The moral animal

A letter, to the NYTimes:


To the Editor;

Thanks are in order for Jonathan Sacks.  His insight ("The moral animal" December 24, 2012) can help us to celebrate the humanity in this season.

And yet, his comment, "Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age"  demonstrates the irony of modern personal salvation. Spiritual evangelicals of all faiths, including that of reason, engage in an other-directed and community-minded action for the sake of the enlightened self-interest.  In this new age of accumulative theology, we consume belief in order to better our selves.

Sacrificing Head Start?

A federal study demonstrates that by the end of 3rd, students who had been enrolled in Head Start, have little to no advantage over students never enrolled: "Yasmina Vinci, the executive director of the National Head Start Association, called the vanishing impacts of Head Start in the early grades "troubling," but noted that Head Start does its core job well by preparing disadvantaged children for kindergarten. "Our work with students ends when children graduate from Head Start, but it is clear that for many, their circumstances continue to hinder their success; circumstances including, but not limited to, the quality of their primary and secondary education," she said in a prepared statement."

There are those will use this report to call for Head Start to be defunded, at the federal level.  A thought experiment.  Suppose they win this call, based on this study.  As a result, Head Start is completely defunded, on the argument that the $8b spent on these kids has no residual effect.

That would mean that Congress accepts the idea that the long-term effects of education may not and perhaps can not be known until several years afterward.  In other words, would using this evidence to impeach the impacts of the Head Start program be the same thing as claiming that standardized tests should not be used to evaluate a teacher and the school because the effects of that teacher can not be determined for several years?

Yes, Head Start would need be sacrificed, at least in the short term.  The statistics given in the new report express success in the students while they were enrolled (as Ms. Vinci notes).  Proponents of the program would not doubt point to those real effects in an effort not to shuttle the program.  However, the longitudinal advantage of having (mostly) Conservative education reforms accepting the irrelevance of real-time testing is humongous.

If progressive-minded educators and politicos have already hatched this plan, forgive me for spoiling the secret.

The Fed's Contradiction or the WSJ's?

Today, I send the WSJ another letter.


To the Editors;

You attempt to ridicule the thinking of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke "The economy needs more monetary stimulus because it is still too weak despite four years of previous and historic amounts of monetary stimulus." (The Fed's Contradiction, December 12, 2012).

And yet, you harbor similar reasoning for continuing the tax rates of the Bush era.  The economy needs lower tax rates because it is still too weak despite twelve years of previous and historic amounts of tax reduction.

You end the piece with this warning: "The bill for unbridled government spending stimulus is already coming due. Sooner or later the bill for open-ended monetary stimulus will arrive too."

You could have equally written that the bill for unbridled government tax cutting is already coming due.  Sooner or later the bill for open-ended tax cuts will arrive too.

Fiscal cliff and education

Rick Hess hides several pertinent points in his appeal to how to handle the 'fiscal cliff': "Look, let's keep this simple. As a nation, we're spending vast sums we don't have. In every year of President Obama's first term, we borrowed more than $1 trillion. Today, the federal debt stands at $16.4 trillion (we spend $220 billion a year just paying interest on the debt.) If we extend the Bush tax cuts, once again prolong unfunded "patches" to avoid pain associated with the alternative minimum tax and Medicare physician payments, and fail to make the cuts dictated by sequestration, the debt is expected to rise to more than $22 trillion by 2020. (I'm okay with going over the dreaded "fiscal cliff," even though the tax increases and spending cuts are expected to trim next year's GDP growth by a half-point, largely because doing so would cut that projected debt down to only $14 trillion in 2020.) Who's to blame? All of us. We're enjoying services that we don't want to pay for--which means we borrow the money, then leave the bill for our kids (that's right, to the same children we claim to love so much). Our profligacy is not just an economic concern; it's a vast, disheartening moral failing on our part."

'We' do not have the funds because we have disastrously reduced tax revenue aggressively since the 1980s.

'We' enjoy services that 'we' don't want to pay for only when those who use the services are distinct from those who pay for them.  With the increasing economic inequality society has experienced for the past generation, the haves (who do not need nor use these services) have more political power than the have nots (who, through wage stagnation; failure to reap benefits of productivity gains - going to profit rather than compensation; benefit loss through the de-unionization of workers).  As long as this continues, those on top will rebel against spending for those on the bottom. The more they feel they deserve their success, the more they will assume the rest of society deserves their failures.

'Our' profligacy is a 'moral failure' precisely because economic and political considerations pay attention only to the current economic status of the wealthy.  If a more conservative disposition were adopted, 'we' would recognize that our institutions are crumbling not because of economic and moral profligacy, but from a single-minded greed that forgets the role of society in individual thriving.

Hess adds later: " The solution is pretty straightforward. We need to get less and to pay more. When it comes down to it, there are only three real choices: raise taxes on folks besides the top two percent of households; reduce growth in the giant entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid); or cut other domestic programs. That's it. And given that most mandatory government spending now involves assistance for seniors, tackling Social Security and Medicare has to be a big piece of this."

Choice 1: raise taxes on everyone.  Exactly, though this need not be income taxes. Carbon (among other Pigouvian taxes) and trade transaction fees (among other forms of a Tobin tax) would also raise substantial revenue.  VAT and consumption taxes do fall regressively on the poor, though relief could come from lower their income or payroll tax deductions.

Choice 2 and 3 make sense only from the prospective of one not interested in admitting that a generation has seen wealth flow to the top <2 b="b">. As a smaller segment of the population has reaped enormous gains from the restructuring of the political and economy systems (see this book and this one and this one), that segment has willfully blinded itself to the effects on the overall society. Time to return to reinvest in the institutions, by reversing the gains.  This is not Marxism, Socialism, nor a resentment politics.  It is fairness and the conservative recognition that the economic changes of the past generation have not helped us but burdened us.

College accountability?

Kevin Carey, in the NYTimes, makes another case for standardizing college academic standards: "The lack of meaningful academic standards in higher education drags down the entire system. Grade inflation, even (or especially) at the most elite institutions, is rampant. A landmark book published last year, “Academically Adrift,” found that many students at traditional colleges showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing, and spent their time socializing, working or wasting time instead of studying. (And that’s not even considering the problem of low graduation rates.)"

The use of the book Academically adrift is problematic for two reasons, both speculative (on my part, based on their data).  First, the number of students not having learned much of value in the author's most recent research equals the number of students more that attended college than the comparison year (2010 v. 1970).  In other words, the same number of students are learning now as their were students before (the total number of students v. a percentage of students).  Alone, that statistic could mean that for over a generation, we have been sending students to college that lack the basic qualifications to be there.  It would make sense that schools lowered the expectations in order to accommodate this influx.

Second, there are no meaningful measures of what percentage of students were learning things of value (or their level of effort) back in the earlier years.  Do the groups being compared merit comparison?  We do not know.  Without knowing a similar set of statistics, the socio-economic context from which these students attended college, the comparison between 2010 and 1970 is moot.

Carey offers a remedy to what he perceives as a problem: "But the most promising solution would be to replace the anachronistic credit hour with common standards for what college students actually need to know and to be able to do. There are many routes to doing this. In the arts and sciences, scholarly associations could define and update what it means to be proficient in a field. So could professional organizations and employers in vocational and technical fields."

Proficiency is the solution to avoid making college degrees "ultimately worthless."  His idea shares the foundational theory of the Bologna Process in Europe.  If all universities aligned in their outcome expectations of skills, knowledge and performance, then comparisons between graduates (for graduate schools and employment, among others) would be much easier.  A standard of what a college degree means, regardless of the college, would provide a clear, objective understanding to the students' degrees.

Learning is not a commodity, a consumable capable of being measured by quantity. No matter how well we formulate what a degree (or major) means, what the student learned and can later apply is a different question, one without a method of standardization, much less objective, empirical and quantitative meaning.  The purpose of higher education should be questioned, and its expense justified. But aiming for a single set of responses is folly, for the set of hoped for proficiencies are never-ending; who gets to decide what a graduate should know?  Better, from the democratic perspective, who is better able to determine what their graduates should know and do but colleges themselves, their faculty, board of trustees and alumni?

Standards of proficiency come from cost-benefit analyses of investing in education. Fair enough, just not sensible enough for an education that has meaning.

Best interests and all that

Forget that Rick Santorum is a dingbat.  Look, instead, at what he considers dangerous in the recently defeated (by the US Senate) UN disabilities treaty, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD): "Another example of this U.N. overreach is the treaty’s “best interests of the child” standard, which states in full: “In all actions concerning children with disabilities, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” This provision is lifted from the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was also not ratified by the United States Senate. This would put the state, under the direction of the U.N., in the position of determining what is in the best interest of a disabled child, replacing the parents who have that power under current U.S. law."

I put that one section in bold to make reference to education.  Is not this exactly what we hear from politicking candidates and school leaders, intent on pushing through one version of school reform or policy over another?  The 'best interests of the child' standard frames the dialogue in favor of whoever makes that claim.  It is a challenge to the other side to demonstrate why your point of view is valid without having to provide the same kind of validity for those making the claim.  They position challengers to established policies or reform agenda as acting not in the child's best interest, simply because the challengers challenge the favored policy.  It act as a trump card, silencing not just dissent but productive, democratic dialogue.

Yet here, the Senate is specifically rejecting a treaty (based on US policy, our ADA and IDEA laws) because of this claim.  Because  the treaty establishes policy in the best interests of the child, the Senate (and its share of fellow traveler dingbats) worries that parents will lose control over their children.  Bureaucracy replaces parental discretion (in parentis loco, without the parents being loco). Therefore, the treaty dies.

OK.  So why, then, do policies in education get normed as being for the best interests of the child?  Why does that claim so effectively marginalize opposition, defame its challengers and norm the status quo or the interests of the reformers who wield this claim as a kind of negating QED?

Education is not about the best interests of the child.  It is done in the best interests of society.  Of course, no conservative would accept such a socialized, communitarian approach to education.  Focusing on the empowerment and personal gain of individual capacity fits more securely into the right-ish version of governmental intervention into our lives.  Schools must be for the benefit of the individual, because 'society,' as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, does not exist.

Now, though, the Senate has placed itself into contradiction:

• Policy must be for the best interest of the child (education) because society is a phantom; maximizing liberty and personal responsibility are on the conservative agenda.
• Policy must not be in the best interests of the child (human rights) because doing so would erect a totalizing bureaucracy that would triumph parental rights.

The issue here is less actual policy and more the process by which policy get enacted.  Ideology blinds to contingency.  Rhetoric works, only to the point where it gets challenged.  Meaning has its context; when it comes to determining what is to be done, be circumspect to the assumptions of each side.  When it comes to education, remember in whose interests the best interests of the child serve.

Cities and Schools

In a piece having nothing to do with education, Guardian essayist Richard Sennett closes with this: "We want cities that work well enough, but are open to the shifts, uncertainties, and mess which are real life."

Let me appropriate and translate his point about 'smart cities' in relation to schools.  Planned, efficient and effective classrooms will no doubt produce the learnings sought out in the objectives, goals, outcomes aims specified in the plans.  They can work, efficiently and with stream-lined focus, to generate the learning gains predicated by the plans, and expected as part and parcel of various forms of standards-based accountability.

What they lack, however, is the human dimension that makes the learning meaningful.  What Sennett calls 'the shifts, uncertainties and mess which are real life' can be experienced in schools as the spontaneous and originality of student insight, the unpredictable sense and meaning a student makes out of the lesson, the divergency of high level critical thought that evaluates rather than the rote, basal level of knowledge repetition (which demonstrates not much).

Transformative, lasting learning depends on a fair bit of trial and waste, respect for the unknown and unknowable and a searching kind of personal reflection and group empathy that can not be predicative of the lesson beforehand.  Smart classrooms, or those planned to the second with stable metrics of the learning, are not science; they are technology, the application of discovery and inquiry.  But that technology quickly engulfs the science and inquiry; discovery suffers for the sake of replication; inquiry for the sake of explicit outcomes.

"Well enough" is the killer point.  The question of what is well enough has become the political one, rendered into the practical one by the failure of school leaders (both administration and teachers, and unions) to articulate the false promise of what Sennett rightfully calls "Fordist" - the belief that all parts of learning are products that respond to and are enhanced through completely systemization.  Learning, the personal meaning and significance that education has for an individual, can be neither routinized nor  manufactured the way consumables are.

David Warlick, at smartblog/education, connects to education: "Formal education is a system that is comfortably predictable, shaped by institutional rules and easily gamed by people who like predictability and the security of rules. Sadly, as success in this world depends increasingly on inventive resourcefulness and a lifestyle of active continual learning, formal education has become more reliant on rigid standards-based instruction and a punitive reward system."

He seems to distinguish the school-based 'formal education' from 'authentic real world learning.'  What students learn to do in schools, confirmed and reinforced by the one-dimensional data collection that counts for evaluation, is to do school. The learn to school.  As long as learning to school matters more than learning to live in a plural, uncertain world, our society will increasing lack the skills to navigate the 'shifts, uncertainties and mess which are real life.'

Go further

Rick Hess makes a reasonable point: "Imagining you can use an interesting and novel (if overhyped) domestic grant program as the foundation for revamping foreign aid is peculiar."

He fails to explain why.  And that blinds him to a relevant question: Why is an interesting and novel (if overhyped, and not that novel) domestic grant program as the foundation for revamping domestic aid not peculiar?  Why would something that would not work on foreign purposes work for domestic purposes?

He adds another sharp insight: "I'm kind of surprised to learn that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Friedman believes our biggest failure in Middle East diplomacy has been not talking with Hamas about proficiency rates."

He fails to turn this reflection into an interesting question: Why is not talking about proficiency rates not our biggest failure in education?  Or, if you prefer to cancel out the double negatives, why is talking about proficiency rates part and parcel of our biggest failure in education?


Lastly, Hess writes: "And, the frustrating thing, is that for things like teacher evaluation and school turnarounds, how you do them matters a lot more than whether you do them." Go further, Rick and tell us who "you" are (is?).  If the doers are the teachers themselves, the practitioners in and of the field, that will result in a much different process and outcome than if "you" is reformers motivated by interests distinct from those of the teachers and learners.

Risk and waste

Bill Keller, in the NYTimes, makes an interesting point (about diplomacy and journalism) that corresponds smartly with teaching.  He writies, "In the end, you have to trust trained, experienced correspondents to judge how much risk is too much. And that brings me to the main point. To my mind, the bigger question for our business is not whether we sometimes err on the side of caution, but whether we are hiring, developing and deploying the next generation of trained, experienced correspondents to make those calls. That also happens to be the best possible investment in security."

To paraphrase and tweak to fit teaching,

• Think of 'risk' as the cost of teacher professionalism. The question is whether we are inducting enough prudence and creativity in our newer teachers to give them the freedom and respect to develop the experience in order to effectively and responsibility to judge wisely what works for their students.  
• Think of 'risk' as waste; society's willingness to let go the restrictive adherence to false consciousness of cost-benefit allowance of education spending.  Put another way, teaching is about taking chances; taking chances can be costly; the costs are the chances for students to learn in ways that resonate beyond the end of course assessments.

Distrust is much easier to generate than trust. Loss anxiety, and thus avoidance of risk, is much more aligned with the human condition than erring on the side of potential, and thus taking on more risk.  We seem to have given up on potential and settled for the simple, certainty of formulaic interventions in social action: financial engineering products; medical practice as a flow-chart of 'if/then' prognosis and diagnoses; plea-bargaining in the judicial system to avoid both reality and the expense of its pursuit; standardized curricula, lessons and their evaluations.

Keller recognizes that an induction process for newcomers to a field must rely more on the sagacity of the current practitioners more than the ideals of outside interests intent of reforming the field.  Yes; there is always the risk of hermetic insulation, a protective layer of reflexive rejection out of fear of losing autonomy.  That risk is not inevitable, assuming that those inside a profession develop the reflective, inquiry stance needed for ongoing development.  But fear of risk, erring on the side of caution, avoiding the public reaction to waste and excessiveness leads to and emerge from that closed-minded, protective attitude.

The big question: how do teachers reclaim (stake out) the kind of respect needed to foster the entrepreneurial risk that flows from and into transformative education?