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2007
APPAM Spring Conference
31 March 2007 - DoubleTree Hotel - Washington,
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APPAM held a one-day conference on March 31 to focus on several important
issues of interest to its member schools of public policy and management. For information
on the two components of the conference please follow the links below or
scroll down this page.
A Summit on Enhancing Faculty Diversity:
Efforts to diversify
the faculty of schools of public policy and management have not yielded the
desired results. Over the past ten years, the legal climate has shifted considerably,
requiring new ideas and approaches to promoting diversity. Co-sponsored by
the APPAM Diversity Committee, the sessions in this topic track brought
together leaders from the social science disciplines and others to share
experiences, exchange information, and make plans for regular post-conference
activities to promote faculty diversity.
This track was co-sponsored by the American Sociological Association (ASA), the American Political Science Association (APSA), and by the
American Economic Association's (AEA) Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession
(CSMGEP). The ASA's Research and Development department has gathered and analyzed data on faculty diversity across the social sciences.
ASA staff will present results of this work on various sessions at the APPAM Spring Conference. CSMGEP has been focusing
attention within economics on issues related to faculty diversity, and committee members William Rodgers III
(Rutgers University-New Brunswick), Mark Hugo Lopez (University of Maryland) and Janice Shack-Marquez (U.S. Federal
Reserve Board) participated in the meetings. The APSA recently appointed Kimberly Mealy to a staff position responsible for overseeing diversity efforts, and
she will participated in the discussions. APPAM has formed a contact group with the ASA, APSA, AEA, and
other social science associations to share information and coordinate future activities.
The sessions in this topic track explored diversity issues that pertain to the
crucial stages of faculty career:
- Promoting Diversity in Ph.D. Program Admissions: Most doctoral
programs continue to not attract a diverse pool of applicants. What is the potential for recruiting minority
students into doctoral programs? What are the types of outreach programs in operation today to increase minority
student participation? What else might be tried? What evidence is there of results? Speakers included
Christopher Matias (Public Policy and International Affairs Program) and representatives of CSMGEP.
- Retaining Students of Color in Ph.D. Programs: Minority students
in doctoral programs often have higher drop-out rates than non-minorities. What can be learned from studies of
student retention? What are the types of services and programs that have been developed to increase retention?
How might stronger incentives be created for students to complete the doctorate? Speakers included
Kyle Farmbry (Rutgers University-Newark and Diversity in Academia), Jean Shin (American Sociological Association) and
representatives of CSMGEP.
- Mentoring Junior Faculty of Color for Launching a Successful Academic
Career: Minority doctoral students may have difficulty transitioning into successful faculty
careers. How might social science associations and universities offer programs and resources to assist with that
transition? How might knowledge of the junior faculty experience help doctoral programs better prepare their
graduates for faculty careers? What are the opportunities for increasing the likelihood of minority faculty
earning tenure? Speakers included Nicole Van Vooren (American Sociological Association) and representatives
of CSMGEP.
- Other Issues of Importance to Faculty Diversity: What is the
role of career tracks outside of academia in shaping the participation of minority students in doctoral
programs and in seeking faculty careers? What about the evolving legal climate for conducting faculty searches
with a sensitivity to racial and ethnic diversity?
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Discussing a Research Framework for Evaluating the Quality of Pedagogy in
Public Policy and Management Education:
At the special, multi-day 2006 APPAM Spring Conference in Park City, Utah, participants widely agreed that an important
obstacle to improving public policy and management teaching is our lack of adequate performance measurements that could
differentiate among pedagogical practices. We regularly collect student evaluations of teaching for individual courses
and use them for personnel actions (even though they are known to be almost uncorrelated with learning and deeply flawed
by — for example — sex and race bias); understandably, we almost never use them to compare pedagogical practice
alternatives. If we had more respectable measures of student learning that we could use to compare results from course to
course or unit to unit, we could implement a serious program of quality assurance for pedagogy. Many possibilities exist:
student performance in follow-on courses, employer surveys, oral exams, perhaps of a sample of students, expert peer
judgment, and more.
APPAM has an expression of interest from a philanthropic foundation in a project that would develop and qualify such
measures. Accordingly, the second track of the 2007 Spring Conference was a series of working sessions to start developing
the proposal for such a project and perhaps to organize a small task force to develop the proposal and execute it. Two weeks
before the meeting, APPAM distributed a background paper reviewing current knowledge of this area; following the very
successful model of the 2006 Spring Conference, the paper was not presented on March 31. Rather, all participants in this
track were expected to have read the paper, and come prepared with ideas, opinions, half-baked schemes, actual knowledge,
and similar useful resources.
To download the briefing paper in PDF format please click
here (120kb).
The sessions in this topic track followed this sequence of activities:
- General discussion of the background to the project: All participants reviewed the motives
identified at the 2006 spring Conference, discussed the issues raised by the new briefing paper on evaluating pedagogy, and put forward any
preliminary issues for further examination.
- Identification of quality measures and their implications for implementing evaluations: All
participants considered alternative measures and contributed to an analysis of their desirability and feasibility.
- Open discussion during lunch: The lunch session was devoted to further discussion of the
issues raised regarding background, measurement and implementation.
- Break-out sessions to identify potential study sites and their implementation requirements:
Participants worked in smaller groups, organized by the types of schools and programs present, to develop plans for specific study
sites and generate possible budgets.
- Final integration and proposal development: All participants convened to discuss the features of
a proposal for initial project funding, including a budget, and possibly identify members of a task group or committee to move the proposal
forward to submission.
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