Here is a vexing topic, at least for this instructor of cultural foundations of education. What can you expect students to read in a typical semester? In a 500 (master�s level, but open to advanced undergraduates) course that I teach on higher education in film and fiction, I am assigning 6 novels with a total number of pages around 2200.
So, over 16 weeks we are talking about 140 pages per week. I have been advised both ways, that this is too much for some of our students, especially those who work, while some of my professorial colleagues say this is not too much. After all, we are talking about current literary fiction such as Don DeLillo�s White Noise and Tom Wolfe�s I Am Charlotte Simmons, not dense theoretical or philosophical texts.
Part of the problem is that students, even graduate students, generally do not do reading these days. This commonly known fact was not the case when I went to college, or at least not for me. But today, as Rebekah Nathan points out in her book My Freshman Year, students cut corners when they can, and if reading is not tested upon or part of one�s grade, very few do it.
So, I ask you dear readers, what is the appropriate amount of reading that we can expect of students at various levels? Are 150 pages of fiction per week too much even for graduate students (for comparison, for an undergraduate course in modern literature where I went to college the professor assigned Proust, Mann, Joyce, and other large texts, one per week)? Should we give students �reading quizzes� to assure that the reading is done?
One strategy regarding readings that a friend of mine suggests is this, and I quote him: �Talk about this problem frankly with them at the beginning of term, and say 'okay, you are graduate students in the philosophy of education. Here's an educational-philosophy issue par excellence. How do you get students to do all the readings assigned? I am sympathetic to the fact that many of you have full-time jobs *outside* Purdue. But, that said, this class is a serious responsibility that you have shouldered voluntarily for the time being. After all, I only have you for a VERY SHORT TIME. I may never get to educate you again after this term. So for these 16 short weeks, I am going to require that you really do �shuffle this course up to the top of the heap,' as it were, and make these readings a priority in your life while you're enrolled in it."
My friend goes on to talk of another strategy he uses: �What I do sometimes in my undergrad courses, if I suspect [know] that they are slacking, is to give a POP quiz, very early in the term, and let them crash & burn. I go so far as to collect the papers. I let them baste in their own juices for a few moments. Then I tear up the quizzes and say, �that was an educational moment all its own. You get a free pass THIS TIME. Next time, though, it *will* count. So be sure you do the reading.' Invariably on the next quiz they all get almost 100%."
Let me hear your reading expectations and strategies for getting students to do the readings.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Curriculum and the different flavors of nominalism
As far as my philosophy-of-ed naivete is concerned, perhaps the best example of a contemporary equivalent of whole-cloth curriculum theorizing in the vein of progressivism, Summerhill, etc., is Marion Brady's Seamless Curriculum. As someone who has taught at different levels but whose arguments don't explicitly come from any single intellectual root, Brady is iconoclastic and sometimes hard to read when he tries to squeeze his curriculum perspective into a shorter piece of writing. Disclosure: My difficulties may come less from Brady than from my own background, which is fairly far from curriculum theorizing. I'm aware of the conventional stuff (formal v. hidden v. taught v. tested v. ... curriculum) as well as the classic critical readings (e.g., Apple) and standard curriculum historiography (e.g., Kliebard).
My reading of Brady is that he's a nominalist: He places his view of the world in opposition to what he sees as a disciplinary slicing of the world, which looks remarkably like a modern version of realism (i.e., that there is a reality, and that the disciplines really do connect up with that underlying reality). He argues that reality is not that sliced up and, moreover, we can't teach children how to understand the world in that sliced-up way. Instead, he says, we should teach students in a way that matches up with the who-what-when-where-why questions (or the 5 Ws, for those familiar with journalism), which he says is more useful pedagogically. Maybe I'm mixing up my philosophies, but that seems very close to the nominalist position�that whatever reality may or may not exist, we tend to put categories and names on that reality in a very human way rather than a way that directly reflects reality.
But these days, there are many different varieties of nominalism. Just to name a few modern ones, there's pragmatism, where the categories are human and a good thing, too; there's deconstruction, where language serves as an inpenetrable barrier between categories and any reality; there's the radical science-studies field of Bruce Latour and others; there are the softier philosophers of science such as Ian Hacking, who simultaneously play with social constructionism and yet don't buy into Latour's and others' arguments; etc. And I suppose within each flavor, there are different attitudes one can take towards the nominalist position. Should we be regretful nominalists, who see dangers in however we slice up our description of reality? Should we be enthusiastic nominalists, who see the human classifications as potentially heuristic? I know I'm taking huge liberties with these concepts (the real philosophers who contribute to this blog will probably slap me with dinner-plate fish over this), but there's a point here... I'd place Brady as a regretful nominalist, though he may well disagree.
There are two weaknesses in Brady's argument. One is the inconsistency in his nominalist argument: Holism is as much of a construction as disciplinary silos. If the disciplines are an arbitrary division of reality, so are the 5 Ws. On what basis is the 5-Ws template a better one than academic disciplines? He asserts it's easier for children to use, but I'm not convinced. It may be easier for children of journalists to use, but young children at around four generally use only one of the W questions (why), and to my calloused parent ears it's not clear when that question functions as an interrogatory and when it's performative/interactive. Brady's ideas may also ignore the capacity for children to understand abstract ideas and categories (see Rick Garlikov's essays on teaching math to young children for another iconoclastic and very different approach). On the other hand, there's a long history of such underestimates, including Piaget.
The second weakness is the regretful approach to towards nominalism, the implication that just because academic disciplines may be artificial, that means that they're suspect for teaching children. My guess is that if you've gone to read Brady's online essay, my classification seemed right or wrong instantly. Why? Because the realism-nominalism duality has a clear meaning to those who've had some philosophy. (Those who have the professional expertise to slap me with dinner-plate fish over my errors will note that I'm ignoring conceptualism.) So having had some philosophy helps put Marion Brady's ideas into a larger context. But academic philosophy is a discipline, and if Brady is right, it's part of the artificial division of the world by disciplines. But it's helpful for explaining his rejection of philosophy as one of the disciplines.
I'm much more of an enthusiastic nominalist than Brady is. The disciplines are not perfect, but they provide useful perspectives, and to throw them out just because they're often used poorly or reified in schools today is tossing the baby out with the bathwater. That doesn't mean that cross-disciplinary themes/approaches can't be used�far from it, as Central Park East Secondary School's Habits of Mind (five organizing questions) comprised one example of a successful unifying approach. But that approach seems inherently interdisciplinary rather than being rooted in holism.
Tom Green, in memoriam
Tom Green died yesterday morning. Among many other accomplishments (see http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/board/green.html) Tom was the �factotum� of the original PHILOSED listserv, from about 1988 to about 1994 (correct me if I�m wrong with the dates). I will remember the intense discussions we had on PHILOSED in those days with extreme fondness. It was, for many of us, the community of scholars that we craved. PHILOSED was the first serious use of technology for building community in the philosophy of education community. In that sense, it was the honored ancestor of this blog.
Tom's guidance and moderation (in both senses of the word) were critical in the formation of ways of thinking of a whole generation of philosophers of education (and their mentors, I think). He could be irascible, irreverent, impetuous. But he was also brilliant, and kind, and generous.
Tom�s book, Predicting the Behavior of the Educational System, (Syracuse University Press, 1980) was one of the most important books on education that I have ever read. The idea that the �expansion� of education to new audiences would likely cause a decrease in quality and/or valuation of the outcomes was revolutionary then, and still. His article, "The Formation of Conscience in an Age of Technology," American Journal of Education 94, no. 1 (1985): 1-32, was critical in the late-20th century turn from seeing morality as a special arena of life to understanding "conscience of craft" as the foundation of professional ethics for all.
By the way, PHILOSED continues to exist, with me as the titular "list owner," although it is not as critical a venue for discussion as it once was. For more information on the list or to join, see http://groups.google.com/group/Philosed?lnk=li&hl=en.
A memorial service is tentatively planned for Jan. 4th in Syracuse.
Update (12/29/06: Arrangements are now complete for the memorial service for Professor Emeritus Thomas F. Green. The service will be held at Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church, 5299 Jamesville Road, Dewitt, NY at 2 p.m. on January 4, 2007.
Donations in lieu of lowers may be made to Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church or to the Syracuse University School of Education, 230 Huntington Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244-2340, Thomas F. Green Scholarship Fund.
Tom's obituary and a guest book for comments can be accessed at http://syracuse.com/obits. His obituary appeared on December 28th or the site can be searched by name.
Saturday, December 16, 2006
A modest administrative reform proposal
We interrupt the silly competition to see who can get away with the most fraud in the 2006 Weblog Awards for best educationalisteseazamatazz blog (a tentative congrats to Michael B�rub�'s loyal readership for having beaten out the readership of a defunct homeschool blog, an Ivy League gossip site, and all the others) to present a serious extension of the last 20 years' worth of education reforms and changes in educational leadership in major urban school districts. From the bulimia of decentralization-centralization to the hiring of politician-CEOs and admired-als, we have learned a great deal about the efforts to Get Serious with Teachers. From more than a generation of efforts to denigrate the effort of teachers, we know that we haven't helped education a darned bit.
We obviously need to redouble our efforts, or the efforts of teachers, whichever makes more political sense.
Therefore, because the darned nuisance of the fourth and eighth amendments to the Constitution prohibits the use of elongated leather motivational devices with public employees, we need to outsource and resource the personnel management system to Terminational Motivational Organizational Leaders (tm). Terminational Motivational Organizational Leaders (tm) are willing, able, and happy to provide the Ultimate Ultimatum. Teachers who ignore the legitimate requests of Terminational Motivational Organizational Leaders (tm) will find themselves deprived of gold stars, certificates, raises, bonuses for national certification, kudos, public recognition of their efforts, congratulatory e-mails and notes, a standing ovation at assemblies, favored consideration in transfer applications, tuition benefits, the benefit of the doubt, advancement opportunities, due process in administrative hearings, cafeteria benefits, a rational salary system, tenure, and biological processes.
The Terminational Motivational Organizational Leader (tm) in your district will personally handle the disposition of such recalcitrant cases and make sure that the school district's investment in personnel resources is used efficiently. With the Terminational Motivational Organizational Leader (tm) program, while the return on public-resource investment may not be of further use in the classroom in terms of instructional leadership, there will be a return on the investment in other ways. Such efficiencies may appear in the school lunch program, emergency lighting capacity, and continually renewed science classroom laboratory supplies.
All other leadership programs pale in comparison to its boldness. All performance-pay plans pale in comparison to its theory of action. The Terminational Motivational Organizational Leader (tm) program is the logical end point of the last generation of education reform. It may well be the last generation of education reform, in more than one way.
We obviously need to redouble our efforts, or the efforts of teachers, whichever makes more political sense.
Therefore, because the darned nuisance of the fourth and eighth amendments to the Constitution prohibits the use of elongated leather motivational devices with public employees, we need to outsource and resource the personnel management system to Terminational Motivational Organizational Leaders (tm). Terminational Motivational Organizational Leaders (tm) are willing, able, and happy to provide the Ultimate Ultimatum. Teachers who ignore the legitimate requests of Terminational Motivational Organizational Leaders (tm) will find themselves deprived of gold stars, certificates, raises, bonuses for national certification, kudos, public recognition of their efforts, congratulatory e-mails and notes, a standing ovation at assemblies, favored consideration in transfer applications, tuition benefits, the benefit of the doubt, advancement opportunities, due process in administrative hearings, cafeteria benefits, a rational salary system, tenure, and biological processes.
The Terminational Motivational Organizational Leader (tm) in your district will personally handle the disposition of such recalcitrant cases and make sure that the school district's investment in personnel resources is used efficiently. With the Terminational Motivational Organizational Leader (tm) program, while the return on public-resource investment may not be of further use in the classroom in terms of instructional leadership, there will be a return on the investment in other ways. Such efficiencies may appear in the school lunch program, emergency lighting capacity, and continually renewed science classroom laboratory supplies.
All other leadership programs pale in comparison to its boldness. All performance-pay plans pale in comparison to its theory of action. The Terminational Motivational Organizational Leader (tm) program is the logical end point of the last generation of education reform. It may well be the last generation of education reform, in more than one way.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Community Organizing and Urban Education V: �Cutting an Issue� (Clarity and Passion)
[To read the entire series, go here.]
One of the most challenging tasks of a community organizing group is to come up with a specific issue to pursue. The world is full of what organizers call �problems,� aspects of the world we don�t like�e.g., world hunger, or educational achievement. Problems, however are too big and vague to grapple with in any coherent manner. In fact, just thinking about them can be disempowering.
So what organizers try to do is cut �issues� out of problems that can be concretely dealt with in a coherent and achievable manner. It turns out that this is an extremely difficult process, since many of the criteria for a good issue are usually in conflict with each other. Here I address two aspects of cutting an issue: �clarity� and �passion.�
Clarity in organizing is crucial. If one is going to bring a group of people who are not necessarily experts together around an issue, then that issue has to make sense without pages of explanation. MOVE, the community organizing group I participate in, worked to increase the number of SAGE schools in Milwaukee a few years ago. The SAGE program includes a number of different components, including reduced class sizes in lower elementary grades. So MOVE sold SAGE as a class size reduction program, instead of getting into the nitty-gritty of the details of how it worked.
Issues also have to have a �gut� sense of importance to the people you are trying to engage. And it is helpful to be able to tie specific stories and testimony to these issues. For example, arguing for more money for schools, in general, is not really a �gut� issue, although many people understand that, in an abstract sense, it is a problem. However, having forty kids in the same classroom, situations where parents have to quit work because a school doesn�t have a nurse to give insulin shots to their kids, stories about bathrooms covered in mold�these have a compelling emotional charge with them. If you can�t find a way to elicit this emotional charge, then you probably won�t be able to organize effectively around it, regardless of how important it may be to you. The right wing has really learned this lesson well.
Also, from an organizing standpoint, it doesn�t really matter whether you, as an organizer, care about a specific issue. What matters is that it is compelling for those you are trying to organize, that they have a �passion� for the issue.
An organizer I know once wanted to organize a housing complex in Milwaukee. The complex had a range of difficult problems, including drug dealers, plumbing and heat issues, and on and on. However, when she went around and talked to residents, what she found was that those issues weren�t the ones that were most compelling to them. What was? Cable television. They wanted to have cable access in their apartments. So that�s what this organizer brought them together around.
Another thing an issue needs to do is bring people together and provide an opportunity to grow the organization. This is actually related more to how you organize around an issue than to how you frame it, initially, but it�s difficult to separate these two aspects.
There are some problems that one can fix by drawing on a few experts. These aren�t good issues for organizing groups. From an organizing standpoint, you actually want an issue that will force the organization to do some collective work, to stretch and grow. In some cases, you may even force this work when it isn�t really even necessary.
The most famous example of an organizer creating the need for collective action out of whole cloth is when Saul Alinsky, the key conceptualizer of organizing�s general vision, went to a local city official in the 1930s and got him to agree to a change in policy. Then Alinsky got a large group of people together and they all marched down to the official�s office with signs, shouting their demand he change this policy. Somewhat bemused, I think, the official agreed. And then Alinsky trumpeted this victory to his group. �See,� he essentially said, �we do have power if we act collectively!�
Of course, lying to your constituents is not a good practice. But in the housing complex example the organizer did something similar. She knew that she could get cable TV for the residents pretty easily, but instead used this as an opportunity to engage them in the practice of organizing. They had meetings, planned actions, created materials, etc. And, not surprisingly, they convinced the landlord to give them cable TV.
Then the organizer turned to the group and said something like, �okay. What do you think about doing something about the drug dealing in this complex?� And they moved to a new issue.
The work of organizing, then, is an opportunity for educating leaders and other participants, it is an opportunity for identifying new leaders, it is an opportunity for expanding the number of people who see themselves as �members� of your organization, and the like. �Winning� in some ways is less important than the �power� that is built through the activity of struggling against oppression.
Sometimes you are �lucky� and a good issue just falls in your lap. A few years ago the school district decided that they would try to get students to go to their local �neighborhood� schools. As a part of this (and to save money) they wanted to eliminate parent�s right to bus their students to the schools of their choice in their bussing area. This created a great opportunity for MOVE to act collectively in resistance, since parents didn�t actually support this change. It even catalyzed the emergence of a new parent organization (even though this quickly dissolved).
In an odd kind of way, then, from an organizing standpoint it�s actually helpful when people in power do overtly nasty things. It�s much easier to respond to these than to more subtle, ongoing processes of oppression that are difficult to define or resist in any coherent way. So the example Dan has given of the state of Virginia eliminating foundations classes actually could be a �positive� rallying point for the field. But, of course, there is no institutional structure to rally people in any coherent way, so an opportunity for collective engagement and organizational power development is lost.
One of the most challenging tasks of a community organizing group is to come up with a specific issue to pursue. The world is full of what organizers call �problems,� aspects of the world we don�t like�e.g., world hunger, or educational achievement. Problems, however are too big and vague to grapple with in any coherent manner. In fact, just thinking about them can be disempowering.
So what organizers try to do is cut �issues� out of problems that can be concretely dealt with in a coherent and achievable manner. It turns out that this is an extremely difficult process, since many of the criteria for a good issue are usually in conflict with each other. Here I address two aspects of cutting an issue: �clarity� and �passion.�
Clarity in organizing is crucial. If one is going to bring a group of people who are not necessarily experts together around an issue, then that issue has to make sense without pages of explanation. MOVE, the community organizing group I participate in, worked to increase the number of SAGE schools in Milwaukee a few years ago. The SAGE program includes a number of different components, including reduced class sizes in lower elementary grades. So MOVE sold SAGE as a class size reduction program, instead of getting into the nitty-gritty of the details of how it worked.
Issues also have to have a �gut� sense of importance to the people you are trying to engage. And it is helpful to be able to tie specific stories and testimony to these issues. For example, arguing for more money for schools, in general, is not really a �gut� issue, although many people understand that, in an abstract sense, it is a problem. However, having forty kids in the same classroom, situations where parents have to quit work because a school doesn�t have a nurse to give insulin shots to their kids, stories about bathrooms covered in mold�these have a compelling emotional charge with them. If you can�t find a way to elicit this emotional charge, then you probably won�t be able to organize effectively around it, regardless of how important it may be to you. The right wing has really learned this lesson well.
Also, from an organizing standpoint, it doesn�t really matter whether you, as an organizer, care about a specific issue. What matters is that it is compelling for those you are trying to organize, that they have a �passion� for the issue.
An organizer I know once wanted to organize a housing complex in Milwaukee. The complex had a range of difficult problems, including drug dealers, plumbing and heat issues, and on and on. However, when she went around and talked to residents, what she found was that those issues weren�t the ones that were most compelling to them. What was? Cable television. They wanted to have cable access in their apartments. So that�s what this organizer brought them together around.
Another thing an issue needs to do is bring people together and provide an opportunity to grow the organization. This is actually related more to how you organize around an issue than to how you frame it, initially, but it�s difficult to separate these two aspects.
There are some problems that one can fix by drawing on a few experts. These aren�t good issues for organizing groups. From an organizing standpoint, you actually want an issue that will force the organization to do some collective work, to stretch and grow. In some cases, you may even force this work when it isn�t really even necessary.
The most famous example of an organizer creating the need for collective action out of whole cloth is when Saul Alinsky, the key conceptualizer of organizing�s general vision, went to a local city official in the 1930s and got him to agree to a change in policy. Then Alinsky got a large group of people together and they all marched down to the official�s office with signs, shouting their demand he change this policy. Somewhat bemused, I think, the official agreed. And then Alinsky trumpeted this victory to his group. �See,� he essentially said, �we do have power if we act collectively!�
Of course, lying to your constituents is not a good practice. But in the housing complex example the organizer did something similar. She knew that she could get cable TV for the residents pretty easily, but instead used this as an opportunity to engage them in the practice of organizing. They had meetings, planned actions, created materials, etc. And, not surprisingly, they convinced the landlord to give them cable TV.
Then the organizer turned to the group and said something like, �okay. What do you think about doing something about the drug dealing in this complex?� And they moved to a new issue.
The work of organizing, then, is an opportunity for educating leaders and other participants, it is an opportunity for identifying new leaders, it is an opportunity for expanding the number of people who see themselves as �members� of your organization, and the like. �Winning� in some ways is less important than the �power� that is built through the activity of struggling against oppression.
Sometimes you are �lucky� and a good issue just falls in your lap. A few years ago the school district decided that they would try to get students to go to their local �neighborhood� schools. As a part of this (and to save money) they wanted to eliminate parent�s right to bus their students to the schools of their choice in their bussing area. This created a great opportunity for MOVE to act collectively in resistance, since parents didn�t actually support this change. It even catalyzed the emergence of a new parent organization (even though this quickly dissolved).
In an odd kind of way, then, from an organizing standpoint it�s actually helpful when people in power do overtly nasty things. It�s much easier to respond to these than to more subtle, ongoing processes of oppression that are difficult to define or resist in any coherent way. So the example Dan has given of the state of Virginia eliminating foundations classes actually could be a �positive� rallying point for the field. But, of course, there is no institutional structure to rally people in any coherent way, so an opportunity for collective engagement and organizational power development is lost.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Liberal democracy, folk positivism, and test scores
This afternoon I had lunch with Stephen Turner, author of Liberal Democracy 3.0 (2003), which is about the relationship between expertise and liberal democracy. His take is a somewhat cynical but important one to consider, that we're inevitably moving towards (and have already shifted towards) a political system that liberally uses expertise as a way to displace political decisions out of political arenas. His book has been important to me as I try to revise the part of my book manuscript that focuses on the tension between technocracy and transparent political dialogue. Stephen told me it just wasn't going to happen, and while I disagree with his claim of inevitability, it's important to understand his argument.
There is a long tradition of debate over the nature of expertise and what we might call folk positivism (and philosophers call naive realism) attached to tests, the belief that a test score must mean something. The standard historiography of testing focuses on intelligence testing and points out the early 20th century confluence of scientific racism, the worshipping of numbers, and the creation of two new professions whose fates were intertwined (psychometrics and school administration). There are a number of arguments about what is putatively labeled governance by expertise, as Frank Fischer has argued for the last decade and a half, or a socially-driven statistics consciousness, as Theodore Porter has argued, and the early history of intelligence testing would fit in fairly well with either argument (and they overlap).
There are two flaws with the common description that wraps up test scores in a host of problems (such as the focus on intelligence tests). One is the implication that just because a social indicator is socially produced and maintains its legitimacy through social processes, it is therefore bankrupt. We can posit a not-quite-naive-realism argument something like this: "Sure, tests are flawed, and they embody a selective and arbitrary sampling of performance, but they're better than nothing even in the worst case and they're quite reasonable indicators if we accept that arbitrary can mean 'arrived at through a process of arbitration' rather than in the capriciousness sense." Hold your grumbling for a moment, because this is close to the arguments in favor of using test scores that you'll hear from politicians. The argument is a bit slippery, because there is an explicit side to it and then a nasty, twist-your-gut side to the argument. The explicit argument is a "this is better than nothing" statement, one that has a utilitarian perspective on information: we'd like perfect information, but we'll take imperfect over nothing. It falls close to casuistry in terms of a willingness to make decisions based on categorically-incomplete information. Arguing against this is essentially claiming, "Look, you don't know what you don't know." Try to win an argument with that claim in any context.
So if that's the easier side to deal with, what's the twist-your-gut, hidden argument? It's this: "Look, I'd like to sit down with you and talk in depth about what we should be expecting students to learn, but I'm a busy guy/gal, and I'm willing to displace the hard decisions into some forum that has the patina of neutral interest. There are these folks called test publishers and psychometricians who can produce a set of statistics, and we can then use those statistics to argue about what we should do with schools. But you're not going to get me to spend my time looking at DIFs and IRT charts and whatnot. I'd rather take the numbers and reports generated by experts and then decide what to do."
This argument matches the liberal-democratic purpose of expertise -- providing an interest-neutral forum for hashing things out without tearing the polity apart -- to the boundary-creating purpose of generating statistics, reports, etc--the claim that the public is welcome to talk about the meaning of what we produce outside the boundaries of our expertise, but the public has no right to invade the boundary within which the expertise works. Turner's argument is that we have crossed the line into an expertise-managed society not by the usurpation of democratic principles but by the workings of liberal democracy itself. In the same way that we defer some nasty decisions to courts with the imperfect but workable assumption that courts are neutral forums insulated from interests that can create "facts" we call decisions -- NOT that they're objective -- we're deferring important decisions about education with the assumption that tests are neutral opportunities to generate "facts" with which we can then make public policy decisions.
From Turner's perspective, we're already into this, and it's inevitable. We get test scores, and while we'll argue about which one is important, the genie is out of the bottle. We had a pleasant debate when I asked him to consider the Bowl Championship Series as a counterexample, since people who obsess about (or love) Division I-A football debate the BCS formula all the time. He countered that people accept ratings and just argue which ones are best, so the boundary shrinks a tiny bit to protect the machinery of rankings but allow debate over which ranking is best. I still think the BCS is a counter-example, because there are plenty who talk about a playoff system. I don't think I budged Turner on this. Part of my disagreement with Turner is with his assumption of inevitability and the philosopher's tendency to reduce the complexities of history and politics into archetypes and core arguments.
But a second argument I have with Turner is similar to the second flaw in the expertise critics'/historiographical argument, which is to conflate several different purposes of and influences upon expertise and test scores. I can think of at least six uses of test scores, and each also shapes the politics of test scores and the naive or not-so-naive realism with which they're treated.
There is a long tradition of debate over the nature of expertise and what we might call folk positivism (and philosophers call naive realism) attached to tests, the belief that a test score must mean something. The standard historiography of testing focuses on intelligence testing and points out the early 20th century confluence of scientific racism, the worshipping of numbers, and the creation of two new professions whose fates were intertwined (psychometrics and school administration). There are a number of arguments about what is putatively labeled governance by expertise, as Frank Fischer has argued for the last decade and a half, or a socially-driven statistics consciousness, as Theodore Porter has argued, and the early history of intelligence testing would fit in fairly well with either argument (and they overlap).
There are two flaws with the common description that wraps up test scores in a host of problems (such as the focus on intelligence tests). One is the implication that just because a social indicator is socially produced and maintains its legitimacy through social processes, it is therefore bankrupt. We can posit a not-quite-naive-realism argument something like this: "Sure, tests are flawed, and they embody a selective and arbitrary sampling of performance, but they're better than nothing even in the worst case and they're quite reasonable indicators if we accept that arbitrary can mean 'arrived at through a process of arbitration' rather than in the capriciousness sense." Hold your grumbling for a moment, because this is close to the arguments in favor of using test scores that you'll hear from politicians. The argument is a bit slippery, because there is an explicit side to it and then a nasty, twist-your-gut side to the argument. The explicit argument is a "this is better than nothing" statement, one that has a utilitarian perspective on information: we'd like perfect information, but we'll take imperfect over nothing. It falls close to casuistry in terms of a willingness to make decisions based on categorically-incomplete information. Arguing against this is essentially claiming, "Look, you don't know what you don't know." Try to win an argument with that claim in any context.
So if that's the easier side to deal with, what's the twist-your-gut, hidden argument? It's this: "Look, I'd like to sit down with you and talk in depth about what we should be expecting students to learn, but I'm a busy guy/gal, and I'm willing to displace the hard decisions into some forum that has the patina of neutral interest. There are these folks called test publishers and psychometricians who can produce a set of statistics, and we can then use those statistics to argue about what we should do with schools. But you're not going to get me to spend my time looking at DIFs and IRT charts and whatnot. I'd rather take the numbers and reports generated by experts and then decide what to do."
This argument matches the liberal-democratic purpose of expertise -- providing an interest-neutral forum for hashing things out without tearing the polity apart -- to the boundary-creating purpose of generating statistics, reports, etc--the claim that the public is welcome to talk about the meaning of what we produce outside the boundaries of our expertise, but the public has no right to invade the boundary within which the expertise works. Turner's argument is that we have crossed the line into an expertise-managed society not by the usurpation of democratic principles but by the workings of liberal democracy itself. In the same way that we defer some nasty decisions to courts with the imperfect but workable assumption that courts are neutral forums insulated from interests that can create "facts" we call decisions -- NOT that they're objective -- we're deferring important decisions about education with the assumption that tests are neutral opportunities to generate "facts" with which we can then make public policy decisions.
From Turner's perspective, we're already into this, and it's inevitable. We get test scores, and while we'll argue about which one is important, the genie is out of the bottle. We had a pleasant debate when I asked him to consider the Bowl Championship Series as a counterexample, since people who obsess about (or love) Division I-A football debate the BCS formula all the time. He countered that people accept ratings and just argue which ones are best, so the boundary shrinks a tiny bit to protect the machinery of rankings but allow debate over which ranking is best. I still think the BCS is a counter-example, because there are plenty who talk about a playoff system. I don't think I budged Turner on this. Part of my disagreement with Turner is with his assumption of inevitability and the philosopher's tendency to reduce the complexities of history and politics into archetypes and core arguments.
But a second argument I have with Turner is similar to the second flaw in the expertise critics'/historiographical argument, which is to conflate several different purposes of and influences upon expertise and test scores. I can think of at least six uses of test scores, and each also shapes the politics of test scores and the naive or not-so-naive realism with which they're treated.
- Test as materialist tool I. This is the "NCLB is there to make money for McGraw-Hill, the Bush buddies" argument. Strength: it's appealing. Weakness: it oversimplifies the political roots of accountability, and there are too many counterexamples: there were no tests before George W. Bush was president, and in no state where he wasn't governor?
- Test as materialist tool II. This is the "tests are culturally biased" argument, and it has a tautological truth in that tests will reflect something about the prevailing norms in society. Given the complex uses of tests, though, this is an incomplete explanation, and it can cut both ways. Right now, the NAACP in St. Petersburg, Florida, is suing the Pinellas County school system for providing an unequal education. Their evidence? Test scores.
- Test as status tool. This is the argument tied into the professionalization of expertise around the turn of the 20th century, and if we froze time in 1930, you'd have a lot more persuasive evidence than now about the power of psychometrics as an occupation. Plenty of professional assessment experts warn about the fragility of tests as measures, and such professional skeptics are often ignored.
- Test as administrative tool. This is the other argument tied into the professionalization of expertise, except this time from the standpoint of school administrators. Of course, there's the small irony that administrators built up the tools of testing to gain autonomy, and the successors of those tests have now become a tool for bashing administrators (and other educators).
- Test as liberal-democratic political tool. This is the claim that Turner makes, that test scores (and other social instruments) thrive less because of technical considerations than because they serve as what a colleague calls seemingly-neutral numerical designations. Sir Humphrey from the British sitcom Yes, Prime Minister might put it something like this: "We solicit smart people, bring them to a nice resort, ply them with food, and ask them to produce some numbers for us or a way to produce numbers that they then tell us the meaning of. If we didn't do that, every government would fall within about a week from the failure of Parliament to understand what a standard error is, and for that matter, I don't want to be quizzed on it, either. It's much better to get experts to do all the dirty work, and then we can decide what to do about the results."
- Test as an assertion of technical accuracy. It is this elision, from the not-quite-naive realism to naive realism, that drives many of us bonkers. But this implication helps grease the skids for the other uses of statistics, because it's not really necessary. Point out the errors of test scores, and the response will acknowledge the flawed and then return to their importance.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Some Thought on the Big Picture Company
Take Ted Sizer�s idea of portfolios, throw in John Taylor Gatto�s notion of community as school, and mix with just a tad of Neill�s Summerhillian freedom. That�s a good opening recipe for the Big Picture Company.
I�m blogging on this because of Craig�s request for a little more information on this topic that I mentioned in a comment to Ken�s posting about re-envisioning the educational system. I must admit that I am very much an outsider to the Big Picture Company and have only followed it as an interested layperson who is always searching out paradigmatically alternative educational models.
What started as a single high school in Rhode Island a decade ago is now a network of 32 high schools around the country (not many in a country of 110,000 schools; but that�s not the point). Some of the distinguishing characteristics are: each school enrolls a maximum of 130 or so students; students work individually with teachers and family members to develop a personalized curriculum that includes a core set of courses; internships in the community are critical to making the curriculum real-world applicable; the schools take seriously their commitment to engaging and linking with the local community and family.
The Big Picture Company has received grants from such big players as the Gates Foundation, has been endorsed by the likes of Ted Sizer, and has received glowing press coverage from Education Week, ASCD, and others. There are no academic research studies of it that I am aware of, though a fair number of popular pieces have been written about it (which can be found here and here).
What I find genuinely striking about this movement is their deep commitment to and operationalization of the idea of �one student at a time� (as their own motto states). This is personal, genuine, and time-intensive learning. This is not about passing tests or seat time; it is showing how learning matters and is actually applicable to the student and to the student�s community. It is also striking that the schools predominantly serve urban, lower-class populations. At a time of public education�s fascination with the lock-step direct instruction curricular and pedagogical approach for such populations, The Big Picture Company is producing dynamic graduation and test score results without demeaning practices. Additionally, I find the central aspect of internships superb, as they offer a real-world linkage that all too often is an add-on and meaningless component of public schools. The by-now standard �volunteerism� required by most high schools is a pale and truly corrosive practice to genuine engagement.
I am trying to avoid waxing eloquent here, but this idea really breaks the mold of traditional educational models in a drastic way. Much like charter schools have forced traditional schooling to confront alternative operational models, the Big Picture Company (at least for me and the students I introduce it to) forces a rethinking of what we mean by �doing� school.
I�m blogging on this because of Craig�s request for a little more information on this topic that I mentioned in a comment to Ken�s posting about re-envisioning the educational system. I must admit that I am very much an outsider to the Big Picture Company and have only followed it as an interested layperson who is always searching out paradigmatically alternative educational models.
What started as a single high school in Rhode Island a decade ago is now a network of 32 high schools around the country (not many in a country of 110,000 schools; but that�s not the point). Some of the distinguishing characteristics are: each school enrolls a maximum of 130 or so students; students work individually with teachers and family members to develop a personalized curriculum that includes a core set of courses; internships in the community are critical to making the curriculum real-world applicable; the schools take seriously their commitment to engaging and linking with the local community and family.
The Big Picture Company has received grants from such big players as the Gates Foundation, has been endorsed by the likes of Ted Sizer, and has received glowing press coverage from Education Week, ASCD, and others. There are no academic research studies of it that I am aware of, though a fair number of popular pieces have been written about it (which can be found here and here).
What I find genuinely striking about this movement is their deep commitment to and operationalization of the idea of �one student at a time� (as their own motto states). This is personal, genuine, and time-intensive learning. This is not about passing tests or seat time; it is showing how learning matters and is actually applicable to the student and to the student�s community. It is also striking that the schools predominantly serve urban, lower-class populations. At a time of public education�s fascination with the lock-step direct instruction curricular and pedagogical approach for such populations, The Big Picture Company is producing dynamic graduation and test score results without demeaning practices. Additionally, I find the central aspect of internships superb, as they offer a real-world linkage that all too often is an add-on and meaningless component of public schools. The by-now standard �volunteerism� required by most high schools is a pale and truly corrosive practice to genuine engagement.
I am trying to avoid waxing eloquent here, but this idea really breaks the mold of traditional educational models in a drastic way. Much like charter schools have forced traditional schooling to confront alternative operational models, the Big Picture Company (at least for me and the students I introduce it to) forces a rethinking of what we mean by �doing� school.
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