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.

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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.

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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