leaks and the rust spots. So, here are just some of the good things to appreciate: We live in one of the most affluent, advanced, democratic, and diverse parts of the world. Despite occasional budget cuts, public colleges still enjoy support of the public. We have thousands of successful, well-connected alums. We help teachers, principals, counsellors, school psychologists – they provide the backbone of todays’ economy, and these professions are not in danger of being outsourced or replaced by robots. So we own the future. We have a nice campus, with beautiful trees, modern technology and many amenities. I am not going to panic about the policy manual being outdated or the committee structure to be imperfect, or the assessment system being too cumbersome. Those may be annoying, but objectively small problems. We will plug all the holes as we go, no big deal. We have bigger fish to fry, and I am happy to report, looks like we’re totally ready for it.Taking stock of the good things

Searching for a vision

Some may believe that politics is the most human of all arts, but it is wrong. Primates do a lot of politicking; they form coalitions, and orchestrate coup d’états. Those behaviors are normal, and they probably become more intensive when resources are scarce (let’s say, drought or budget cuts). However, faced with a common external threat, chimps tend to act as a unified force.

The Academia is one of many primate habitats, and every single institution I know has its share of internal politics, which by necessity includes factions. After all, one cannot advance one’s interests and agenda without friends. So, coalitions naturally form and engage in various levels of competition. The acceptable levels of factional struggle are such that it does not take away too much time and effort from doing the work for our students, and moving forward as an institution. I know this is a vague definition, but it does the job. We have a given set of time and intellectual resources. How they are expanded matters. If too much is dedicated to internal politics, the task of development is threatened. In the most severe cases, even the routine maintenance of operations could suffer, but it is a rare case.

A new dean’s worst mistake is to get immediately entangled into the micro-politics by simply joining one of the coalitions, and letting it become the sole source of support and information. And let’s keep in mind, such a move is very tempting, for if you want to advance any kind of agenda, you should have people to rely on. So it works in the short run, but in the long run, the move is self-defeating, for it leaves the structural arrangements unchanged. Machiavelli had plenty to say about that. In his time, excessive internal struggle meant losing wars to neighbors. In our times, it means stagnation, and eventual loss of competitiveness. Authority based on trying to be objective and even-handed, fair to all factions, is slower, but ultimately, it is more stable and productive. The first rule of conduct – I cannot belong to any faction, but will try to listen and understand everyone. The basic English common law principle is to hear to the both sides, while trying to be impartial. It is perhaps one of the best ideas ever; it was designed to contain our natural tendency to color all information depending on whether it comes from a friend of from a foe.

Dean’s conduct is important, but not critical. The most important is to have a common vision, a big goal for all of us. If we get it, the micro-politics will be kept in check; they never become destructive, or take too much of anyone’s time. They still exist, but can even be a positive force where all factions find niches, and compete on how much they contribute to the common good. That is not just theory; I have seen this happen, and it works. We don’t have to be all friends. In fact, I find the utopian images of human brotherhood dangerous and ultimately destructive. I like the pragmatic, good-enough, yet inspired communities. We tend to share the same values, and that is the 80% of the way to flourishing.

To convert shared values into a vision is not an easy or fast project. There are some fascinating things to know about how visions cannot be too precise, and have to stay a little blurred. I even wrote a paper about that a couple of years ago. The term “vision” evokes the use of visual imagery; it cannot be limited to words. It is a mental picture of the not-so-distant future where we all want to be.