Education policy as 'counter-insurgency'?

Andrew J. Bacevich reviews a recent book that examines, and deconstructs, the military strategy of counter-insurgency (in the Chronicle of Higher Education). He retells the key points made by the author (Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War).  Reading them, I was stuck by the analogy to education.  Perhaps inappropriate?  Perhaps, indeed.  Yet, let me elaborate.  Below are Bacevich's summary of the criticisms of COIN made by Porch. After each, I will explain the resonance to education.

• First, COIN is neo-imperialism in drag. The same "ethos of paternalism" that empire-builders once devised to justify their actions persists. What we have and represent is what they—Algerians, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans—want and need. COIN ostensibly offers the means to make good on this invented obligation. Underlying "contemporary COIN as a hearts and minds, good governance, state-building exercise," Porch writes, is a tacit assumption that "non-Western societies exist in a time-warp which the adoption of Western practices ... will allow them to overcome."

Policy makers claim to speak for the goals and purposes of education. Rather than investigate the indigenous practices, norms and meanings that constitute effective teaching and learning that emerge in local communities and across campuses from the ground up, policy makers posit their own norms and meanings (and increasingly, mandated practices: see NCLB and RttT). Teachers exist in a time-warp to the policy makers, resisting advanced practices that will allow them to overcome the encrustations of bygone, failed systems.

• Second, this duty to liberate, civilize, or uplift provides a pretext to do the otherwise impermissible. "This small wars tradition," Porch writes, "views insurgents as beneath the respect accorded combatants by the laws of war." The bad guys are mere outlaws or criminals—in contemporary parlance, terrorists. As a consequence, Western soldiers engaged in small wars cite "the barbarous nature of their enemies" to exempt themselves "from the requirement to follow civilized standards of warfare." In practice, this provides a tacit authorization for torture, prisoner abuse, and collective punishment of local populations deemed insufficiently cooperative in helping to out the insurgents.

Convinced of the supremacy of their ideas, policy makers can view teachers as 'outlaws,' obstructionists in need of (at best) managing and (at worst) removal.  The 'laws of war' are changed: elimination of collective bargaining rights, teacher autonomy and local curricula. Punishment replaces reward.   Being a team player - 'cooperative' - matters (think of the influx of PLCs shaped by top-down agenda, rather than organic discussions about students and their needs).

• Third, peel back the grand claims, and there's remarkably little substance underneath. Counterinsurgency inverts Clausewitz. Rather than defining war as the continuation of politics, it employs violence as an excuse to avoid tough decisions, compensating for a "lack of a strategy with tactical solutions." COIN offers technique devoid of larger purpose, amounting to "a doctrine of escapism." What purports to be a thinking man's approach to war actually gives policy makers license to stop thinking.

The outcomes of education become test scores as measured by 'adequate yearly progress' and international comparions (TIMMS; PISA; NAEP; and soon, assessments on/for the Common Core curriculum). Rather than a means utilized by teachers to better help students learn, tests are the ends, and thus all work is subsumed to increasing achievement. The problem is that these tests are held up as representative of something larger then themselves - economic competitiveness, usually - for which there is zero evidence (nor any attempt to focus on what else impacts economic competitiveness in a global marketplace) that achievement on these tests significantly affects this larger purpose. Despite its low level of face validity (of course a more educated populace might perform better in many spheres of the global world), this policy lacks any significant substance.  It is just assumed to be valid

• Fourth, when put to the test, counterinsurgency doesn't work all that well. Even when nominally achieved, mission accomplishment exacts enormous costs. Solutions—the French "victory" in the Battle of Algiers is one example—tend to come unstuck. For this very reason, sustaining a COIN campaign finds supporters conjuring up some vast existential threat—monolithic communism or the prospect of a new caliphate controlled by rabid Islamists. Put another way, counterinsurgency stokes fantasies that undermine strategic realism.

We have been graduating more students, matriculating more students into college, increasing test scores  and IQ scores and generally accumulating a massive databank on successful pedagogies for at least a generation (especially since introduction of NCLB in 2002). And yet, the consequences indicate that, by the reformers' calculations, things are worse than ever. Thus, policy makers continue to gin up the existential threat of bad schooling to impose even more 'rigorous' standards and practices that extract enormous costs from communities (and get to beat upon teachers - see point 'Second' above).

• Finally, sooner or later, COIN-incubated chickens come home to roost, appearing as intrusive surveillance systems, militarized police forces, and profiling that categorizes certain citizens as "subversives because of their ethnicity or ideas." Porch also emphasizes counterinsurgency's corrosive impact on civil/military relations. COIN undermines military professionalism. Selling small wars converts officers into hucksters, with senior commanders subordinating truth-telling to the imperatives of public relations as they court politicians and curry favor with journalists. Worse, counterinsurgency campaigns that end badly foster resentment among soldiers who feel misused or stabbed in the back.

Scripted curricula; aggressive accountability measures; corrosive affects on teacher attitude and school climate, including erosion of collaboration (teachers working in merit pay context are incentivized not to share their best practices with others) and professionalism (cheating scandals); for profit companies sprout up to offer schools an assortment of materials that promise to maximize student gains, thus turning administrators into 'hucksters' for the sunk costs; and resentment, from teachers and communities aware of what is happening.

Bacevich ends with a prick on the military's new emphasis, like drone warfare and special ops militarism: "Together they provide not a basis for strategy, but a further excuse not to have one, even as they sustain illusions of kick-ass military supremacy."  I would argue that the reformers use of their current methods - COIN for Education - permits irresponsibility.  When means becomes the ends,  no need to consider just what school is for exists.

Inappropriate?  Please let me know.

What education is and is not

Philip Kitchner has a thoughtful point (in his NYTimes critique of Thomas Nagel): "Nagel’s 19th-century predecessors wondered how life could be characterized in physico-chemical terms. That particular wonder hasn’t been directly addressed by the extraordinary biological accomplishments of past decades. Rather, it’s been shown that they were posing the wrong question: don’t ask what life is (in your deepest Newtonian voice); consider the various activities in which living organisms engage and try to give a piecemeal understanding of those."

He adds some of Dewey's advice on how to go about understanding a world that lacks ultimate certainty: "First, philosophy and science don’t always answer the questions they pose — sometimes they get over them. Second, instead of asking what life and mind and value are, think about what living things and minds do, and what is going on in the human practices of valuing ... a kinder approach would be to talk about the ways in which various aspects of living things have been illuminated."

Let me repurpose, and rephrase, these claims for education more tersely:
There is no 'education' but many educations
Understanding them must not mean trying to unite them.
Answers often go on long past the questions that they address.
Description unveils more layers and levels of experience that prescription can.
Ask how we know we know what we know.
Start over.

Schools are ecology, full of social life, the life of the mind, public good emerging in collaborated life and the various of lives of students on full display of emotions and sentiment being earned from moment to moment. Education, writ large, is the holding frame of all this life.  It is not something that holds together form the outside, but rather makes sense as some 'thing' only in the retrospective; what has happened when all this life occurs, under what contexts, encompassing what intentions, motivations and desires?  That is education

Arguing for what is lost in online education (in a different op-ed, published on the same day),  Aaron Hirsh writes of that at best education, "... courses prompt and equip students to investigate the world, leading not merely to a diploma and a salary, but to a more engaged life — not just to a richer bank balance, but to a richer existence."

Schools, and classrooms, are engaged life.  As long as education requires only the demonstration of knowledge mastery and skill competency, a restricted, efficiency-focused, low resource schooling makes ideal sense. But then, the experience of being educated withdraws. All that life happens, untutored and un-applicable to these emergent lives.

Infinite

My mind wanders all the time tnow, even when trying to read.  I end up reading just for the sake of spending time.  I begin feel depressed, that I'm wasting my time.  Nothing gets done; I am neither successful nor acting pursuing anything I want to be successful at (at which I want to be successful).  I sink further into depression, for not being anyone, not doing anything and not being able to motivate towards something. Seconds and minutes and hours pass, simply of endurance, ticking down toward death

Then it hits me. Each second is not getting me closer to death. Yes; death is to come, and from now, that means that as time passes, I get closer to death.  But, we never know when death will come.  It could come ... now.  Or ... now.  Or even ... now.  And yet, it does not.  Death does not yet, has not yet come. Each second does not bring me closer to death.  Each second takes me away from a death that did not come. Time brings me no closer to the end. Rather, time, and the experience I have of living in time, grants me immortality away from death.  I do not need to be depressed because I am wasting my days, speeding off toward ultimate silence.

However, I am depressed that, freed from death, existing in the infinite that runs away from death, I still do not add much to the human condition.

Empathy and Neuro-political priming

Interesting line about the nexus of neuro-cognitive science and the current zeitgeist of social context: "My sense is that the most insidious, influential and largely unacknowledged of these belief systems is neoliberal capitalist ideology. That is, the critical missing piece in this lively and rapidly proliferating conversation about empathy is the failure to identify the dynamic convergence of of culture, politics and the brain, what the eminent political theorist William Connolly once describes as neuropolitics or the “politics through which cultural life mixes into the composition of the body/brain process. And vice versa.”"

Here is what sense I make on this. From roughly Reagan '80 onward, a shift in consciousness has taken place.  People are encouraged to think of themselves above all else (as in Thatcher's comment that society does not exist, only people do). Economic self-interest becomes the primary mode of self-recognition and effort (this essay from the LARoB partially explains the economics of the transition towards greedy self-aggrandizement as the height of achievement). Schools feed into this context by teaching forms of consumption (knowing more, being able to do more) and competition (knowing more than others; doing more than others) and meritocracy (the system is fair and neutral, therefore the winners deserve their gains).

Lee Siegel makes what I take to be a similar point in his essay from the WSJ on how humanities ruined the humanities (well, literature's own self-immolation): "So you see, I am not making a brief against reading the classics of Western literature. Far from it. I am against taking these startling epiphanies of the irrational, unspoken, unthought-of side of human life into the college classroom and turning them into the bland exercises in competition, hierarchy and information-accumulation that are these works' mortal enemies."

The background to engaged efforts to understand (of what Paulo Freire might have called conscientization) in our time engender instrumental applications for this learning.  Put another way, the more successfully critical thought is learned by students, the more adept they become at using the system to enrich their own life.

Can empathy be the antidote to the irrupting this contextual reality?  Can teaching students, and demanding of leaders in all institutions, a form of mindful consideration of the interconnection of all things, of the relatedness that our actions have on others and the suffering that others experience are part and parcel of our own lives matter?

Siegel again: "The literary classics are a haven for that part of us that broods over mortal bewilderments, over suffering and death and fleeting happiness. They are a refuge for our secret self that wishes to contemplate the precious singularity of our physical world, that seeks out the expression of feelings too prismatic for rational articulation. They are places of quiet, useless stillness in a world that despises any activity that is not profitable or productive ... Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read."

Empathy as the process of accept mystery, sitting with silence, withdrawing from the aggressive act of making sense and thus affixing function on life?  One can hope and act in pursuit of that hope.

NYTimes, David Desteno, on meditation

A short piece on the value of meditation, too shrift of good research discussion, earns a letter.

To the Editor;

In his fascinating study on the value of meditation ("The morality of meditation" July 6, 2013), David Desteno misses, for this educator, a more encouraging reason why his participants exhibited compassion: simply participating in the study made them more attuned to those around them.

Their compassion might not "... stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the artificial social distinctions — ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like — that divide us," Rather, being part of a specific group - as members of in a study on meditation - may have induced the participants to engage with the world around, regardless of any consequence from their mindfulness work.

I try to encourage my students to embrace more fully in their social world as part of their training to become teachers.  It is hopeful to learn that simply by doing so, they may become more empathetic, and thus better serve their students.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

First in my summer reading is Cormac McCarthy's Blood meridian.  The book has one lasting virtue and one soft spot.

First the virtue.  McCarthy's writing is elegant throughout.  He never allows the violence to wane, always finding a lyricism in his language of agony and human destruction.  The narrative is bleak, hostile; at times, unrelenting gruesomeness. His skill is to normalize the ongoing misery experienced by most of the characters, without romanticizing it, nor diluting its effecting, arresting shock.  There are no heroes here, few protagonists, just characters who live through a series of deadly encounters. What makes the writing so evocative is McCarthy's ability to constant find seams of beauty in his descriptions.  As if he writes so as to explore and describe the levels of depravity, each scene comes fresh, despite the dulling routine of violence and shared agony.

The end comes abruptly, not because the narrative ends (there is hardly an arc of a story to tell), but as if in recognition that McCarthy could continually find eloquence amid the shower of emotional and physical toil he depicts. He could go on, at ten times the length of the book, finding new insight, new levels of literary expanse and shattered beauty.  But the end brings the quishy thud of the character in the kid.  Now, the man, twenty years on from the main segment of the tale, he seems to have learned nothing during that time.  That is a shame, for while the kid/man need not serve as the allegorical characterization (only a brief coda stumbles there), his lack of psychic change mars the end.  His relating to the Judge demonstrates no growth, no earned human wisdom, no change from the naive, survivalist moralism of his earlier experiences.  The reader is left with no traction on how the slaughter of landscape and human devastation helped shaped the attitudes of a generation of American identity.

Blood meridian should be read slowly, with care and abandonment of expectation. Let McCarthy's writing push you into flow, as he trips along the edges of prose into the unwinding power of poesy.

Ed Week sponsors another corporate attack on education

EdWeek once again spearheads distortion of our work, giving space to a corporatist approach to educational reform.  

The authors work for an organization with the following mission:

• Teacher Preparation Analytics, a limited liability company founded in 2011, is focused on high-leverage strategies to strengthen teacher and education administrator preparation. The company will draw on unique tools and approaches in working with individual programs or institutions, state university systems, and state or national associations, networks, and consortia to generate several instrumental outcomes that are critical to program improvement:
• Accurate, detailed analysis of the problems that compromise program excellence and the challenges that hinder program improvement
• Identification of measures, data, and methods required for ongoing program self-assessment
• Development of action plans and strategies to address key problems and challenges
• Strategic support -- research, convening, assessment, and capacity building -- for preparation programs individually or in networks dedicated to program improvement
• Research-based reports and white papers that discuss important policy and practice issues in educator preparation and provide reliable information and guidance to inform the decisions of educators and policymakers

TPA's founders are national experts on teacher preparation programs and can provide reliable information and guidance to inform decisions of educators and policymakers. TPA seeks to be an objective and effective resource on teacher preparation.

TPA is an LLC - most likely a for-profit venture.  LLC's allow partners to risk less of their own stake in the performance of the company; they are not personally on the hook if the company goes under. Other advantages include  lawsuit protection, credibility, tax savings, deductible employee benefits, asset protection, anonymity, the ease of raising capital, creating a separate legal entity for personal protection. The arose in the 1990s as a convenient way to attract foreign capital.

Peggy Noonan's Flag Day non-surprise

She uses the holiday to bash the Obama administration.  I wrote back.

To the Editor;

I just wanted to confirm that when Peggy Noonan writes, "It is a great irony, and history will marvel at it, that the president most committed to expanding the centrality, power, prerogatives and controls of the federal government is also the president who, through lack of care, arrogance, and an absence of any sense of prudential political boundaries, has done the most in our time to damage trust in government" she is referring to the administration that invaded another country for false reasons then failed to adequately plan for nation building which spawned a civil war, instituted torture and the rendition of suspected bad guys to nations that torture and used the office of the Presidency to privilege the already rich and powerful to a degree unseen in this country in over one hundred years.

Right?

NYTimes on the panopticon

A good rebuke to claims that NSA programs are 'benign' or 'modest' sacrifices of privacy in the NYTimes draws a letter:

To the Editor;

The claim about NSA 'dragnet' programs like Prism, as emphasized by James Rule in "The price of panopticon" (June 12, 2013), that "... no serious analyst can doubt that such steps may be helping to pinpoint terrorist acts in advance, as supporters, like Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, have insisted," rest on two questions.  First, do other, less Constitutionally suspect measures exist that can work equally well?  And second, have people who are not terrorists been unduly burdened or investigated through faulty analysis of massive medadata connections?

Until both of these are rigorously examined, debated and proven, please take all claims about the necessity of big data government surveillance as abrogation of our fourth Amendment rights.

Brooks on Snowden

I wish David Brooks believed even half the stuff he writes.

In commentary on Edward Snowden, the whistleblower on the NSA data mining, Brooks sees him as an exemplar of the "... the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good."

In doing so, Brooks mistakes his 'lone wolf' theory of social breakdown for the truly menacing character who wraps himself in just these social institutions, claiming to speak through them and for them.  We see this in religious leaders who castigate all those who believe differently as immoral degenerates, unworthy of social capital; political leaders who  marginalize opponents as anti-American, unworthy of civic participation and open dialogue; school leaders who abrogate the rights of teachers and students in order to pursue 'official knowledge' that serves the interests of their political or economic class; economic leaders who influence policy that benefits their sector above all other concerns, thus spreading inequality and ecological devastation in the name of progress and growth.

Brooks is not wrong, of course.  He makes sharp insight into our climactic age.  His basic point, though, that "For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures," does not go farther enough to inquire into how the leadership of this country has modeled just this lack of trust and cooperation.  Through the practice of fear-based campaigning, authoritarian justifications for policy, both domestic and foreign, and ethnographic perception of what are the best interests of the public, our leadership has arrogated trust, faith, respect and the willingness to follow.

Edward Snowden may not be much of a hero. He may only be a product of what he has been so long witness to.

Ed Week stumps for Common Core

In a commentary/op-ed at Ed Week, Alice Johnson Cain makes this case for the Common Core State Standards: "The common core defines critical, real-world understandings that students need for success in college and career, broken down by grade level. Until the development of the common standards in English/language arts and mathematics, teachers have been expected to cover a surfeit of material. The common core reduces this load, but in return demands that teaching be pursued with increased rigor, depth, and relevance. This call for excellence has been met with great enthusiasm from teachers and students alike. Best of all, all students will benefit from this standards push, and the increased rigor across the board has the potential to catapult our schools—particularly schools in states that do not currently offer a rigorous curriculum to all students—to levels of quality and equality of opportunity that have not yet been reached."

Since the CCSS have yet to be implemented, taught, assessed and made sense of in practice, these claims are hopeful only. Consider this, though.  Teachers have not really needed assistance in leading students to 'critical, real-world understandings.' Almost any curricular reform since the post-War period has made a similar claim.  A litany of education philosophy traced back to John Dewey, at least, has also documented just that approach to schooling. What has usually stood in teachers' way has been politicians who are reluctant to allow students to grasp critical, real-world understandings. Think of what would happen if our students actually do start to perceive their society with greater acuity, fluency and understandings of the social context to policy.  As for "success in college and career," these are more of the rhetoric business interests use to justify co-opting the education process in order to serve their institutional aims.  Of course, that history does not mean the CCSS will fail in its mission. Rather, the point is that such abstract claims are immune to critique.  The reformers adopt performance measures that demonstrate how, no matter what the current system provides, it fails on their terms.

Having worked in schools since 1996, I do not remember a time when teachers were not pursuing "... increased rigor, depth and relevance."  Nor has there ever been a "call for excellence" not met "with great enthusiasm from teachers and students alike."  The idea that "increased rigor across the board has the potential to catapult our schools ... to levels of quality and equality of opportunity that have not yet been reached"is  conjecture, wish-fulfillment and blindness to the work educators have made over the past 30+ years (since a similar tone of cheer-leading and dire warning emanated from A Nation at Risk, in 1983)

Johnson Cain serves as a VP for TeachPlus, a non-profit for urban ed advocacy, funded, it seems, within the Gates constellation of organizations, most of advocate strongly for the Common Core. She has a background working for the good of schools and in defense of under-served students.  I have no reason to doubt her veracity, just her proximity to an ideological mission to privatize public services.

Let's look at what else she writes.  After the above statement, she claims that the CCSS has sparked a revolution in education.  The result? "Thanks to the common core, for the first time in history, teachers across the United States are united in a way that opens the door for the use of massive online open courses, or MOOCs, as professional-development tools."  The leaders of this revolution are tech companies, like Microsoft and Pearson, who see vast wealth in education, not the teachers and committed leaders intent on teaching students in excellence.

Johnson Cain calls for the creation of a hybrid teacher-leader: "... districts should find ways to empower and invest in teacher-leaders, who would make ideal trainers for their colleagues. This would enable teachers to learn about the standards from in-the-classroom experts they trust, instead of outsiders. Hybrid roles for teacher-leaders, so that they can teach part time while also coaching colleagues, is one way we can invest in teachers as experts to make the common-core rollout a success without wasting time." A great idea, one that has needed not a CCSS but funding from schools.  Teachers she works with are "enthusiastic about the standards because they offer opportunities for cross-country collaboration on best practices and for high expectations for students' critical-thinking skills—the learning that matters most." Teacher currently have this opportunity (through acronymic vessels like PLCs), though are often bogged down by district mandates and a lack of planning/meeting time.  No reason that a CCSS is needed, except to create opportunities for professional development through products neatly aligned with the CCSS and its assessment apparatus.

Thus, near the end, comes the lede: "The federal government sends states $2.5 billion each year for professional development for teachers and gives great latitude to states and districts on how they spend those dollars. Rather than delays or moratoriums, there is an opportunity for leaders like Weingarten to help states figure out how to squeeze every possible dollar to fully prepare teachers and schools for the common core and to ensure that the transition to new standards-based assessments, currently slated to begin in September 2014, goes well."  Moving forward on the CCSS and its assessments creates a massive need for entrepreneurial organizations to create products to tap that spending. Obstacles that interferes with that potential market, like delays to consider the long-term comprehensive complexities of the CCSS, must be removed.

Were Johnson Cain not funded by Gates, I would still be skeptical of her claims.  Nothing prevents teachers and schools from creating exactly the reforms now that she sees as burgeoning with the CCSS.  The scope and sweep of education philosophy for the past 30 years has argued for these forms of teacher mastery, autonomy and purpose.  Clothed in arguments about excellence, revolutionary potential and un-before-seen potential, they mask an aggressive encroachment by those staking gains for their private interests, not the public good.

Ross Douthat on Reform Conservatism

I have never much understood what it means, or had meant, to be a Reform Jew. But I have always been one. Reading Ross Douthat's argument about Reform Conservatism does not help me understand reform movements in general.  It is hard, then, to consider myself one.

He writes that its major premises constitute "... not just a tendency or an impulse, but at least the outline of a reasonably coherent reform agenda." Already, I wonder if being a reformist means stretching for certain specifics or attempting to reorient the project along its main principles.  Revisiting Oakeshott, I have always considered conservatism to be tendentious, rather than concretized into details. Thus conservative reform would not concern content, per se, but about vision.  And vision bogs down precisely when principles are exhumed into rules.

He presents the dilemma this way: "The core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not income inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation — weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class ...  But economic and social policy can make a difference nonetheless, making family life more affordable, upward mobility more likely, and employment easier to find ...  The existing welfare-state institutions we’ve inherited from the New Deal and the Great Society, however, often make these tasks harder rather than easier: Their exploding costs crowd out every other form of spending, require middle class tax increases and threaten to drag on economic growth; their tangled web of subsidies and credits and tax breaks often benefit the already-affluent and create perverse incentives for the poor, and the distortions created by the way they pay for health care, in particular, contribute mightily to the rising cost of health insurance and thus the stagnation of middle class incomes. So we don’t face a choice between streamlining the welfare state and making it more supportive of work and family; we should be doing both at once."

Conservatives prefer to adhere to our collective inheritance, until exigent conditions deserve change.  From my experience of the past 30+ years, today's conditions make it seem more crucial to protect the infrastructure of these programs, explicitly for the reasons Douthat entertains: growing inequality in social opportunity and outcomes, stratification along economic and thus social lines and a stagnation of social mobility.  In fact, the failure of conservatism to be conservative begat the heart of the problem Douthat raises.  These inherited programs have been long predicted to 'explode' in costs because of the aging baby boomers. And yet past attempts to ameliorate this disproportionate expense - by uncapping the SS and FICA levies; creating a 'lock box' for the future - have been met with derision.  Adjustment now includes middle class tax increases only because past attempts to structure differently - progressivity in the tax code above $250/450k - have been met with tax absolutism.

Thinking of conservatism as a set of philosophical and policy specifics distorts it from an orientation of sustainability to a tribunal of activism.  Put another way, the more outcome-focused reform conservatives become, the less they are conservative.  We can see this in the first two of Douthat's recommendations for action:
"a. A tax reform that caps deductions and lowers rates, but also reduces the burden on working parents and the lower middle class, whether through an expanded child tax credit or some other means of reducing payroll tax liability."  A conservative would look at Social Security, Medicare and other social wide programs and ask how well they are integrated into the American social structure.  In the first two cases, hugely.  A conservative would then ask how we can continue to fund them in order for them to function as purposed. The answer is one that political conservatives abhor: raising revenue: tax increases on the segment of the population whose behavior will be fundamentally altered through the imposition. We are back to uncapping SS and FICA fees and increasing the progressivity of marginal tax rates. We can lower pay-outs, of course.  But that is not what the program was created to do.  It boggles the mind that anyone could assume that those who depend on Social Security and Medicare do so as malingers, nested in moral hazard through life-long dependency on the nanny state.  To do so means to have no idea what life is like living solely on state aid.

"b. A repeal or revision of Obamacare that aims to ease us toward a system of near-universal catastrophic health insurance, and includes some kind of flat tax credit or voucher explicitly designed for that purpose." Revision, yes. Repeal is merely a flag waived to signal allegiance to the current flavor of political conservative, not a policy implication of a conservative orientation. Rather than fight the current law, conservative awareness demands agressive action to make sure the reasons behind the law are functional and prudent. Does increasingly universal advancement toward single-payer coverage create poorer health outcomes? That is a question best answered not through ideological rhetoric but through efficiently empirical science and qualitative feedback of those in such a system. A conservative would prefer to find out before either abandoning the project or erecting a system through wild abandon.

The rest of his ideas unspool in equal measure: a kernel of an idea, shaped to appeal to existing political conservative proclivities.  His one pseudo-reformist solution ("An attack not only on explicit subsidies for powerful incumbents (farm subsidies, etc.) but also other protections and implicit guarantees, in arenas ranging from copyright law to the problem of “Too Big To Fail.”") would be better served by naming powerful incumbents who have the expressed power to block this idea: military contractors, energy conglomerates, insurance and bank multinationals.

Douthat makes other specious claims about what a reform conservatism would not do, particular regarding addressing climate change (When is conservationism not a conservative tendency? When it is opposed by radical, aggrandizing economic interests) and  tax increases (When is fiscal prudence not conservative? When it means raising the revenue needed to sustain the infrastructure upon which America demands).

Reform conservatism is needed.  Or rather, conservatism needs reform, if by conservatism, we mean those in Congress and in state government who are pushing for radical not conservative ideas.  If not, then conservatism does not need reform. It needs conservatives to be, actually, conservative.

"Free" Speech

The WSJ, again, Rivkin and Casey edition.  I could not get past their first sentence without feeling the urge to reply.

To start, they write: "The unfolding IRS scandal is a symptom, not the disease.For decades, campaign-finance reform zealots have sought to limit core political speech through spending limits and disclosure requirements. More recently, they have claimed that it is wrong and dangerous for tax-exempt entities to engage in political speech."

So, 'core' political speech is not, say, politicians speaking, but donor contributing money to campaigns? And I my tax dollars should subsidize the political work of a non-profit?

How are either of those beliefs conservative?

Obama v. Bush?

Daniel Henninger of the, of course, WSJ, starts making mindless points and piles on ideology.

He first notes, that "Now, in the grimmest way possible, he is Bush, another American president who must come to grips with the aftermath of a mortal act of Islamic terror on U.S. soil, televised to the whole world." What makes Obama not-Bush is his reaction to the attack.  He treats them not as a prompt to implement the retraction of civil rights, the opportunity to plunge the country into a series of catastrophic overreactions and a basis for his identity as 'war president' (and all the economic, political and moral damage that caused).  Rather, he allows the FBI and local law enforcement to carry out their duties (perhaps to their own overly reactive extent).  In short, he treats the criminal act in proper, and effective perspective.

Next, he makes this claim: "George Bush immediately used his political capital—and paid a heavy price—to pass the Patriot Act." What cost exactly?  The Patriot Act, in many ways, become the blue print for the entire eight years of the Bush administration: ignore civil and human rights, politicize every form of dissent and inquiry into political decision-making, stoke fear and threaten reprisal at any blowback or political questioning.  To the contrary, one might counter-claim that the Patriot Act supplied the political capital for Bush to operate insulated from internal turmoil for a good six years.

Henninger then makes a false distinction: "The Patriot Act created the means to answer such questions. Its primary weapon to prevent terror was the wiretap, a surveillance tool virtually everyone in law enforcement says is the best way to catch criminals. " Everyone in law enforcement also said that such wire tapes must be procured through legal means: warrants and judicial oversight. The Bush approach abandoned such measures as expendable niceties, easily disposed of in times of terror.  It created the fear from which it could then justify the ignoring of civil rights due to fear.

He does add one salient point: "When its turn came, the Obama administration used the Patriot Act—its title now grimly appropriate—and defended it in court. In 2011, the Obama administration embraced reauthorization of the Patriot Act, which Harry Reid years earlier promised to kill."  Perhaps Henninger might want to peruse his own paper for coverage at the left's vitiating attacks on President Obama. Here, indeed, was a Bush-ism. The difference, if there is one, is that Obama's use of this legislation has been constrained, rather than defining. Not much to build on there, though.

He ends with note of mindless extrapolation: "But let us posit an unimpeachable fact: Whatever their eventual opinion of "Bush-Cheney," Bostonians and Americans generally would have happily signed off on a warrantless wiretap of the Tsarnaevs' phones before the deaths and mutilations of April 15, 2013."  'Unimpeachable;' cute.

How might we know who, ahead of time, would act in such a way?  Does Henninger think that all phone conversations and all social networking and all email and all public, and even private, internal reflection, should be subject to warrant-less, aggressive data mining? The thought police, because then we would absolutely know in advance who would do what, and we can stop them?

NYTimes on teacher evaluation

Not sure why the paper ran this story, but I responded anyway.


To the Editor;

Jenny Anderson makes several comments that demonstrate the misperceptions and misunderstandings of the education reform movement ("Curious grade for teachers," March 30, 2013).  Some of the more unfortunate examples and the mistaken premises upon which they rest, include:

"The changes, already under way in some cities and states, are intended to provide meaningful feedback and, critically, to weed out weak performers" and, later, "Education reformers insist they help to identify and remove ineffective teachers, while offering more feedback for teachers to improve their practice." The premise is that these two goals are commensurate rather than in tension with and antagonistic upon the other.

"Principals, who are often responsible for the personal-observation part of the grade, generally are not detached managerial types and can be loath to give teachers low marks." The premise is that education relies too much upon the subjective, intersubjective understanding of human relations and not enough on the hard, empirical stuff of objective data.

"But because Leon County set the test-score bar so low, when their marks came out, all but one were highly effective, and the other was categorized as effective" and, later, "Grover J. Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said variations in teacher quality had been proven to affect student academic growth. If an evaluation system is not finding a wider distribution of effectiveness, “it is flawed,” he said." The premise is that student test scores are a direct cause, not just correlated to, teacher effectiveness.

"“We are seeing improvements in practice,” he said, noting that 400 teachers had been fired as a result of the new system, and several hundred had left voluntarily after weak ratings." The premise is that the teachers left because they were ineffective and not due to the pressure to produce meaningless statistics rather than critically thinking and empathic people, to treat students like numbers rather than humans capable of autonomy and dignity, or to abide by a philosophy that treats education as a commodity and political tool rather than a process of living and engaging with the world.

Anderson did offer one insight that captured the reason for these mistakes, "In Florida’s first go-round with the new evaluations, for example, some teachers had to be rated based on students in their school, but not in their classrooms, because there was not enough data for their own students."  In other words, teachers recognize the harm that 'managerial' types of evaluations does to the act of education.  It is telling that she includes this insight as a parenthetical rather than a strong, objective claim in itself.  Until the media uncover the premises that ground this debate' on education reform from each side, only the public will be massively misinformed.  Our students, and the future of society, are at stake.

WSJ: History version

This one a book review, deserving a response.


To the Editor;

Amity Shlaes fizzles what is an otherwise honorable review of the life of Herbert Hoover when she declaims 'progressive historians' who, "... are eager to absolve a hero of government expansion, Roosevelt, from responsibility for the Depression that plagued his first two terms. If Roosevelt was good, they reason, then those who preceded him—Hoover especially, but also Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding—must be bad" ("He knew he was right" March 29, 2013).

With her new book extolling Calvin Coolidge, and a previous work attempting to deconstruct the historical record on Franklin Roosevelt, Ms. Shlaes by her own logic could be read as offering her own 'extreme' version of history.  

It works both ways, unfortunately. Either historians succumb to the group think narrative of their chosen partisan base, or they interpret the facts as they find them. Students deserve better than to be treated as ignorant and naive, unable to perceive the engine of bias. Seeing so much personal at stake in her scholarship, Ms. Shlaes should not be confused if one might be tempted to question understanding of the past.

WSJ: 'Til the Supreme Court do us part"

They speak; I respond.

To the Editors;

You raise a necessary concern of Federalism over redefining the meaning of marriage through the courts ("'Til the Supreme Court do us part" Thursday, March 27, 2013).

Yet this concern is hardly sufficient to the issue. The more essential question is not, as you indicate, "... that for the Court to transform the definition of marriage for one group fundamentally restructures it for all groups and makes it harder for society through its representatives to rule out anything that adults want to call "marriage.""  Rather, the concern is whether states can create conditions that benefit one group of people and not others. On what state interest should such conditions be allowed?

Perhaps the most prudent act would be for the state to abandon is sanction of 'marriage' and stick to civil unions.  Let churches, temples, mosques and other institutes of spiritual matters conduct marriage. The Fall of the West will not commence.

The war on entitlements

Thomas B. Edsall, in the NYTimes, makes clear, sound arguments about Social Security and Medicare reform:
"First, insofar as benefits for the affluent are reduced or eliminated under means-testing, social insurance programs are no longer universal and are seen, instead, as a form of welfare. Public support would almost certainly decline, encouraging further cuts in the future.

Second, the focus on means-testing and raising the age of eligibility diverts attention from a much simpler and more equitable approach: raising the payroll tax to apply to the earnings of the well-to-do, a step strongly opposed by the ideological right.  In this kind of conflict over limited goods, one of the most valuable resources that can get lost in the fray is the wisdom of the electorate at large.  

Third, and most important in terms of the policy debate, while both means-testing and eliminating the $113,700 cap on earnings subject to the payroll tax hurt the affluent, the latter would inflict twice as much pain."

I would have liked for him to analyze the Conservative view that any policy that supports those in need creates a cycle of dependency.  Together with the opposing view, that a civil, moral society takes care of those in need, these positions show the sharp, radical split that prevents sane, thoughtful actions.

Helping those in need can create dependency, particularly when the help does not enable beneficiaries out of their crises. Yet not helping those in the midst of a crises, no matter the amount of past help, is immoral. Policy is caught between competing visions of pragmatics, morals and ideals.

Raising the cap is my choice, though I recognize this action does not create conditions that enable rather than remediate.

Daniel Henninger critiques preventive strike?

Not in so many words.  So, I wrote a letter to help him understand.

To the Editor; 

I applaud Daniel Henninger for his line, "If I'm a 40-year old southerner, born in 1973 and raising a family in one of these states, this view by four justices on the Supreme Court in 2013 of what I might do is insulting and demeaning" (Is the South still racist? March 7, 2013).

By rebuking the argument that we must act in advance of potential harms, no matter how seemingly reasonable, he eviscerates a host of current policies, especially that of preemptive military strike.  I look forward to his advocacy of rigorous, sustained and multilateral engaged diplomacy as the foreign policy ideal.

A reply to Thomas Friedman

To the Editor;

Thomas Friedman makes a terrific point, "The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know."  He then contradicts himself, "We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency ,,, and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency" ("The professors' big stage" March 6, 2013).

Part of the crisis in education is this demand to have it both ways.  Competency is measurable precisely because it requires convergent, rote-like knowledge and skills. Creativity and entrepreneurship is often not measurable precisely because it requires divergent, radically different use of knowledge and skills.  The more schools insist on the former, the less they are capable of cultivating the latter.

Teaching the Bible in public schools

The editors of the WSJ let a live one through today.  I responded in its spirit:


To the Editor;

re: "Why public school teachers should teach the Bible," Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, March 1, 2013)

Imagine that public school teachers take the Supreme Court's 1963 Abington decision as rationale to teach the Bible.  How might a teacher present the Bible "objectively as part of a secular program of education"? 

Students would be asked to think critically about the claims being made. They would be asked to evaluate, challenge and debate the text in order to treat the evidence as objectively and secularly as possible.  Like all great literature, the Bible would be analyzed for motivation, subtext, metaphor and symbolism.  It would be presented as fiction, authored by humans for distinctly human goals.  Any literal truth would be abandoned in pursuit of aesthetic, moral and psychological lessons.

I second their notion.

What are schools for?

The WSJ posted an editorial critical of Pres. Obama's goals for universal pre-school.  I wrote a letter in response.

To the Editor;

In your editorial "Head Start for all," (February 26, 2013), you make solid points against many of the current fads dressed up as education reform.

"All of this is consistent with the phenomenon known as "fade out," in which any tangible gains from preschool dissipate as students progress through elementary school."  Fade out occurs at all levels in the school system when achievement is measured through standardized exams.  They are distinctly incapable of telling us anything of lasting value about a student.

"Nearly 80% of enrollment is "just a transfer of income from the government to families of four year olds" who would have attended preschool anyway." Vouchers are indeed a sly method to redistribute taxpayer money to the wealthy, not just for preschool but all along the educational system.

"...it can't even be replicated in Georgia." No matter the promise, reforms do not scale.  What works in one classroom or even one state depends on specific goals, dispositions and needs. We are just too diverse as a nation to cut and paste school policies from one state to the whole country.

Standardized testing, vouchers and generalizing 'what works' seem logical. They are not.  Doubtful will the Common Core, longer school days, expanding charters, online education and other fascinations of the new-style reformists succeed to a significant degree as well.  Until we examine a more enlightened and animating reason for schooling, reforms simply serve vested interests rather than tomorrow's students.

Wolf in the herd

The New York Times got a letter today.

To the Editor;

Yuval Levin reiterates an incomplete and unhelpful dichotomy when he writes, "Democrats want to close the budget gap by having the government lean more heavily on the wealthy, while Republicans want to close it by having the government spend less money." (February 20, "Old and White? Less help for you").

A more representative depiction would be that many want to close the budget gap through higher revenues (which do not come from lower tax rates) and through lower government spending (which should not affect the needs of crucial public projects, like education, science and infrastructure).

Because we want what is impossible, we get nothing but commentary.

Brooks on character and ECE

Another letter, to the NYTimes, in response to David Brooks:


To the Editor;

David Brooks exposes the central contradiction in educational policy when he writes that "... There’s still a lot we don’t know about how to educate children that young. The essential thing is to build systems that can measure progress, learn and adapt to local circumstances." ("When families fail," Friday, February 15, 2013).

The difficulty of adequately measuring any progress is that it takes a long, long time.  End of year testing, at whatever level in the school system, create false consciousness about learning.  If the government creates oversight that is 'as simple as possible,' it risks creating systems that sacrifice valuable longitudinal knowledge for politically motivated insufficient data.  There is no 'real and ambitious' way forward through short-sided, coercive policy.

Slow destruction of the human condition

Roger Cohen is quite eloquent today:
"Urban livers wallow in emotion — about death among other things — because of a dearth of necessity. Cut off from natural patterns of life and death, they become sentimental. Reality shows take the place of the realities of life. You do not find heroes among the dales. The word would be considered indulgent. You do what has to be done.

Once most of humanity is estranged from nature, rootless, unfamiliar with the rhythms of the seasons and the cycle of passing and renewal, bound by material considerations alone, uncomfortable with solitude and silence and darkness, jostled by the crowd and the hum and the neon, the danger is that some essential ethical ballast and reference is lost."

WSJ on doctors (and teachers)

In response to a commentary, I sent the WSJ a letter:

To the Editors:

In his concern about the potential for doctors to strike, ("The doctor's office as union shop,") Wednesday, January 30, 2013), David Leffell explicates the inevitable danger of prioritizing corporate profits over health care.  

Doctors should be concerned that the economics of health care sift money out of the patients' well-being.   Teachers, to whom he offers in comparison, already worry that privatizing education pulls money away from learning to enhance shareholder value and quarterly returns.  When the focus of medicine is no longer patient welfare, as the purpose of education is no longer student learning, but corporate profit, Americans should, to rephrase Dr. Leffell, "expect the quality of their care and access to it decline." Collective action, though rarely and often poorly used, remains a bulwark against that threat.