Good Professors Train Good Students

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about a study from Penn State that indicates students are more likely to return if they have professors who teach well:

Good teaching and exposure to students from diverse backgrounds are some of the strongest predictors of whether freshmen return for a second year of college and improve their critical-thinking skills, say two prominent researchers.

Patrick T. Terenzini, a professor of higher education at Pennsylvania State University, and Ernest T. Pascarella, a co-director of the Center for Research on Undergraduate Education at the University of Iowa, spoke to an audience of chief academic and fund-raising officers convened by the Council of Independent Colleges here on Sunday.

The two men are co-authors of a highly influential book, How College Affects Students, and they sought on Sunday to synthesize what recent research says about student learning, while also weighing in on recent controversies in higher-education research.

Mr. Pascarella based his observations on the findings from the first year of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, which followed thousands of students at 19 liberal-arts colleges. It recorded the background information of entering freshmen, asked them about their experiences, recorded their outcomes after their first year, and collected the same information again after their fourth year.

Good teaching was not defined by test results. Instead, its attributes were identified on a nine-item scale, which included student appraisals of how well the teacher organized material, used class time, explained directions, and reviewed the subject matter. [emphasis mine]

The likelihood that freshmen returned to college for their sophomore year increased 30 percent when students observed those teaching practices in the classroom. And it held true even after controlling for their backgrounds and grades. "These are learnable skills that faculty can pick up," Mr. Pascarella said.

Two-Tiered Justice System Operating in Milwaukee

In his new book Liberty and Justice for Some, which I do not have the money to buy or the time to read at the moment, Glenn Greenwald writes about what he calls "Two-Tiered Justice System" of America.  At the higher tier, inhabited by political and financial elites, promises scant if any charges or prosecutions relating to serious and damaging crimes, such as the creation of the Bush Torture Regime and the events that led up to the Financial Collapse of 2008.  Most other people, including me and everyone else I know, fall into the lower tier of the Justice System.   If most people are charged with a crime, they have the largest, most well-funded criminal justice system in the world bearing down on them; which includes district attorneys who can and do break the law and violate constitutional rights with few, if any, legal ramifications, a brutal punishment-oriented prison system, juries that assume a defendant's guilt before the trial begins, and a broken, underfunded public defense system.

For people who read up on issues like criminal justice, Greenwald's point is not news.  And from the reviews I've read, his focus on elites, both political and financial, misses what is one of the worst routine miscarriages of justice in the country: the relative immunity of police officers.  Unless the crime is particularly violent and heinous, such as the shooting death of Kathyrn Johnston or the New Orleans Police murders on the Danziger Bridge after Hurricane Katrina, police officers almost never face criminal prosecution for the crimes they commit, which often include assault and battery, false arrest, and depriving citizens of their constitutional rights.

Close to home, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently finished a two year long investigation into Milwaukee police who commit crimes.  And the picture the investigation paints is not pretty: