Selling the Academy

June 30th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has released a Report stressing the need to deepen education in the humanities and social sciences. The Report declares that these disciplines “teach us to question, analyze, debate, evaluate, interpret, synthesize, compare evidence, and communicate—skills that are critically important in shaping adults who can become independent thinkers.” (p. 17) I agree with that assertion, which is why I’m so disturbed by the way this Report analyzes and communicates evidence.

The Report’s Introduction sounds an ominous tone: “we are confronted with mounting evidence, from every sector, of a troubling pattern of inattention that will have grave consequences for the nation.” (p. 19). The Report then cites three pieces of evidence to illustrate the “grave consequences” we face. The Executive Summary stresses the same three warning signs and concludes: “Each of these pieces of evidence suggests a problem; together, they suggest a pattern that will have grave, long-term consequences for the nation.”

What are these three pieces of evidence? Presumably they were the most persuasive and best documented points that the Report’s authors could find. As I explain below, however, each claim is incorrect, incomplete, or misleading. That’s an embarrassing record for a blue-ribbon commission of distinguished educators, humanists, and social scientists.

Equally troubling, the misstatements represent much of what I hear from higher education today: a constant refrain of exaggerated claims about the academy’s worth, buttressed by misleading interpretations of the factual record. This Report is selling the academy, not analyzing or synthesizing evidence. Let me walk you through the three claims to show you what I mean.

1. “For a variety of reasons, parents are not reading to their children as frequently as they once did.”

As a parent, that statement immediately resonated with me. Parents are not reading to their children? What’s wrong with our society?!? I immediately envisioned children huddled in front of television sets or computers, ignored by their parents for weeks at a time. The claim, however, is incorrect or misleading in several respects.

First, the data stem from a survey that measured the percentage of children being read to, not the percentage of parents reading. The difference matters, because household composition varies over time. If the parents who are most likely to read to their children have fewer offspring, then the percentage of children being read to will decline. Confusing parents with children is sloppy (and potentially misleading) data analysis.

Second, the survey reveals how many preschoolers had a parent read to them every day in the week before the survey was administered. That’s a pretty high standard for single parents, working couples, and parents with multiple children. A family with three children, like the one I grew up in, wouldn’t meet the standard if the oldest sibling substituted for a busy parent one or two times a week.

Applying the survey’s tough standard, how deficient are contemporary parents? The Report language made me worry that today’s parents were reading to their children just a few times a month. It turns out that in 2007, the most recent year measured by this survey, more than half of all preschoolers (55.3%) experienced a parent reading to them seven full days a week.

Most important, that 2007 percentage is higher than the one reported for 1993, the earliest year of the study. Let me repeat that: The percentage of children listening daily to a parent read increased over the fifteen years tracked by this survey. The Report’s contrary claim hinges on the fact that the percentage decreased between 2005 and 2007, the two most recent years studied. The import of that decline, however, is unclear. Although the percentage clearly increased over the years studied, the figures varied somewhat from year to year; like many data trends, the path is not completely smooth.

The Report’s language does not convey this pattern. The reference to what parents “once did” suggests a long-term decline, rather than the latest move in an oscillating pattern that has moved upward with time. An accurate statement, based on the data cited by the Report, would be: “Between 1993 and 2007, the percentage of children who heard their parents read to them every day grew from 52.8% to 55.3%. The percentage rose and fell during that period with the highest level (60.3%) occurring in 2005 and the lowest levels (52.8% and 53.5%) registering in 1993 and 1999. The trend over time, however, is positive.”

2. “Humanities teachers, particularly in k-12 history, are less well-trained than teachers in other subject areas.”

This second claim is just wrong. The cited data show that music and art teachers are the most highly credentialed teachers in both middle and high schools. In 2007-08, the most recent year studied by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 85.1% of high school music teachers had both majored in their field and earned a teaching certificate. NCES uses that combination as the best available evidence of teacher quality. Arts teachers were the next best educated, with 81.7% of them holding both certification and a major in their subject. A respectable 71.7% of English teachers had the same top training, just a shade under the 72.9% of teachers in the natural sciences–and well above the 64.4% of high school math teachers. Foreign language teachers varied widely in their training: 71.2% of French teachers held both certification and a major in their field, a percentage comparable to teachers in English and the Natural Sciences. Only 57.5% of Spanish teachers, in contrast, held those qualifications.

For middle schools, NCES’s most recent data stem from 2000 and lack information about teaching credentials. The patterns, however, were similar. Music and art teachers outshone colleagues in other fields, with 89.4% of them majoring in their subject. Natural sciences teachers ranked next, with 49.3% having majored in their field. Teachers of English (46.3%) and foreign languages (48.8%) were not far behind. Only a third of middle-school math teachers (33.8%), in contrast, had majored in their field.

These statistics belie the Report’s claim that “Humanities teachers . . . are less well-trained than teachers in other subject areas.” The qualifications of humanities teachers vary, with some subjects showing the highest level of training, others matching or exceeding levels in math and the natural sciences, and some falling below.

The embedded clause in the Report’s claim, “particularly in k-12 history,” has more truth. None of the cited statistics relate to elementary education, but history teachers in both middle schools and high schools do lag behind most of their peers. NCES reports that only 28.8% of high school history teachers hold both certification and a major in their field. That particularly low percentage stems more from lack of teaching certification than from lack of a history major; 62.0% of history teachers did, in fact, major in history. Still, it is true that high school history teachers have less overall training than teachers in other subjects.

Similarly, middle-school history teachers were less likely than peers in other fields to major in their subject; just 31.3% of them did. This percentage is very close to the expertise level of middle-school math teachers (with just 33.8% having majored in math), but it is the lowest reported figure.

The Report could have focused on the relatively low preparation of history teachers; instead, it makes an exaggerated (and incorrect) claim about all humanities teachers. A correct statement, again based on the data cited by the Report, would be: “In both middle and high schools, humanities teachers in music and the arts are better trained than teachers in any other subject. English and natural science teachers rank next in training; these two groups have similar credentials at each educational level. Math teachers lag behind all of these groups, with lower levels of training at both the middle and high school level. History teachers have the weakest training, with the poorest showing in high schools and one that is comparable to math teachers in middle schools.”

3. “And even as we recognize that we live in a shrinking world and participate in a global economy, federal funding to support international training and education has been cut by 41 percent in four years.”

This one is literally true: The federal government cut funding for foreign language study and area study centers at universities, as well as for Fulbright-Hays programs. The statistic, however, offers an isolated (and rather faculty-centric) measure of the vitality of international study and foreign languages on college campuses.

International study is booming among college students. The number of U.S. college students studying abroad almost tripled between the 1996-97 academic year and the 2009-10 one, growing from 99,448 students to 270,604. The number of foreign students enrolled at American universities, meanwhile, grew by more than 50% during the same period, from 453,787 in 1995-96 to 690,923 in 2009-10. In 2010-11, the most recent year available on the latter measure, the number reached 723,277.

The study of foreign languages is also on the rise at colleges and universities. The most recent study by the Modern Language Association found that “[c]ourse enrollments in languages other than English reached a new high in 2009. Enrollments grew by 6.6% between 2006 and 2009, following an expansion of 12.9% between 2002 and 2006. This increase continues a rise in enrollment in languages other than English that began in 1995.”

Students, furthermore, are learning a more diverse set of languages. The MLA reported that enrollment in “less commonly taught languages,” those outside the top fifteen, surged from 2002 through 2009. Between 2006 and 2009, U.S. colleges added 35 new languages to their offerings, bringing the total of “less commonly taught” languages to 217 tongues nationwide. That’s in addition to the fifteen most popular languages, which today include Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Ancient Greek, and Biblical Hebrew.

Even two-year colleges participated in the upward trend of language study. These colleges registered increased enrollment in such diverse languages as Arabic, ASL, Chinese, Hawaiian, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Two of those languages, Hawaiian and Vietnamese, do not rank among the top fifteen languages studied in four-year colleges, suggesting that community colleges play a special role in teaching some languages.

We certainly could do much more to teach foreign languages and encourage international understanding at all educational levels. The Report’s isolated reference to cuts in federal funding, however, paints a very one-sided picture of the status of these subjects in the United States.

Analyze, Evaluate, Interpret, Communicate

This Report, like so many other products of higher education, exhorts citizens to examine data carefully, think critically, and write precisely. Yet the Report itself falls far short of these goals. This is not a thoughtful document; it is one determined to sell the social sciences and humanities. I agree with many of the Report’s recommendations, but we can’t rest those recommendations on faulty interpretations of the factual record or misleading statements. The academy should lead by example, not just exhortation.

There is a final irony to the misstatements in this Report. Respected commenters like Verlyn Klinkenborg and David Brooks have cited the Report while deploring a shift in college majors from the humanities to more “vocational” studies. High on the list of those dreaded vocational majors is Business, where we fear that students learn to sell things rather than to think. But what behavior are we in the academy modeling?