In my piece over at Inside Higher Ed, I argued that the Figlio, et al working paper recently published by the NBER “does a great deal to sow confusion" regarding the fact that the pedagogically effective NTT cohort studied were not badly paid, part-time, semester-to semester 'adjuncts.'
One key effect of this confusion is to obscure how the study, when its results are fully published, will likely contribute further evidence for a positive correlation of faculty pay and working conditions to a range of student outcomes.
Lest we doubt the effectiveness of confusing this issue, consider this piece by Cedar Riener that apeared today on The Atlantic's website. Misconstruing the Northwestern study as showing that adjuncts are better teachers than tenure-line faculty, the author argues that we should stop studying “university salaries or labor practices” or trying to argue that pay correlates to performance. Rather, he claims, we need to make a purely moral argument for paying adjunct faculty better.
In other words, Riener is asking us to throw out some of the strongest arguments we have for de-adjunctification in favor of one that is unlikely to move any administrator or policy maker—let alone to advance the cause of college faculty of any description in the larger political arena.
For those needing to catch up on this story, you can refer to my IHE post above and to my earlier post here, as well as to Eric's follow ups here and here. Also, Riener's argument against trying to better establish the relationship between faculty working conditions and student learning runs directly counter to the position I argued in this post responding to President Obama's education plan.
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