Building Students versus Sorting Students in College Education

 The university I teach at is part of Florida's State University System and receives "performance based funding" (or not) based on various metrics. https://www.flbog.edu/finance/performance-based-funding/

For the last year or two we've had millions of dollars taken away because we're not meeting certain targets that were set for us. The four year graduation rate for full time students is probably our biggest sticking point because it often takes our students more than four years to graduate. The main reasons are 1) we're admitting students who aren't very prepared for college academically, and 2) our students struggle with financials and time management because the cost of living is high here and students' parents often can't or don't pay their tuition and bills so the students have to work tons of hours outside of school to survive.

We're trying various things to improve our metrics, although its questionable if the things we're doing really address the two main causes I listed above. Lately our initiatives have focused on identifying and helping the students most at risk of failing or dropping out. It's nice that we do that, but there are some risks to it, such as pressure to lower academic standards and inflate grades. That brings me to the main thing I wanted to philosophize about in this post: The balance between building students and sorting students in education. 

Building means helping students develop skills and knowledge. At lower grades the enterprise of education is almost entirely focused on building, as it should be. We need to help each kid develop intellectually as much as possible so they can deal with the challenges of life and strengthen our society. 

Sorting includes matching students to endeavors that suit them and also filtering out the more capable students from the less capable ones. Sorting plays an increasing role in higher education, where it is usually acknowledged that individuals vary in type and level of abilities, and that it behooves us to select and develop individuals for the roles that they're most suited for. We want the students with high math aptitude for our engineering programs, students with good writing skills in our journalism programs, etc. The "best" colleges maintain their academic reputations not by taking an average pool of people and building them up remarkably well, but by being extremely selectively about who they take into what programs. Yes, they have brilliant faculty who can further build up those top students, but the selective filter is a huge part of how they're able to do what they do. 

Anyway, BOTH building and sorting matter, and I think its perilous to neglect the role of either. Anytime we confront a problem in education we should be prepared to think about it from both a building and a sorting perspective. Further, we should recognize the links between building and sorting. Like, if we don't do a good job with building in K-12 then we're not going to have good "pickings" when it comes to the sorting stages later. Below is a conceptual diagram I made of how I think the relative roles of building and sorting change at different levels of education.  

Weaken Endangered Species Act? NO! My public comment

Habitat loss is the #1 cause of extinction, globally. The US Endangered Species Act only works because it (currently) prohibits destruction of critical habitats. The Trump administration is proposing to narrow the ESA to make it NOT protect habitats. https://www.npr.org/2025/04/17/nx-s1-5366814/endangered-species-act-change-harm-trump-rule We have 30 days left to comment and protest to stop this. Instructions for how to comment, and the text of my comment, are included below.

To comment go to www.regulations.gov. In the Search box, enter FWS–HQ–ES–2025–0034, which is the docket number for this rulemaking.

My comment:

Dear Rule Makers,

Please do not rescind the definition of harm under the Endangered Species Act to preempt habitat protection.

Habitat loss is the leading cause of species extinction in the US and globally, and worsens the impact of other threats to species such as overexploitation and pollution [1]. Our Endangered Species Act is currently effective principally because it prohibits destruction of habitats critical to the survival of listed species. The proposed rule change, narrowing the definition of harm to exclude habitat destruction, would inevitably result in a cascade of habitat loss and extinctions. This would permanently diminish our nation's unique natural beauty and biological wealth [2].

I strongly encourage you to reject this proposed rule change and affirm the value of habitat and species protection for our national well-being.

Thank you,

James G. Douglass, PhD
Professor of Marine Science
The Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University


References cited:

[1] Brook, B. W., Sodhi, N. S., & Bradshaw, C. J. (2008). Synergies among extinction drivers under global change. Trends in ecology & evolution, 23(8), 453-460.

[2] Cardinale, B. J., Duffy, J. E., Gonzalez, A., Hooper, D. U., Perrings, C., Venail, P., ... & Naeem, S. (2012). Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity. Nature, 486(7401), 59-67.

Crewing in Conquistador's Cup Regatta

This weekend I helped "crew" a friend's 7.9 meter S2 sailboat in the Conquistador's Cup Regatta in Charlotte Harbor, Florida. Charlotte Harbor is a large, open estuary in the next county up from the one I live in. 

I was by far the least experienced of the five member crew- I sailed tiny "Laser" dinghies in day camp as a kid, and I've obviously windsurfed a lot, but multi-person sailboats are much more complicated. Since I didn't know how to do much, I did the simple jobs like sitting on the upwind rail of the boat to keep it from leaning over too far. (Inexperienced crew members are referred to as "rail meat.") The trickiest thing they let me help with was deploying and retrieving the parachute-like "spinnaker" sail that is used when sailing downwind. 

All the sail changes and maneuvers we did seemed fast, complicated, and intense, especially when there were other boats nearby, and especially in the ~20 knot winds and big chop on the second day of the regatta. 

The boat's speeds (6.3 knots average, 9.5 knots maximum in the last race) are pretty slow compared to a windsurf or kiteboard, but you can sail at steep angles to the wind and do a lot of technical, tactical, teamwork stuff that makes it interesting. A sailboat is kind of like a house that you can race. Also, you can't have five people and a bunch of cookies, sandwiches, and drinks on a windsurf, so there's that. 

Anyway, I felt really lucky to get to do something completely out of my normal with a great group of people this weekend, and I would HIGHLY recommend that anyone who is kind of aquatically and socially oriented give this a try. Sailboat owners seem to always be looking for crew.  

Getting read to race.

Captain Jason (center) and crew at the awards banquet. 

Jason's boat "Echo Shmeco" at the dock in Punta Gorda where we set out from.

Trying to stay ahead of "Greggarious" when going downwind. The colorful sail is the spinnaker. It looks mellow but deploying and managing the spinnaker in strong wind was scary. 

This is "Greggarious" another boat of the same exact type that we raced in the regatta. I think the blackish sails are cool looking. 

That's my knee in pants and another crew member being "rail meat" while we try to stay ahead of the other S2 7.9 sailboat that was our closest competitor in the regatta. They beat us on day 1 but we beat them on day 2. 

Young men even more likely than old men to fall for the far right?

I've seen some polls lately indicating that young men are even more likely than old men to have far-right political views and support "strongman" dictators and such. 

I think young guys are easy targets for the pied pipers of the far-right because they are EXTREMELY insecure about masculinity, status, and sex-appeal. They have all sorts of superhero / super-stud / billionaire fantasies coupled with overblown fears of being too nerdy / wimpy. 

This isn't a new thing - I definitely went through it myself in my teens and early 20s. The issue is that when young men should be evolving / being guided out of that phase and learning to be humble, decent, and mature, the unscrupulous influencers / marketers / propagandists prey on their insecurities and divert them off into right wing macho fantasylands. 

What I'm not sure about is how to counteract that, like how to show that the real rewards of being a good person are better than the false promises of "alpha male" glory. I suspect that a lot of the macho jerks like Trump who brag about having it all are actually still miserable and insatiably insecure, so if that could be revealed somehow it might dispel the myth that lads are being lured by.

Oyster reef restoration bonus: Mangroves!

Since 2018 my colleague Serge Thomas and I have been helping the City of Naples, Florida monitor three oyster restoration sites in Naples Bay. The project has been really successful in terms of oysters. They have colonized the constructed reefs at such high density that the original construction material (limestone rock and fossil shell) is now completely obscured by a spiky layer of living oysters. 

The concrete igloo things are called reef balls. At this site they are used as breakwaters to protect the rock pile reefs behind them from being eroded by boat wakes, which is a big problem for natural reefs in Naples Bay.

A bonus of the restoration is that the upper parts of many of the constructed reefs have been colonized by mangroves. Mangroves are tropical trees that grow in salt water and are helpful for protecting coastline from hurricanes, providing fish and wildlife habitat, and performing various other "ecosystem services" valuable to nature and humanity. 

Today I kayaked to two of the reefs with my undergraduate research students to count and measure the mangroves. Most were red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle), but we also saw black mangroves (Avicennia germinans), and white mangroves (Laguncularia racemosa). The site constructed last year had just small mangroves, freshly sprouted from the floating seedlings called propagules, while the site constructed seven years ago had substantial saplings with some over a meter high. 

Here my students are doing the official FGCU hand gesture, which is called "wings up" because our mascot is the bald eagle.

The students will analyze their data in more detail to try to figure out the patterns, like why some areas within the restoration site had tons of mangroves and others had relatively few. We hope this work will inform and inspire other restoration practitioners.

PS- If you have Florida waterfront, please let mangroves and other plants colonize and grow along the shoreline. In addition to providing myriad benefits to nature they will help protect your property from erosion.

Venn Diagram of People into Environmentalism

It's tricky to be an environmentalist because a lot of times your allies, who agree with you that the environment needs to be protected, wildly disagree with you about other things. I don't have the solution for this but I've tried to map out the problem with this Venn diagram.

Red Tide is back in SW Florida

My title is a bit misleading. Florida red tide (blooms of the toxic dinoflagellate alga Karenia brevis) has actually been skulking around west and southwest Florida since last summer. But because of the wind and current patterns it has mostly stayed to our north and offshore... until now.

Karenia brevis blooms are tricky to understand and predict because they usually start far offshore, fueled by nutrients from deep water currents that brush along the "continental shelf" of west Florida. But when winds and currents bring the blooms closer to shore, they interact with nutrient sources from the land; the flow from polluted rivers and runoff. There is a growing scientific consensus that while Florida's red tides may not be *initiated* by pollution, they are definitely worsened by pollution.

As paddleboarding marine biologist I'm out in the water a lot, so I get a lot of reminders of what's at stake; what we have to lose if we don't get our pollution under control and tamp down these red tides. For example, last week when paddleboarding around Lover's Key the water was relatively clear and I saw a cute little bonnethead shark swimming along over the sand. Today, paddling the same route with a friend, there were dead fish floating everywhere and a stench was in the air; a mix of rotting fish and the aerosolized "brevitoxins" of the red tide bloom. When we paddled over the same patch of sand where I'd seen the baby shark last week, there it was again, or another one about the same size, freshly dead.