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.