Is it Diversity over Content at Ed Schools?

January 11, 2008 by dave

I thought this City Journal article by Jay P. Greene and Catherine Shock was very interesting. They looked at the ratio of classes on multiculturalism vs. mathematics at leading schools of education. What do you think they found? In many universities multiculturalism wins by a landslide.

A good education requires balance. Students should learn to appreciate a variety of cultures, sure, but they also need to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Judging from the courses that the nation’s leading education colleges offer, however, balance isn’t a goal. The schools place far more emphasis on the political and social ends of education than on the fundamentals.

To determine just how unbalanced teacher preparation is at ed schools, we counted the number of course titles and descriptions that contained the words “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and variants thereof, and then compared those with the number that used variants of the word “math.” We then computed a “multiculturalism-to-math ratio”—a rough indicator of the relative importance of social goals to academic skills in ed schools. A ratio of greater than 1 indicates a greater emphasis on multiculturalism; a ratio of less than 1 means that math courses predominate. Our survey covered the nation’s top 50 education programs as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, as well as programs at flagship state universities that weren’t among the top 50—a total of 71 education schools.

The average ed school, we found, has a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 1.82, meaning that it offers 82 percent more courses featuring social goals than featuring math. At Harvard and Stanford, the ratio is about 2: almost twice as many courses are social as mathematical. At the University of Minnesota, the ratio is higher than 12. And at UCLA, a whopping 47 course titles and descriptions contain the word “multiculturalism” or “diversity,” while only three contain the word “math,” giving it a ratio of almost 16.

Some programs do show different priorities. At the University of Missouri, 43 courses bear titles or descriptions that include multiculturalism or diversity, but 74 focus on math, giving it a lean multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 0.58. Penn State’s ratio is 0.39. (By contrast, the ratio at Penn State’s Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania, is over 3.) Still, of the 71 programs we studied, only 24 have a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of less than 1; only five pay twice as much attention to math as to social goals.

I thought the article was very interesting although not really all that surprising. The article goes on to explain how this situation gets perpetuated -- college professors select doctoral candidates who get hired as professors and that the students like the easier multiculturalism classes in place of the harder math classes. They add that accrediting organizations also encourage the situation through the imbalance in their standards in favor of diversity over content.

I really like the idea of evaluating schools of education based on the impact their graduates have on student achievement. I think such a measure could go a long way in moving the priority back to instructional techniques and strategies that will serve the new teacher well in the classroom.

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