1.) Sam Dillon covers the merit-pay system in the DC schools, originally created by Michelle Rhee and agreed to by the city's teachers' union. This section, in particular, is worth commentary:
"Several respected studies have found that such payments have scant effect on student achievement; since most good teachers already work hard, before and after class, there are limits to how much more can be coaxed out of them with financial incentives ... But Washington is the leader among a handful of large cities that are seeking a more fundamental overhaul of teacher pay. Alongside the aggressive new evaluation system that has made the city famous for firing poor-performing teachers — more than 400 over the past two years — is a bonus-and-raise structure aimed at luring talented people to the profession and persuading the most effective to stick with it ... “The most important role for incentives is in shaping who enters the teaching profession and who stays,” said Eric A. Hanushek, a professor of economics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “Washington’s incentive system will attract talented teachers, and it’ll help keep the best ones.”"
How does this system resemble the bonus culture in the financial industry, that rewards short-term profits while ignoring or failing to account for longer term failures? Maximizing the short term often means not paying attention to whether those gains are solid and stable, robust and actual. In education, just as in finance, whether the effects of policies aimed at short-term performance on learning tasks (like a focus on quarterly reported earnings) and the singular, aggressive use of standardized testing (like mortgage writing that pays little heed to the ability of the borrower to continually pay for their new home), merit-pay bonus culture in education narrows accounting to a series of metrics that report a snap-shot of student performance. If a child or a group of children do well on these metrics, the teacher earns the reward. What tells us, though, that such performance has any lasting significance?
It can be argued that long-term accounting on learning is impossible, since too many variables intercede, that time brings history and maturation which renders analysis on previous learning performance somewhat moot. That, at best, we can measure and assume that our measurements are 'real' enough to base an evaluation of 'what has been learned.' Or that incentives to think long-term are a virtual impossibility today, for industry at least (this article has an awesome quote on this: "Charles Holliday Jr., the C.E.O. of DuPont who retired three years ago, told me that it’s tough to get investors to think more than two years ahead — at most. “The stock market pays you for what you can do now,” he said.").
Fair enough. But that does not obviate the need to understand why we want students to learn anything, or what it means to put to use that learning. Put another way, do we even want to consider its usage, or just a documentation that something has at one time or another been learned, as measured in some way?
Further, does adopting a bonus culture make students the means towards a teacher's ends: their scores have value to the extent that they help teachers increase their salaries? In other words, what are the ethics and morality (in a Kantian and a common sense way) of learning and treating students as autonomous rather than a method for accentuating adult compensation? Pay attention to any critic of teachers, who argues that the unions are corrupt because they put the interests of the adults over that of children. If they advocate merit pay performance practices, do they not do that as well?
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2.) Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes about 'unknown knowns' on the Opinion page:
"He reminds us of the famous if gnomic saying by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the United States secretary of defense, that “There are known knowns... there are known unknowns ... there are also unknown unknowns.” But the Irish problem, says Mr. O’Toole, was none of the above. It was “unknown knowns” ... What he means is something different from denial, or evasion, irrational exuberance or excess optimism. Unknown knowns were things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to “unknow”"
The fallacy Mr. Wheatcroft makes shows up a bit later: "The answer to that was obvious and could have been known to all, but too many people chose to unknow it." Nothing is obvious. Or rather, the obvious emerges in retrospection, once the full extent of circumstances, history and action can be grasped. To believe otherwise is to embrace an idea of objective rationality, beloved by Plato, that one can emancipate themselves from ignorance by stepping out into the clear light of the Good. It is to ignore the very real ways our minds are shaped by the contingent, the biased sifting of reality around us according to what we already know, already want and already have grasped. It plays down human blindness, self-deception, motivated reasoning and the multiple forms of cognitive blindness that human thinking contains. It makes a political comment - that some truths are desired in advance and history is somewhat inevitable based on what we know at any particular time. It surrenders the concept of natality (from Arendt), of the radical emergence of possibility, unknowable in advance, that comes with free human action.
Truth is a narrative, an ongoing story that we understand in dynamic tension to the other stories we constantly live out. To believe that something is obvious in the moment is how we experience life, yet requires almost exactly the kind of inventive ignoring that later perspectives will show as inherently partially and, well, unknowable; consciousness is conscious of something and, at least on the level of self-awareness, that something is circumscribed by our past experience and the limited nature of working and long-term memory. We literally can not know everything; obviousness begets omniscience. We are not our gods.
It would be different if Mr. Wheatcroft were simply saying, "I and others told you so." That is a fair description of what usually happens in debates, especially potent political dialogue and action. And the current system of civil engagement and participation certainly does not harbor much respect for that kind of deeply intellectual, scientific, reasoned and disciplined kind of thinking. Put another way, why a point of view carries the day matters not so much about what is real than it does about what narrative attracts the most support, support garnered through processes less adherent to truth and the obvious than to self-interested and contingent factors. We are not fools, nor immoral for believing one thing over the other. We do risk all kinds of fallacies and damage by not examining what we believe, why we believe it and ultimately what the consequences are of acting on that belief.
