The Teagle Liblog

A year ago, Teagle made a $75,000 grant to the Partnership for After School Education (PASE) to support its Supporting Afterschool Agencies in Turbulent Times (SAATT) initiative. SAATT emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and was designed to help youth-serving organizations in New York cope with the new economic conditions, and importantly, develop plans that would ensure their stability in the future. With the grant, PASE selected 10 organizations and worked with them to develop strategic plans, identify program outcomes, facilitate staff development, strengthen information technology systems, review financial and fiscal plans, and the like. In addition, PASE ran 6 training sessions—which were open to all organizations in its network—on topics such as evaluation and assessment, strategic planning, creating collaborations and strategic alliances, working with boards, and securing funds for general operating support.

“Findings” from the SAATT initiative were detailed in PASE’s report to the Foundation, and are as follows:

Smaller, nascent agencies are often the ones most in need of assistance as well as the ones for whom individualized support can have the greatest impact. At the same time, however, providing technical assistance to small agencies presents unique challenges. These agencies often lack “the capacity to build capacity,” and the limited number of staff and high demands on leaders of these organizations means that investment in capacity-building must be flexible and well-monitored in order to be effective.

Smaller organizations typically have only one or two individuals in senior leadership positions, and unlike in larger organizations, these leaders are likely to be responsible not only for organizational management but also for supervising day-to-day program operations, often at a very “micro” level. Working with an executive director or senior leader within a multi-tiered management structure at a large organization is a very different endeavor from working with a leader who is not only responsible for the overall management of an organization but may on any given day be called upon to step in and lead an art class in place of an absent teacher, discipline or counsel an individual student, or even go to the grocery store to purchase snacks. Smaller programs also struggle significantly more with emergent circumstances. Staff departures, facilities issues, or any other major disruptions tend to take attention away from any other organizational projects until they are resolved.

A less significant challenge but still an important one to recognize is the powerful personal connection that senior leaders of small agencies—who are often the founders of their organizations as well—have with their organizations. The passion of these individuals for their work is often integral to the success of their organizations, but it can also result in the perception of professional advice as personal criticism.

It is PASE’s experience, however, that none of these challenges diminishes the desire of small organizations and their leaders for healthier management practices and systems or their recognition of the value of expert external assistance. These leaders recognize that the improvement of internal systems and the building of organizational capacity are critical to sustainability and success. This strong desire means that capacity building for small agencies can still be a success despite the challenges described above. In its experience working with these agencies through SAATT and other projects, PASE has identified the characteristics of an approach that will allow technical assistance to overcome these challenges and effect organizational change:

• Employ a joint assessment process that collaboratively identifies needs and priorities. In order for technical assistance to achieve change within an organization, agency leaders must understand the need for this change and recognize it as a priority.

• Ensure that the agency leaders understand the time and energy that will be required to achieve their technical assistance goals and are prepared to commit those resources.

• Establish a clear timeline with deadlines by which particular steps will be completed and revisit this timeline frequently. This timeline should include at least one near-term goal that is readily achievable.

• Balance setting high expectations for these agencies and adherence to the timeline with the recognition that the many competing demands on agency leaders requires flexibility. Technical assistance for small agencies may take longer than services for large agencies.

• Understand and accommodate the emotional connection of leaders to their organizations. In order to be successful, technical assistance providers must be prepared to take a personal approach in their work by findings way to engage with agency leaders, acknowledge their successes, and regularly emphasize that the purpose of technical assistance is to strengthen and sustain their program.

This is all pretty important stuff to keep in mind, even when times are not turbulent.

Over the last few years, there has been a wave of publications defending the place of the humanities in the academy, supporting a return to “classical” education, and bemoaning the emphasis on professionalism in higher education. (See, for example Martha Nussbaum’s “Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities,” Stanley Fish’s column in the New York Times , “A Classical Education: Back to the Future,” and the series on “Science, The Humanities, and The University,” in The New Atlantis .) It is hard to argue with the basic premise that the humanities are a crucial element of every education, college or pre-college: that they inspire and encourage creativity, place ideas in the context of history, prepare students to become engaged citizens, and develop the skills for critical analysis and argument. Where these authors err is in placing the sciences in opposition to these goals. This false tension comes as a result of misunderstanding the nature of the scientific enterprise—bad science education has a lot to answer for!—and a conflation of science itself with the uses to which it has been put.

It is stating the obvious to say that the sciences and the humanities are just two approaches to seeking knowledge. Neither is inherently “useful,” in the sense that is embraced by policymakers and decried by the authors of the above works. (The average high school or college graduate sees no more use for algebra than for Silas Marner.) The humanities and sciences share a goal of understanding the world and our place in it, out of curiosity and wonder and in search of answers to large questions. Employers and politicians who promote science as being more immediately relevant to economic progress are looking for technicians, not scientists, and are short-sighted even according to their own standards: surveys show a majority of employers seek to hire graduates with a broad range of skills and knowledge along with those in-depth in a specific field.

It is ironic that the contribution from science favored by advocates of classical education is almost exclusively content: vocabulary, memorization, and application of basic skills. As most scientist/educators know, content-heavy courses are what drive many talented students away from science. Rather than use the analogy of having to drill on scales before you can play inspired music, I prefer to compare early education in science to learning a landscape by walking in it, not by studying maps.

The basic difference that I have seen—as a scientist, teacher, and administrator— between humanistic fields and scientific ones is in what counts as evidence. Scientists trust data, from which they build theory and make predictions. Humanists trust argument from which they build narrative (or sometimes vice versa ). The more data, the better for scientists, while for humanists a single compelling story can be enough. These differences make for difficult and sometimes contentious faculty meetings, and they explain a lot of the tension around assessment of student learning. Students, however, ought to be exposed to both systems of acquiring knowledge and creating it. Students who major in the sciences at a liberal arts college seem to have the best of both worlds; while students majoring in the humanities or social sciences take the minimum science required for graduation (none if none is required), science students take many more humanities courses and social sciences than needed. As the Nobel laureate Tom Cech describes, these students receive “cross-training” in the disciplines. Further support for this cross-training comes from recent experiments in eliminating the requirement for basic sciences in admission to medical school. The comments posted in response to a story in the New York Times about the Mt. Sinai Humanities and Medicine Program were filled with testimonials from physicians and medical students of the ways in which science courses, along with humanities courses, had enriched their learning even when not directly relevant to medicine.

Scientists and humanists should be working together to encourage broad liberal education and, in fact, to be finding ways to embed their values and approaches into the professions if that is where students can encounter them.

“I just don’t do math.”

“I’m not right-brained enough for that.”

“If I can test out of college algebra, I’ll never have to do math again.”

Those of us who work with incoming students to our colleges and universities hear these kinds of statements all the time. Despite deeply held beliefs and prejudices about mathematical thinking, the appropriate response to all three is that as participants in the world, they have no choice but to “do” math.

Cooking, estimating earned run averages, constructing a fence, or winning a game of poker all require people to “do” math, even when they can’t. Perhaps even more vitally, people can’t make decisions about government, health, and the economy without a sound understanding of statistics and numeric reasoning. Mathematical understanding is a real world skill that can be a barrier to full engagement in the world.

In the thirty-six small private colleges and universities of the Appalachian College Association (ACA), roughly 20 to 30 % of incoming freshman need to take some sort of developmental mathematics in order to be ready for statistics, pre-calculus, or calculus. This is not unusual across the United States; the percentages can rise even higher for public universities. This is despite the fact that most students graduate from high school with at least two years of college algebra.

To deal with the paradox of negative cultural mores about mathematical thinking despite the reality of an ongoing need for mathematically literate individuals, educators talk about the need for Quantitative Literacy, Quantitative Reasoning, and/or Numeracy as an essential skill for all college graduates.

In a forthcoming series of blog entries, ACA campuses that have worked on increasing ease with mathematical competency among their incoming freshmen will talk about some of the challenges and opportunities they pursued with the assistance of funding from the Teagle Foundation. Please feel free to contact me, Irene Burgess at ireneb@acaweb.org if you want further information on details of the projects from Berea College, Bethany College and Emory & Henry College.

A few years back, Bob Connor wrote in this blog about a New Yorker essay that had had a powerful impact upon him -- Atul Gawande’s “Bell Curve.” The essay, which Gawande later included in his collection Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, describes the range of outcomes for centers that treat cystic fibrosis, outcomes measured in life expectancy for their patients. These outcomes fall into a bell-shaped curve, with a few centers at the best and worst ends of the spectrum and the majority falling into the large middle bulge. In 1997, the practical meaning of the curve was that a patient being treated in an average center could expect to live just around thirty years; those at the top center had a life expectancy of forty-six, a gain of over 50%. Gawande’s diagnosis suggests that two essential factors determine whether an institution can move its performance out of the middle range and to the right side of the bell curve: the presence of a transformational leader, and an overarching institutional willingness to commit to doing whatever is necessary to achieve change. Underlying the two factors is a further prerequisite: a readiness to be utterly transparent about one’s outcomes and efforts to improve them.

What intrigued Bob Connor about Gawande’s essay was the questions it posed for higher education: is there a similar bell curve for our institutions? if so, how would it match up with existing rankings, such as those in US News and World Report? and, is it possible for an institution to significantly change its performance? Like Bob, I found this an extraordinary essay when I first encountered it – and indeed I’d heartily recommend Gawande’s book to anyone interested in how organizations can reinvent themselves through a process of improving the basics of practice. Rereading the essay recently, however, I found myself asking some other questions and wondered whether higher education is getting much closer to tackling the issues Gawande describes and whether we are much closer to making the kinds of change for which he calls? Specifically, how fully and how deeply has higher education embraced assessment of its work in the way that cystic fibrosis centers have used it to improve their outcomes?

For me, one of the most educative experiences of the past decade has been the opportunity to serve on teams visiting campuses as part of the accreditation process – it’s a marvelous opportunity to plunge deep into another institution, explore its processes and culture, and learn how, in ways both like and unlike one’s home institution, it goes about trying to accomplish goals of liberal learning. On every visit, assessment has emerged as a significant issue and prompted a range of questions for the team: why has this institution not really begun to assess student learning? Why did that campus respond so well to the report of the last visiting team, do good initial work with developing assessment measures, and then lose impetus a few years later? How can any institution engage in assessment in a way that helps it become something that faculty and staff find meaningful and even essential to their own fundamental work with students? And last but not least, what can be done to help college presidents move from seeing assessment as a hurdle to be got over rather than an opportunity to help them shape their institution? Time and again, one or more of these questions takes shape as the team learns during its visit, through the accumulation of individual conversations, just where the campus culture truly stands on developing its understanding of student outcomes. Moreover, just as Gawande found with hospitals, perceived institutional quality provides no guarantee of success: last year, by luck of the draw, I had the opportunity to be on three teams visiting institutions ranked among in the top 15 national liberal arts colleges by US News. In each case, the campus was facing significant challenges around assessment and, above all, still clearly needed to be persuaded that assessment could be intrinsically valuable rather than merely an externally imposed requirement.

A significant part of the challenge, in both medicine and higher education, lies in fundamental issues of organizational culture. When Gawande visited the top-ranked center for treating cystic fibrosis, Fairview-University Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis, he found those factors he saw as essential to improving outcomes: charismatic leadership, overarching institutional commitment, and transparency. However, he also saw “a degree of uniformity that clinicians usually find intolerable” and, what one doctor described as the director’s absence of “collegial respect for different care plans.” To improve outcomes in higher education our most daunting challenge may well be neither the accrediting agencies nor the US Department of Education, but, rather, something that is also the source of our greatest strength: the intellectual diversity and mandate to explore one’s field that we tend to encode into the concept of academic freedom. For it is precisely that commitment to intellectual diversity and the emphasis it has long placed upon individual faculty autonomy that has made it such a challenge to persuade faculty members to look beyond their own courses, see the value of assessing students as a cumulative product of all their educational experiences within the curriculum, and work together to develop such assessments.

How do things get better, then? As a modest proposal, let me suggest the value of separating assessment out of the context of accreditation and linking it instead to that transformational leadership Gawande saw as essential to creating change in the hospitals he visited. College presidents, who are so often called to make declarative statements about the quality of learning on their campuses, are also those best positioned to ask the most fundamental questions about identity and mission and the extent to which the institutions they are stewarding are, in fact, accomplishing their claims. Moreover, and especially on small campuses, it is they who are best placed to exercise the kind of leverage that is ultimately needed to reshape institutional cultures and to conduct the tricky business of persuading the faculty to take on a task that potentially calls for a working in very new ways. In difficult economic times and just two weeks before the peak of this year’s admissions cycle, the challenge of creating a true culture of assessment may well not be the most pressing issue on a president’s mind, but what will best serve their institutions best in the longer term? Just as the treatment of cystic fibrosis shows what could be gained when the resistance to developing and sharing common sets of outcomes data was overcome, so too liberal learning will ultimately be all the stronger for campus leaders who commit to understanding, and disclosing, what truly happens to students on our campuses.





Iain Crawford teaches in the department of English at the University of Delaware. He served as the vice president for academic affairs at The College of Wooster from 2003 to 2009.