Last week, I wrote a post c0mmenting upon Sheridan College President Jeff Zabudsky’s announcement that he intended to turn Sheridan into a university.  I followed it up with a post speculating about some of the reasons why university graduate schools may be shying away from admitting students who graduated with degrees from Ontario colleges.

I’m grateful to have received two responses to those posts, which I’m excerpting below.

The first is from our most frequent correspondent.  He ties the current credentialing muddle to the forces that — from practically the very start — diverted Ontario’s colleges from their original vision as a post-secondary institutions that stood alone from universities, but nevertheless provided and required a broad range of both vocational and avocational offerings.  He argues that the result of the government’s abandonment of this (or any) clearly-delineated role for Ontario colleges . . .

. . . has been predictable chaos. Most colleges are seeking new names, new identities and a new focus. Some are cementing their “articulation agreements” with universities. Some are going whole-hog for their own “degree” programs. Some are just flailing around, more or less directionless and increasingly panicky.

And, in the middle of the mess are the students and the educations they were promised. The real “market value” of college degrees is untested, but this much is certain: the last thing college students need to worry about is whether their college degrees will get them into M.Sc, M.A., M.F.A., M.S.W., M.Ed. or other fancy credentialed programs. The real problem is that college degrees are not even guaranteed to translate into any credits toward an ordinary B.A. (Never mind what employers think.)

There have been at least two fundamental problems with the colleges: (1) their failure to take their original mandate seriously; (2) their inability to negotiate transfer of credits to universities. There have been at least two accompanying failures by the various governments of Ontario: (1) their failure to give proper leadership and direction to the colleges; (2) their abrogation of responsibility when they abandoned the colleges by tossing them into the roiling academic waters and telling them to learn to swim. The universities, of course, are not blameless. For decades they have held themselves aloof and treated colleges with contempt. Now that they are struggling for funding in a society that no longer seems to care much about education, they are scrambling to maximize their profit potential by only making deals with colleges that are to their financial and market-share advantage. It is laissez-faire at very close to its worst.

The losers? First, the students; then, the teachers; and, in time, our society as a whole.

Our correspondent’s observation about the ”real problem” facing holders of college degrees is neatly corroborated by this story — from a correspondent in southwestern Ontario:

[In] my niece’s experience (in 2012), Ontario Grad Schools do not recognize or even acknowledge an Ontario Post-Diploma Program. A requirement for admission into the college post-diploma was a BA (preferably Honours) in a related field. Upon applying to grad school this year, the four Ontario Universities to which she applied did not even want her College transcripts, as they were deemed irrelevant. She sent them in anyway, but questioned the validity and usefulness of her time spent in College, if the education achieved is of no value to the University system. One would think that more education is better; however that’s logic and common sense.

One would indeed think that more education is better, but I do personally think that if colleges want their offerings to be recognized as legitimate by universities, then they owe it to themselves — and their students — to take into account the universities’ own standards and principles.  One of those principles is academic freedom.  Another is the role of Academic Senates to establish and enforce academic policies.

And if the colleges are indeed interested in obtaining credibility among universities, then I think that these two principles might be an excellent starting-place for the representatives of both management and faculty at Ontario colleges to seek common ground this summer, as they begin to negotiate a new Collective Agreement.

As ever, please send your thoughts to ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com.  Your anonymity will be preserved.

In my last post, I discussed the plans stated by Sheridan College’s President, Jeff Zabudsky, to turn his college into a university in the next seven years.

His stated reasons for pursuing this course of action had nothing to do with the prospect of obtaining money offered by the Ontario government for its election promise to create three new undergraduate campuses.  (To give an example of the potential sums involved, I note that the City of Barrie has expressed an interest in housing a campus of Laurentian University, and has requested $40 million dollars from the province to help accomplish this goal.)

No, President Zabudsky has justified the switch to university status on the grounds of increased opportunities for Sheridan graduates, claiming:

“We’re being driven by student demand for degrees, but I want every graduate to be able to carry on to grad school if they choose. Currently they confront many barriers.”

In my last post, I questioned the number of Sheridan students who might truly be suffering from reduced grad-school opportunities, and I might also question whether it’s appropriate to turn a college into a university wholesale, for the sake of the ~10% of its current student population who are enrolled in college degree programs.  But Zabudsky’s fundamental point is, in fact, quite valid: I know from my own students’ experiences that graduates holding college degrees do, in fact, face very real obstacles if they choose to pursue graduate degrees.

What confuses me, about Pres. Zabudsky’s remarks, however, is his tone of surprise and disappointment that the holders of Bachelors’ degrees from Sheridan are impeded in their pursuit of Masters degrees.  The Toronto Star reports that he is:

Frustrated by growing demand for its degree programs that Ontario graduate schools refuse to recognize — most are called “applied” degrees when offered by a college . . . .

To allay Pres. Zabudsky’s confusion over the plight of Sheridan’s ambitious degree-holding graduates, permit me humbly to point out why graduate school admissions committees might express some hesitation over the bachelors’ degrees offered by Ontario colleges like his own:

• Ontario college faculty often lack terminal degrees in their area of instruction, and as few as 50% of their faculty teaching students in degree programs may possess terminal degrees
• Faculty in Ontario colleges lack academic freedom
• Ontario colleges lack Academic Senates to adjudicate educational issues, and academic decisions are instead made by managers

In addition, there are a few more factors that limit the appropriateness of a college degree for direct admission to graduate school.  I find it hard to believe, moreover, that these would come as any surprise to President Zabudsky, given that they are clearly stated in the government agencies’ own literature on the credentialing of college degree programs:

• Ontario college degree programs are approved in part by Ontario’s Postsecondary Education Quality Assessment Board (PEQAB) on the condition that they relate to fields distinct from those offered by universities (cf. the reference to “non-duplication” in pp. 15 of this document)
• PEQAB also clearly stated (as of July, 2011) that “Ontario colleges may offer only degrees in applied areas of study”, and not the “academically-oriented [or] professionally-oriented” degrees to which the title “Honours” could be given.
• Said “degrees in applied areas” are clearly intended by the Ministry to prepare students “for some second-entry professional degree programs, employment in a variety of fields, or advanced entry into an honours or specialist program of study in the field.”  This is in clear contrast to Honours degrees, which are designed to prepare students for “entry into graduate study in the field, second-entry professional degree programs or, depending upon content, employment in a particular field of practice or employment in a variety of fields” (all italics mine)

If President Zabudsky truly wants “every graduate to be able to carry on to grad school if they choose”, I think that remains a laudable sentiment.  (And, in fact, this might be a compelling argument for developing programs to bridge the gap between Applied and Honours degrees.)

If, however, he maintains the opinion that the current holders of applied degrees are appropriately prepared to enter into graduate school programs — and are simply being held back because of the Ontario grad schools” snobbish bigotry towards Applied degrees — then he might do well to familiarize himself with the province’s own credentialing criteria.

But if degree-holding graduates at Sheridan — or any other Ontario college — find themselves surprised by the challenges they face getting into graduate schools (when competing against students who graduated with Honours degrees from universities), then it behooves us as an academic community to ask whether we’re representing our degree programs responsibly to prospective applicants.

Yes, President Zabudsky is correct in concluding that becoming a university is one way to enable Sheridan’s graduates to enter grad schools, but it’s worth noting three things:

1. It’s unclear that students currently enrolled in Sheridan’s degree programs would, as a whole, necessarily benefit as a consequence of the higher tuition rates, higher admission requirements, and more stringent academic demands that are associated with universities

2. Not all undergraduate university programs are equal, in the eyes of grad-school admissions committees.  Graduates with Honours degrees from several universities also find themselves impeded in their quest for graduate education.  So simply becoming a university does not automatically guarantee graduate school admission, even to your very strongest graduates.

3.  If Sheridan college does indeed to pursue university status within the next seven years, does it intend in the meantime to level with its degree programs’ applicants or incoming students, regarding the “many barriers” they currently face, when applying to graduate programs?

Upcoming, we’ll look at some reader feedback, and then consider the feasibility of Sheridan’s ambitions.   E-mail me your thoughts at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com

Okay, well, there was a bit of a surprise in today’s Toronto Star, which featured Sheridan College’s Jeff Zabudsky musing about his intention for Sheridan to become a university in the next seven years.

Zabudsky frames the decision not as one motivated by the as-yet-unspecified funding promised by the Ontario government for the construction of three new undergraduate campuses, but rather by his concern about the current barriers faced by the current graduates of Sheridan’s degree programs:

Frustrated by growing demand for its degree programs that Ontario graduate schools refuse to recognize — most are called “applied” degrees when offered by a college — Sheridan president Jeff Zabudsky said the school owes it to students to become an institution that gives its grads the most options. 

“So we’re waving the white flag and saying, ‘Okay, we might as well become part of the (university) club,’ ” said Zabudsky.

“We’re being driven by student demand for degrees, but I want every graduate to be able to carry on to grad school if they choose. Currently they confront many barriers.”

And, while I’m a bit amused by Zabudsky’s description of his efforts to convert a college into a university as an act of surrender, I think that it’s worth analyzing his claims at face value.

The alleged cause of his determination for Sheridan to become a university is the limited graduate-school options open to the graduates of Sheridan’s degree programs.

Let me crunch the numbers for a moment:

• A June, 2011 document published by Sheridan’s Board of Governors claims that Sheridan “serves more than 1,500 undergraduate degree students in its own programs”.  Those would be the students for whom Zabudsky proposes to convert Sheridan into a university.  (Sheridan also claims another 1,000 students in university-partnership programs, but although the Star article conflates those two figures, students in university-partnership programs would already be graduating with university degrees, and would therefore be comparatively unhindered in their quest for grad school.)
• 1,500 current degree students would equal an average of 375 students in each year of Sheridan’s four-year degree programs
• The retention rate for Sheridan’s diploma programs was an impressively high 70% (in a 2000 study).  If one is generous and guesstimates the same proportion for its degree programs currently, that would result, I believe, in an average of 313 students graduating annually with Sheridan degrees
• Taking a wild guess that perhaps 20% of successful undergraduates at any institution are interested in applying to grad school, that leaves us with a grand (purely speculative) total of . . .

Approximately 63 graduates.  Annually.

Approximately 63 graduates, annually, for whose sake Zabudsky is reluctantly (but bravely) “waving the white flag” and proposing to transform his college — which currently claims to serve over 15,000 students in its certificate and diploma programs — into a university.

Further updates to follow — As ever, feel free to send your feedback to ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com

So my father died in October.  I haven’t posted here since then.
 
He was a doctor, and had his general practice in Scarborough for 51 years, taking care of four generations of patients.  He kept his black medical bag in the trunks of successive Chryslers over the decades, for his house calls to his elderly patients.

To me, he embodied the goodness, simplicity, and truth that Tolstoy identified as the prerequisites for greatness.

He gave me many things, and he hoped – like every father must – that I would grow to share in his hobbies and passions.  I’m grateful for the interests that we did share, including an interest in history and politics that formed the basis of hundreds of dinner-table conversations.  I regret – as many sons must – the times when inclination limited my enthusiasm for his other passions, particularly for cars, airplanes, and boats.

But what he did manage to instill in me was his passion for his work – as a Scarborough family doctor, as an assessor of other Ontario doctors, and as an officer in the Air Force Medical Reserves.  He also passed along to me his pride in his career, which he contentedly recognized as essential to his character.  He never got to enjoy retirement (working up until he was too sick to continue do so), but I don’t know if he would have been able to enjoy retirement, anyway – I kept joking that if he retired, he’d end up wandering around the house in a white lab coat, giving repeated physicals to his family members and anybody else who was unlucky enough to knock on the door.

The circumstances of his death were difficult.  Diagnosed with advanced leukaemia in August (after having been diagnosed with Myelodysplasia the year before), he opted – as many doctors do – against aggressive treatment, and chose instead to receive palliative care at home.  That choice turned me, my mother, and my sister into care providers, as my parents’ house began to look more and more like a hospital with every passing week.

And if it takes a village to raise a child, I now realize that it also takes a surprisingly large community to bury an adult.  A cohort of doctors, nurses, and support workers became common presences in our house, and familiar faces in different medical facilities.

So permit me here to acknowledge a debt that I cannot repay: To the doctors and attendants at the Odette Centre for Cancer Treatment in Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital, as well as the hospital’s oncology, nursing, and Blood Services staff.  To the doctors and administrative staff at Mount Sinai’s Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care.  To the nursing and administrative staff of Saint Elizabeth Health Care.  To the administrators, home- and support-care workers at Spectrum Health Care; and to the helpful and friendly workers at Medigas and KCI Medical Canada.  And, ultimately, to the kind individuals at Benjamin’s Funeral Home and Holy Blossom Temple.

I was unfailingly impressed by all of their professionalism, but even more by their incredible generosity of spirit.  From a doctor in a hospital who personally tracked me down, to return the laptop that I had misplaced; to a tow truck driver who bought me a much-needed cup of tea after I had stood for 30 minutes in a rainstorm; to a blessed individual who found a way to ‘accidentally’ give me access to an essential telephone number – all of these people reminded me that professionalism exceeds itself, by somehow moving beyond mere profession and into the essence of that which connects us as a community.

And in the end, the experience of my father’s illness and death ended up reinforcing one of the biggest lessons that he had taught me through his 53 years of practice: That our work is a cause for pride because it is rooted in our collective value within our communities.  The value we ascribe to our labour is ultimately a recognition of our own importance, and of (or ‘in terms of’) the importance of those whom our labour benefits.  Work is by no means the only way of reinforcing social and ethical relationships – it’s probably not even the best way – but it is one way, and is therefore an honourable one.

A good man now rests from his labour, and leaves his accomplishments as the legacy of which he was so very proud.  To pay tribute to him is to pay tribute to that which he accomplished.  That, in turn, is to pay tribute to those to whom he devoted his attention: His patients, the community of Scarborough, the doctors and people of Ontario, the Air Force servicemen, and the citizens they serve, in turn.

To pay tribute to him is also to recognize the value of the work we all do, and the people whom we serve.  We affirm their value, and, in so doing, recognize our own.

And that, I believe, is a legacy worthy of the man.

A reader directed me towards Heather Mallick’s column in today’s Toronto Star, concerning the Star‘s recent expose of high-school credit mills, where those students who can afford the tuition are able to “jump the queue” of University and College admission standards, through inflated grades.  The Star’s series of articles was summarized in an earlier blog post, which in turn generated at least one reader’s response.

Mallick’s column is deservedly pointed.  While I’m not sure that the repeated references to her colleague’s book benefit her argument, she offers a forceful reminder about why we hold education as a social value, and the way that the fetishization of academic credentials threatens to pervert the educational system.

The article is reproduced below:

Credit mills grind up young futures

by Heather Mallick, Star columnist

Revelations about Ontario “credit mills” offering underachieving high school students a way to buy inflated marks are both a shocker and a warning.

Yes, the unregulated fly-by-night schools, as revealed by Star reporters Jennifer Yang and Robert Cribb, are a disgrace to the Ministry of Education’s grip on what we most value, our children’s future. But it gets worse. Students who take the path of least resistance — who fork over money to avoid studying — are headed for a permanent grief.

The grief continues when they cheat — and that includes cheating another genuine hard-working student out of a place at university — only to discover that university or college is too tough for them. You can’t buy your grades at the University of Toronto. You have to do the work.

So your misspelled essays and disastrous multiple-choice tests in first year force your university to put you through makeup classes more appropriate to Grade 10 students. Tenured professors shun teaching such students so they hand over classes to an army of underpaid adjunct professors, with PhD students to do the marking.

When you bought your marks from the pathetic non-credentialled teachers at unregulated schools taught out of garages, you infected the education system. Proud of yourself?

Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. It’s not really your fault. Students are hustling like this because they’re frightened, and who can blame them?

That was the shock. Here’s the warning: They’re reacting to a world we built for them and it’s our job to fix it.

Credentialism has overtaken education. You don’t want to learn in high school, you want the diploma. You don’t want to study in university but you want the degree. In fact, you don’t even want the degree so much as the job you pray it will get you. When you’re told that a BA isn’t enough, you get an MA to set you apart.

But what sets students apart is their ability to think, spell, create, interpret, generate ideas, do the work and in general be the product of what the education system was intended to be: an improver of human beings, an enlarger of personal worlds.

When we regard universities as job factories, increasingly filled by students popping out of credit mills, then who cares about the content of the courses?

I have nothing against vocational schools. Indeed I wish we had more of them because you either know how to take a photograph/engineer a bridge/maintain a machine or you don’t.

But instead we have a chain of lowered standards, starting with credit mills and moving on to credential generators feeding “job” factories. In 2010, Toronto author Russell Smith wrote a novel called Girl Crazy about this world, his protagonist the depressed (but still idealistic) community college teacher named Justin who suspects his students are being forced to buy marks.

Smith, one of Canada’s finest writers, dares to approach an unthinkable subject, an approaching class warfare in which everyone fights for status measured out in money but also in degrees.

We are told the arts don’t matter, but little has made the educational struggle as real to me as Smith’s stark scary novel of modern Toronto.

Justin straddles worlds. He has the credentials his students yearn for. He teaches strivers like the ones Yang met when she went undercover. But he is miserable because credentialism got him nowhere and yet he knows credentialism makes the world go round.

The corrupt reptilian school administrator in Girl Crazy sums up the attitude that is killing genuine learning: “It’s not really an education that helps you do well in the world. Nope. What helps you . . . is skill at a particular job . . . How are you going to do that if you don’t have a foot in the door? Hey? We provide that foot in the door.”

“Why would we make getting that thing more difficult for them?” he asks.

Because it’s immoral not to. Because it costs them money they don’t have. Because they’re going to crash and burn with an education that teaches nothing.

The Ontario government has to shut down credit mills. It has to end credentialism because it doesn’t educate and doesn’t lead to jobs. This can’t go on.

hmallick@thestar.ca

In response to my last post — on the Toronto Star expose of disreputable high-school “credit mills”, our most frequent correspondent explains how a commitment to academic integrity necessitates that we extend our vigilance beyond our personal practices as teachers, and towards the trends taking place in both our educational workplaces and the larger educational system within which they are situated:

The Toronto Star has done a great service by giving wide publicity to this issue. Unfortunately, it is only one of a host of related concerns about the quality of education at all levels.

I urge college educators to become alert to all sorts of institutions including allegedly postsecondary schools which grant “degrees” and might easily fool unsuspecting admissions personnel and other authorities into granting advanced standing for dubious credits.

Even more, however, we should be vigilant about our own practices. When the colleges were first established in the late 1960s, there was a common purpose and something of a common set of standards across Ontario. In the intervening forty years and more, we have witnessed a growing chaos, now reaching its most intense level as Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology have been tossed into the world of competitive marketing.

One superficial aspect of that is the “rebranding” of institutions as they call themselves all sorts of new names, advertising what they take to be their strengths. Another, more serious, innovation is the plethora of certificates, diplomas, degrees, “articulated” programs in which colleges and universities offer joint programs leading to the awarding of a college diploma and a university degree, and what are commonly known as “postgraduate” college programs. Moreover, as colleges get into the “business” of cooperating with private sector firms to offer “designer” courses to meet whatever “need” the corporate sector may demand, a further confusion will inevitably occur.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not necessarily objecting to any of these particular innovations or to adaptive change in general. I am just warning about what can happen when market-driven modifications in academic programming become the determining factor in educational philosophy and practice.

We might all benefit from reading a little about this sort of thing. As a start, I urge that we pay attention to a book published the late and much lamented Professor David Noble of York University. His Digital Diploma Mills (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003), parts of which are available on the “Net,” is a commendable exploration of one element of this overall trend.

Call it the commodification of education, the “dumbing-down” of curriculum or any other catch-phrase you please, the upshot is that we are caught in a profound alteration of what it is to be a college, and it may be time to insert the concept of academic credibility into the mix, before the entire system is put at risk.

I don’t know whether you’ve seen it, but the Toronto Star has spent the last couple of days unveiling the results of its investigation of private high schools in the GTA.  The investigation appears to have been undertaken jointly by Star reporters and Ryerson students; this post includes links to five separate articles that the Star has published online (some of which might not have made it into the print version) — I encourage you to read them all.

To begin with, The Star reports a fact that some of us likely already know, which is that certain private schools inflate grades considerably (to an estimated 20%-30%), often seemingly in direct proportion with their tuition fees.  And the Star‘s main article leads with the significant fact that such a system skews the university-application and scholarship-granting process in favour of students whose parents can afford to send them.   In particular, the article reports that:

Provincial inspection reports obtained through freedom of information requests and interviews with students, teachers and principals, reveal:

• Grades at some private schools arbitrarily increased upon request
• Credits granted with less than half of mandatory class hours completed
• Outdated curriculums, no lesson plans, no course outlines and missing student assessments
• Difficult questions removed from exams
• Teachers without proper qualifications and those who “do not understand” evaluation and assessment
• Students permitted to take courses without the mandatory prerequisites
• Rewriting of tests for $100
• Students left to write tests with little supervision and access to the Internet.

The fact that some of this information came from provincial inspection reports is significant, since it indicates that — while reduced funding for education may limit the government’s ability to inspect schools — even when that inspection reveals abuses, the Ministry of Education remains unwilling to punish schools for violating ministry standards.

As an example, another article reports that one school:

. . . was inspected at least four times between 2005 and 2009 and consistently failed to assess and evaluate students in accordance with provincial standards.  Nevertheless, the Scarborough school was allowed to continue operating and granting credits. Between 2005 and 2009, at least 651 students have obtained high school credits from [it].

In fact, as the first article points out, there are over 358 credit-granting private schools today, yet, Since 2006, the Ministry has revoked licenses only eight times.  And even if a school’s license is revoked, “school operators are often permitted to reopen under different names.”

These articles do strain to differentiate between some of the less-reputable schools and their more prestigious, “legitimate” counterparts (who occasionally happen to purchase advertising space in that paper) — often by emphasizing the strip-mall locales of the credit mills.  But quotes from three different University officials indicate that they can or do make no such distinctions.

“As long as the ministry’s approved them I take the grades as they are. That’s the ministry’s job to verify the schools,” says Janice O’Farrell, director of admissions at Carleton University.

Right.  The ministry’s job.  We’ll get back to that later.

Another article brings to light the frustration felt by the humble public-high-school guidance counsellor or principal, in the face of this widespread academic fraud that has been perpetuated with (and through) the provincial ministry’s benign neglect.  And, in fact, it seems that guidance counsellors have been the most pro-active in trying to rectify the abuse:

Since 2009, the ministry has received a total of 30 complaints about inflated marks from public school officials, according to records obtained through freedom of information legislation.

In most cases, the ministry’s response is listed in the records as “reported to regional office.” In only once case is an enforcement action indicated.

Evans says she’s phoned and written the ministry numerous times complaining about “overinflated” grades from private schools.

“I’ve never had a response from the ministry. It’s one-way communication. We’ve stopped because it falls on deaf ears.”

The two remaining articles offer first-person accounts of what goes on inside the classrooms at these schools.  In the first, a student seeking higher grades in a math class reported that he managed to achieve them, thanks to:

Lax attendance policies, “unqualified” teachers who would walk out of the classrooms for exams, leaving students to share answers or use the Wi-Fi connection to find answers on their phones. . . .

“I (would tell the teacher) ‘I can’t do this,’ and I asked her how would you do this question and she just said don’t worry about that question”. . . .

[He] walked out with a 95 per cent which was transferred to his high school transcript [and] entered Waterloo in September 2009 with an entrance scholarship based on an overall average in the 90s. . . .

The second article is written by Jennifer Yang, a Star reporter who went undercover to take a class at Toronto Collegiate Institute, for $550.  She offers a short illustration of how she managed to achieve a “mathematically impossible” final grade:

Going into my final exam, I had a middling 60 per cent average. I was told my final exam would be worth 30 per cent of my overall grade — that means the highest mark I could hope for was 72, but I would have to get a perfect score on my final exam.

I did not score perfect on my final exam. Yet, I wound up receiving a final chemistry mark of 72 per cent anyway — and then, the teacher arbitrarily boosted that by another 13 percentage points.

My final grade: 85 per cent.

Which brings us to the relevant issue for this forum: The question of teachers’ responsibility.

Firstly, a little context.  One of the schools discussed reports paying teachers $20 per hour (presumably per class hour).  The principal of another school tried to blame the teachers for the fact that “his school gave out credits to students who received as little as 50 hours of instruction, less than half of the 110 hours stipulated by province”, claiming that “they (teachers) were not meeting the required number of hours.”  Needless to say, no mention was given of the number of hours they were asked/paid to teach.

Half the teachers at yet another school lack certification from the Ontario College of Teachers, since, “unlike public schools, private schools are not required to hire teachers certified by the Ontario College of Teachers and no education or training is necessary to open a private school”.

In his defense, the principle of that school claims that “by far the worst teachers I’ve had have been accredited (by the Ontario College of Teachers) . . . . Not everybody is a good teacher just because they get through teachers’ college.”

And indeed, Jennifer Yang’s report on her chemistry class would appear to confirm this.  Her teacher (who is listed on the College of Teachers’ website as having recieved a B.Ed. and a Ph.D. from universities in India) is depicted as utterly deluded, if well-meaning.

But the techniques that this teacher employed to ensure high grades are somewhat significant: Grade curving, teaching to the test, review sessions that specifically tackle questions that will be featured on the exam, stressing certain points of instruction right before handing out the test, arbitrary grade curving.  These are classic strategies employed by teachers who have a vested interest — not in their students’ education — but in their students’ grades.

They are the strategies employed by teachers whose continued employment or whose school’s funding depends upon the students’ receiving high grades.  They are, in short, the strategies employed by teachers who are pressured to “perform”, and whose performance is measured exclusively in terms of student grades, (short-term) student satisfaction, and student retention.

And indeed, in the final article, reporter Jennifer Yang reports that her teacher admitted to “fixing marks”, following “a lengthy, closed-door meeting with [the] school director”.

Personally, I take two lessons from this series of articles: The first is that tenured employment (in whatever form) for teachers is the foremost precondition of academic integrity.  Yes, obviously, tenured teachers are capable of inflating grades, but they are also the most able to resist outside pressures (whether from managers or students) to do so.  Just as we cannot speak of academic freedom where job stability is absent, so too must we recognize the threat posed to academic integrity when teachers can lose their jobs at the whim of a manager, rather than for any demonstrated malfeasance or incompetence.

The second lesson that I draw from this is a prediction: The Ministry of Education obviously needs to do a better job of enforcing its own educational standards — the Star articles implicitly suggest that one first step would be to bar the managers of schools found to violate ministry standards from working in Ontario schools thereafter.  Regardless of how the ministry might choose to crack the whip, if it continues to fail to do so, then Ontario colleges and (especially) universities will ultimately require all applicants to write a standardized test (much like the SATs in the U.S.), since the grades that would appear on high school transcripts would increasingly bear no relation to academic performance.

And that outcome leads to its own implications: Kaplan test prep courses for those who can afford them, and the general diversion of high school resources to prepare their students for that test.  In short, it would result in virtually all high school teachers being held responsible for grades on standardized tests — with things like merit pay for those whose students have good test scores, and increased scrutiny and job instability for those who do not.

Of course, this model for may have been precisely what Mike Harris desired for public high schools when he relaxed the regulations surrounding Ontario private schools in 1995.

But ultimately it would cause all high school teachers to resort to the exact same sorts of measures that were taken by the teacher who was mentioned in the Star‘s article.

In short, if the province permits private schools to continue to undermine provincial educational standards (and the quality of our graduates), then postsecondary schools will lose the faith in grades as an indication of those standards.  The consequent need for standardized testing would ultimately pressure all Ontario high schools and high-school teachers to adopt the same priority as the schools targeted in these articles: An emphasis upon grades over education.

Too many of our own students may already share that priority, and no doubt there are any number of directions from which they have been taught to do so.  In turn, job security for competent teachers (i.e., employment that does not simply hinge on student grades or student satisfaction) is one of the foremost elements that can help to maintain academic integrity, by limiting teachers’ personal stake in their students’ grades, permitting the teachers instead to privilege their stake in the students’ education.

And that’s a lesson that bears great significance for Ontario’s colleges and universities, where an increasing number of faculty are not full-time, and an increasing number report feeling that their continued employment depends on keeping students satisfied (care to guess how?) and on avoiding grade appeals (care to guess how?)

The long-term interests of our students, their prospective employers, and the province of Ontario all depend upon a powerful assurance that grades provide an honest reflection of academic achievement.  The ever-growing reliance on contract faculty in Ontario’s colleges and universities threatens that assurance.

E-mail your own related insights and experiences anonymously to ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com

Well, according to WordPress, this week marks both my 100th post and my 40,000th hit.

So far, the celebration has been muted — it involved only a (possibly temporary) change of theme and tagline.

But if you read the blog, this seems like an opportune time for me to invite you to consider subscribing, using the button on the right-hand side of the screen.

That’s it; celebration’s over.  Time to get back to work.

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Probably many of you checking in nowadays are looking for news about the Support Staff strike.  So let me take a moment to pass you on to the excellent strike blog at: http://strike2011.wordpress.com.  In particular, if you haven’t had the chance to read it, I recommend the essay by Ryan Patrick Way that the blog featured in its first post.  That essay happily starts to crunch some of the relevant numbers, bringing a welcome measure of empirical data to one’s understanding of the negotiations.  The blog also features a useful explanation of the union’s current bargaining position, in layman’s terms

In the next day or two, I hope to discuss some of the current initiatives undertaken by student organizations, in light of the current election campaign.

Two letters arrived, in response to one that was included in yesterday’s post.

The first is from a support-staff worker currently on the picket lines:

I empathize with everyone affected adversely during this strike.  I know everyone has tough issues to deal with, myself included.

I refuse to be bullied by the powers that be because I know they will continue to erode my rights until there is nothing left.

What will you do when the college decides your job is only required part-time, or contracted out, or eliminated? Who will you turn to for help then?

Will these college saviours be so quick to provide you with a job when they can get support staff for a dime a dozen?

The second is from a prof in the GTA:

The dilemma this fellow faces is real. It would be presumptuous to dismiss his real pain. It would be a moral conceit for me, a faculty member who is also “crossing the line,” to denounce him as a “scab” or presume to condemn him morally.

At the same time, where I come from, when your union is on strike, you do not work. End of story. No excuses, no complaints. Everyone is in the fight, or the other side wins.

I will not judge this person as an individual, but I will say three things:

1. In cases of legitimate hardship, does the Union not have the means to assist? It seems to be that it does. Has this fellow even tried that route?

2. Can his wife not delay her education for a time? Yes, it’s a sacrifice, but I’ve been a union member throughout my working life, and we all have to make sacrifices. As things stand, all Support Staff are paying his way.

3. As presumptuous as it may sound, there is a matter of principle and a matter of politics at stake.

The principle is one of selfishness vs. solidarity. Putting your own needs and desires first buys into the very market model of society that the authorities endorse … and it leads to poor wages, an end to full-time employment, the end of our pensions (just you wait!), the end of Medicare as we know it, and the creation of the sort of dog-eat-dog society that is not only ethically unsustainable, but in which middle- and working-class Canadians lose even more.

The politics are simple, too. No one I know has ever gone on strike for the fun of it. It’s the last resort and one that is, in my experience, always provoked by management. Make no mistake: the employer (and its friends in the government) figured this all out in advance. They have a plan and they’re sticking to it. The alternative is to cave in (as faculty did to our everlasting humiliation in our most recent “settlement”).  So, when a strike is forced upon us and we do what we must do, Union members either stick together or we don’t. If we don’t, the employer wins by default [. . .].

In the meantime, I have no energy to rail against this fellow. What we all must do is to find a way to make college faculty aware of the situation, [and] do the necessary education and mobilization to [. . .] stand together with the Support Staff in every possible way.

So far we haven’t, and so it is just self-indulgence to label one man who says he is 100% on-side but frets about “hostility” from his brothers and sisters who are working for their collective benefit (and in the long-term interest of the colleges, the faculty and the students).

When college professors join together and really support the Support Staff, we will have earned the right to criticize individual strike-breakers. For the moment we have our own sins to atone for, our own penance to take and our own redemption to achieve.

A valid point.  And although I can’t speak to its redemptive value, I’ll be happy to pass along the address to the Strike Hardship Fund, if I can obtain it.  Maybe one of the more effective ways that we professors could show solidarity with our support-staff colleagues would be devote a portion of our current incomes to supporting their own solidarity, inter se.

As I’ve said before, I don’t really know the details or merits of the offers and counter-offers; I only know that the strikers are the people who’ve been there so consistently when I’ve needed them, and who have helped me to accomplish my own aims.  I welcome the chance to return the favour.

Today I’m reposting two letters from readers, which represent different views on the charged topic of crossing picket lines for the purpose of strikebreaking — an act that the college administrators have been encouraging and facilitating, and one that OPSEU has been equally vocal in opposing.

Needless to say, these letters represent the opinions of the senders, and not necessarily my own.  Please feel free to send your thoughts or responses to ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com.

The first takes offense with the colleges’ invitation for strikers to cross the picket line:

I am one of the support workers on strike.  This is the first time for me and walking that picket line for hours in the cold and the rain is not easy or fun — I’d rather be back at work. But unfortunately my college doesn’t care if I’m “out on the street”; in fact, they are willing to leave me there.

Obviously they do not value or respect me or my work.   If they did they wouldn’t be sending emails telling me that’s it’s okay to cross the picket lines and that the union is lying to me. I have read the constitution and the union is not lying and it’s not okay to cross the picket line. They must think I’m stupid, stupid, stupid to believe that they only sent out the email that it was okay to cross the picket line to let me know my rights.  I guess they also think I don’t have any morals or values and would turn my back on my fellow members 

If they valued and respected me they would be telling the College Employer Council to get back to the table and bargain in good faith.  They wouldn’t be on the front page of our local paper fighting like children and pointing fingers and blaming the union for everything.  If they really valued and respected me I wouldn’t be on strike at all.

The second laments any hostility fostered by those involved in the strike towards those support staff who feel compelled by circumstance to work during it:

I agree 100% with support staff going on strike.  I am also a support staff worker.  I am concerned however about the hostility I’ve felt for having to return to work.  I am married with two children.  My wife is a full time college student.  I am the sole breadwinner in my family.  I have bad debt from some previous bad investments.  My wife commutes to college and we spend $500+ a month on gas.  Both of my children are in daycare [. . .].

I will continue to support my fellow support staff workers in any way I can, and I regret that doesn’t include walking the picket line with them.  If I wasn’t one paychecque away from being evicted, things might be different.