My Entry in the International Guide to Student Achievement

Routledge just published a thick book entitled The International Guide to Student Achievement, and I'm one of three authors to offer a piece on an a Sub-Saharan African country.

My short article on Ghana gets across some basic factual information.  Ghana spends about one third of its budget and 10% of its Gross National Product on education.  More than 80% of children of primary-school age are in school, and  about one half of those of junior-secondary-school (grades 7-9) are.

Other findings are more depressing.  Ghanaian students have not done well, on average, at tests examining their proficiency, and researchers find that most teachers still emphasize rote learning.  A study that examined classrooms in Ghana, Tunisia, Morocco, and Brazil found that teachers were teaching just 39% of the time set aside for that purpose in Ghana compared to an average of  71% of the time in the other three countries.  Teacher absenteeism is particularly acute at public schools, and children who attend public school have been much less likely to do well on the exams which largely determine which high schools or universities they will attend--if any.  Ghanaian parents in fact undertake great sacrifices to send their children to private schools.  But access to a good education correlates very closely with wealth.

I met many highly dedicated teachers in Ghana, at both private and public schools.  But several told me that committing themselves to a teaching career is a bit like taking a vow of poverty.  Ghana's economy is growing very quickly.  Hopefully higher salaries for teachers will soon follow.

Professors Will Be Downsized

This is not a good time to be getting a doctoral degree in the humanities or the social sciences, at least if you expect to become a professor.

The California State University system--the largest in the world--is the latest to move toward putting some of its courses online.  The cost is just $150 per course for remedial math courses.  Preliminary studies indicate that students taking such courses learn more than do students in (the much more expensive) face-to-face classes.

Of course people like me might argue that it is relatively easy to automate a system to teach and grade elementary math, quite another to capture the nuances of historical experience.  But how many history instructors could compete against, say, a class on the Civil War that featured lectures from Eric Foner of Columbia University and online discussions and papers graded by earnest and capable teaching assistants located in, say, India at one quarter the cost of a similar course at a state university?

Cheap, effective online courses offered by prestigious universities are likely to be a great boon for debt-burdened students and a disaster for professors.  Professors can minimize the shock by: teaching so well that we cannot be easily replaced; adjusting to the new online reality by incorporating the best aspects of it into our teaching.

Sell Your House

I heard an inspiring story on NPR late Thursday about a fourteen-year-old girl who was telling her mother that their family should do something about global inequality.  The somewhat exasperated mother finally said: "What should we do, sell our house and give the money away?"  "Great idea," responded the daughter.  So they sold their huge home, replaced it with one half as large, and spent a year researching what to do with the money they had saved.  They ended up donating several hundred thousand dollars to the Hunger Project (they owned a really big house in one of Atlanta's most exclusive neighborhoods).

Of course not all of us have an extremely expensive house that we can sell off.  And, by definition, most Americans are not in the top 1-5% of the nation's wealthy.  But the great majority of us could spend much less money on ourselves than we do and still live very, very comfortable lives--and in the process greatly enrich the lives of hundreds if not thousands of others, people born into less fortunate circumstances.

http://www.thepowerofhalf.com/

Article in Africa Today

After nearly three years of researching, writing, rewriting, and rewriting some more, my article comparing how Ghanaian intellectuals and its social studies textbooks approach its past has just appeared in Africa Today (volume 59, Winter 2012), which is available online at PSU and other university libraries.

The article examines why Ghanaian textbooks are relatively positive about British colonialism, certainly when compared to historical accounts intended for adults, such as the novels of Ayi Kwei Armah and the film Heritage Africa.  My argument is that the textbooks express the government's emphasis on unity (they depict colonialism as bringing Ghana together) and progress (colonialism is praised for bringing Christianity, education, railroads, and other technologies).  In sum, "pragmatism trumps romanticism."

I don't think that this emphasis on colonialism's advantages can be simply interpreted or criticized as an example of internalized colonialism, in part because Ghana's "entire education system, not just its textbooks, serves the ends of unity, conformity, orderly progress, and other conservative themes," impulses that were present in Ghana before the British imposed colonialism and that still resonate for many Ghanaians today.