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Nine high school students burst into a room in which the Tucson, Arizona school board was scheduled to meet last night, chaining themselves into the very seats that the board members were scheduled to occupy. Their action forced the cancellation of the meeting, which has yet to be rescheduled.
The students were protesting a planned resolution that would remove ethnic studies from the core curriculum in Tucson schools. That resolution was drafted in response to HB 2281, a new state law intended to remove ethnic studies from the Tucson school district entirely. The board is divided on the resolution, which opponents call a capitulation to HB 2281.
There’s a fascinating piece up today at The Chronicle‘s website on a new trend in student course evaluation — “smart” recommendation systems.
The premise is that course evaluations, on their own, don’t tell provide you with as much information as they could about how you’re likely to respond to (and how well you’re likely to do in) a particular class. If most of the folks taking “Immigration in America” are upper-level Sociology majors, and you’re a Bio student looking to fill out a distribution requirement, the fact that the prof gets high ratings for clarity doesn’t tell you a lot about whether you’re likely to sink or swim.
A smart course recommendation system, on the other hand, can pull out course evaluations from students like you — same year, same major, even similar GPAs — to see how folks in your position responded to a given class or professor. As the Chronicle notes, it’s basically applying the Netflix “our best guess for you” approach to movie ratings to the world of academic advising.
While writing my dissertation, I uncovered evidence that student course evaluations first appeared in the late 1940s as a program of the National Student Association, a student-run organization that eventually grew to be one of the largest and most important student activist groups in American history. The course evaluation program at my own alma mater, in fact, started as an NSA-inspired project.
Student course evaluations have since been adopted by colleges and universities themselves, of course, even as sites like Rate My Professor have sprung up to provide students with franker, less filtered feedback. But as someone who is now on the receiving end of such evaluations, I know that they’re still often frustratingly vague and incomplete, and this kind of demographic number crunching strikes me as a big step in the direction of making them more valuable for everyone.
Last week the Cal State Northridge Daily Sundial ran an article on student drinking habits that claimed that American first-year students “spend more time drinking than studying.” Their source for this claim was a deeply flawed report produced by a company that markets anti-alcohol programs to college campuses.
As we reported last month, the study in question was little more than a marketing handout for Outside the Classroom, a for-profit company that produces anti-drinking programming for use by student affairs administrators.
The study received quite a lot of attention on its release, in large part because it was presented at the annual meeting of NASPA, a professional association for professionals in the student affairs field. What received much less attention was the fact that Outside the Classroom is a major corporate sponsor of NASPA, and paid for time at the group’s annual meeting.
And the problems with the study don’t end with its sponsorship. Its methodology is questionable and its most often repeated conclusions are not supported by the evidence it offers.
In short, the Outside the Classroom “study” is shoddy, anti-student research from a company with a financial interest in portraying students as problem drinkers. Disseminating it doesn’t bring us any closer to actually understanding student drinking habits, healthy or unhealthy.
A former student has filed a lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University claiming that she was dismissed from a graduate program in counseling for refusing to “affirm or validate homosexual behavior within the context of a counseling relationship.”
At the start of this year, when she was nearing the end of her coursework at EMU, Julea Ward was engaged in a Counseling Practicum. Ward has religious objections to homosexuality, and when she discovered that one of her assigned clients was gay, she asked her professor whether she should see the client or have him reassigned. That question, she contends, set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to disciplinary proceedings and her removal from the program.
The university has declined to comment publicly on the case, but in a March 12 letter the chair of her disciplinary committee said that Ward had “by clear and convincing evidence” violated ethical standards requiring that counselors “avoid imposing values that are inconsistent with counseling goals” or engage in discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
A copy of Ward’s complaint, with various documents relating to the disciplinary charges, can be found in PDF form here.
Update: We analyze Ward’s suit and the conservative blogosphere’s response.
A fifth grade class in Murfreesboro, TN learned about the civil rights movement this month by staging a protest march … against junk food.
Here’s the meat of the article:
After a two-week lesson on civil rights, the students picked their own issue, eating healthy and exercise, and marched in protest.
Parent Belinda Pate said she thought it was a good way to get the history lesson across, plus healthy eating a exercise are “what us parents are always trying to protest with our kids.”
The teachers also had the students wear different colored T-shirts – either red, green or blue – and treated the groups differently depending on what color they wore.
For example on the way to the protest, red-shirted students had to sit in the back of the bus, blue-shirts sat in the middle and weren’t allowed to talk, and green-shirts could sit in the front of the bus and talk all they wanted, student Asha Phillips explained.
The teachers also made different groups use different bathrooms at school.
This kind of thing leaves me deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, it’s great to see kids learning about activism and organizing in school, and being encouraged to think of themselves as potential activists.
On the other hand…
If you think about what would have happened if the “protest” had been about a controversial subject — gay teachers, say, or prayer in the schools — you see just how problematic the exercise is. Because you really couldn’t do an event like that. Whatever position the class adopted would be offensive to somebody’s parent, and probably go against the values of at least a few of the kids. This “protest” was only possible because it wasn’t the contemporary equivalent of a civil rights march. And that’s not even getting into the whole t-shirt thing.
I don’t want to get off on too much of a rant here. I’m sure these teachers meant well, and I give them credit for trying to bring this particular moment in history alive. But teaching about social justice movements is hard. It’s challenging. If you make it easy, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Anyway, that’s my reaction. What’s yours?
studentactivism.net 
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