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.
