Who Takes Advantage of Family Friendly Policies

A recent study by researchers at the Association of American Medical Colleges suggests that when institutions enact family friendly policies, the long standing traditions and practices in the institution may inhibit the use of those policies. Sarah A. Bunton and April M. Corrice, the researchers at AAMC, found that half of all medical schools had enacted policies that extended the tenure clock for all faculty - sometimes to as much as ten years. When they examined the use of the opportunity of lengthening the tenure clock, however, they found that only a very small number of faculty actual took advantage of it. Their report states: "Many institutions may have developed flexible policies, but implicitly or explicitly discourage faculty members from using them."

An overview of the report appears here: http://tinyurl.com/4huxsy4.

The journal article containing the full report appears here (but requires access to the journal): http://tinyurl.com/6cuwfmv.

Given the nature of the workplace, these results are unsurprising. Organizational and occupational culture both have strong influences on actual practices in organizations, regardless of the official policies that the organization may have established. If the culture in the institution disfavors an option, such as parental leave, that is open to organizational members, it is likely that few will take advantage of the option.

CE21 Conference

Attending the NSF sponsored, CE21 conference over the past couple days. CE21 is a new acronym and program area for NSF - it stands for Computing Education in the 21st century. Two of NSF's earlier programs in this area, Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) and the CPATH program (can't remember what that one stands for), have been discontinued over the past year or so, and CE21 is something of a replacement for them.

The general premise for the conference is that the U.S. as a whole is woefully behind other industrialized countries in providing computing education in the K-14 space. The statistics quoted did paint a dismal picture: Most states have very few teachers who are qualified to teach high school students the basic skills and knowledge needed to take the Advanced Placement test in Computer Science. In Alabama, for example, only 4% of high schools have a qualified teacher in this area. The number of students taking the AP test nationwide has been dropping; this is in contrast to other STEM disciplines, including engineering disciplines, where the number of students taking the AP test has been growing.

NSF is poised to make a major investment in rectifying this situation, which they attribute to a lack of a coherent body of research that guides how computer science should be taught in schools. The how includes the content, the methods, and the strategies for making programs a success, both in the school context and in informal learning contexts. This conference brought together computer scientists with an interest in educational reach with a like number of educational researchers from schools of education around the country. In fact, the badges for the conference were colored either yellow for computer science or purple for educational research. I had a purple badge, though I did not feel that I really fit in either camp. Interestingly, my informal survey of attendees showed just one or two others from iSchools. I asked almost everyone I met whether they had heard of iSchools, the iSchool movement, or Schools of Information, and essentially none had. When I explained the interdisciplinary nature of our iSchool, the educational researchers seemed to get it pretty readily. The computer scientists I talked to did not seem to see where iSchools fit into the picture, and were especially surprised to hear me describe how Library Science might fit into the picture.