NYU Professor Is The Canary in the Coal Mine
NYU Professor Is The Canary in the Coal Mine
But what is he saying?
The organic chemistry professor at NYU, who was fired after students complained about their grades, was pundit catnip this week. His story became a cautionary tale that proved a host of societal ills: college is now a “consumer product,” declining standards is bad, college is too punitive on students and professors alike, adjuncts are vulnerable, sometimes a weed-out class is an important wake up call.
Who knew that one incident could have SO MANY ANGLES! SO MANY SOCIETAL ILLS! Pundit heaven, for sure. All these pundits felt that Dr. Jones was a canary in the coal mine, but each had him tweeting a different song.
I didn’t touch the story for awhile, beyond a link and little observation on my blog, because at first glance, the story was nothing new. Organic Chemistry has always been super hard. Student evaluations are important, especially for non-tenured professor. The New York Times could write this same story, but with a different professor and a different college, every single day. It’s odd that this one story took off like it did.
The real reason why this story is important is buried a few graphs down in the article, and did not get quite enough attention. (Yet another societal ill!) Professor Jones, the fired organic chem professor, said while student academic performance has declined in the recent years, grades really took a nose dive after COVID. From the New York Times,
“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” he wrote in a grievance to the university, protesting his termination. Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.
The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” he wrote. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”
After several years of Covid learning loss, the students not only didn’t study, they didn’t seem to know how to study, Dr. Jones said.
Dr. Jones’s observations about the COVID slide was buttressed by another story this week. ACT test scores dropped to their lowest level in 30 years. From the AP,
ACT scores have declined steadily in recent years. Still, “the magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a statement. “We see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting college-readiness benchmarks in any of the subjects we measure.”
A nation-wide decline of student achievement is a massive problem, due to closed school and inept hybrid education. It is complete madness that dealing with this problem has been passed down to the absolute smallest fish in the academic ecosystem — an adjunct professor. Whew! Such an abdication of responsibility. (I wrote a couple of articles for The Atlantic about adjuncts and was one for many years.)
I spent two years writing newsletters talking about the problems with remote and hybrid schools — everything from the isolation, connectivity issues, cheating, and soul-destruction of life in a bedroom. I embedded a few links, but really my whole archive for two years is really just me standing on my soapbox trying to get people’s attention.
For a while, I hoped that the government would swoop in and help kids recover from the academic damage with tutoring and summer school and new programs aimed at those with the worse damage, like my autistic son. It never happened. At this point, it will never happen.
Society has written off the kids who lived through the pandemic, because the problems are too huge. High schools don't know how to handle it. Colleges don’t know how to handle it. Government, and soon social welfare institutions (what do you think happens to damaged people), don’t know handle it.
Without any outside help on the way, parents need to make sure that their own kids are okay. All signs show that being shut up in a bedroom for years was not super awesome for teenage mental health. Because mental health is more important than ACT scores, parents should increase family communication, get the kids outside experiencing the world, line up a therapist or another trusted counselor, downplay academic pressures, and opt out of the high stakes college admissions racket.
To get the kids back up to speed academically, parents will have to fork out money to private tutors or use free online resources like Khan Academy. Kumon Math, which is more affordable than private tutors, helped my autistic son a great deal. If I was a parent of a younger student, I would concentrate on the basics like reading and math. Older students should consider doing a year at the local community college before going to college, especially if they are hoping to got into a STEM field.
Help isn’t going to come from the schools at this point. Many schools are struggling with major staffing issues right now, and can’t worry about the third grades who can’t read. Parents are going to have to manage this crisis on their own.
So, Dr. Jones is my canary in the COVID coal mine. He’s dealing with very privileged students, who even in their rarified high schools, learned nothing except for bad habits during the pandemic.
I have a hard time getting too worried about those NYU kids. Sure, a few of them will drop their STEM majors and won't end up as a million dollar plastic surgeons on the Upper East Side. But their parents supported them during the pandemic with tutors and rugby practices, and they’ll keep helping them after graduation. They’ll make a call to a neighbor to make sure there’s a nice six figure job waiting for them in the right zip code.
While I’m sad, though not too sad, for the privileged kids at NYU, I feel terrible for the kids whose parents could never afford NYU’s $80,000 price tag. Those kids are now failing in much less dramatic and less entitled ways all around the country, and we have not yet beyond to truly understand what’s happened to them. It’s much harder to measure decline in kids, who don’t take the ACT scores or get their professor fired.
LINKS
Yes, Bernie and the other oldies in government should step aside and let a Boomer or a Gen-Xer take their place. Diane Feinstein in particular. Cringy comments about the Internet in Senate hearings should be a barrier to re-election.
If I you need to buy something Amazon, please use an Apt. 11D link.
They know how to help kids with reading problems, but schools are still not making the necessary changes. It’s so exhausting.
Teenage mental health continues to suck. I think we need to rethink everything. Getting the kids outside experiencing the world is a good goal. I’m a huge fan of Outward Bound.
Disabled adults, like the seniors, are going to see a 8.7 percent jump in their Social security payments — it’s a cost of living adjustment. My kid will get an extra $800 per year, which won’t make a massive difference, but he’ll take it.
The childcare crisis.
Fascinating story about how Angela Lansbury moved to Ireland to get her kids away from heroin and Charles Manson.
Gossip: Harry and Megan’s reality show is going to drop in December, and Harry’s Burn Book comes out next spring. We will be completed submerged in royal grievances for months. This will be painful.
I’m working on a new series for my autism newsletter: