on Arendt

At Slate, Ron Rosenbaum uses two new books on Hannah Arendt to unleash his fury over her phrase 'banality of evil.' He calls it 'fatuous,' 'subprime,' ' bankrupt,' 'fathomless,' 'deceitful and disingenuous,' 'utterly fraudulent' and 'the most overused, misused, abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language.' So there.

Rosenbaum offers sound evidence, pulled from the books under review and several other recent commentaries on Arendt. He builds up a psycho-tableau of her self-identy, burrowing her idea(s) under a kind of unconscious adaptation to the zeit of Germany in the 30s. Or a 'parochial' Jew living in Germany high society in the 30s. Fine. But in doing so, he must accept the patency in what Arendt meant. In condemning 'banality of evil' as he does, Rossbaum risks assigning Arendt's thinking to the banality of evil represented by nascent-Hitlerian Germany. What led her to construct a meaningless and historically empty phrase is her meaningful and historically potent frame of mind. She understand the banality of evil because, well, she represented the banality of evil in other form.

Human reason is necessarily contingent of the content of the mind at any given point in life. That content is supplied by the socio-temporal moment in which we live, our 'lifeworld' of all that is known and believed in our time. Our reason is necessarily limited by the cultural community that nurtures us, the educativeness of the society in which we grow to understand the world and the openness of our thinking to a skepticism that appreciates the novel as a challenge to the normal, the assumed to be. That kind of openness is itself subject to these same limitations. The banality impressed by Arendt fronts the everyday nature of human communities. We can not always question everything and everyone. We function through a matrix of understandings presented through a consistent world; it would be ridiculously superhuman of us to wake up everyday and remap the essence of our lives.

So we live a banal life, a fluid participation of what is, stopping to question when life unspools in front of us (major calamity), when our ideas and expectations fail to produce (William James' gut-level pragmatism) and when the mystifying overwhelms the senses. Arendt may have missed some essential truth about herself when writing Eichman, as Rosenbaum details. Yet she presents us moderns with a devastatingly clear explanation for the hubris to human understanding: reason is not an objective state of perfect clarity, but a subjective experience complete in itself. We are frail, fallible and committed to error with every thought. Accepting that radical humanness does not mean we should live in fear of acting or even thinking. Rather, the banality of evil looms over us in harmony with the banality of goodness. What we do is what we do. Our moral life is measured not by the balance sheet of deeds presented after death to Osiris, or whoever awaits outside the tombs of everlasting life, but by the capacity to understand ourselves down to the most minute and fragmentary of trace implication. Time and history, space and place; we are always and already in flow with all there is.

The Impossibles

Freud once stated that teaching is impossible.

I doubt he meant a harrumph at the indolence and irresponsibility of his students. Nor, I suppose, a lash out at the folly of standardized tests, outcome-based standards or any other idealized version of education as technical tinkering. To assume, further, that he thought as a small government, low-tax, anti-public spending libertarian would be make him too much contemporary. History still does not allow a revision of the past in the identities of the present.

So what then did Freud mean?

Let me explain this question another way. In the current model of accountability (courtesy of NCLB), our educational system uses standardized, quantitative scores on tests to determine student knowledge and skills, and growth in knowledge and skills over the course of a set period (a semester, a year, a unit). Merit or performance pay synthesizes the students' learning into their teachers' effectiveness; the so-called "value-added" model of teacher accountability. Through inferential and raw/direct statistics, a teacher can be evaluated by the result of her students' scores on such exams. This process uses a positive gain as a determination of a successful student/good teacher; a negative loss as a determination of an unsuccessful student/poor teacher.

The flaw in this system is exposed when considering the reasons for schooling. Put another way, the qualitative rationale for schooling can not be analyzed through the quantitative measures used in schooling. While we believe we can measure a student's learning of concepts and skills, we have no method for measuring the justifications for learning these concepts and skills. This lack does not mean a better instrument is needed to do so. Rather, such instruments are impossible to create. What does all this mean? It tells us that no matter how efficient and effective our teaching, no matter how documentable through quantitative data our students' learning, no matter how empirical and obvious our beautiful numbers, we can not analyze the effect of schooling in the same way. Our measurements of learning give no significant or even sensical information on what effect that learning has on the the student or society.

Now, for me, this is a huge, huge thing. If I am not able to apply the metrics used to determine whether a student has learned to determine any justification for their learning, then either

1. there is no justification for schooling, or
2. the metrics used to determine learning need to be radically transformed.

Common sense, perhaps, explains why we would want our children to learn to read and communicate, to understand and manipulate numbers, to hold a common core of truths regarding the physical and biological sciences, to have knowledge of the history of our kind and the art of our cultural heritages. Common sense, as well, explains why our democracy needs literate, rational thinkers; our economy needs effective, knowledgeable workers; our culture needs the values and capabilities of appreciation for the products of human artifice. But common sense has no purchase in the accountability we employ in the institution of education. Common sense represents something tacit, but felt and experienced to be obvious. It presents a taken-for-granted obviousness, something one need not spend time defending. To question common sense is to question rationality itself. Yet common sense prevails in schooling through the curriculum and skills expected in our students. In other words, there is no need to statistically warrant the course and scope of study (with some ding-a-ling culture wars on the margin; part of Freud labeled the "narcissism of small differences"), because the why is implied in all this common sense. This paradox, or double-consciousness, of quantitative measuring and qualitative common sense exposes the impossibility of ever getting schooling right. "Right" does not exist; only politics does.

Teaching is impossible, not because it is difficult. Nor because it is too open-ended, or even indeterminate. No, teaching is impossible because, by the laws presented as how to measure its effect, we will never know what effect its effect has on students. The outcome of teaching, like the outcome of the experience of schooling itself, is immeasurable. Literally. Both are acts, or participation of acts, that ultimate point beyond themselves. Nothing that we can determine about what is learned tells us anything about what that learning means. Teaching is therefore the investing in a purposeful act the mystification of what that act means. It is a myth, mythic; teaching is the religion of everyday life. That we have chosen to place this practice at the heart of our social order is the finest expression of the mystery to existence.

Teachers are not bankers?

Paul Krugman has a smart brief this morning on changing the way bankers are compensated. Right now, rewards are earned through short-term success, without consideration of longer term effects. As he writes, "In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses."

Many of the current ideas about 'merit pay' and/or 'value-added' models of teacher compensation take a strikingly similar approach. Teacher earn their bones, and its rewards, when their students demonstrate competency of standards-based outcomes. Sounds like a sane approach. Yet, as for the bankers, teachers in this system (just like right now) are not held responsible for a students' success or struggle in the future. After all, how could they? Rigorous research methodology would never warrant any conclusion that claimed such a longer-term effect; too much life intervenes, making any claim specious, more projection than evident.

As part of the accreditation of teacher ed programs (whether nationally, through NCATE, or state-based - in Oregon, Teacher Standards and Practices Commission/TSPC), documentation must be presented that shows the effect a program has on the success of its graduates. In other words, my school must present evidence on the effect our alumni have on their students. The evidence? Some qualitative artifacts, but mostly, k-12 student test scores.

Schools are already on that path. A 'traditional' approach to teacher pay took teachers as salaried employees of a large system, where the overall health of the community significantly effected the learning of the students. Teachers were never paid well, comfortably more in recent years, but never comparable to professionals. Implied, though, was the role teachers played in the bigger wheel of society. Their effects, in essence, were part of something bigger.

To put this all in perspective, then. Teachers are to be paid in relation to how their students demonstrate the objectives for the year. They are not held responsible, at least in terms of their pay, for a student's performance in subsequent year; that is another teacher's load. Schools of education, however, are held responsibly for how their graduates perform once they leave, regardless of the intervening factors and contingencies that occur. If Krugman is correct, and I for one agree with him, then any pay-for-performance system established for educators replicates the dysfunctional incentives that spurred the financial crisis.

Gross National Happiness

Reading Joseph Stiglitz makes me feel as if my inner-conscience has been draped over the world. He comes with all the laurels (Noble Prize, full Professorship, extensive publication via peer-review) and he invokes all the logic of doing things differently because what we are doing now blows. I often do not believe that he means what he writes, since his ideas make too much sense to me.

Take this latest essay. The challenge of measuring the most inscrutable - the quality of human experience - renders moot any attempt. As he writes, "What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things." Using GNP as a syllogism for the state of society, the micro world of individual lives suffers for the macro world of a big thing: economic growth. A rising tide may lift all boats, true; but not everyone in the world has a boat. Or can swim.

Of course, using Bhutan as a model of clarity might not win over the same-as-usual empiricists. And this topic is itself another version of the defense of liberal arts learning, more or less. Still. It encourages me to trust what I think I know, to realize that some of the important people also know what I think I know.

Senator Ted Kennedy, rest in peace.

Some journalists will eventually ask other Senators whether they now have an obligation to pass a health care bill, out of respect for Kennedy.

That is not the right question. Instead, it should be:

"If Sen. Kennedy were on life support in a permanent vegetative state and his family was ready to end his life if Congress did not pass a health care bill by the time he fell into his coma, because his family says that that is what the Senator wanted because he told them even though he did not have an advanced direct because Medicare would not cover that kind of meeting with his physician, would the Senate and House rush back to D.C. to pass a health care bill?"

Perception

Give humans something to see, and we make a world of it. A phrase from a contract, a flower in a field, one moment out of the infinite moments of a day. We give it meaning, significance. Or we don't. Context matters, so both are true. The smallest thing means everything, as the largest, not at all.

This might just be another of saying that life and all its enterprise gives itself over to excess. We find meaning in the slightest fragment of perception. We plunge into what jumps to mind, what presents itself with the slightest flicker to our open senses. All is Surface, without end, perfectly smooth and complete, but infinitely dense. Depth is the meaning we give, the fullness we find in all things. We live in that slippage; content to skim across things as they are until forced by habit or purpose or intuition to free-fall into the grain, which we catch as meaning.

Think of some professions. Medicine, teaching, state craft, law; all require inquiry and expense. When dealing with others, heuristics make for human need. Doctors and teachers, politicians and soldiers must burn through resources with impunity if they are to heal or to lead. Outcomes matter, but these are the outcomes of people, for whom being is more than a description. Means must be human, too, must give in to the accelerating complexity of what being human requires. Our bodies constantly self-stabilize, unlike clocks whose gears lie inert before the clockmaker. Doctors get to know the body, how it functions and interacts with itself, through an extensive process of exploration. Again, the means are profligate by function. Teachers, too, come to understand their students in a similar; learning is both piecemeal and indefinite, the result of an individual's own condition, not the application of technology to a clear problem. No less legislators, nor generals, when dealing with others, can avoid messy extraneous efforts. We have to go too far, because the outcome in its rightness shows itself only after we wade in. In this sense, we splurge in order to figure out what we want the ends to be.

Isaiah Berlin once said that "we must be free to make mistakes." He was talking about political democracy, but I take him to imply truth as well. And it truth, reality. Being free to err is not a license. Rather, Berlin means that we are free to be correct. The world is not given (less so a government). We thus have a responsibility to search it out, to find meanings - many wrong, few right - benefiting our task. That is an awesome load. This "negative" liberty, in Berlin's phrase, restricts prior constraint on our experiences. Put another way, institutions (whether the state or church, the academy or the hospital) do have any final answers. Citizenship of state and of humanity requires us to ask more than the given.

The difficulty in this life is obvious. We must chart things for ourselves, in concert with others on their own courses. No more so than in the professions. Doctors and teachers go as far beyond the horizon of what is known as necessary to attend the person in need. Each patient, each student brings something new in a new way with new conditions. The freedom to make mistakes is limited by the dangers of being wrong, of course, with their deadly finality. Being right, though needs the space to avoid that danger, while also engaging the difficulty of understanding the particulars of any one person.

Learning is the word for the layered interaction of what a student knew and felt previously and how the new material is experienced. Teachers can not mandate nor control that experience. At best, they create climates rich with material (content, say) for students to work through, then layer on pedagogy. Since not all students will experience the same thing, not all students will learn the same way or at the same speed. A teachers keeps this classroom practice going, long after something has been learned. She is not being inefficient; rather, she is exercising her freedom to be right for this student in this lesson at this time. Business hates waste. Teachers hate doing less than is needed since what is needed might only be known after the fact. We call this "time." Imagine the irresponsible doctor prescribing the same drug to every patient with the same symptoms. Now imagine the teacher treating every reading problem with the same lesson. It takes time to create the work that leads to learning, for each and every student. In schools, time wasted is time not being taken.

To sum this up, think about the invisible hand. It works wonderfully for economic reason by evoking the image of centrifugal wind that naturally blows goods and services to their best use. It creates an order, spontaneous and beautiful, from the combined self-interest of its participants. Yes, if we consider the hand always already at work. Within its functioning order, energy is efficiently expended to achieve known, expected outcomes. That is the system in its pure form. How, though, did it get that way? What happened before? The human need for more, for expansive time and excessive action, generates the hand. Our interests follow from our discoveries, which follow from the kind of mazy runs we take across new fields. And new fields come to us in the briefest of forms. We find patterns wherever we look; meanings emerge with the effort to form them, no matter the text.

That is why we can see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. To be human is to be large, to contain multitudes.

WSJ

I like the Wall Street Journal. I subscribe. Its reporting is usually generous, its arts pages are limited but do inform me of books that I might never discover and its back-page columnists, while reflexively anti-Democratic, usually provide a coherent perspective and thought on an eclectic variety of content. Plus, its letters page stokes up the most interesting reading from patrons, even compared to the NYTimes. I read its editorials knowing I'll get a combination of business-friendly and politically-rightist cultism. At least, I tell myself, they offer a kind of one-dimensional transparency.

Right.

1. In his review of Rich by Larry Samuel, Adrian Wooldridge writes:

"From 1960 on, the ... rise of the counterculture stimulated hedonistic consumerism even as it eroded Puritan morality."

A facile, almost rote historiography about US social history, that attempts to reify liberalism as a dark path we best avoid.

I am not sure when the "Puritan morality" held (or what it is/was). Maybe during the "dying times" in early colonial history John Smith could call it up - he who does not work, does not eat. By the the post-Civil War gilded age, if not earlier, no morality of any kind seems to have stemmed the greed of corporations and their leaders, not if proliferating tenements, rancid and dangerous food production systems and aggrandizing trusts represent anything. I suppose we could even laughably claim that the Depression was caused by a sudden rise of people not working and still wanting food. But that would miss the greed infused market climb in the 20s, the immoral (at least illegal) speakeasies that sparkled with hedonism incarnate, the cooptation of Jazz and hipster lifestyles, and even the salience of films, like Marlon Brando's "The Wild Ones" (1953). My historical knowledge has gaps, but I use what I do have to make this point. Advertising, a form of history not constrained by fact, is a better culprit, for it has long sought to shake standard comforts, inviting us to put down everyday, conserving practices and try a new way of doing and being. But that argument would be anti-business.

So attempting to center the rise of rapacious consumerism on a brief period of reaction strikes me as cowardly. It blinds us from contemplating a more robust significance of the 60s: transparency hurts. Let's dispel the easy trope of blaming moral decline on a few freedom-actualizing hippies and free-lovers. And it is easier to offer a demagogic version of social illness (perverts pervert the purists' purity and we go to hell). Reconstructing a more evocative historical narrative requires, well, actual history and the willingness to put aside fabricated versions of American beauty. Mirrors are not windows, nor is history escapist literature. We will not regenerate republican virtue by hiding how we came to be who we are.

2. The editors make a mess in their opinon piece "Obama's 'Race to the Top.'"

Data. The editors state that educational spending topped $665b last year. Add in the $100b in stimulus funds staked already this year, and we are talking huge sums of money. The paper, however, plays loose with what this means. For instance, the stimulus money went to states in order to make up for the more than $200b they will not spend on education because of the recession. Next, the paper sees as spurious any charge of "underfunding" by explaining how President Bush increased federal spending on education from $28.3b to $37.5b. $9b sounds like revolutionary step, unless you realize that it increases the fed share by 1.5% of the total amount spent. In fact, the Bush administration increased its share from 5.1% in 2008 ($28.3b/$553b) to 5.6% ($37.5b/$665b). A whopping .5% of the total expenditures.

Third, in next paragraph, the editors write

"It’s also worth noting that the U.S. has been trying without much success to spend its way to education excellence for decades. Between 1970 and 2004, per-pupil outlays more than doubled in real terms, and the federal portion of that spending nearly tripled. Yet reading scores on national standardized tests have remained relatively flat. Black and Hispanic students are doing better, but they continue to lag far behind white students in both test scores and graduation rates."

According to the Census bureau, there were roughly the same number of students in school in 1970 and 2003 (the last figures I could find), around 49m. How out of whack is a doubling of the money spent per pupil? If a comparison works (it may not - forgive my googling), a new house cost around $23k; a new car $3900; bananas were $.12/lb, a tube of Crest was $.77 and Jiffy peanut butter $.59. A 1970 dollar would be worth roughly $5.30; reverse that, and $1 today would buy > $.20 in 1970. While prices have jumped five-fold, the government has up spending two-fold and still achieved the same results. Consider as well that today a greater percentage of the students are English language learners, due to demographic shifts. That would mean that while they have had their total funding cut by nearly 60% in relative dollars and their student population now present greater academic challenges due to second language acquisition, schools and teachers have been just as successful as they were in 1970, at least in terms of test results.

Of course, the editors could have used the same statistics to argue for the abolishment for the Department of Education, due to how little it actually contributes. But their real zeal deal is vouchers.

Bait and Switch. The editors complement the White House for its "Race to the Top" program, which "the Obama Administration claims will reward only those states that raise their academic standards, improve teacher quality and expand the reach of charter schools," then criticize it for "being at the behest of the unions, also shuttering a popular school voucher program that its own evaluation shows is improving test scores for low-income minorities in Washington, D.C."

So the White is trying to improve education through a $4.5b competition to produce the most effective charter schools, something to which the teachers' unions object. Unfortunately, this only sounds good. It is not really good, because money does not go to voucher programs. Put another way, the Obama administration antes up just under 50% as much as Bush did (on top of $100b stimuli), specifically for a program to expand school choice, to the teachers' displeasure, but that is still not good enough, because the money does not go to voucher programs.

The Federal government spends way too much money on education and the Federal government spends way too little money on vouchers.

Merit pay/Performance pay - bad idea

When I became a teacher, I understood that the salary would be ever modest. At no point did I feel a sense of nobility and sacrifice as recompense, though. The money would be fine, enough to allow me to live in relative comfort, no yachts aside. And through my first clump of years, I was able to save. Even when I moved into higher ed, the salary had nothing to do with my decision; I loved the work, the time to go mental and wander around in ideas and the access to others equally (or not) committed to extracting human potential. Money, such that it did not leave me all achy for the juiciness of more, was always good enough. I also never minded that higher salary came with time. I granted that veteran teachers knew stuff, that practice honed something valuable, whether or not I could immediately cipher it. While there will always be extremes (does every school have an ol' Ms. Kennesque, cooking up gumbo during her math classes?), I respected the institutionally memory of the older teachers. What I was less happy about was the time-gap between the salary steps.

Perhaps I had too low esteem, never demanding my dessert? Subconsciously afraid to demand more, for I would then have to demonstrate I deserved more? Ignorant to what a market approach to my compensation could do for me? Understanding what it could?

No. The money thing just did not matter. I would make out a good life, be it ever so.

*********************************************************************************

Merit pay, or performance pay, or outcome-dependent pay - whatever; is a terrible plan. It reifies education as a temperament of acquisition, and reworks students into the means necessary for the money-laced ends of teaching. In short, it misses the reason we have schools in the first place.

1. Low riding goals. Much begins from the question "what is school for?" We can ask this in multiple ways: what are the ends of education? what are the outcomes of teaching and learning? what should be taught? what is worthy knowledge? And we do ask this, implicitly in how educators teach and expressly in how decisions are made about what to teach and how to teach it. Too often, few listen; lalalalalalalalalalaIcan'thhhhheeeeeeaaaaaaarrrrrryyyyyyyoooooooouuuuuuulalalalalalalala.

These questions get answered aspirationally or particularly. The former consists of broad, engendering goals - life-long learning, democratic participation, productive citizenship, economic competitiveness, college-prep (reductio ad absurdum). The latter of prescriptions - curricula and content standards, pedagogy and structured lessons, discipline plans, or any state/district/school wide programs targeting specific, observable and measurable products from students and their teachers. Accept this either/or with the caveat that while educators routinely believe that both are possible, at the same time, in the same act of schooling, I take that belief as unfounded by reason. This question of telos - for why do we do what we do? - does not bifurcate in fact. The conceptual must, in action, settle into some concrete actual practice toward some reachable goal. The ends of education are both, of course, and therefore any policy attempting both is false.

We can strive for both, and should; we can not base a teacher compensation on both. Here is where merit pay games the question of why school, and gets the wrong answer. Think of it this way. As a teacher, I can have the philosophy that I am preparing my students for democratic citizenship. Through this lens, the curriculum and state standards are the vehicle by which I prepare my students. Following, I can believe that mastery of these standards is the best path to democratic citizenship. Therefore, I measure my success by how well students perform on assessments of the content. In other words, their learning comes with an implicit heuristic, that performance in my class on the knowledge and skills I set out for them will result, sometime in the future, in their successful participation in our democracy. Choose any of the aspirational ends, and this holds.

Yet, I will never really know if I have succeeded. Schools adopt mission plans based on these aspirations even though these goals will never be tested out. How would we know if we reached them? Some kind of longitudinal research that follows each of my former students along their live-path would gorge up all kinds of data that may possibly, tangentially correlate to their having being one of my students; that might work (recognizing that the longer out we venture from when the student was my student, the more live experience they undergo, the more distortion interferes with whatever increasingly marginal effect I may have had). Now, the individual student might say their democratic participatory zeal comes from their time with me. Maybe. The point is that schooling is not set up for such big picture objectives.

That means success - the teachers' and students' - if measurable (and thus the basis of performance pay) is a local phenomenon. The content I teach is itself the goal; what happens afterward is not my purchase. This decouples the aspiration goals from the particular classroom goal; the big picture is external to, and non-impinging upon, what happens in my class. Again, we can strive for both, but we only can accommodate one: the chosen content goals of a course. The better a teacher does at leading her student to these goals, it would seem, the higher her success. The higher her success, as the merit pay thinking goes, the greater should be her salary. You can tie these accomplishments to growth models, or portfolio documentations, work sample arrangements, grades or raw standardized test scores. No matter: the better performing her students, the better her pay for that merit.

Merit pay would mint fractured, self-contained ethic into an institutional trait. Teachers would not be responsible for anything beyond their course. 5th grade teachers need not worry themselves about anything the 6th grade teachers wanted; 8th grade math teachers could schluff off any vertical teaming with 9th grade math teachers. Schools would be fractured into separate islands of this-is-this, without any real justification for complementary approaches (I do recognize how prevalent is this state of schools already, by default and recalcitrance; that merit pay would in essence codify such atomization is, however, a qualitatively different level of disengagement of the goals of schools with the outcomes of teaching). Perhaps that is too strong condemnation. Very well. Still, I want to point out that any collaboration towards anything outside of the realms of each teacher's course expectation would be, depending on how radically specific the merit pay plan, optional. Or rather, outside their pay. Literally; if I can, in my own classroom, reach the goals held for me (and my students), there is no incentive for me to collaborate, other than the phony ethic of team-ness. Merit pay dumps out the virtue of teaching, in favor of a blinkered aggrandizing; I, me, mine.

2. Ethics

Kantian cosmopolitanism is disputational these days, what with President Obama willing himself a citizen of the world, and 49% of the country aghast at such not-quite anti-Americanism. So much less, then, for the ethical stance Kant imposes upon us humans: treat others not as means to your ends, but as ends themselves (more or less).

Merit pay - actually, any formal system that uses student performance as a mode of evaluating the teachers and the school - obliviates the moral relationship of teacher to student. The students, and their academic performance, come to serve the economic ends of their teachers. Nothing new here; move along. Parents have been choosing schools for their children based on things such as StaNines, Iowa tests, National Merit and SAT scores plus other fine metrics for several generations (not to mention home prices, but they can not be pinned directly on the kids - I don't think). Merit pay is nastier because it seeks to attract a "stronger" crop of minds (questionable in many ways on its face) into teaching with the incentive of earning gobbles of $ through the direct use of students.

True, a teacher's pay is properly connected to student effort, at least in the sense that teachers are responsible for what students learn. It would be fairly odd to not examine into student achievement when qualifying a teacher's work. Merit pay, though, risks turning student effort into teacher value. Without being too Marxist about it, when the student effort is manipulated by the teacher for the sake of more money (which is the practical result of merit pay) and student learning is measured externally (through test scores or other empirically sticky observables), students are both used as a means for teacher ends and alienated from their subjective experience of the learning. Learning is redescribed as evident through the numbers (or portfolio), not as something internal to the student. Neither of these admits the human, moral dimension of personal efficacy.

Critical theory and ethnography work against this kind of alienating education. Students are able to account for themselves their learning, or lack of it. The density of what exactly a student does learn - deep down and lasting, not just the shallower though more easily accepted observable outcomes - makes difficult assumptions that teachers can "see" their effect through students. Paying them based on an outside effect because of the unquantifiability of the internal actuality treats them as a-sensate. Their own experience is negated in order to fashion a terminal point to accrue credit.

3. Elusive/Illusive outcomes. The bottom line is that teachers do not teach for the money. Commitment to teaching composes a person divergently; the human factor opens outward into a world of shared meaning, and dangerous possibility. I am all for drawing in quality minds. I would rather incentivize them through the rewards of teaching, not exclusively one aspect of its outcomes. After all, the outcomes are elusive: how do we really know if our students learned what we think they learned? What do we mean by 'learned' anyway? Should a teacher who receives plenty of dough, relative to others that year, because her students aced the standardized tests be required to return the money if these same students fail the same test when taken a year later; five years later; at the 25th reunion?

It insults a teacher to assume that she will try harder because more money is offered. More money is nice. Value the teacher for the full scope of what it means to work with students, for the humanity they dedicate towards others. That, is hard, wrenching even. Treating people like people is perhaps the most crimped disposition in the human condition. That is a thing itself to be learned and experienced. It insults the point of education, at least the big picture aspirations that found the purpose of schooling, to commodify the outcomes (btw - I never appreciate the posters in schools that link graduation with higher salary; wrong message, if the point of schooling is to get student to learn beyond merely graduating, since they are not the same thing). I realize that anyone who already believes that merit pay is an idea worth considering probably views education through a business/economic parable of incentives. Too bad, especially for our students.

Accounting

Start with an impulse, a natural reaction to being in the world - "how am I doing?" Natural, because our bodies constantly monitor and control to stasis. When thing get whacked (hormones rage; injuries; too much or tool little food), the body responds to settle things. If we buy Erving Goffman's sociology, then people also adjust in infinite subtle ways to their environment. "How am I doing?" is another way to understand this micro-refinement.

Post Freud, this tacit, internalized question barged out with a loud voice. It is now a question of human consciousness, from which agency and autonomy, and being aware of oneself as a separate being, spill forth endless blood. "How am I doing?" needed more than spontaneous automaticity; it need proof, both subjective ("I feel fine") and objective ("My body is not injured, I have a job that pays me $75K working with special needs adults, my house has no visible foundation problems ..."). Put another way, measurements were needed. Solid, robust empirics and the tools they come by emerged.

**********************************************************************************

A note in the July 15 Education Week (link may be gated) announced how NCATE has redesigned its reaccreditation process. Ed schools seeking to reup had two options:

1. Document progress, and processes involved, from "acceptable" to "target," or excellence; or

2. Work with a local school district to develop and implement an Action plan.

Let's look at these in order, from a perspective that neither offers the kind of help ed schools need.

1. Document progress, and processes involved, from "acceptable" to "target," or excellence.

This plank seems progressive and common sense. Why wouldn't programs want to constantly strive for excellence? To ask this differently, though, a different question appears: what is excellence? Think back to our original impulse, "How am I doing?" When a natural response to world around us, a version of excellence is implied. For the body, stasis is excellence; for humans in society, our individuality seeks its own kind of stasis within a group which, if achieved, is the equivalence of a life good lived. Excellence has a nominal valence once "How am I doing?" becomes a live question, because humans have the capacity to posit excellence as something not as much natural as aspiration.

Ed schools find their vision of what education means, then create systems and hire faculty and recruit students to teach that value. The difference between excellence and what works is not so much a philosophical issue as it is a local one. What works in one classroom will be necessarily distinct from what works in another, even one next door. Ed schools, responsibly, assess their candidates on the minimum necessary for the teacher to develop what works in her own classroom, while leaving open the possibility that a candidates will demonstrate superior qualities during her tenure as a candidate. Thus a difference between "acceptable" and "target." Here, though, is where things err, in two ways.

First, excellence then, is a local phenomenon, while acceptable is a rather general one. Or rather, minimum competency is a general level of achievement that every graduate must meet. It is demonstrated through, following NCATE's structure, measurements of outcomes. We could say that, based on that measurement, acceptable is a minimum score while excellent is a higher score, but that misses the point: every candidate passes the minimum mark. Every candidate has what it takes to be a teacher. Ed schools are not predicting what kind of teacher their graduates will be, only that they will be able to succeed as teachers, not matter the context (well, hopefully no matter the context). These teachers will or will not be excellent, depending on how their eventual school districts define excellence.

And second, what is minimally competent for an ed school might change, for good reason. For example, if school A measures its candidates such that more and more are scoring at the excellence level, that could be due to better candidates (more teaching potential), better pedagogy (the faculty uses the NCATE process to improve) or gaming (aligning scores upward toward excellence). But no matter the case, an ed school would need to constantly monitor what the minimum level of outcome it should set. If too many candidates score excellence, perhaps the program is not pushing their students hard enough: better students and improved pedagogy prompt upward pressure on expectations; grade inflation requires downward pressure on evaluations.

The upshot for both, then, is that a focus on moving from acceptable to target/excellence does not by itself answer the question "how am I doing?" In fact, it can hide the question in the original standards adopted by the program. It could be that constant monitoring of the program against other programs would result in an answer of "pretty damn well," but that is not the NCATE model of measuring a program's effectiveness of achieving its stated goals internally. Any program worth crowing about should have already set its minimum expectations at a high level, such that completion of the program at this level is already a significant feat. Jamming up to excellent, without a reevaluation of what the minimum means, is just another potential act of gaming the system.

2. Work with a local school district to develop and implement an Action plan.

Strong ed programs develop teachers that can be successful in any context (within reason - this is not an uncontroversial claim, I realize). School districts have needs of particular kinds (highly mobile families; outsized second-language or poverty issues; massive overcrowding, for instance). Action plans therefore confuse what teachers need with what schools want.

The idea itself is brilliant: put emerging teachers into schools with a well-developed research plan of improvement. What great experience. But the needs of the teachers will always be greater than the wants of a school. Nothing wrong with integrating candidates into PLCs (or whatever), to achieve a similar affect. Linking ed schools to local districts makes a necessity (where else would the candidates get their students teaching) into the overriding focus. Again, a program worth its spine will set its minimum expectations at "higher" level, such that graduates will be successful in a diverse set of conditions. District action plans, though possibly of great range, will be narrower that the range of skills and knowledge needed to be successful wherever.

Dubious Standards

Outrage over "double standards" never goes out of style. Which is mostly a good thing, if the goal is to highlight the complicated way people make sense of their world. Perhaps calls for more reflection and less reflexion will have a humbling effect on the righteousness of our opinionizing.

We, human peoples, did not grasp how we occupy our own space. There is no clear consciousness, clear of some background system that allows us to understand the world around us. We see as we do because of our long experience of being ourselves, squeezing that experience inward through language. Language is not merely a tool used to interpret the world; the world exists because of language. We think in language. Since we enjoin with others in use of language, the world is common, though not identical. What we can not do is interpret our own use of that language; to do so requires us to think about ourselves without language. This, we can not do from ourselves. How can we not be who we are, such that we can experience who we are from outside our way of making sense of the world?

We either deal with this paradox or not. "or not" produces the shock, shock at double standards. Dealing with our unhappy consciousness (do we focus on the world out there? do we focus on how we experience that world?) produces a level of distance from naive experiencing, though it will not solve things. It can, at least, help us to understand why we have the standards we have for things (why I, for instance, do not mind as much when President Obama exercises the exact powers that President W did).

Politics is the skill of using our double reference system for personal gain. Double standards means, on one hand, "hypocrisy," and on the other, perspicuity. Until we commit to a turning inward, the binary keeps rocking, and false consciousness smokes out more rage against system.

Bad research

Meryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York state Board of Regents (something like the state educational superintendent) explains a plan that "asks" schools of education to track the performance of their graduates. Once the Board is "armed with this data, we - and they - will be able to see which programs are working and which aren't ..."

This is probably inevitable, as long as the beans of accountability have to be counted sometime. And it such a dumb idea - that the cause of a student's individual success or failure in school can be traced back to their teacher's certifying institution (why not correlate a student's learning to the happiness of their principal's lovelife) - I'm sure it will catch on. Unfortunately, plans like this one will ooze out across the country. It is much easier to affix blame three or more layers away than work hard to understand an ailing society creates ailing schools.

Ricci, not Sotomayor

The NYTimes editorializes how the Supreme Court "dealt a blow to diversity" by ruling against the New Haven fire department (I actually prefer how Matt Yglesias criticizes the decision).

Like many other pieces of commentary, the Times raises the connection to Sonia Sotomayor, who took part in the 2nd Circuit's decision that was overruled. By doing so, it misses a chance to discuss why the decision was reached, and what the decision means, for Ricci, for whites, for blacks, and for Title VII of Civil Rights Act. What I see (caveat: I only imagine I've attended law school and I am omitting way too much information) is a Court split between process and outcome. The rightish five base their opinion on the procedure that New Haven used to implement the test, and the leftist four focus on the outcome of the procedure. By emphasizing the reasonableness of the process used by New Haven (the city consulted with minority groups in devising its officer test) and the unreasonableness of abandoning its established process (the city did not have any firm evidence that its actions discriminated against the minority candidates who did not pass the exam), the majority ruled that disparate treatment is more objectionable than disparate outcomes.

In other words, the outcomes of a process are dependent on many factors; therefore, due diligence in establishing a process is enough to indemnify organizations from discriminatory action, no matter the outcome. There is no way to determine a significant correlation between the exam (in this case) and the outcome, therefore, how the exam was implemented matters. According to the majority, New Haven erred, and thus created disparate treatment against the candidates who took pains to pass the exam, when it abandoned the results of the exam. The dissent of the minority argued in contrast that outcome matters, especially for a city with the racial history and demography of New Haven, no matter how reasonable and diligent the city was in establishing its policy to not discriminate.

I am surely not iterating anything not already explained, and done so in a far superior way, by other commentators. However, I do want to emphasize two things:

a.) Making this decision about Sotomayor abases the realtime experience of Frank Ricci and the other people for who this case mattered. Frank Ricci felt discriminated against, it seems, because he is white. Micro-parsing the decision as a commentary on Sotomayor's thinking (digging through the runes of footnote #10, say) elides the effects on the people involved and the law that emerges. They are what matters, so explain and analyze these dimensions instead of creating barren hypotheticals and imaginary mindsets of the judge.

b.) Ginsburg's comment - that Ricci should not have an expectation of promotion even if he operated by the rules established - creates an untenable situation: any good faith effort to play by the established rules and policies of an organization means nothing if the outcome fails to achieve some non-qualificational result. Let me reemphasize that I am not fan of testing nor do I accept the "meritocracy" of systems. And I would not ignore the social context of any outcomes from a process used to assign worthiness. But I do understand the pragmatics of adaptation. If I enter into a system with well-established process for excelling, unless I recognize and call attention to the unfairness inherent, I have every reason to expect the rewards of working the process. Moreover, the system is itself nothing but those processes. They can be changed, if they do not produce a result aligned with the institutional goals, afterward, of course. But that should entail a more comprehensive deliberation, not a spontaneous reaction. Which did New Haven undertake?

It is precisely because I recognize the contingency of things and the ultimate fallibility of human constructs that I agree with the minority report, in essence. But the result of the dissent in this case just puts more onus on the organization (here, New Haven and its fire department) to continually evaluate its procedures, its goals and aims, and its validity in its community. The question is whether New Haven had already undertaken such a review. The majority attempt to make reasonable, and fair, the extent any organization must go to establish such a review process. We can disagree whether these limits go far enough, or not. But to argue that results determine whether an organization went far enough simply vacates any steps an organization takes. The ends do not justify the means. To argue otherwise undermines any human effort to act mindfully, and surrenders a large quantum of human agency to a politically and socially viable vision.

ADDED: After reading the post exchange on Ricci over at Slate, especially this one from Emily Bazelon, I am sticking with my comments. I will, however, cop to being on her side. I do not share the snideness of Alito, and I can not imagine that Kennedy et. al. understand completely the kinds of justice they anticipate their ruling dispenses. Perhaps my thinking comes from my negation of the 80% rule for discrimination (if a racial group scores less than 80% of a majority group on an exam, there is de facto discrimination - more or less). In other words, I do not accept that standard as a qualification of discrimination by itself. There innumerable reasons for disparity on exams. Did New Haven make an effort to check the validity and reliability of the exam beforehand? If so, as I express above, I can accept the decision of the majority. For me, it comes down to how due diligence is determined. The Court only minimally answered that question in this decision

The Sacred and Beautiful

Roger Scruton has a short essay on the postmodern life, posted up on the City Journal website. Let me offer two responses.

1.) Scruton does not need to work so hard trying to scrape out a new form of transcendence in human experience. While the rational mind of this era does "desecrate" by nature - putting reason to the sacred in order to understand its human utility and social construction - and can be "transported" and "captured" by a moment of empty clarity, we people of the modern have always kept alive the sacred in a most fundamental way: ourselves. Consciousness, that undoubtable moment of experienced self-awareness, can not desacralize itself. The "phenomenon of consciousness" (as termed by William James) keeps itself whole; we can not stand apart from our own being to problematize our self in any way other than the abstract. Action in the world is self-actualizing, and no amount of reflection can alter the immanence with which we live.

2.) Scruton sets aside certain human endeavors (holiday meals; getting lost into a suddenly appearing shaft of sunlight) as evidence that we still live invested in beauty. In doing so, he emphasizes what Ellen Dissanayake calls "making special." This means, to be entirely too reductive, to invest value into acts of social construction, to acknowledge what William James (again) called the more to our lives. The very power than enjoins human reason to understand the world elides what it can not fit into meaningfulness. "For what we do not have language, we pass over in silence" (Wittgenstein). Elision becomes ignorance; the more becomes not the mystical dimension, where art and religion serve with soteriological agency, but a null part of human existence. Put another way, the observable and rational subvert the hapticity of experience. What we can not explain, we dismiss and move on.

His essay adds elegant prose to the dialogue between art and utility. The fact that something is created by humans for humans in order to live more autonomously in the world of humans does not deprive it of a kind of godliness. The final cause can not be known. The challenge for us the people is how to deal with that.

ADDED: I had the chance to attend a dinner in honor of Nell Painter, the Princeton professor of History. There were few people around the table, maybe ten, at the point that Dr. Painter claimed that "beauty did not have a narrative." Cam White and I had no idea what she meant, and neither of us were bold enough to approach her about this claim (it came across with a tone of perceived obviousness). I am still unable to understand her point, though I occasionally find ways to justify it.

Its relevance here, then, reminds me of the complex dimensions at play in what Scruton writes. Is beauty a thing itself, an end without recourse as a means? Should we pursue beauty, like the good and the true, for no utility other than to experience the beautiful? If so, then beauty as a social construction opens us to bad, bad faith: creating out of the flesh of human experience the portal of transcendence from humanity negates the transcendence. We fall back into ourselves.

Schools fail this test continually. Art, or any non-"objective" content subject course like music and PE, gain traction in schools in proportion to the utility for the mainline content course. Or their ability to raise measurements (re: testing) of these contents or the efficacy of schooling. There is, of course, a political and practical advantage to taking this purposefulness as a given. What it means, though, is the subjugation of beauty, and truth and the good, to their value in social life. Education deprives students of their experience of the goals of meaningfulness, in order to prepare them for a life that seeks these goals. Pursuit of the Good is not an end of schooling. Education sucks away the humanity of experience - even just the recognition that such a thing as the Good exists and the significance of a life of seeking.

Education becomes the process of regression, the infinite deferral of the goals of living in favor of more tools in which to seek them.

two ideas

1.) Results oriented action. Life is unpredictable, but somewhat consistent. They idea that we can know, with surety, the next moment does not create a kind of bad faith. Things seem to work out as planned, making it safe to anticipate the reaction and results of our actions. 'Anger the Gods; make plans' fizzles into a harder reality of 'anger the Gods; lack expectations.'

So for schooling. Outcome-based teaching seems a rational approach to education. Figure out what we want our students to know, to know how to do and to feel; create lessons that enable students to know, to know how to and to feel. Results; proof; efficacy.

Yet striving for outcomes depends on a messy process. Knowledge, skills and disposition are not produced so easily in a lab setting, much less the decidedly unsterile schoolhouse. Too many factors jump into play for teachers or students. What is learned does not easily fit into concise, clearly conceptualized results. Broadly, yes; a student learns to add, to dissect, to read, to understand how a bill gets enacted. If these rather broad goals count as results, then outcome-based teaching has a strong kind of validity. In fact, the broader the goals, the less we care about the mess. Learning on a macro-level does not impose complexity. Increasingly, though, learned is being targeted on the micro-level. We must deal with the mess; the divergent nature of knowledge and skills and the highly individual psychology of every student.

Put another way, schooling resembles a court case. The law is what it is, but the process determines the reality of the abstract law. And that process is highly contingent (the personalities of the lawyers and judges and juries; the particulars of any case; the social climate and norms present at the time of the case), thus messy. The results of the case can not be known ahead of time, even though the broad outline can be: the law will be applied in a way that does little damage to what the law means.

The little things are the most unpredictable and least conducive to plan for. However, they are the heart of how truth is discovered.

2.) Understanding life. In a longish discussion on affirmative action, I tried to make the case that using race as a 'plus' factor for a candidate will not help bring about the end to race-based decisions (on hiring, school admissions, whatever). Even as a transition, from the overtly racist, white paternalism, to a more just society, I doubted that using race to move past using race would effect any social change. My partner explained something, though, that I found important: Blacks have lived the experience of being black. No matter how equal the qualifications between two candidates - one black; the other white - the lived experiences in contemporary America will be different.

To be clear, I have no delusions that such a thing as "equal qualifications" exist, nor the immense value of diversifying a faculty or student body for its own sake. And I understand the logic of compensatory measures to equilibrate the diversity of an organization. My concerns are that such action will not lead to overcoming such actions.

And this argument which I found really strong - the experience of being a minority in America - got me thinking. By this, do we mean that a black's experience of being black is enough? In other words, is their blackness itself the worthy feature of their experience? Or is it their ability to experience their experience of being black? Is there a difference between hiring someone who is black and hiring someone who is conscious of the experience of being black? The distinction seems crucial, since awareness of experience is not limited to minorities, and thus perhaps a better description of what race in American means.

For example, I am white, Jewish, well educated and from successful parents. This experience is not unique in itself. Nor does it lend me to an untapped perspective on things. But let's say that I come to understand what it means to be white in American; I develop a consciousness complementary and opposite of blacks who are conscious of their experience in being black. And I develop a consciousness of being Jewish; the consciousness of being relatively privileged and secure as I grew-up; the conscious of what these mean in society today. Would these levels of awareness mean that I have a similar experience as minorities who are conscious of and understanding for being a minority in America?

Perhaps this sounds all very dismissive to the real plight of many in America, of the history of real discrimination and poverty suffered, of the actual experience of living this experience. It may be that my words here make it seem like I am looking for a way to explain away this experience, to not have to deal with it, by turning a lived experience into a concept, and a concept that I can arrange for myself. And maybe what I have just done is demonstrate to those, like my partner, who argue for diversity as a value itself to slap awake those, like me, who can not truly know what it means to live in the other Americas.

I probably agree, then, to all that. My point, though, is to help make clear the messiness of our concepts and actions, to anchor what is to be done more snugly into the bedrock of why we need to do it. This post may be a terrible, and possibility ignorant and insulting attempt. Grant me the chance to start here as I make my way somewhere better.

Zen and that quality-thing

Here is an email I sent this morning to my dean, regarding how our teacher education should best respond to the down slope of applicants.  The response was, "Thanks.  That helps."  We shall see it if really did.

Rita,

If tasked with making our case to the BOT, I'm not sure I would use "independence."  "Autonomy" rings truer.  We can read the decline in our application/matriculants in two divergent ways. a.) We are too expensive, too rigorous, too much more of everything than what the prevailing expectations for teacher education have become, or b.) there are fewer people choosing to become teachers.  I believe in absolute terms b.), but in relative terms (for the Northwest) b.) is a nearer truth.  That leaves us, and the Board, a kind of choice: what would we like out of our program?  Arthur Levine smacked down on the most recent generation of teacher ed programs.  With the exception of the rare few, most colleges have focused not so much on the quality but of the quantity of $ these ed programs bring in.  Curricula are similar across the country, so much so that a consistent array of theories and ideologies, types of field experiences and outcome expectations appear everywhere (abetted no doubt by the NCATE-ization of standards).  Traditionally, ed programs have been criticized for their theory-less foundation, for the lack of mental wattage needed to become a teacher and for the routinization of programs that could be handled in an easier, simplified manner in alternative ways (TFA, district-run programs like the NYC and Boston internships, for-profit private programs).  In a corrosive way, the expectations for teaching had become so low, that ed schools hollowed out their own expectations of quality.  Thus we get many teaching candidates who want a narrow, limited "how do I teach math/3rd grade/reading ...?"  If a program does not provide that, in a straightforward, take-away manner, the program is seen to fail even on these neap-tide expectations. Society does not have tremendous respect for what it takes to be a teacher.  What respect it does have is for the technology of teaching.  "Knowledge workers"?  Long finish.  We are left with a rather unfair false choice: quality or $?  Assuming that pursuing both at the same time ensures that neither is reached, I would advocate for the former and ask Board support for our efforts to make the quality of teachers - their minds, their ideas, their creativity, the leadership - our vision.  Of course, this would mean a more than concerted effort on behalf of the faculty to pursue this, both in scholarship and in practice (what we research and disseminate and how our program enjoins its implications).  I believe it is more than imperative that we not shift this argument to the M.Ed, but focus on the holistic and socially contexted need for a quality teacher prep program.  Does that help?

Bank Lending

When an editorial supporting the Geithner bank plan appears in the WSJ, perhaps we should rethink the Geithner bank plan.

Remembering that I have no economic training, let me propose a humble alternative plan, Instead of using Fed support to induce hedge funds et. al. to buy up the "legacy assets" at large banks (whose presence on their balance sheets prevent them from lending - no one trusts the solvency of the banks), what if the government channeled the TALF/TARP/whatever to solvent, and necessarily smaller banks?  Without the slime of any unpriced assets, without the over-leveraged balance of debt to liquidity, without the post-Glass-Seagal interconnection of services and speculation, these mid-sized banks across the nation would be the new financial engine of recovery. Limiting their size by limiting the ratio of debt they may carry (how about ... 6:1?) might create trust in their lending.

As for the big, soiled banks so much in the media?  Without government money as a lifeline, they would need to deleverage quickly to get into the action.  That means dumping these securitized instruments.  Government could assist homeowners through mortgage rate reduction (warning: I am a home owner who owes about what my home is now worth), say to 2.5%, though with no revaluation of the homes.  That might help keep people in their homes; the government pays the interest up to the contracted rate (for example, my interest rate is 6.5%; I longer own enough equity to refinance down to the current 4.5%; in my pseudo-plan, I would pay a mortgage at 2.5%, with the government funding the gap up to 6.5% until I once again own enough equity to refinance down to current levels), which may add stability to the securities.  Once the big banks are able to start selling their load of toxicities, they can slowly deleverage down in size.

There are many problems here, even I recognize (like who decides which mid-size banks get the money? how independent are they?).  Yet I question the justness of a financial recovery by our government.  Instead of using the profit incentive to lure in more fantastical speculation (with almost no risk), why should we use the government strength to create a need for the banks to establish their own market for the clogs that are freezing their willingness to loan?  In the meantime,  added capitalization of mid-sized banks will allow small business and home buyer lending, within reason.

"Pseudo-objectivity"

Completely unrelated (it would seem) to education?  I extrapolate an apt analogy from Dr. Muller's critique of using mathematical models to accurately represent qualitative content.  Put another way, the "cult of accountablilty" led to the false conception that numbers were all that mattered.  Get the equation right, get the statistical objectivity down, get the final tabulation graphed, and you create a true vision of what is what.

Read the whole essay for a nice primer in the economic recession.  Then read again, only this time think "school" instead of economy.

In Praise of Ms. Rhee

Nicholas Kristoff uses his column to commend the work of D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee, and exhort ed policy makers to follow her lead.  To do so, he makes three assumptive errors, all completely understandable and all too commonly taken as given:

a. scores on standardized tests adequately measure learning

b. the gap in scores between high achievers and lower achievers can be bridged

c. merit pay will inspire teachers to make the necessary effort to teach well

In a much longer post I could break-down each of these points and their misconceptions.  Here, though, let me be way too brief:

a.  they can, but only by defining "learning" as that which is measurable in standardized tests

b. it can, but only by under-testing the ability of the high achievers and teaching the lower achievers how to succeed on these tests

c. insulting, and ironic: conceivably true only by admitting that teachers are underpaid in poor performing schools

The point here is not to dismiss Mr. Kristoff's plea, nor Ms. Rhee's effort.  Rather, by focusing on the assumptions and cognitive biases involving in rethinking schools, we can avoid policies and pedagogy that perpetuate easy empirical proof and ignore the complex and often ineffable social contexts of learning.  There is nothing to attempting radical or didactic approaches to shake out the best of our schools.  We just need to get over the idea that any of them are sustainable.

Mr. Brooks' cattle

David Brooks  gives another passionate and clear-eyed defense of the need for accountability in education.  He suggests, more over, that ed schools need to be held to the same kinds of data-riven measurements.  While he does not explicate what kinds of data are appropriate, he does define as successful "which teachers are bringing their students’ achievement up by two grades in a single year and which are bringing their students’ levels up by only half a grade."

Which leads me to point out the problem with his thinking.  Bad teachers, he tells us are "the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed."  And so for "bad schools," I would imagine (though he does not write this).   Yet, with standardized testing as the main accountability determinant for state, district, school and teacher evaluation, student learning becomes a by-product (though, in theory, an important one) of successful state, district, school and teacher evaluations.  In this way, students are the means by which school systems collect their rewards or suffer their punishments.  The ends are high accountability ratings, which produce the lucre of merit pay or federal cash or an increase of students from education-savvy parents.

As for teacher education, strong programs focus their graduates toward thriving careers. This often ignored dimension of preparation for the classroom means the difference between a teacher who has instant success but a flatter growth curve and a teacher whose early trials lack the bright shining of immediate spectacular effects, but who develops at an accelerated pace as they gain more experience.  The first kind of teacher is what most schools think they need right now.  The second kind of teacher is what all schools need for long-term sustainable practices in the very best interests of our generations.

Social cost of education

Gary works as an environmental consultant, and is fascinatingly equipped with a creeping cynicism toward the human ability to act collectively.  My attempts to explain why I agree with him - due in part to the individualistic cant of the American educational system - keep failing.  Then, today, Stanley Fish answers with an excellent post.  I leave you to agree or disagree with Dr. Fish's conception of academic freedom (an institutional, not a political right, also explicated in these two books).  My point, as I now understand it, concerns how the modern project of human rights unfortunately uncouples these rights from human responsibility.

A shift towards liberty requires a theory of freedom, or rather, a freedom from something.  Think of our Bill of Rights.  Many are negative freedoms, expressed limitations on governmental action.  Cast this way, liberty is a restraint upon governmental action, not enumerated rights.  By offering rights by way of restricting that which would constrain them, our Constitution does not sever a citizen's rights from her responsibilities.  Over time, groups and individuals made successful arguments for their rights, but the amendment process because exponentially more difficulty (as rightly it should; except in California, for some reason). Arguments of these kind are political, moral, cultural, the whole gamut of human interactions.  Into the public sphere, these rights could more easily be explicit, since arguing for something (voting rights; economic fairness; equal opportunity) is a lot more effective than arguing for government to enact a law that limits government (except in California, for some reason).

Human rights, on a global scale, funds this trend.  Rights are attached to groups or individuals who lack these in their home countries.  Again, the enumeration of each right makes clear what is lacking for their basic humanity, not what should be done to limit the government restricting these rights.  In fact, pitched as human as opposed to national, there does not exist a government whose actions must be limited.  Rather, the right is a thing itself, to pursued and grasped.

Education, by way a process of knowledge accumulation, skill competency and grade/level completion, follows a similar path of expressing what is learned individually.  Students gain for themselves some thing more than they had before.  While it is certainly possible to teach responsibility as a necessary part of what should be learned, that too would be arguing for responsibility as another thing accumulated.  Perhaps that might not matter in the end, as long as people act in a mindful way according to the demands of their rights within their responsibilities.  But learning each as distinction allows each to be chosen distinctly and exercised separately, not of a piece.

As long as education is structured as a positive gain ("what I learned today is ___"), can schooling serve as an engine for collective action?

Educational Loafing

This essay by Bertrand Russell reminds me of my favorite character from literature, Larry. 

"The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake ...  One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness ..."  I hear Russell telling us to be prudent, even a little mindful about our lives.  The tendency to utilitize action and thought (to work in order to achieve something else, for which we use to achieve the next thing; repeat) effaces our choices, our thoughts and even our happiness.  What matters is not the present moment, but the possibilities the present provides.

Larry is riven with this instrumental rationality.  A veteran for the Great War, he has been shaken by the futility of purpose; what is to come, the ends, can not compensate for the experience of bringing it about, the mean.  There is no erasure of consciousness, just a grasping for the solace of progress.  Larry's answer comes from a life spent, as he calls it, "loafing;" and he finds purpose in the journey itself, into the heart of meaning.

Education can use a fuller dose of loafing.  The pursuit of competencies and knowledge, skills and dispositions, place as goals the outcomes of student learning, which themselves are useful only for future outcomes.  Knowingness obscures any valuation of what is worth knowing.  Learning serves as a full-tilt rush into future learning. Which is necessary, in many ways, of course.  Yet the usefulness of learning, or "modern learning" in Russell's terms, erodes what is learned.  Full consciousness may not be possible, yet the abandonment of its possibility contaminates the importance of education.  We teach not for our students to experience what they learning, and thus not to learn what learning is.  Rather, we teach our students to project a future good, not to understand the present.

More

This recent essay demonstrates the paradox of educational loafing.  Though others have made the author's point about authentic learning, I find much to like about a project-based curriculum.  Still, the idea of finding a "use value" for schooling dredges up tools to account for that value.  Put another way, a utilitarian approach to schooling has obvious face value, especially for convincing students to stay in school and to make commensurate effort while in school.  It does not, though, offer reasons for why those (or whatever) values should be sought.  The purpose of schooling remains beyond itself, pointing the better tomorrow.  A necessity, of course.  Just not different from where we are now.

More education, less schooling

School districts across the country are running out of money.  Many do not have enough funds to finish the school year.  Their main options seem stark: cut days off the term or cut programs and people.

When superintendent and state legislatures act, no doubt, prudently and pragmatically to terminate school employees, this approach has an obvious logic: since cutting school days would hurt teachers and students (income and learning), downsizing faculty to keep school days only hurts teachers (income, but not learning).  Since beating up on teachers has more political expediency than slashing school days (and risk being seen as against student learning), districts will eliminate jobs in an orderly fashion, from seniority and necessity to temporary and support.

Too bad, since enabling the institution of the school comes with the risk of degrading the purpose of the school, education.  More time in classroom studying more content to learn more skill means little as a concept.  A worthy outcome, true.  Herein lies the trouble, though.  Although schools can scaffold the opportunity for this learning, they can not produce it.  Schools are space of possibility, not quality control centers of excellence.  It falls upon the people within these spaces - teachers, staff, students, leaders, lunch ladies, custodians, everyone - to reach beyond the input/output logicistic of schooling for education to be realized.

Lest I be dismissed as incorrigibly impractical, given the real-politic of educational policies and the physical and social conditions of our schools and student populations, try the following thought experience.  Imagine you have been asked to explain to a visitor from another dimension the purpose for education.  Think for a few moments about what you would tell her.

(Pause)

OK.  Now consider how to explain to her how you would know that you have achieved that purpose.

(Pause)

Can you institutionalize a process to do so without changing either of your answers?

MORE.

The WSJ demonstrates how considerations of education are framing through considerations of schooling.  Education codifies into outcomes ("having the highest proportion of college graduates" "increase the number of students taking AP and college-level courses") that infer substantial education; common sense tells us that such outcomes should mean that students have been well-educated.  Planning for outcomes is exactly the main grist of institutional orders.  Schools collectivize its resources toward that goal, regarding "how" is achieved to a secondary, and manageable concern.  Teachers and students serve the system, which is ordained, indifferent to the people who serve it.

Perhaps you have a different take?

"Anything that runs off correlation is charlatanism"

Add this to the bowel of educational measurement.  What level of abstraction is assumed about learning when a teacher correlates a certain pedagogy with accountability tools?  Rifting on the epistemelogic of the earlier post, is it fair to all students to correlate the assessment/evaluation/grade with their learning?

What is education?

An old, classic debate seems relevant today, at least for those involved in the work of schooling.  On one hand, education is something real, a specific set of practices and outcomes that every teacher and student strive to achieve.  This underlies many relevant ideas about what school should be, including what needs to be taught, how it best should be taught and why society should go about teaching at all.  Read many textbooks, current or decrepit, to find the essential elements of content.  Truth is both evident and overt; methods of teaching are learnable and perfectable; measures of learning are accurate and predictive.

The counter argues something like this:

"There is something real, but not universal.  Do not look outside of some particular thing for the essence of that thing.  That thing that you see is all that there is to that thing."  For example, think of education.  Whatever general idea you have about what it is, how is works or what people do in it comes not from something that truly exists.  Rather, your idea is formed by all the specific examples of education you have experienced.  The concept of education forms from the repetition of these examples, that you gloop together in forming your schema of education.

Now, I recognize that schooling and education need not be the same thing.  Many, I suppose, will express a great faith in education but denigrate the actual schools in which it takes place.  Fair enough.  Yet, this is an example of conflating an ought - the best of what education should be - with an is - the actual state of any particular school.  And while some might argue that real reality has itself become a concept (or a fiction formed by a faith in essence over existence), others express the same point as epistemelogical modesty.

A question then, for any of you who are teachers or who have a stake in what education is to be. Ask yourself not just what education is or what it is for, nor just what works in schooling, but a more ontological question about yourself: "how do I know I know what I know?"

First Question

At what point does recognition of difference create the difference that is recognized?