Primrose Road

There's an article in this quarter's Skeptic magazine about some of the causes and effects of the "positive thinking" movement in American culture that for the most part rehashes previous arguments about self-esteem and The Secret but presents some interesting facts about the self-esteem movement in the classroom. Author Steve Salerno notes that psychologists found that while students in three Asian countries had stronger academic skills, students to whom they were compared in the United States "expressed much higher self-appraisals." The self-esteem movement may have simply made students feel more confident about poor academic skills and destroyed their ability to self-appraise, a skill that educational psychologists have shown is actually important to academic performance.

I remember several years ago taking a course within the composition program at my university's English department and students presenting unreflectingly positive reviews of a book that suggested that grading was akin to violence. At the same time, I was taking educational psychology courses and learning about research that shows that teaching is most effective when clear objectives are set and evaluated as quantitatively as possible. Though grading, when not used correctly, can indeed serve as a method of punishing students who do not enter the classroom with a certain skill set, I wonder if the grading-as-metaphor-for-violence idea instead comes from a concern that grading simply doesn't feel good.

Self-esteem feels good. Of course, as any competent psychologist will tell you, what feels good isn't always good for you; in fact, psychological treatment itself can often be unpleasant. While I think that we do need to eliminate the correlation between standardized testing and funding and socialize our public schools a bit more so that every child actually does have the opportunity to start from the same place, I at the same time do not believe that holding this view means that I must also buy into the idea that if it feels good, it is good. Policy in this case needs to be left up to educational psychologists, not self-esteem pushers and people with ideas about metaphors.

Measles is on the rise again in the United States thanks to celebs and M.G.'s (the respected "Master of Google" degree) pushing the belief -- to desperate parents in desperate situations -- that vaccines cause autism.

Read about it here and here.

Put really simply: this is why science education and critical thinking skills are so important.

During the summer, I teach SAT prep for the high school kiddies. When I told a class that the SAT is a reasoning test and that content-wise, there's nothing above Sequential I Math, they laughed and told me that there has been no such thing as Sequential I for years. There are now two Regents exams -- Math A and Math B -- in place of the three that I had to take when I was in high school.

What this means: the required terms of math / required terms of gym ratio in most New York State high schools is now more ridiculous than ever.

To this day, I live in fear that someday the Dept. of Ed is going to come after me for the term of high school gym I'm "technically" missing and threaten to revoke all of my degrees unless I go back and pass one gym class. Of course, I'm nearly 100% sure that that won't -- and can't happen -- but the concept could rake in some cash as a Drew Barrymore movie, no? ;)

Fighting a Brecht-and-Deleuze-induced headache, I took two Advil and went to the Chinese restaurant up the block to get some chicken fried rice. While waiting fifteen minutes for my rice, I paged through a copy of The Learning Annex's latest catalog, noting every seminar led by someone with the letters "Ph.D." after his or her name.

On a related note, can we please grind up the Law of Attraction, bake it in a pie, and serve it to its mother for dinner?

Of the six "Ph.D."s in the catalog, two are legit. One woman teaches Law of Attraction-style thinking, but she has a dissertation listed in Dissertation Abstracts International. Another, despite being endorsed by Oprah, has a Ph.D. from an Ivy League school, with a dissertation on a non-woo topic. The other four (I'm being nice and not including names):

1) A Ph.D. in "energy medicine." Two biographies online tell us where he's taught, but not where he obtained his degree.

2) A Ph.D. candidate at an unaccredited distance education school of "esoteric and hypnotherapy studies." According to her bio, she attended one accredited university, though it doesn't say anything about her having graduated or earned a degree. The second institution listed does not appear to exist anywhere outside of the woman's own biography.

3) A "former psychology professor" who doesn't tell us where she formerly professed. She also isn't forthcoming on where she earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, which would explain why there are no hits on her very distinctive name in Dissertation Abstracts International.

4) A "metaphysicist" who calls herself "Dr. ______ ________, Ph.D.," though her site mentions nothing about her having earned a degree. There are zero hits on her name in Dissertation Abstracts International.

Word of advice: people with accredited, legitimate advanced degrees tend to be forthcoming about where they earned those degrees.

In today's New York Times Magazine (The College Issue), David Leonhardt takes into account the intersection of the categories of low-income students and minority students, and indeed points out that

"many of the beneficiaries of the preferences end up being upper-middle-class minority students, since they tend to have better test scores than poor minorities."

Even with affirmative action in place, universities tend to favor students from middle- to upper-middle-class families.

"The colleges apparently put even more stock in the polish that comes with affluence — the well-edited essay, the summer trip to Guatemala, the Arabic language lessons. In any case, the poor lose."

Then, Leonhardt alludes to what may be the most problematic aspect of college admissions: even in the era of affirmative action, they rely on outmoded forms of intelligence testing:

"Intelligence, indisputably, is in part genetic; and every intelligence test shows a gap between black Americans and others. For a long time, scientific research wasn’t very good at explaining this gap. But it has gotten better lately. For one thing, the gap between white and black adults has narrowed significantly since 1970, according to work by the noted researchers William Dickens and James Flynn. Four decades is too short a time period for the gene pool to change, but it’s not too short for environment to improve. Most intriguing, Roland Fryer and Steven D. Levitt, two economists (the latter is one of this magazine’s Freakonomics columnists), have found there to be essentially no gap between 1-year-old white and black children of the same socioeconomic status."

It seems that "socioeconomic status" is the key here: despite the many adjustments ETS has made to the SAT in the past few decades, the idea underlying the test and standardized tests like it (even if most of us no longer subscribe to this kind of thinking) is that low-income students should be kept out of the ol' Ivory Tower. Even today, students who have attended well-funded schools, can afford a $1500 test prep course, and even have a working knowledge of Latin have an automatic advantage on tests like the SAT.

Affirmative action, as it currently stands, seems to be based far more on politics and "good ideas" than it does on actual research in educational psychology. Meanwhile, the SAT and GRE are based on 1920s and 1930s testing methods designed to keep out low-income students (and there is, of course, a sizable intersection between "low-income" and "minority" in this country). In my view, an alternative to overly-politicized, not-really-student-centered affirmative action policies would be a radical rethinking of admissions testing. While SAT administrators have taken a step in the right direction by eliminating analogy questions (which often took the form of the infamous RUNNER:MARATHON::OARSMAN:REGATTA one), I believe that we would benefit from an alternative test (one that would eventually eat the SAT alive, perhaps) based on unbiased educational psychology research.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I teach test prep classes to supplement my adjunct-o-riffic income. And I've seen firsthand what a difference a few thousand dollars and a few extra hours of leisure time can make in terms of students' SAT, GRE, and LSAT success.]

A Ministry of Education-approved trade college for astrologers has opened in the Ukraine. But before you dismiss this as residual Eastern Bloc wackiness, note that we have a fully functional, non diploma mill college of astrology right here in the United States. Though unaccredited, Kepler seems to offer its A.A. and B.A. students a relatively rigorous liberal arts curriculum, requiring courses in classical languages (Latin and Ancient Greek), literature, history, and psychology comparable to those offered at the country's better community colleges. Students are required to do two years of coursework for the associate's and four years for the bachelor's. Since 2001, when the school was approved to issue degrees (but still not accredited), there have been debates as to whether the school should be accredited.

I'd like to go with the "well, at least it's not a diploma mill" argument, but it's difficult to get past the fact that the school is offering degrees in a pseudoscience. The majority of students in my 200-level poetry class this term are earning bachelors' degrees in biology, mechanical engineering, or architecture; what does it mean for them that in two years, the "B.A." or "B.S." on their resumes could be, accreditation-wise, the same "B.A." or "B.S." on a Kepler graduate's resume?

Employers and passers-by aren't always going to be able to recognize the difference. I have in the last year spoken to a number of people who, perhaps or perhaps not surprisingly, believed that unaccredited online institutions were a godsend for people lacking the time and money to invest in an advanced degree. They claimed that there was no fundamental distinction between my Ph.D. (which, when I earn it in 2009, will have four-and-a-half years of coursework, a master's thesis, six months of studying for comprehensive exams, articles, conference presentations, and a dissertation behind it) and a Ph.D. obtained from an unaccredited institution with $5000, 6 months of classes, and a fifty-page research paper.

In fact, there seem to be two levels to the diploma mill problem: (1) government workers and educators who have knowingly used diploma mill degrees to "earn" promotions, and pop-psychology authors who knowingly pad their credentials with false doctorates; and (2) those learners who honestly don't know that six months of classes and a fifty-page research paper does not a dissertation make.

So I wonder, in light of the diploma-mill issues that don't quite apply to the US's very own astrology college but nonetheless affect decisions regarding accreditation, is it reasonable or ethical to confer accreditation on a liberal arts college of pseudoscience?