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.

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 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.

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

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.

More with the "Death Panels" again?

David B. Rivkin, Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley construct a shoddy and intellectually empty argument against Obama care in today's WSJ ("'Death Panels' come back to life," December 30, 2010).  Were I to respond in a LTE, I would write that such writing does not belong in a publication aspiring to higher quality.  Since that publication is the WSJ, that would be satire.

The authors begin with a moral claim, as they analyze the FDA's banning of Avastin to patients with advanced-stage breast cancer:

Ponder the FDA's justification—there wasn't "sufficient" benefit in relation to Avastin's risks. Sufficient according to whom? For your wife, mother or daughter with terminal breast cancer, how much is an additional month of good-quality life worth? And what costs should be weighed? Like all drugs, Avastin has side effects including bleeding and high blood pressure. But isn't the real cost to these women a swifter, less dignified death?

In other words, considerations of quality of life are individual, and the government has not moral claim to determine these questions for us.  We should be left alone to decide for ourselves what benefits us and what counts as dignified.  They continue: "The FDA made a crude cost calculation; as everyone in Washington knows, it wouldn't have banned Avastin if the drug cost only $1,000 a year, instead of $90,000." Against such absolute claims of what counts as liberty, something as "crude" as an economic argument pales.  They further emphasize this perspective in the following:

Think it can't happen here? Think again. The 2009 stimulus bill spent $1.1 billion to research "comparative effectiveness." That's the same approach used by Britain's National Health Service to ration care, weighing cost against factors such as the ever-elusive concept of quality of life.   

Here, though, their thinking shows its weakness.  Against absolutist claims of liberty, as they make about  who should decide how best to conduct and live one's life, everything pales.  It is an unfair comparison, since they have already dug out the highest ground for the claims of autonomy.  By their reasoning, any governmental attempt to limit one's pursuit of happiness impinges on this kind of liberty: drug interdiction, traffic laws, food regulation, taxes.  Obamacare, and its efforts to use scientific research to determine effectiveness of medical procedures, fails because any and all comparisons fail.  This is ingenuous logic.

After a brief foray into finding support for the reality of 'death panels,' the authors find the crux of their claim:

There's an enormous difference between government-imposed rationing and treatment decisions in the private sector. When insurance companies deny coverage—for example, on grounds that treatment is "experimental" or not "medically necessary"—they do so based on contract language agreed to in advance by subscribers. If you don't like what a particular insurer offers, you're free to shop around. 

This is an ignorant argument.  People can hardly "shop around" for insurers to cover illnesses they might develop later in life, since they have no idea what those illness might be.  And if they already have one, insurers will be able to deny them coverage (should Obamacare be repealed or found wanting Constitutionally) or hike up the premiums as to make them uninsurable.  Further, the authors are now changing the focus of their disagreement, from the FDA's power to license a drug to the new health care bill's ability to determine what procedures will be covered, through the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

They should their ignorance with their claim that "Moreover, you and your doctor have extensive rights to appeal the insurer's denial, and wealthy patients can pay for the care out of their own pockets." That last would still be true; wealthy people covered by Medicare will still have the option of going outside the system to pay for care.  But these author's do not acknowledge that.  Instead, they point out:

When it comes to that right, courts have held that laws cannot impose an "undue burden" on access to life-preserving treatment. And there's no greater burden than blocking access to such medical treatments on the grounds that the average person, according to a government agency's reckoning, won't benefit sufficiently.  

If the government wants to reduce health-care spending, it can impose higher beneficiary cost-sharing, means-testing or other limits on eligibility that would be perfectly constitutional. But it can't restrict every American's access to proven treatments. With regard to medical care, the government must weigh delicate considerations of cost, quality of life and other factors individually—not collectively—in order to preserve citizens' rights and dignity.

Accept courts do allow laws all the time that restrict our ability to pursue treatment, especially if that treatment has not already received social approval.  And the authors do not bothered that insurance companies routinely make just these restrictions; laws may not intervene between me and my dignified pursuit of life, but financial considerations may.  How is that moral?  It is legalistic, a reversal of the tone they take at the beginning of their op-ed.

The authors seem genuinely upset that government is developing a process whereby decisions about one's health will be made that might restrict the kinds of care one receives.  They should be, as should we all be.  But the point of the health care bill is to bring more people into the system, a moral goal, and to strengthen the fiscal health of the system, a financial goal.  Right now, the system works for those with money or those who are not sick.  Criticizing the new health plan should mean suggesting ways for individuals and doctors to have more say in how a patient is treated, in a way that does not explode the cost curve of the entire system.  Relying on insurance can work, as can developing a single-payer system, in each case provided there is enough money in the system but not too much money to create hazard.

Muslim outreach

Joshua Muravckik makes poor use of statistics in his op-ed in the WSJ today ("Is Obama's Muslim outreach working?" December 29, 2010).  He demonstrates how numbers need context, something he fails to provide.

His claim is speculative, but straightforward:
The data are too slender to sustain the claim that Mr. Bush's policies succeeded in turning much of the Muslim world against terrorism. But they are substantial enough to inform our understanding that Mr. Obama's approach has achieved little in this regard.

And the data that he supplies, from the recent Pew Research Center's Global Awareness Project, does suggest that support for terrorism declined substantially more during the administration of President Bush that under President Obama:
The sharpest decrease in terror support in Indonesia, Turkey and Lebanon came between 2003 and 2005; in Jordan, between 2005 and 2006; and in Nigeria and Egypt between 2006 and 2007.

What Mr. Muravchik does not explain, however, the intensity of the support.  It is facile to think that support follows some rational mode of thinking.  There will be true-blood believers and there will be those with a willingness to follow an idea until faced with what that idea looks like enacted.  Those with less intensity of belief would be the first and a relatively easy group to convince against the use of terrorism.   Faced with the life-blood consequences of what terrorism does to populations and societies, this kind of intellectual, abstract support quickly fades out.  Hard-core supporters would not be much stirred to change their mind.  Nothing much that a foreign-policy built on war and confrontation could to do stifle that passion, but nor could engagement as a policy.

(If we look at Pew, another interpretation of the numbers is always possible.  For example, the bottom for support of terrorism occurred in 2008, at the very end of Bush's term and the beginning of Obama's.  Perhaps Obama's failure to actual end the wars he campaigned to end might contribute to why there is a slight return of support for the idea that suicide bombing is "sometimes justified"? This take corresponds with another Pew study that show a growing disappoint with the President in these same Muslim countries)

Without a more involved analysis on what kind of support terrorism had in the Muslim countries in the first place, through richly layered and extensive ethnographic work and fine-grained research into the state of the population and their beliefs, such claims like Muravchik's take a simplistic account of the data.  Whatever his ulterior aims, this essay is a shoddy piece of academic propaganda, not the respectable work of a "fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies."  That title gives academics a bad name.

The Spirit of Giving?

Arthur C. Brooks makes things up in his most recent op-ed from the WSJ ("Tea partiers and the spirit of giving" December 24, 2010).

He starts innocuously enough with a grand bland claim:
By now everyone knows that the dramatic November election was not an endorsement of Republicanism, but rather a rebellion against expansionist government and an attempt to re-establish America's culture of free enterprise.

By "expansionist" he does not mean the $3trillion war in Iraq and Afghanistan, unpaid for except by borrowing from foreign nations (and not through the shared sacrifice of taxes), nor does he mean the intrusive and civil-rights compromising government data-mining operation; these fall under 'national security,' and are apparently exempt from consideration of the size or reach of government.   Government has increased in size only if we consider the federal government (since states have shed public jobs at an arithmetically higher rate than the national government has added them) and only then if you we include the bulge of Census worker hiring.  Otherwise, the size of government has ebbed.  Yes, regulation has become more dense, though we can include the weak financial regulations bill and a general uptick in oversight departments actually demonstrating oversight (opposed to, for example, the lax and criminal malfeasance of the Bureau of Mining under Republic administration for the past decade).

To"re-establish America's culture of free enterprise" requires that America's culture of free enterprise has been disestablished.  When did that happen?  And what does that mean?  The only thing suffering free enterprise in this country is the corporate culture of down-sizing as means of profit, substituting temporary for full-time employment as a way of reducing benefits, off-sourcing jobs in order to lower labor costs and unwillingness of the banks (soluble only because tax-payers bailed them) to loan money to small businesses.  The middle class is disappearing, and free enterprise with them, a trend that begun under Reagon-omics and Thatcher and accelerated during the decade of Bush tax cuts following Clinton-era deregulated finance.

Brooks them starts playing with numbers, claiming that "nearly one-third of Americans ... classify themselves as "supporters" of the (Tea Party) movement, according to Gallup."  Supporters of what, exactly?  Brooks does not say, leaving the impression of some significant groundswell of those in concerted alignment with everything the Tea Party wants.  Looking at the numbers, though, it is difficult to figure out where Brooks earns his belief.  The most recent Gallup/USToday poll does indicate that 27% of respondents want the Tea Party standard bearers to set the policy agenda, as many as want the Obama White House to do so, and slightly more than want the GOP leaders and the Democrats to lead.  This is less than one-third of those who were polled; Gallup does not explain who they asked, so we have no idea about how to generalize these results.  Brooks, though, has no problem turning them into a concrete narrative.

I could be considered a supporter of Tea Party movement if asked whether Medicare should be eliminated (we'd both say "no"), if government should be less intrusive (as in protecting a robust 4th Amendment), or if the debt should be reduced (yes - though I would raise marginal rates and eliminate tax breaks).  Further, we would both agree to shrink the size of government - though I would 'support' this through a smaller military, reduction of agricultural subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare and larger role for local control of schooling.  My point is that Brooks dispenses with further explanation since further explanation would dilute his narrative.

With that false identity installed - of the 100+million Americas who stand against Obama America - he gets to his main point:
In fact, the millions of Americans who advocate for private entrepreneurship and limited government—whether they are rich or poor—may be stingy when it comes to giving away other people's money through state redistribution, but they are surprisingly generous when it comes to giving away their own money privately... (a small section on how Americans give more than the non-free enterprise Europeans and Chinese-Russian-others) When it comes to voluntarily spreading their own wealth around, a distinct "charity gap" opens up between Americans who are for and against government income leveling. Your intuition might tell you that people who favor government redistribution care most about the less fortunate and would give more to charity. Initially, this was my own assumption. But the data tell a different story.


Giving more money to charity means caring more about the less fortunate than giving less money to charity but preferring that the less fortunate are cared for in a sustainable, institutional and socially effective way?

He continues:
The most recent year that a large, nonpartisan survey asked people about both redistributive beliefs and charitable giving was 1996. That year, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that those who were against higher levels of government redistribution privately gave four times as much money, on average, as people who were in favor of redistribution. This is not all church-related giving; they also gave about 3.5 times as much to nonreligious causes. Anti-redistributionists gave more even after correcting for differences in income, age, religion and education.

First, what does 'government distribution' mean?  Social services?  Unemployment automatic adjustments?  Social security?  Public school?

Second, a clearer demographic picture of those 'against' and 'for' governmental redistribution is necessary.   Who are they?  What is their wealth?  What are their politics?

Third, average is a terrible statistic to use, since a few high contributors can skew the figures.

Fourth, focus on the omnibus last sentence modifier - "correcting for differences in income, age, religion and education."   What does Brooks mean by correcting for?

Finally, so what?  Immense donations to charity does not mean care more for the fortunate; it could just as easily demonstrate a higher concern for the tax subsidy.  And interest in having government, not the individual, play a leading role in redistribution could represent a logical and compassionate belief in sustained structural support as a more effective and efficient way of addressing chronic and debilitating inequality than sporadic, individualistic, tax-planned giving (dependent on yearly income and estate effects).

More:
The GSS in 2002 showed that those who said the government was "spending too much money on welfare" were more likely to donate blood than those who said the government was "spending too little money on welfare." The anti-redistributionists were also more likely to give someone directions on the street, return change mistakenly handed them by a cashier, and give food (or money) to a homeless person.

Here is the methodology of the GSS:
In-person interviews were conducted with a national, full probability sample of 2,765 English-speaking persons 18 years of age or over, living in non-institutional arrangements within the United States. Interviews were conducted during February, March, and April of 2002. The response rate was 70 percent. 

How different would social attitudes have been in 2002 than now?  What history has intervened between 2002 and now?  How representative would 1936 (70% of the 2765 sampled) randomly sampled people of the entire 300million US population in 2002, much less now?  What would the Tea Party have thought about the massive Medicare Part D vote taken by a Republican-dominated Congress and signed by President Bush in December of 2003?  Would they have preferred that individuals made private donations to drug companies on behave of the elderly instead?

Notice how Brooks turns these 1936 respondents into his "millions of Americans who advocate for private entrepreneurship and limited government"?  This is one way he does a lovely job of using what little data is available to him to create a mythic of Tea Party generosity:  The millions of Americans who believe in limited government give disproportionately to others. This is in addition to—not instead of—their defense of our free-enterprise system, which gives the most people the most opportunities to earn their own success.

Again, with the millions.

It may be that people who have a dim view of their taxes being raised to pay for the social welfare of others give more to private charity.   It also stands to reason that people who see inequality as a rising force shaping the American identity would prefer to use the levers of government to ameliorate the suffering and potentially eliminate its causes through a broad institutional approach.  There is no evidence, not least supplied by Brooks, that supports any of his reasoning behind the 'charity gap.'