Daniel Henninger, of the WSJ, in a pitch perfect example of Foxification of news: "In 2008's election, many Republicans and independents voted for Mr. Obama to put a final nail in the coffin of Justice O'Connor's racial anxieties. The millions of them who then cast votes against Mr. Obama in 2012 did so almost wholly because of the status of the economy after four years of his presidency. No matter. They lost in 2012 because they're "too white.""
Did non-Democrats vote for Obama in 2008 merely because he was Black? It had nothing to do with his opposition, contempt for the GOP, Obama's promise and vision, and a willingness to believe that politics (and governing) could once again be sober, rational and bipartisan?
Did anti-Obama voters pick Romney because they trusted his vision of economics (which was what?) more than Obama, and not because Obama was Black?
Henninger wants to have it both ways. Obama won in 2008 because he was Black, but being Black had nothing to do with votes against him in 2012. People who voted for him in 2008 were irrational; people who voted against him in 2012 were rational.
He also claims that, "When George W. Bush attracted 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004, there was no cry that the Republican Party was "too white." The GOP's problem with Hispanics today is a tangle of issues involving the law, labor and assimilation that is hardly reducible to the accusation that the party is too white."
Except that being 'White' correlates highly with feeling threatened by the Brown-ing of America. Hispanics voted for Bush 2 because of his immigration policies; Hispanics voted against Romney because, also, of his immigration policies. True, but Romney's policies were driven by the fearful politics of White privilege and xenophobia, inflamed by red state news' (et. al.) reporting that the "Browns" are stealing jobs of "Whites," flooding the public services and thus raising the taxes of "Whites" and the leading cause of crime and violence in otherwise calm and peaceful "White" society.
Henninger and friends are free to believe what they want and to pitch false consciousness onto their readership. That does not mean its readership needs to trust them.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Monday, November 26, 2012
Intellectual Empathy
Matthew Lee Anderson has the right idea: "The real problem seems to be that people are uncertain about what to do with our disagreements, how to open and conduct conversations across the aisle without sacrificing our core convictions ... And if the “first things” of our framework are really at stake, then it can be easy to slip into a belligerent defense rather than entering into open inquiry ... "
His solution seems spot on: "One way to cultivate such common ground in our own local communities is through what some of called “intellectual empathy,” or the decision to enter into a person’s way of the seeing the world and look along with them ... Intellectual empathy is a form of seeing how. As in, “Oh, I see how you could think that. It’s wrong, but I can see how it might make sense.” It is an act that is aimed, first and foremost, toward the good of understanding, a good that persuasion may flow from but can never precede."
Intellectual empathy, then, requires one person to accept that the other has legitimate reasons for her beliefs, regardless of the validity the one gives to them. Giving reason, as Donald Schon described it, is the act of taking the position of the other, and recognizing that, just as each of us has (mostly) strong reasons for what we think and why we act as we do, so do others. To deny them that level of reasonableness dehumanizes; a signaling, perhaps, more to our fear of making vulnerable our ideas and beliefs.
Moreover, intellectual empathy means embracing the other's view as one's own. Until we get inside their thinking (by a process that helps us towards understanding the context and contingency of their view, the identity claims presented in their view, the normative and subjectivities involved in coming to their view), we will continue to treat their views as static and concrete, ignorant or uneducated, rather than stochastic, fluid and dependent on an overall world view and experience of living in the world view.
Problems arise when the one person implicitly devalues the other's opinions, thereby defaming her reasoning. While one can see the other as mistaken or lacking in understanding, missing some key fact or factor or just poor in analytical ability, that is a second order understanding. The first takes seriously that the other has reason for their understanding, and attempts to justify those reasons as reasonable.
His solution seems spot on: "One way to cultivate such common ground in our own local communities is through what some of called “intellectual empathy,” or the decision to enter into a person’s way of the seeing the world and look along with them ... Intellectual empathy is a form of seeing how. As in, “Oh, I see how you could think that. It’s wrong, but I can see how it might make sense.” It is an act that is aimed, first and foremost, toward the good of understanding, a good that persuasion may flow from but can never precede."
Intellectual empathy, then, requires one person to accept that the other has legitimate reasons for her beliefs, regardless of the validity the one gives to them. Giving reason, as Donald Schon described it, is the act of taking the position of the other, and recognizing that, just as each of us has (mostly) strong reasons for what we think and why we act as we do, so do others. To deny them that level of reasonableness dehumanizes; a signaling, perhaps, more to our fear of making vulnerable our ideas and beliefs.
Moreover, intellectual empathy means embracing the other's view as one's own. Until we get inside their thinking (by a process that helps us towards understanding the context and contingency of their view, the identity claims presented in their view, the normative and subjectivities involved in coming to their view), we will continue to treat their views as static and concrete, ignorant or uneducated, rather than stochastic, fluid and dependent on an overall world view and experience of living in the world view.
Problems arise when the one person implicitly devalues the other's opinions, thereby defaming her reasoning. While one can see the other as mistaken or lacking in understanding, missing some key fact or factor or just poor in analytical ability, that is a second order understanding. The first takes seriously that the other has reason for their understanding, and attempts to justify those reasons as reasonable.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Evolution and the Creationismists
Adam Laats, in an essay online at Chronicle of Higher Ed, writes this helpful description:
"As it stands, scientists' blundering hostility toward creationism actually encourages creationist belief. By offering a stark division between religious faith and scientific belief, evolutionary scientists have pushed creationists away from embracing evolutionary ideas. And, by assuming that only ignorance could explain creationist beliefs, scientists have unwittingly fostered bitter resentment among the creationists, the very people with whom they should be hoping to connect."
This paragraph gains traction by highlighting the dichotomous thinking involved between evolution and creationism. For one to to be valid, the other must be invalid. Truth is a kind of mercantilism reality, an either/or confrontation with what is. Except, in this case, that very dichotomy is the problem.
One of the stronger arguments against teaching Creationism (or its variants, like I.D.) in science classrooms is that Creationism is not scientific. Evolution is. Creationism could be a topic in a Social Studies class, even a literature class. Not science because ... it is not scientific. Making the choice one of either believing in Creationism or believing in evolution obviates that strength. It all but forces a science teacher to incorporate Creationism into the curriculum; the dichotomy needs to be resolved. Science v. Creationism.
For the moment, ignore the implications of believing one or the other. Creationism, then, could be understood as a cosmology, not the process after cosmogenics. Evolution, on the other hand, could be understood as the process after cosmogenics, not a theory of cosmology. One narrates the beginning; the other, what happens next. While I do not find much credence in Creationism, I can not impeach the theory. It is un-impeachable, another trait that removes it from the scientific. While I can not prove evolution, I can attempt to impeach it (in theory I could, had I enough background and methodology), its virtue of being scientific.
Laats makes a good point about taking seriously the reasoning behind those who back Creationism. But because the belief is not science, and thus not open to rebuke, Creationismists should never be engaged in a battle of right v. wrong. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote, treating them as "non-overlapping magesteria" is not a abdication of either. It is, rather, a recognition that they are non-comparable.
"As it stands, scientists' blundering hostility toward creationism actually encourages creationist belief. By offering a stark division between religious faith and scientific belief, evolutionary scientists have pushed creationists away from embracing evolutionary ideas. And, by assuming that only ignorance could explain creationist beliefs, scientists have unwittingly fostered bitter resentment among the creationists, the very people with whom they should be hoping to connect."
This paragraph gains traction by highlighting the dichotomous thinking involved between evolution and creationism. For one to to be valid, the other must be invalid. Truth is a kind of mercantilism reality, an either/or confrontation with what is. Except, in this case, that very dichotomy is the problem.
One of the stronger arguments against teaching Creationism (or its variants, like I.D.) in science classrooms is that Creationism is not scientific. Evolution is. Creationism could be a topic in a Social Studies class, even a literature class. Not science because ... it is not scientific. Making the choice one of either believing in Creationism or believing in evolution obviates that strength. It all but forces a science teacher to incorporate Creationism into the curriculum; the dichotomy needs to be resolved. Science v. Creationism.
For the moment, ignore the implications of believing one or the other. Creationism, then, could be understood as a cosmology, not the process after cosmogenics. Evolution, on the other hand, could be understood as the process after cosmogenics, not a theory of cosmology. One narrates the beginning; the other, what happens next. While I do not find much credence in Creationism, I can not impeach the theory. It is un-impeachable, another trait that removes it from the scientific. While I can not prove evolution, I can attempt to impeach it (in theory I could, had I enough background and methodology), its virtue of being scientific.
Laats makes a good point about taking seriously the reasoning behind those who back Creationism. But because the belief is not science, and thus not open to rebuke, Creationismists should never be engaged in a battle of right v. wrong. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote, treating them as "non-overlapping magesteria" is not a abdication of either. It is, rather, a recognition that they are non-comparable.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
NYTimes, 1.1.12
Two articles that inspire thinking.
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?
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.
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?
*
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.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Theory of mind/change
Theory of mind describes the way that one person understands another. We begin to recognize that all the thoughts, feelings, intentions and other mental states I experience, you experience, whatever or not I can ever understand them in the same way you do. Just as I have reasons, however vaguely I comprehend them, for what I do, so do you. Whether we locate this process of mutual recognition in the brain (mirror neurons), or in culture (socialization), or existentially and ontologically, theory of mind complements empathy.
"Theory of change" is a looser term, describing the practices an institution or group of individuals go through to develop, implement and evaluate action-oriented transformation. Success can result in a grounded model of what works to bring about an updated, better or improved state of affairs. The approach gets written and subsequently publicized. It becomes a must-follow technique and is soon adopted wholesale, regardless of the context. On a bigger picture, "theory of change" means the large-scale project of developing and spreading these iterative models of transformation. Put differently: change is necessary, change can happen, and change can be managed, directed and effective towards pre-conceived outcomes.
What do these two ideas have in common? Why discuss them together? Because education reform needs more theory of mind and less theory of change.
"I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience ... I do not experience your experience. But I experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experienced by you. And I experience you as experiencing yourself as experienced by me. And so on."
And so on. Or, we strive to understand another and the willingness to do so, despite failing, marks our humanity. We are disposed to try, always in novel ways. With and through empathy, I change. But change comes without prior theory or expectation. I do not know how I will change. At some fundamental level, who I am alters in ways non-predicated or foreseeable. It makes sense that some refrain from seeing another fully, experiencing the gulf between self and other as a challenge, a lack, a sign of our own incomprehensible understanding of ourselves. We risk when we empathize, for we make the sense of ourselves as full experienced and conceived vulnerable.
All this means that a theory of mind pulls us more intimately into our own experience; the more we recognize the fullness of others, the more transitional and incomplete we find ourselves. What results from that awareness is education.
That imposition matters if we are to view schooling as partaking in the formation of the whole person. When the process by which we nurture and, well, educate successions of citizens and fellowmen and women models a top-down administration of experience, we teach students that one need not work at empathy, or on themselves. Rather, just climb to a position of authority and dictate from on high the meanings you demand that others adopt. Outcome-based education reform (as opposed to, but not different from, outcome-based education theory and practice; the medium is the message) can therefore strangle empathy, and render human relationships into instrument object-use relationships. The other is for me a vehicle for my own self-interest. Mutual recognition becomes Hobbesian and narcissistic; empathy erodes.
With loss of the possibility of empathy, the self grows complacent and settled. The openness needed for life-long learner - Socratic wisdom - vanishes; we are finished and oriented against and opposed to the world. What results from that kind of self is not education, however much we make it into what schooling does.
"Theory of change" is a looser term, describing the practices an institution or group of individuals go through to develop, implement and evaluate action-oriented transformation. Success can result in a grounded model of what works to bring about an updated, better or improved state of affairs. The approach gets written and subsequently publicized. It becomes a must-follow technique and is soon adopted wholesale, regardless of the context. On a bigger picture, "theory of change" means the large-scale project of developing and spreading these iterative models of transformation. Put differently: change is necessary, change can happen, and change can be managed, directed and effective towards pre-conceived outcomes.
What do these two ideas have in common? Why discuss them together? Because education reform needs more theory of mind and less theory of change.
*
I like to think of empathy, the heart of theory of mind in action, as both process and disposition rather than a state of being or an outcome. By this definition, we must actively and continually position take with another person, trying to understand their experience from within their ways of knowing. Max van Manen depicted this as trying to make thoughtful sense of the meaning the other's experience has for the other as well as for our view. We need to seek out to the fullest extent how contexts and conditions and norms shape thought and meaning. That we try is crucial; we are slated to fail, because an undeniable gulf exists between what I experience and what you do. R. D. Laing puts this well:"I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience ... I do not experience your experience. But I experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experienced by you. And I experience you as experiencing yourself as experienced by me. And so on."
And so on. Or, we strive to understand another and the willingness to do so, despite failing, marks our humanity. We are disposed to try, always in novel ways. With and through empathy, I change. But change comes without prior theory or expectation. I do not know how I will change. At some fundamental level, who I am alters in ways non-predicated or foreseeable. It makes sense that some refrain from seeing another fully, experiencing the gulf between self and other as a challenge, a lack, a sign of our own incomprehensible understanding of ourselves. We risk when we empathize, for we make the sense of ourselves as full experienced and conceived vulnerable.
All this means that a theory of mind pulls us more intimately into our own experience; the more we recognize the fullness of others, the more transitional and incomplete we find ourselves. What results from that awareness is education.
*
Educational reform (the whole bag of iterative examples of addressing needed change in schooling, too many to list) posits this idea that something better can be conceived and achieved. It makes theory of change an outcome-oriented concept, rather than a process of reaching understanding, or inquiring into the conditions of and elements of experience in schooling. It puts the ends (a better school) in front of the means (what is experienced and school and what are its outcomes?); we know where to go before we know what why we are going. Put another way, when theory of change ignores theory of mind, understanding is not possible, and meaning is inscribed by above, politically and ideologically and from hegemony.That imposition matters if we are to view schooling as partaking in the formation of the whole person. When the process by which we nurture and, well, educate successions of citizens and fellowmen and women models a top-down administration of experience, we teach students that one need not work at empathy, or on themselves. Rather, just climb to a position of authority and dictate from on high the meanings you demand that others adopt. Outcome-based education reform (as opposed to, but not different from, outcome-based education theory and practice; the medium is the message) can therefore strangle empathy, and render human relationships into instrument object-use relationships. The other is for me a vehicle for my own self-interest. Mutual recognition becomes Hobbesian and narcissistic; empathy erodes.
With loss of the possibility of empathy, the self grows complacent and settled. The openness needed for life-long learner - Socratic wisdom - vanishes; we are finished and oriented against and opposed to the world. What results from that kind of self is not education, however much we make it into what schooling does.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Faith and silence
I sent this letter off today.
J____,
I have been reading All things shining and thought it has much to say about your recent Ed theory piece and our previous start-up conversation on silence. It makes a rather strong point that meaning, or faith in any sort of content, derives not from agency. Rather, it comes through the ways we each are attuned to the possible. When that attunement finds too high a register in our own willfulness, we alienate ourselves from the possibility of disclosure in the world. Put another way, faith as a function of self-chosen belief is a form of false consciousness. Rather than a dwelling of existential freedom, faith becomes flight from a more radical and difficult freedom, the freedom to be what is possible. Less Fromm and more Bultmann, who wrote that "true freedom is freedom from oneself."
Cultivating silence, or what we called 'silent being,' I think, recognizes the loss that accompanies outcome-based action. Even at its most pragmatic and necessary, goal-directed living and learning risk meaningfulness in action for meaningful of action. It would be the height of irresponsibility for us moderns to construct a social institution not dedicated to effective, efficient pay-offs; we must be purposeful, directed and effervescent in pursuit. The contradiction is most apparent when teachers discuss motivating students. "Relevant" and "meaningful" get used without a deeper commitment to how things are valued. We end up working hard to convince students to either value something that will happen as a result of undergoing this things call education (or schooling or learning or, whatever) or to recognize in their school work something that they already value. Neither contend the students with what is worth valuing nor with how the emerge of value (meaningfulness) is part and parcel of a modern, occlude process of faith.
Silence, then, is less curricular than dispositional, while faith is less muscular (as Simone Weil has called faulty forms of prayer) than it is open.
Roll that around in your South Texas dirt and get back to me.
Take care,
Neil
J____,
I have been reading All things shining and thought it has much to say about your recent Ed theory piece and our previous start-up conversation on silence. It makes a rather strong point that meaning, or faith in any sort of content, derives not from agency. Rather, it comes through the ways we each are attuned to the possible. When that attunement finds too high a register in our own willfulness, we alienate ourselves from the possibility of disclosure in the world. Put another way, faith as a function of self-chosen belief is a form of false consciousness. Rather than a dwelling of existential freedom, faith becomes flight from a more radical and difficult freedom, the freedom to be what is possible. Less Fromm and more Bultmann, who wrote that "true freedom is freedom from oneself."
Cultivating silence, or what we called 'silent being,' I think, recognizes the loss that accompanies outcome-based action. Even at its most pragmatic and necessary, goal-directed living and learning risk meaningfulness in action for meaningful of action. It would be the height of irresponsibility for us moderns to construct a social institution not dedicated to effective, efficient pay-offs; we must be purposeful, directed and effervescent in pursuit. The contradiction is most apparent when teachers discuss motivating students. "Relevant" and "meaningful" get used without a deeper commitment to how things are valued. We end up working hard to convince students to either value something that will happen as a result of undergoing this things call education (or schooling or learning or, whatever) or to recognize in their school work something that they already value. Neither contend the students with what is worth valuing nor with how the emerge of value (meaningfulness) is part and parcel of a modern, occlude process of faith.
Silence, then, is less curricular than dispositional, while faith is less muscular (as Simone Weil has called faulty forms of prayer) than it is open.
Roll that around in your South Texas dirt and get back to me.
Take care,
Neil
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
a double shot of Rhee
WSJ gave two separate spaces to Michelle Rhee and her new Students-First organization. The first was a more or less simple account of her new organization. The second was an opinion piece she authored describing the why and the how of her organization.
Why, then, did the paper include quotes from Ms. Rhee in its 'news' article if it concurrently gave her space on its 'opinion' section?
The article offers some details of her agenda, and a few bites of criticism from the leading teacher's unions about her politics, not the quality of her ideas. Her opinion, though, gives the reader much to consider on these ideas.
For example, there is this:
"However, we do believe that the fiscal crisis, and the latest embarrassing rankings of U.S. students by the Program for International Student Assessment compared to their international peers (of 65 countries, American 15-year-olds were 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math), can focus the nation on the need for change."
First, the financial crisis is threatening the quality of public schooling; it is not a savior. Rather that providing opportunity for schools to show how they can do less with more, the economy has forced schools to eliminate programs like music, art and PE, raise class size to 40+ students in critical content areas; and further spiral social cohesion as one of a community's main support structure (the school) faces continued harsh reductions in force and staff. Leveraging the crisis to push through reform plays on the currency of fear and dread the current economy has spurred. Fear and trembling does not foster rational, thoughtful approaches to any policy, much less on one that is already a cause of psychological trauma for a community. Instead, it encourages demagogues to push through ideology. Bad form.
Second, the US scores on PISA are 'embarrassing,' and meaningless. Google away on PISA and you can find countless stories on the limited nature of these rankings. I particularly like this comment from Richard Posner:
"The 2009 PISA test scores reveal that in American schools in which only a small percentage (no more than 10 percent) of the students receive free lunches or reduced-cost lunches, which are benefits provided to students from poor families, the PISA reading test scores are the highest in the world. But in the many American schools in which 75 percent or more of the students are from poor families, the scores are the second lowest among the 34 countries of the OECD; and the OECD includes such countries as Mexico, Turkey, Portugal, and Slovakia."
In other words, address poverty to improve our PISA scores.
Ms. Rhee then lays out the planks of Students-First.
"Treating teachers like professionals. Compensation, staffing decisions and professional development should be based on teachers' effectiveness, not on their seniority. That means urging states and districts to implement a strong performance pay system for the best teachers, while discontinuing tenure as job protection for ineffective teachers. This will ensure that the money spent on teacher salaries goes to the hard-working professionals who are improving student achievement every day.
The budget crisis inevitably requires layoffs of school staff. Teacher-layoff policies are a good example of how recognizing quality over seniority translates into responsible decision-making during difficult economic times. Currently, layoff decisions are based on seniority, which means the last person hired is the first person fired. However, research, such as a recent study by Dan Goldhaber at the University of Washington, shows that when teacher layoffs are determined by seniority it hurts students and teachers."
Performance pay does not work. It also misconstrues what teachers do. Yes, teachers want their students to succeed academically. But the effort of teaching is not rewarded by higher test scores. Value-added measures operate on the provence of testing, which leads to narrow curricula and goal setting at the lowest level of cognitive and emotional outcomes. While there is definitely a lot of work needed in removing poor teachers, the value of seniority and experience on staff can outweigh the pure numbers-focus approach of firing the lowest scoring teachers.
Next.
"Empowering parents and families with real choices and real information. Parents, especially those who live in lower-income neighborhoods, have limited educational options for their children. StudentsFirst believes that states and school districts must remove the barriers that limit the number of available seats in high-quality schools. This includes allowing the best charter schools to grow and serve more students. It also means giving poor families access to publicly funded scholarships to attend private schools. All children deserve the chance to get a great education; no family should be forced to send kids to a school they know is failing. StudentsFirst also urges legislation to equip parents and communities with the tools they need to effectively organize and lead reform efforts when their public-school system fails them. California's "parent trigger" law, for example, forces the restructuring of a poor performing school when more than 50% of the parents whose children attend it sign a petition."
The 'trigger law' is an intriguing idea, implemented correctly and emergent from the parents (not organization pushing agenda that manipulate parents). Charter schools, however, perform no better and often worse than traditional publics. And using public money to pay for private school amounts to no more than a tax cut for the wealthy, or it opens the gates of for-profit schooling to prey on parents who lack full understanding of the school system, or suck up a quick buck and fold, leaving parents worse off. How tightly would Ms. Rhee like these schools regulated?
Finally.
"Ensure accountability for every dollar and every child. Due to the financial downturn in the states, it is critically important to ensure that every dollar spent on public education has a positive impact on student learning. Unfortunately, billions of dollars today are wasted on things such as paying for advanced degrees for teachers that have no measurable impact on student achievement.
States will continue to find it difficult to solve budget deficits if they continue to ignore problems surrounding the current structure of their benefits and pensions for teachers and administrators. For example, states and districts must shift new employees from defined-benefit pension programs to portable, defined-contribution plans where employees can contribute a proportionate amount to their own retirement savings. This will help ensure that states aren't draining their budgets with pension payouts."
This section is an attack of schools of education and the pension system for teachers. On the later question, remember that teachers most likely never pay into social security. Their pensions were collectively bargained, effectively, with voter-accountable politicians. Still, it is difficult to argue about moving future retirement policies into defined-contribution plans. As for schools of education, learning matters. It is right to question the quality of teacher education programs and to weed out certification and Masters factories. Quality, though, is, well, qualitative, not numerical. It must be experienced, not propagandized or synthesized. We should continue to insist that teachers privilege continual learning. Asking them pursue a rigorous, thoughtful Masters program is both a great model for their students (hey! I'm learning always) and a way to ground teachers in the intellectual pursuit which is the core of the educational process: dare to know.
The WSJ does not realize it has decided whether to focus on its journalistic enterprise or its advocacy. On the other hand, I bet it has.
Why, then, did the paper include quotes from Ms. Rhee in its 'news' article if it concurrently gave her space on its 'opinion' section?
The article offers some details of her agenda, and a few bites of criticism from the leading teacher's unions about her politics, not the quality of her ideas. Her opinion, though, gives the reader much to consider on these ideas.
For example, there is this:
"However, we do believe that the fiscal crisis, and the latest embarrassing rankings of U.S. students by the Program for International Student Assessment compared to their international peers (of 65 countries, American 15-year-olds were 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math), can focus the nation on the need for change."
First, the financial crisis is threatening the quality of public schooling; it is not a savior. Rather that providing opportunity for schools to show how they can do less with more, the economy has forced schools to eliminate programs like music, art and PE, raise class size to 40+ students in critical content areas; and further spiral social cohesion as one of a community's main support structure (the school) faces continued harsh reductions in force and staff. Leveraging the crisis to push through reform plays on the currency of fear and dread the current economy has spurred. Fear and trembling does not foster rational, thoughtful approaches to any policy, much less on one that is already a cause of psychological trauma for a community. Instead, it encourages demagogues to push through ideology. Bad form.
Second, the US scores on PISA are 'embarrassing,' and meaningless. Google away on PISA and you can find countless stories on the limited nature of these rankings. I particularly like this comment from Richard Posner:
"The 2009 PISA test scores reveal that in American schools in which only a small percentage (no more than 10 percent) of the students receive free lunches or reduced-cost lunches, which are benefits provided to students from poor families, the PISA reading test scores are the highest in the world. But in the many American schools in which 75 percent or more of the students are from poor families, the scores are the second lowest among the 34 countries of the OECD; and the OECD includes such countries as Mexico, Turkey, Portugal, and Slovakia."
In other words, address poverty to improve our PISA scores.
Ms. Rhee then lays out the planks of Students-First.
"Treating teachers like professionals. Compensation, staffing decisions and professional development should be based on teachers' effectiveness, not on their seniority. That means urging states and districts to implement a strong performance pay system for the best teachers, while discontinuing tenure as job protection for ineffective teachers. This will ensure that the money spent on teacher salaries goes to the hard-working professionals who are improving student achievement every day.
The budget crisis inevitably requires layoffs of school staff. Teacher-layoff policies are a good example of how recognizing quality over seniority translates into responsible decision-making during difficult economic times. Currently, layoff decisions are based on seniority, which means the last person hired is the first person fired. However, research, such as a recent study by Dan Goldhaber at the University of Washington, shows that when teacher layoffs are determined by seniority it hurts students and teachers."
Performance pay does not work. It also misconstrues what teachers do. Yes, teachers want their students to succeed academically. But the effort of teaching is not rewarded by higher test scores. Value-added measures operate on the provence of testing, which leads to narrow curricula and goal setting at the lowest level of cognitive and emotional outcomes. While there is definitely a lot of work needed in removing poor teachers, the value of seniority and experience on staff can outweigh the pure numbers-focus approach of firing the lowest scoring teachers.
Next.
"Empowering parents and families with real choices and real information. Parents, especially those who live in lower-income neighborhoods, have limited educational options for their children. StudentsFirst believes that states and school districts must remove the barriers that limit the number of available seats in high-quality schools. This includes allowing the best charter schools to grow and serve more students. It also means giving poor families access to publicly funded scholarships to attend private schools. All children deserve the chance to get a great education; no family should be forced to send kids to a school they know is failing. StudentsFirst also urges legislation to equip parents and communities with the tools they need to effectively organize and lead reform efforts when their public-school system fails them. California's "parent trigger" law, for example, forces the restructuring of a poor performing school when more than 50% of the parents whose children attend it sign a petition."
The 'trigger law' is an intriguing idea, implemented correctly and emergent from the parents (not organization pushing agenda that manipulate parents). Charter schools, however, perform no better and often worse than traditional publics. And using public money to pay for private school amounts to no more than a tax cut for the wealthy, or it opens the gates of for-profit schooling to prey on parents who lack full understanding of the school system, or suck up a quick buck and fold, leaving parents worse off. How tightly would Ms. Rhee like these schools regulated?
Finally.
"Ensure accountability for every dollar and every child. Due to the financial downturn in the states, it is critically important to ensure that every dollar spent on public education has a positive impact on student learning. Unfortunately, billions of dollars today are wasted on things such as paying for advanced degrees for teachers that have no measurable impact on student achievement.
States will continue to find it difficult to solve budget deficits if they continue to ignore problems surrounding the current structure of their benefits and pensions for teachers and administrators. For example, states and districts must shift new employees from defined-benefit pension programs to portable, defined-contribution plans where employees can contribute a proportionate amount to their own retirement savings. This will help ensure that states aren't draining their budgets with pension payouts."
This section is an attack of schools of education and the pension system for teachers. On the later question, remember that teachers most likely never pay into social security. Their pensions were collectively bargained, effectively, with voter-accountable politicians. Still, it is difficult to argue about moving future retirement policies into defined-contribution plans. As for schools of education, learning matters. It is right to question the quality of teacher education programs and to weed out certification and Masters factories. Quality, though, is, well, qualitative, not numerical. It must be experienced, not propagandized or synthesized. We should continue to insist that teachers privilege continual learning. Asking them pursue a rigorous, thoughtful Masters program is both a great model for their students (hey! I'm learning always) and a way to ground teachers in the intellectual pursuit which is the core of the educational process: dare to know.
The WSJ does not realize it has decided whether to focus on its journalistic enterprise or its advocacy. On the other hand, I bet it has.
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