In addition to his physics research activities, Dr. Bozack has a distinguished career in science education and continues to publish actively in the area.  His most recent contribution . . .

When Feel-Good Education Hurts

Michael J. Bozack, Surface Science Laboratory, Department of Physics, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849

It happens every quarter.  The day after final grades are posted, there are several notes on my door from irate students who want to talk about their grade.  Then the phone starts ringing.  "There must be a mistake.  I couldn't have received a D in your course.  I'm not a D student."  In my email, there is a message from a student saying that it was impossible for him to get an F in the course, despite the fact that he missed an hourly exam and handed in less than half of the homework assignments.  Then a knock at my door.  "Dr. Bozack, if I get a C in your course, my dad will kill me and I will get kicked out of my sorority.  Is there any way you can change it to a B?"  And the litany of complaints continues for several days.

Where is all this coming from?  When I was a student, I remember complaining about difficult assignments or a poor grader, but I never asked my professors to change my grade.  Is the problem my grading system?  Not unless you believe that setting standards for achievement is a bad thing.  No, the problem is much deeper, and lies in what has been a steady diet of "feel-good" education at the secondary level.  Secondary schools have become environments where mediocre achievement is condoned and rewarded.  Each incoming class of college freshmen brings further evidence of lowered skills, inadequate preparation, and inability to do college-level work.  As a result, many first-year college students are frustrated because they now find themselves paying the price for years of goofing off and lax standards.

Can the current, deplorable trends be reversed?  Not easily.  Once the dumbed-down genie is out of the bottle, it is difficult to return to tough standards.  But return we must, or we place our students and their future in jeopardy.  Here are some observations about how to get there and what we should be teaching.

Teach the Discipline of Study Skills and Work Habits
A large fraction of incoming freshmen has little or no study skills and are unwilling to put forth the effort to learn because studying is difficult and requires work.  Instead, many students spend their evening hours watching TV, socializing, or working, but not studying -- at least until the day before the test.  I frequently hear students brag about how they aced all their courses in high school by never cracking a book.  If they never had to study in high school, and received good grades, why should they have to in college?  Further, the value of learning is a non-issue for many students because of the long hours and the hard work required.  In a society saturated with surface values such as fame and wealth, education sounds eccentric.

Part of the problem is due to "social promotion," the practice of promoting students to the next grade before they exhibit competence at the previous grade.  The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) studied the promotion policies in 85 school districts in 32 states. While no school district explicitly endorses social promotion, most have "an implicit policy" that places limits on holding students back, said AFT president Sandra Feldman.  The report found that about half of the districts restrict the number of times a student can be retained, prohibit retention in specific grades, or set age limits to move older students along.  The conclusion, noted Feldman at the National Press Club, is that there is "a clear message to promote socially" in our schools. When students get the message that they can get by for just showing up, it's not hard to understand why they make little effort to study.

Restore Order in Schools and Develop a Backbone
Many good teachers are frustrated at the lack of administrative and moral support in the schools.  Politically-correct and meaningless exercises in "sensitivity training" and "student rights" substitute for what could be solved by simple refusal to tolerate disrespectful behavior on the part of students.  But teachers are in a no-win situation as they deal with the social pronouncements of the liberal educational establishment.  Administrators often care more about not hurting parents' feelings than in supporting faculty.  If students know they can run to the principal or cry lawsuit whenever a teacher tries to enforce discipline in the classroom, education is undermined and students learn to complain to get their way.  Misbehaving students then control the classroom environment at the expense of good students who want to learn.  It should be the other way around.

Offer Courses Which are Meaningful and Which Challenge Students
Many students tell me of secondary teachers who are reduced to babysitters or who assign so much busywork to keep students occupied that little learning takes place.  This is what I fear about the current push to get computers in the schools -- computers are likely to become another television, an additional  babysitter which entertains and passes time at the expense of real education.  Further, students are allowed to bypass traditionally difficult courses such as math and science in deference to watered-down, "feel-good" courses that pad their GPA.  Busywork is not education.  When I was in high school, the best course I had was English Literature (not science).  The teacher required that we write an essay every week and read the classics of literature.  He taught us to argue critically, to express ourselves orally, and to develop a love for literature.  We had to memorize poems, study the background of great literary figures, and read our work aloud in class.  Busywork was not an option.  Several Rhodes scholars were the product of his efforts.

Teach Basic Functional Skills and Stop the Feel-Good Education
The tragedy of modern education is that a student can come out of high school today with little reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. Whatever happened to content?  One would think, for example, that a person who studied English nearly every week of his life for 12 years would be an expert and have a Ph.D. in the subject.  But alas, most of our students can barely write a grammatically correct sentence.  Such is the value of taxpayer dollars for a public education for our children.

The lack of basic functional skills is especially evident in science education where, in a recent editorial in USA Today, Ann Finkbeiner bemoans the conclusion that only half of Americans polled know that the Earth orbits the sun once a year.  But I'm not talking about the ability to work with Newton's Laws, but the basic skills of writing an effective sentence, the ability to count change in a store, and how to communicate verbally.  Dave Sloan, writing in a recent issue of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, polled a random sampling of 130 graduating seniors in the Atlanta school district to find out how many could add 1/2 + 1/4.  Fewer than one-fourth could get it right.  All had passed the Georgia Graduation Test, and one woman was an honors student and was headed to a major university on a scholarship, yet she could not add 1/2 + 1/4.  And to add insult to injury, only half the kids entering high school in Atlanta graduate in the first place -- Sloan was polling the kids who had finished school.  I frequently hear students in my PS 200 Foundations of Physics class at Auburn say  "I know the answer, but I can't express it."  Such a response is not surprising when students enter college without functional skills.

Teach that Grades Reflect Achievement and Not Merely Effort
Achievement is not the same as effort.  Try to tell Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls that his salary is based on merely showing up at the game.  No, Jordan's pay is based on his outstanding performance with the basketball.  Before the era of feel-good education, grades were indicators of personal achievement, not just whether you tried or not.  Not so any more.  There is a current, alarming trend that views grades not as achievement markers but as consumer commodities subject to negotiation.  The attitude is that you can get a better grade by taking it back to exchange it for a better one, similar to getting a freebie gift or redeemable coupons.  There is a disconnect between grades and the quality of one's work.

This attitude stems from a steady diet of gift grades and gummy bears for self-esteem.  The message is that students can get by without talent and work if they can pressure the teacher into a break or cheat their way through school.  But perhaps I should not be surprised, for the prevailing value system today tacitly assumes that if you can get it for free, then why work?

Teach the Value of Personal Accountability
For many students, it's someone else's fault if they get a low grade -- either "the teacher was terrible," "my grader was too hard," or "my parents won't send me any money so I have to work."  In many cases, students try to wheedle better grades for no other reason than it worked in the past and they just want a better grade.  Nothing about whether they earned it or not.  Accountability is frequently not even relevant -- "If I don't get a C, I'll lose my scholarship" or "I'm on academic probation, and I can't get another D" or "if I don't maintain a 2.0, I won't graduate on time."  The teacher is the one who is responsible for someone being on probation, losing a scholarship, or not graduating on time.  In a society where everyone is a victim, this attitude is not hard to understand.  

Teach that the Current Lax Standards Result in Disaster Later
What happens when socially-promoted students graduate?  That's when eroding academic standards become most evident.  In my case, the majority of the students I teach are science and engineering majors. What happens when a student, that I have passed because I didn't want to hurt his feelings, gets a job?  The classic example familiar to all physics teachers is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (TNB) Disaster.  The TNB, a large suspension bridge near Seattle, collapsed during a storm because an engineer miscalculated how much wind it could take before shaking apart.  Remember the Hubble Space Telescope fiasco?  The engineers who were supervising the construction of the telescope primary mirror made an error during the mirror grinding that nearly turned a multi-million dollar project into space junk.  Or the Challenger disaster?  Should I continually reward students for answers on exams that are "partially" correct?  Tell that to the families of the individuals who perished when the Challenger blew up during liftoff.  In short, there are serious, social consequences of errors and lack of expertise. Close enough and partial credit do not cut it in the real world.

Teach Values and Morality
The foul behaviors and bad manners that have been accepted and tolerated in secondary schools are now starting to filter into colleges. The problem has become so serious that several colleges have adopted "value pledges" that all incoming freshmen are asked to take in response to increasing poor behavior among students.  The University of Pittsburgh, for example, has a pledge statement called a "Commitment to Civility" which says that learning is "best accomplished in an atmosphere of mutual respect and civility, self-restraint, concern for others, and academic integrity."  Good luck.  It is ironic that values education is currently encouraged in Russian schools, but you open yourself to lawsuits if you attempt to teach morals in the United States.  This was brought home to me by a missionary friend who had just spent a short-term mission trip teaching values in Russian schools.

Teaching academic subjects is one thing, but we must also teach our students respect for people, authority, and country, and character traits such as honor, integrity, truthfulness, responsibility, and service. In a society of broken homes and a 50% divorce rate, morals are not being taught by loving parents at home.  Many students think that getting a degree reduces to working the system, usually by shortcuts to learning. Too many of our schools have abdicated their responsibility to teach values.  John A. Pidgeon, headmaster of The Kiski School, a college preparatory school east of Pittsburgh, writes that "building character is fundamental to the education process.  A student's success will be measured by far more than his SAT score.  The world will judge him not by his good grades, but by his good character.  A man of good character has the personal integrity to do what is right, not what is expedient.  He doesn't follow fashion, but forges his own path . . . it's fine that a student understands how to navigate the information superhighway, but he should also understand simple courtesy."

Until that time comes, a whole raft of college professors will continue to wonder whether we should hole up at the beach for a few days after finals.