Tag Archives: tenure

The difficulty in wording survey questions about American education

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Emily Richmond points out some of the difficulties in creating and interpreting surveys regarding public opinion on American education:

As for the PDK/Gallup poll, no one recognizes the importance of a question’s wording better than Bill Bushaw, executive director of PDK. He provided me with an interesting example from the September 2009 issue of Phi Delta Kappan magazine, explaining how the organization tested a question about teacher tenure:

“Americans’ opinions about teacher tenure have much to do with how the question is asked. In the 2009 poll, we asked half of respondents if they approved or disapproved of teacher tenure, equating it to receiving a “lifetime contract.” That group of Americans overwhelmingly disapproved of teacher tenure 73% to 26%. The other half of the sample received a similar question that equated tenure to providing a formal legal review before a teacher could be terminated. In this case, the response was reversed, 66% approving of teacher tenure, 34% disapproving.”

So what’s the message here? It’s one I’ve argued before: That polls, taken in context, can provide valuable information. At the same time, journalists have to be careful when comparing prior years’ results to make sure that methodological changes haven’t influenced the findings; you can see how that played out in last year’s MetLife teacher poll. And it’s a good idea to use caution when comparing findings among different polls, even when the questions, at least on the surface, seem similar.

Surveys don’t write themselves nor is the interpretation of the results necessarily straightforward. Change the wording or the order of the questions and results can change. I like the link to the list of “20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results” put out by the National Council on Public Polls. Our public life would be improved if journalists, pundits, and the average citizen would pay attention to these questions.

How does the rise in non-tenured college faculty affect education?

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There has been much conversation about this in academia lately but here are some actual numbers about the percentages of tenured and non-tenured faculty:

Once, being a college professor was a career. Today, it’s a gig.

That, broadly speaking, is the transformation captured in the graph below from a new report by the American Association of University Professors. Since 1975, tenure and tenure-track professors have gone from roughly 45 percent of all teaching staff to less than a quarter. Meanwhile, part-time faculty are now more than 40 percent of college instructors, as shown by the line soaring towards the top of the graph.

This doesn’t actually mean that there are fewer full-time professors today than four-decades ago. College faculties have grown considerably over the years, and as the AAUP notes, the ranks of the tenured and tenure-track professoriate are up 26 percent since 1975. Part-time appointments, however, have exploded by 300 percent. The proportions vary depending on the kind of school you’re talking about. At public four-year colleges, about 64 percent of teaching staff were full-time as of 2009. At private four-year schools, about 49 percent were, and at community colleges, only about 30 percent were. But the big story across academia is broadly the same: if it were a move, it’d be called “Rise of the Adjuncts.”

This is quite a shift over several decades. While there is a lot to explore here about economic life in colleges and universities, there is another question we could ask about how this affects the college experience: how does this change educational experiences and outcomes? Are students learning more or less depending on what kind of faculty in the classroom? Does it matter?

An argument against tenure

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Megan McArdle of The Atlantic makes an argument for getting rid of tenure and concludes, “I find it hard to believe that tenure is crucial to preserving the spirit of free inquiry at our nation’s colleges.”

I’d like to see someone produce a thoughtful rebutal to hear the other side.

h/t Instapundit