Frankly, I never imagined that Santorum could become a serious challenger. He lacks any noticeable charisma, it seems to me, he lost his 2006 bid for a third Senate term by 18 points (big losers in state politics don’t normally become national winners), and he’s far too openly religio-moralistic in his politics for most people–even most conservatives–to feel really comfortable with him. So…why Santorum now?

I think the answer is simple; there’s nobody else left. All the other anti-Mitts having run themselves out of the race through their own verbal idiocies, there’s only one Anti-Mitt left and he’s it. He was not a serious candidate at the beginning of the process, and given any other acceptable conservative he would not be a serious candidate now. But by virtue of having avoided any big verbal gaffes–or perhaps of having just avoided the spotlight–he has become the last man standing for conservatives. (And it hasn’t hurt that Romney has made a couple of verbal gaffes himself recently.)

But now all attention is on Santorum. The spotlight that was previously elsewhere, drawing attention to the oratorical oopsies of others, is now focused on him. That means everyone is now oohing and aahing over the threat he poses to Romney. But of course they oohed and aahed over the other would-be anti-Mitts, too, plumping each on up as maybe being the real deal. Whether they did that simply because it sells or because the national media is really shallow enough to take each flash-in-the-pan as the second coming of St. Ronnie of Malibu, I don’t really know, but in each they over-estimated the candidate’s chances.

And there’s the lesson for the moment. The media is again agog over a conservative anti-Mitt’s chances, but now that the spotlight is on Santorum, does he actually have a chance to fair any better than his predecessors? Or will he the spotlight simply bring national attention to errors he has made, is making, or will make?

Possibly he has more staying power simply because he’s the last hope. Had he been the first to attract notice, perhaps he’d now be gone, and we might be focusing on whichever other candidate had best avoided drawing attention to him/herself. But being last, the conservative base simply has no other place to turn, so they may stick with him no matter what, out of sheer necessity.

But…this is Rick Santorum we’re talking about. He lost his Pennsylvania Senate race by 18 points as an incumbent because he insisted on basing his campaign on moral issues, and that’s still the basis of his campaign. Sure, he looks good at the moment, but how many “theology” statements can he make before he looks every bit as crazy as Michele Bachmann? How many people, even among conservative Republicans, want a president who argues that “Satan is systematically destroying America“? Americans surely like to see their presidents sitting in a church pew, and we like him to say “God bless America,” but we really don’t respond well to the “preacher as president” model (ask Mike Huckabee about his presidential aspirations).

My prediction is that Santorum stumbles badly, in the near future, as the media begins to spotlight the way in which he fails to discriminate between religion and politics. It won’t be his Catholicism that does him in but his evangelicalism. And for me that can’t come too quickly. I don’t care much about a president’s private religious beliefs, but I don’t want a president driven by apocalyptic visions, or one who thinks half the country is demon-possessed. No good can come of that.

She also recorded comments that she received. Keep in mind her clientele was predominantly white, but it’s not as if black folks are at all unusual in our town (only about 4.5% of the population is black, but it’s a small town so it’s not like they’re cloistered far away from the eyes of us white folks). The two comments that caught me as just being crass, while attempting to be complimentary, were:

• “You are the prettiest black girl I have ever seen.”
• “You have pretty eyes girl, all the black guys must want you.”

And she noted,

When told that the blue eyes were contacts approximately one half of all guests seemed disappointed while the other half were careful to mention, “You’re still beautiful regardless”.

The student took this well, commenting that she understood they were trying to be complimentary, but noted that she felt, “an underlying sense of dissatisfaction, with hidden language suggesting that I did not quite measure up.” Of course that’s not very objective data about what the customers were thinking, but it’s pretty objective data about this particular African-American female’s subjective response.

Some racism is subtler than other racism, and some is wholly unintended and unconscious. Keep that in mind next time you tip your waitress.

It’s not too far-fetched to think my job is some combination of these. And after more than a decade in this business, you’d think my wife would actually know that I’m not always at the beach (this is Michigan, and we teach in winter, dear). All that’s missing is what my administration thinks I do, but that’s probably NSFW.

When Gregoire signed Washington’s “everything but marriage” domestic partnerships bill into law in 2009, I predicted it was the prelude to full-blown same-sex marriage in the state because it authorized all the legal rights of marriage in domestic partnerships, withholding only the name. It was a camel’s nose under the tent kind of ploy, and I said at the time it would allow Washingtonians to get accustomed to the idea, and eventually realize that there wasn’t any gain in withholding the word. (Although on the potential significance of the word itself, see Burt Likko’s comment on the 9th Circuit’s Prop 8 decision.)

Of course local bigots are planning to put a repealing initiative on the ballot. Hellfire and damnation, why can’t they just leave people alone?

Once upon a time opponents of SSM used to (correctly) claim that SSM had never been enacted democratically. Nowadays they’ve had to drop that argument, because Washington follows New Hampshire, D.C., New York, Vermont, and Maine (although Maine’s law was repealed by a vote of the public–on the other hand, the public’s likely to vote on it again this year, and if the new initiative passes, it will be the first time SSM has passed through citizen initiative).

Even conservatives at this point recognize that same-sex marriage is here to stay. All they can hope for now is a semi-successful rear-guard action to keep it from spreading to every state. I’m reminded of the British toast from the Napoleonic wars, “Confusion to our enemies!”

You may remember that the last one had a section of the upper deck collapse in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. This one is designed to withstand the greatest lateral displacement expected from a quake in the next 1500 years. And what fascinates me is one of the key features, “sacrificial sections of weaker steel” that will absorb the energy, sparing the rest of the structure. These are 60 foot long sliding steel tubes at the joints, and hinge plates that connect the four shafts that make up the single tower of the suspension bridge portion. I immediately thought of how Indy cars are designed to shed pieces in an accident, to bleed off the energy–this seems to be the same principle. Unlike an Indy Car, though, if the hinge plates are deformed in an earthquake, the bridge will still be operational–they’ll still be strong enough to hold the sections of the tower together, and can be replaced at greater convenience, without shutting down the bridge.

That is so cool.

Note that the Missouri primary doesn’t give Santorum any delegates, because the state GOP is holding a caucus on March 17. That’s because the state legislature moved the primary date ahead of what the national GOP allows, so in order to avoid losing half it’s delegates, the state party is choosing its actual delegates through at a “legal” date.

Note also that Gingrich missed the filing deadline in Missouri, so he didn’t appear on the ballot. Is this yet another sign of the disorganized state of his campaign, or does it only signal that he didn’t worry about a primary that wouldn’t produce any delegates?

With 1144 delegates needed to secure the party’s nomination, the current delegate count, according to the BBC article linked to above, is

• Romney: 101
• Gingrich: 32
• Santorum: 17
• Paul: 9

Thoughts?

I just completed my department’s senior research assessment report, and it was a little bit eye-opening. Assessment is the big new thing in education–if your college wants to be re-accredited, you damn well better show that you’re doing assessment–and I’ve been torn on the issue.

One the one hand, as a policy guy I firmly believe in assessment: Failure to assess policies and procedures is a gold-bricked path to accomplishing nothing of value.

On the other hand, these reports are generally not reviewed in a meaningful way and generally end up sitting on some administrator’s shelf as “evidence” of assessment, regardless of what is actually in them and whether it’s ever been acted upon. In addition, nobody seems to have a clear idea of how to assess academics–in my research on the topic when I first had to deal with this, I found article after article that said, “there is no one right way to do assessment,” followed by lots of mindless drivel couched in the jargon of teacher education programs. None of the citations were to actual studies, but to what other people who also hadn’t done actual studies had said. (When enough people say enough baseless things, you eventually have a body of literature you can reference.) To help us, my college brought in an “expert” to give a workshop. Some people were enthusiastic, but I heard nothing from him that suggested he actually understood the policy assessment literature (for example, he said nothing about being sure to measure output instead of input). As a third point of unease, we teachers are being asked to spend an ever-increasing amount of time dealing with administrative details; collectively they are substantive enough that they are cutting into time for classroom prep and/or research/keeping up with the literature of the discipline. An assessment without any real methodological grounding, to be stuck on an administrator’s shelf somewhere, seemed like the perfect waste of time.

But not necessarily so. I forgot to think about who the main audience for assessment is–myself and my departmental colleague. The real point isn’t to have someone from outside review our assessment and tell us what we’re doing well, what we aren’t doing well, and how we should improve it, but for us to see that.

My colleague (who is exceptionally broadly read within the discipline, but whose primary lacuna is the policy literature), hated the whole assessment thing even more than I did. His response to the argument that we need to assess student learning was, “I know when they’re learning; they stop saying stupid stuff.” It was good for a laugh, and I agree, but it’s not particularly helpful because it doesn’t give us actual data to work with. The assessment protocol we developed does.

The Protocol
Some departments have taken a content-based approach to assessment, using a standardized test to measure students’ acquired knowledge. I like that approach, but it’s not suitable to our discipline because it’s so broad and we have a fairly minimal core curriculum in our department. So we took a skill-based approach, and used student performance in the senior research as our point of measurement. For our discipline we think this is superior to a content-based approach because in our discipline a) there are so many diverse content sets, b) content knowledge is not directly translatable to career success (in most cases), while c) the skills they develop are translatable across multiple disciplines and career paths.

The measurements are:

1. Objective 1: Students will be able to choose an original research question, asking an interesting question. This may be either an interesting empirical question, or an interesting theoretical question.
2. Objective 2: Students will be able to demonstrate familiarity with the relevant literature, through a professional-style literature review.
3. Objective 3: Students will be able to gather relevant data/information enabling them to answer their research question.
4. Objective 4: Students will be able to organize and meaningfully analyze the data to provide an answer to their research question.
5. Objective 5: Students will be able to present their analysis clearly and persuasively in writing.
6. Objective 6: Students will be able to verbally present their work clearly and persuasively in a public presentation.

For each of these we rate students as “unsatisfactory,” “satisfactory,” or “distinguished.” Each of the categories has a standard, such as,

Satisfactory: The student has written a satisfactory literature review, both in form and in the demonstration of familiarity with the literature, either in breadth or in depth.

Disturbingly we were asked to write standards for our standards. I inevitably thought of the line from Brazil: “I’m having complications with my complications,” and I asked, “Will I also need to write standards for my standards for my standards?” That didn’t go over well–neither the humor nor the real import of the question was apparent to the administrator making the demand. But in the classic bureaucratic tradition, we shirked on accomplishing that, and the issue seems to have been forgotten.

Usefulness
What this protocol does is allow us to keep track of the proportions of student success on each measure.This all actually turns out to be quite useful to us. We now have more solid data to back up our correct but imprecise notions of what students were achieving and what they weren’t. This allows us to really discern, beyond general feelings and impressions, what skills our students are really developing and which they aren’t. And that positions us to focus specifically on the problem areas and try to figure out solutions to them. For example, our students seem to lack understanding of how a professional-style paper is structured, so we have implemented a departmental rule that each course have as part of its reading set, at a minimum, a number of research articles equal to the course level (e.g., minimum of one full research article for a 100 level class, etc.). This means not redactions or excerpts, but full articles. We hope that repeated reading of professional-style articles will develop familiarity with the form.

We didn’t mean to use the data this way–we thought the whole thing was something of a joke, but once the data is there, it’s actually useful, and in writing up the report it’s hard (at least for a policy-minded guy like me) to not think about it. In fact the whole thing is still something of a joke, in that at the institutional level the act of producing the document is more significant than the act of making use of the findings in the document, but that’s both true for policy assessment in all domains and irrelevant to my department’s purposes. Ultimately the effort is as useful as we decide it will be.

This doesn’t mean we’ve found “the” proper protocol. It is true that there is no one way to do it, but that’s only trivially true. Sure, Political Science assessment necessarily differs from assessment in Art (in fact the first two examples I was directed to were Art and Creative Writing–not useful models), but assessment of military performance necessarily differs from social services assessment. But “no one right way to do it” doesn’t mean there are no principles, and this is where the literature on academic assessment has suffered from being written education professionals rather than professional policy analysts.

Despite the lack of understanding in the literature, there are some consistent principles that can be drawn from the policy literature. Above I mentioned measuring outputs rather than inputs–that’s basic, but frequently violated. Another is baselining and benchmarking–figure out your baseline, what you’re currently achieving, and what your benchmarks for determining improvement will be. That depends on understanding what your actual goals are. This is surprisingly difficult at times, as the easiest things to measure aren’t necessarily the real purposes of your organization. A classic example is state highway departments measuring miles of road paved, but that’s actually an input, not an output. Just paving 1,000 miles of road does not demonstrate accomplishment, because it doesn’t demonstrate you improved the quality of any roads. Actual measurements of road (and bridge) quality would be a better measure, but obviously more difficult to come by. And it’s because the actual goals differ that the assessment protocols differ. While I think all art students should develop analytical skills, that’s probably not what the Art Department’s primary purposes and goals are, anymore than developing drafting or sculptural abilities are part of my department’s goals, even though I think all my students would benefit from developing such skills.

In our case we were lucky to have a small department in which the two of us agree on what we really want our students to achieve, which is overall analytical ability above pure content knowledge. And we could figure out, or at least rough out, actual measures of that–ability to recognize an interesting question, ability to synthesize the literature, ability to collect data, ability to organize and analyze the data, and ability to present a coherent account both orally and in writing. Our actual measurements are inevitably subjective, which is less than desirable, but in this case it’s not a fatal weakness because we both have an informed sense of what constitutes a professional standard on each measure, and because our personal professional interest is to have our students do well (it’s both more gratifying and less onerous to review good quality work). The major drawback is that our subjective standards, while similar, may differ just enough to affect placement of marginal cases in the various categories. The solution to that is for each of us to read each senior project and attend each presentation each year, rather than alternating years, and evaluate them independently. That can (and may) be done, but it requires significantly more effort from each of us.

Notice that I said our “personal” professional interest drives us to give serious evaluations. Our institutional professional interest does not, although our Dean tries to persuade us it does. While this may not be a problem for my department, it could be an institutional problem. While all professors prefer students who perform well, taking time to think about whether they’re achieving standards, in what ways they’re failing, and how the professor can change long-established practices to promote achievement of standards is a process that demands a significant portion of the professor’s limited time and that risks challenging their personal identity as a professor–”maybe it’s not just my students, maybe it’s me“–and nobody is comfortable with that.

In the end, I still don’t care about the institution’s interest in assessment, because I know they won’t come up with any functional plan for actually being effective in causing my department to improve. If they did, and it was to my department’s detriment, I could simply adjust the protocol or fake the results, and they wouldn’t really know because they’re only looking at the measurements I’ve made, which are, as noted, subjective. But it turns out to be useful for my purposes, regardless of the institution’s interests, and that’s both gratifying and annoying. Annoying because I have to admit I was wrong in objecting to doing this, even though much of my reasoning is still accurate. Gratifying because all along I really did believe in assessment, and said so, assuming we actually were doing something meaningful–both in terms of what we were actually measuring and in terms of what was done with it. My pride is a bit dinged, but my professional side is gratified to report that the policy analysts have been right all along.

conservatives believe in accountability

Who knew Karl Rove had such a good sense of humor?