Cities and Schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go further

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

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

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

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


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

Risk and waste

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

To paraphrase and tweak to fit teaching,

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

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

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

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

Henninger and the WSJ (part 17, at least)

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.

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.

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.

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.