What will you put your mind to?

For the last four years I have put my mind to a thing (urban education) so intently that I forgot how to operate a motorcycle. I don't mean I forgot to go out on the bike, I mean that I got on the bike last summer and could not remember how it worked. My brain was too full of every possible thing I could stuff in there about my chosen subject.

Stuffed in there too were all the rules and confines of academic study and research rigor, and all the subtle cues one picks up in graduate school, those constant small pushes toward conformity in thought and process. Which was painful, as conforming has never resulted in anything fruitful, or connected to joy or possibility, for me. But I think I was as free as I was allowed to be in my research approach, and the result is a completed and defended dissertation about the experiences of a group of urban charter school teachers navigating compromise, constraint, and the mental juxtaposition of their student-centered pedagogical training against the market forces that now define their profession.

I will graduate in May, as a PhD in Urban Education. And as someone who knows perhaps much more than I ever wanted to about the forces at work in the contemporary "school reform" movement; I have now to turn the burden of that sad knowledge into good work. And maybe remember how to twist the throttle again.

Where You Come To

Working my way through the clutter of the last two years of grad school paperwork, I came across a favored quote (which I have noted before) from a book on how we see and how we create what we want to be seen. The author frames this around abstract artists who step away from the rules of convention that govern representational painting, but it's applicable to many forms of thought. He describes the process of stepping away from those rules and into abstraction as going down a ladder, letting go rung by rung, subtracting, until you find yourself in a place where you can be fully skeptical of the visible world. As he states it: "The ladder of disorder leaves conventional representation behind, in favor of images that explore inadequate representation." I love that sentence, and the notion that this sort of descent allows one to more freely act on what one favors -- because this sort of descent allows one to see beyond certain structures, and beyond the need for certain structures.

This is not a way of living, not some form of enlightenment or whatever. It is rather a forging of new connections in the brain, using vision as the tool do so...a sort of un-training while also rewiring. The author is addressing the mesmerizing idea of encountering abstraction or content of any kind that can't adequately be pictured. He positions you at the top of the ladder encountering something incomprehensible; do you climb down, subtracting as you go? And what does the world look like to you when you reach the last rung?

When one is fully skeptical of the visible world, skepticism about other things comes fairly naturally. For if you can see (without the aid of super-special They Live glasses) the difference between what the author James Elkins calls "the machinery of realism" and whatever else there is, you kind of train your brain to hear the difference too. Meaning you become better attuned not simply to hypocrisy but to how people actively construct ideas about and identities for themselves. And what becomes remarkable (at least to me, and I am maybe late to this game) is the sort of oddly beautiful, reliable, limited rhythms that people use to reify their identities. Like the beautiful, reliable, cirumscribed brush strokes representational artists use to show us the known and knowable. (Possibly this is also on my mind because of the imminent arrival of cicadas on the scene; listening to their sound is like listening to the earth thinking.)

This is something I realize is probably an after-effect of going back to graduate school at my age. I have emerged halfway through the process very far down the ladder, having let go of more rungs than I can count, but with a much better ability to assess constructions of any kind. This is especially true of theories, which are rampant in education -- theories of teacher motivation, student identity, knowledge acquisition, brain development, learning styles, affect in the classroom, etc. I see why they are rampant, see the comfort that comes from descriptions of the structures in the visible world, like the comfort we all find in our descriptions of ourselves. These are the rules of representation in my field; these are the familiar rhythms. Having now climbed well below the world of conventional representation that these generate, I am not aligning with or embracing any. Instead I am viewing them from below, as images of fascinating, incomplete, always inadequate representations. And this is yet another weirdly happy place I feel lucky to have come to.

I Wait for the Water

News out this week about efforts by Rupert Murdoch and the Gates Foundation (inevitable efforts, given the players) to go down the road of turning all K-12 student data into a funland for entrepreneurs prompted me to post my own view, from inside:

The research director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) co-authored a report in January in which he explained how he and his colleagues had miscalculated the impacts of fiscal multipliers (“the short-term effects of government spending cuts or tax hikes on economic activity”) within the various economies which were bound by the austerity policies the IMF promoted during the recent global economic downturn. The IMF had used “empirical studies from 27 economies the 1930’s” (another period when interest rates were near zero) to establish a baseline for what fiscal multipliers should have been in 2010, and forecasted a model that under “rational conditions” would have a “coefficient on the fiscal consolidation” that was quite low – or in other words, held an expectation that the fiscal multipliers for these economies would be very small and would remain fairly static over time. This was coupled with an apparently willful blindness to another context, wherein “lower output and lower income, together with a poorly functioning financial system, imply that consumption may have depended more on current than future income, and that investment may have depended more on current than on future profits, with both effects leading to larger multipliers.” Or in other words: Greece.

The IMF then realized, after prioritizing debt-repayment and austerity policies that had devastating impacts on these economies, that “a number of empirical studies have found that fiscal multipliers are likely to be larger when there is a great deal of slack in the economy…[and] fiscal multipliers associated with government spending can fluctuate from being near zero in normal times to about 2.5 during recessions.” A Washington Post story from January 3rd provided some perspective on the IMF’s policies and on this recent report by stating that: “The Fund has been accused of intentionally underestimating the effects of austerity in Greece to make its programs palatable, at least on paper” and noted that the projected fiscal multiplier number used for policy formation was “a background assumption rather than a variable that needed to be fine-tuned based on national circumstances or peculiarities.” The IMF essentially apologized in their report for the consequences of policy decisions that were not bounded by reality, or context; these decisions were not, in the end, trustworthy.

Along these same lines, the Economic Policy Institute, in collaboration with Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, published a report in January that claims comparisons of international tests of students do not provide trustworthy premises on which to base currently popular U.S. school reform policies, in part because of a very basic item: “social class inequality is greater in the United States than in any of the countries with which we can reasonably be compared…If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the Unites States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany and the United Kingdom).” The authors do not simply use income, race, ethnicity, or parental education level to define social class groups. Instead, the authors use household literacy, specified by the number of books in a child’s home, which they find “plausibly relevant to student academic performance” within an accepted social science research frame, and they posit that “children in different countries have similar social-class backgrounds if their homes have similar number of books.” By making this choice, the authors implicitly encourage policy makers to broaden their definitions of social and class distinctions, and to be aware that “countries’ social class compositions change over time” so that “comparisons of test score trends over time by social class group provide more useful information…than comparisons of total average test scores at one point in time.” And they encourage policymakers to think about a range of contexts, including time, when forming policy, the hoped-for result being policy based on more trustworthy assumptions about data.

Policymakers do often choose to sidestep contexts, or base decisions on a specific or static state without any expectation of or comprehension of change, when forming policies that they nonetheless believe are rational and therefore ethical and beneficial. Policymakers also tend to be removed (or by intention keep themselves removed) from the problematic environment they are making policy about. The two examples cited above speak to this; they are also examples of how such thinking can be challenged in a reasoned manner. And these examples also connect to the current accountability era in school reform in a particular way, as they forefront both how persuasion can be and is used to make policy arguments that seem rational and trustworthy but are not, and how this might be countered. For how one counters these reforms – the calls for accountability in education as measured through tests, “objective” evidence-based policies, “objective” data-driven decisions, the primacy of standardized testing, the commodification of teaching and learning, for the general overhaul of public education to align more closely with business priorities – matters, not simply because time and data have shown these reforms to be more about exercising power than enhancing student experience or skills, but because these policies and tenets were from the outset based on hypocritical conceits. And hypocrisy, as Hannah Arendt once noted, “cannot be met with what is recognized as reasonable behavior. Words can be relied upon only so long as one is sure that their function is to reveal and not to conceal. It is the semblance of rationality, rather than the interests behind it, that provokes rage. To respond with reason when reason is used as a trap is not ‘rational’.”

So perhaps these policies need simply to be challenged outright, to be met with the emotion suitable to them, and their “rationality” denied. 

     

Because if one were to reverse-engineer the IMF policy formation process, one could clearly say (and the report’s authors do say) that the policy makers engaged in that process were entirely capable of imagining varying contexts, pressures, and “peculiarities” in national economic systems had they chosen to, and were capable of incorporating these into the thinking that fueled their policies, but for political or other reasons, they chose not to do so. One can also look at contemporary school reform policies that, at their inception, incorporated the fearful predictions of 1983's fear-inducing screed A Nation at Risk and ideas on education from Ross Perot, and say that policy makers engaged in that process were entirely capable of envisioning American public education as not being a threat to global competitiveness and capable of envisioning its “chaos” as not needing to be managed like an enterprise IT system, but for political or other reasons, they decided not to. 

     

This may seem an extreme perspective, but it is a position that is actually given weight by much of the thorough, methodical, and decidedly not extreme analysis of school reform initiatives provided by educational researchers in the past decade. Much of this research addresses the very things that school reformers see as problematic about public  education (such as agency and control in educational practice and management, choice in educational environments, accountability in educational processes, access to educational resources, and equity in education) and finds that while these are issues that directly connect with and impact both teaching and learning, designing profit-promoting reforms that commoditize the intellectual capital around pedagogy has not been shown to directly impact either teaching or learning in a positive manner.