Shameless cross-promotion

Over at Legion -- which has been prolific and fascinating lately, and should be on your daily reading list -- Garrett and I are discussing the question of teacher quality. I can't promise you'll be interested, but if you're a wonk or you like the below graph it's probably worth heading over.

Also Mel is defending Gov against Social Studies and Jon-Mark Overvold wrote some badass lyrics for Babar the elephant. Hey -- there's finally a Harvard blog that rivals ours for coherence and predictability!

McCain and school choice

This morning, John McCain spoke at the NAACP Convention in Cincinnati about his plans for education and the economy. Most of it was standard Republican boilerplate - lower taxes ("for whom?" is an inconvenient question), smaller government (except the Pentagon) - stuff he probably recites in his sleep. But here's one particular bit of Republican boilerplate that really irked me:

In Washington, D.C., the Opportunity Scholarship program serves more than 1,900 boys and girls from families with an average income of 23,000 dollars a year. And more than 7,000 more families have applied for that program. What they all have in common is the desire to get their kids into a better school.

Democrats in Congress, including my opponent, oppose the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. In remarks to the American Federation of Teachers last weekend, Senator Obama dismissed public support for private school vouchers for low-income Americans as, "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice." All of that went over well with the teachers union, but where does it leave families and their children who are stuck in failing schools?

Wait, wait, wait, hold up, Mac. I understand that election season is, by definition, oversimplification season, and if I complained about every instance of blaming the trial lawyers or the teachers' unions or the homosexuals, I'd probably break this blog. But the issue of school vouchers is particularly near and dear to my heart, because I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, hometown of the voucher movement. I received the first fifteen years of my formal education in the Milwaukee Public Schools, and I'm pretty well aware of the system's problems - low test scores, class sizes well beyond capacity, and shrinking budgets. (For one of the best illustrations of our budget problems, use the bathroom in an MPS school. After Tuesday or Wednesday, finding toilet paper is a gamble; in some bathrooms, you will find Boraxo, a powdered soap product so old that Ronald Reagan made an ad for it.) It seems to me that the sensible thing to do about those problems is to fix the public school system, not airlift students out of it. But Milwaukee's voucher program, which started in 1990 - about the same time that I was throwing a fit because Ethan Reik got to sit on the "E" in our kindergarten letter circle - took the latter approach, and like other voucher programs, it has had less than a stunning record of success. Which means that there are plenty of reasons, other than McCain's fictitious union-centered greed, to oppose school vouchers.

There are a number of fundamental issues with the concept of voucher programs - privatizating public goods, violating the separation of church and state, and so forth - but the one I want to deal with is that vouchers impose the classical economic paradigm of rational choice on a situation that doesn't fit that model. Anyone who's taken Ec 10 will be familiar with the model of the rational consumer, who carefully considers the costs and benefits of every available option before choosing the best one, which is good for the consumer and good for the rest of us, too. This may be sensible in a situation like buying a cell phone - at any rate, I presume that's why there are so damn many ads for models I can't afford. But the rational-choice paradigm works quite differently when parents are picking a school for their child. Part of this, to be sure, is the fault of individual parents who enroll their children indifferently in voucher programs, just as they enroll them in public schools. But a more fundamental part of the problem is that there isn't much information available on which parents could base a rational decision. MPS publishes test score and demographic information for every school it operates; there is no equivalent source of information for choice schools, making it impossible to make a rational economic choice. Consequently, the benefit of a free-market approach - that parents, by voting with their voucher dollars, will ensure that only the best schools survive - simply doesn't happen.

Nonetheless, parents keep on enrolling in the voucher program, perhaps on the assumption that private schools are uniformly better. (Evidence from the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, which McCain cited as an example of what he'd like to do, suggests this might be the case: while kids in the program don't test better or feel more positively about their schools than kids in the public schools, parents do think that choice schools are better and safer than public schools.) We tend to picture a private school as a well-funded institution with talented teachers, motivated students, and a strong college-prep curriculum - places like Chapin or Exeter or Horace Mann (although if they aren't getting kids into Harvard, I guess they're just failing completely). But this isn't what parents actually get when they enroll in voucher programs. The maximum subsidy for the 2008-09 school year in Wisconsin is $6,607 - a sizable chunk of money, to be sure, but that's less than half of the tuition for a year of kindergarten at the University School of Milwaukee, one of the best private schools in the state. Eligibility is restricted to families with incomes below 220% of the federal poverty level, which means that vouchers are not enough to help those families make up the gap between their income and tuition at a really good private school.

Instead, students on vouchers find themselves at poorly regulated schools with an astounding range of quality. The horror stories include Mandella School of Science and Math, where the principal claimed voucher payments for students who weren't enrolled and bought himself two Mercedes-Benzes, and Alex's Academics of Excellence (you read that right), which was founded by a convicted rapist and evicted from two different locations. Because the Wisconsin voucher law has very weak accountability provisions, these violations were detected by journalists, not the state, and it took much longer than it should have to shut these schools down. I don't mean to say that all voucher schools are like that, but a couple of good success stories does not make public policy, especially when the state doesn't give parents the tools they need to distinguish between the success stories and the horror stories. And if John McCain really wants to fix educational equality in the United States, instead of leaving kids' education up to Alex's Academics of Excellence, he ought to invest in the public schools that serve everyone.

Since when is teaching an alternative?

Today's Crimson included coverage of a talk by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, under the headline "Teaching: A Viable Alternative".

I don't mean to fault the Crimson for what amounts to no more than a moderately awkward headline, but I think it does accurately reflect the sentiment of most Harvard students, which rubs me the wrong way. Since when is teaching an "alternative"? I know I grew up thinking of it as a pretty honorable profession. At least in part this is because I come from a public school system where the teaching is, frankly, not systematically good; so the teachers who knew what they were doing and loved their jobs made a tremendous difference in my life (and exam scores), while the ones who were there because they sort of fell into the job were pretty easy to pick out. Consequently I have a fairly strong belief in the power of a good teacher.

So the question becomes: since teaching is such a valuable and important profession, since teachers have more direct influence on more people's lives than any investment banker I can think of, why do Harvard students overwhelmingly go for i-banking over teaching? I see two possibilities: either Harvard students are all crass resume-obsessed materialists, or there's something deeper at play in society at large that makes us devalue teachers.

Wishy-washy liberal that I am, I tend to opt for both answers. In part there must be something about being in the Ivy League that makes you really value your Ivy League education; whether it's pressures from the parents or guilt that every year you spend here costs as much as the median American household makes in a year, there is some force that makes lots of us believe that we have to employ our Harvard degrees to the fullest - which means pursuing occupations that would be difficult to get without a Harvard degree. But I also think that most people in the outside world also tend to devalue teaching, for whatever reason, and to a certain extent Harvard students' unwillingness to regard teaching seriously as a respectable career choice (which is to say, for us, not just for other people) is simply a reflection of that bigger conception.

Thoughts?

Any Future for Academe?

There are a couple of great accounts by Harvard bloggers of their graduations: Ryan and Pablog deserve a read. These images are haunting me today -- the weirdly forced ceremony, the sense of total detachment -- (the thought that in two years I'll be dealing with this) -- and they got me thinking about the value of academia & formal education in today's political climate. Are we wasting our time at Harvard?

With that in mind I present this fascinating essay by Henry Farrell (of Crooked Timber, also an assistant prof at GWU), using Michael Bérubé's argument with David Horowitz to explore "different kinds of procedural liberalism" in academic environments as vs. politics. It's lengthy, but worth reading at length. The bits that got me:

Bérubé’s ideal academy is one that has a place for conservatives, and for people whom he disagrees with radically. Indeed, this is key to the “pragmatic anti-foundationalism” that underpins his specific form of procedural liberalism. Substantive liberals – those who believe in the importance of equality etc – don’t have a monopoly on the truth. Therefore, we need procedural liberalism too, where “any reasonable proposition can and should be debated from any reasonable angle.” This is a pretty uncontroversial claim in itself...

When one is acting as a scholar, one has a clear duty to be faithful to one’s vocation, to acknowledge uncomfortable facts, and to give due respect to viewpoints that are not one’s own. The duty of the professor to the student is not to impart the professor’s values to the student, but rather to help the student to understand his or her own values more clearly... The duty of the politician, in contrast, is precisely to use argument to express one’s own beliefs and, where possible, to sway others towards them so that one’s political goals can be achieved.

The academic can of course act as a politician, but only outside of the classroom. Not only are his roles as educator, and as a citizen engaged in politics distinct from each other, but they are profoundly different; as Weber describes it, they serve different gods. The political realm is one of unending struggle between different and antithetical ethical standpoints, each of which has adherents who want it to win. Here, it is incumbent on the politician to ensure that her point of view prevails, and to use whatever means are available in the electoral system to do so. While the truly responsible politician recognizes the tensions between lofty aims and the morally compromised tools that she must employ, and even that her own point of view is not unassailable, she fails in her responsibility as a politician unless she participates actively and wholeheartedly in the political struggle. The scholarly realm (within the social sciences) is one of debate where one starts from the premises that no point of view is foundationally right. Thus, the teacher imparts two important kinds of moral lesson to her student – lessons that allow the student to clearly articulate his own views to himself, and lessons that allow the student to recognize in principle that no point of view provides an account of the world that is complete and foundationally grounded.

So. Basically, what Farrell says here is that academic liberalism is incompatible with argumentative political liberalism (or any political ideology). In theory. But Farrell goes on to take case studies of people who don't adhere to these norms:

In practice, however, even within small-l liberalism, I suspect that there are limits to the accommodation that should be granted to specific individual students... Students who persistently and belligerently refuse to recognize in principle that other points of view may potentially hold some truth prevent seminars from becoming genuine intellectual exchanges, and need to be discouraged, if necessary in very strong terms, from so doing. They’re acting to stop the university from doing what it should be doing, from providing a proper environment for people to pursue the academic vocation.

Farrell then differentiates -- and this is where I depart from him -- between bomb-throwing types like David Horowitz, who deserve only scorn, and students/academics with legitimate intellectual cases for conservative/extreme positions. He writes:

a liberal (in the broadest sense of the word) academic should deal with Horowitz in a very different way than she would deal with John, or with a conservative scholar within the academy who was arguing in a reasoned and honest way that conservatives should get more of a voice. She should deal with him as a political actor, using the tools of political debate. She should under no circumstances take him seriously, where taking him seriously would give him political traction. She should, however, take the aforementioned conservative scholar very seriously indeed, and do her best to push students like John [a loud, aggressive, conservative] to adhere to the basic rules of academic argument, without at the same time asking them to change their substantive values.

Thus the need to distinguish between different kinds of procedural liberalism, which should work in different spheres of activity. As Weber argues, different spheres of social life are governed by different principles; the vocation of the academic is not that of the politician. While a small-l liberal should recognize that it’s healthy that both politics and the academy are populated by a wide range of viewpoints, including some that she is violently opposed to, she should recognize that these viewpoints interact in very different ways in the two spheres, and that the proper standards for vary dramatically from the one to the other.

I find this contention, that more "serious" conservatives deserve greater respect in academia than their political-activist counterparts, rather silly and more than a little depressing. Because the point that Farrell doesn't grasp here is how contested this "procedural liberalism" really is.

Procedural liberalism, the idea that you cannot grasp absolute truth -- which Farrell isolates as the root of academic discourse -- is now a partisan position, and a characteristically liberal/progressive one at that. In this day and age, to make any statement that involves subjectivity, context, or hints at relativism immediately identifies the speaker as a liberal, and places them within this political fight. It thus cannot function as the overarching modus operandi that it is intended to.

After all, the whole conservative ethic, Republican Party and all, is predicated on pure value judgments and an understanding of the world that operates with absolute confidence; this is why it encloses religious fundamentalism, militarism, and economic orthodoxy so well. It's not by coincidence that conservatives are so often derided as thinking of things in "black and white" -- they do.

And this kind of conservatism stands, at its most basic logical structures, in active opposition to procedural liberalism. It rejects context (hence, constitutional orginalism) and change (hence, the same-sex marriage fight). It cannot abide any suggestion that gods are fallible or principles imperfect; it cannot conceive of its opponents as anything other than traitors or lunatics. (George Lakoff explains both these mindsets, and shows how they operate, very well in Moral Politics.) It is sworn to destroy the entire field of academic discourse. An intellectual scorched-earth policy.

Understandably, this places academic procedural liberalism in a pretty bad situation. It claims to neutrality, and to containing within itself a healthy intellectual debate, even while it is being attacked at the roots by this toxic, destructive absolutist conservatism that has zero interest in "reasoned argument," whihc is in fact quite seriously opposed to it.

I keep picturing the opening scene from Cold Mountain, where the Confederate soldiers stand vigilant guard in their trench, helplessly unaware that the Union is tunneling underneath them planting explosives.

FURTHERMORE, academic liberalism is totally incapable of engaging this strain of conservatism, since all the Weberian principles that underly liberalism -- and this is Farrell's mindset -- insist on friendly coexistence and healthy disagreement. If you permit this kind of conservatism to continue, it disrupts and discredits procedural liberalism, but if academics oppose it they abandon their own core principles. To actively defend liberalism, then, becomes anathema to liberalism. And as a result we get Henry Farrell, who even as he recognizes the threat from a showman like Horowitz remains unable to address the threat from conservatism itself, making limp, tepid prescriptions like the one I quoted above:

A liberal should...take the conservative scholar very seriously indeed, and do her best to push John to adhere to the basic rules of academic argument, without at the same time asking them to change their substantive values.

Unfortunately, if you do not change the substantive values of these people, they will destroy academia and liberal thought as we know it. That has been their stated goal from the beginning. But out of loyalty to his increasingly frayed intellectual system Farrell cannot argue for their destruction. Nor should he be expected to; he'd be a traitor to his ideas.

As a result the academic establishment stands entirely undefended against conservatism, waiting to be destroyed.

--

This will sound bleak, but I don't see a way out of this paradox. Academics are damned if they do and damned if they don't. An institution like Harvard, which will undoubtedly defend its claim to anti-foundational neutrality, will at best become marginalized and increasingly irrelevant as intellectual/political production is left wholly to the activist spheres and people who are more willing to stick up for their ideational systems. We are already seeing that marginalization of the elite universities ("bastions of liberalism," "Kremlin on the Charles" etc.), and it's not a short leap from that to the marginalization of academia as a whole.

As a result, and this will sound apocalyptic, I have to question whether -- for us -- it's worth spending our time on academic pursuits. What (aside from a leg up in the job market) is a B.A. from Harvard going to get us? What about an M.A.? It doesn't look like it's going to prepare us very well to engage our nation's critical issues, that's for sure. If anything I suspect it might saddle us with some totally unhelpful intellectual baggage.

(Speaking personally, I know I'm deathly afraid of getting caught in academia, winding up 30 years from now bearded in an ivory tower writing silly articles about 19th century art and refusing to ever leave Cambridge because my faithful cat would get lonely. This is a realistic scenario for me.)

So what do the rest of you think? Can we wring value from our Harvard experiences, and can we fend off the conservative threat while maintaining the integrity of procedural liberalism? And if not, what is the alternative?

What's Happening to St. Louis Schools?

Somewhat randomly I stumbled on this story, which grabbed my eye, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

State moves to take over St. Louis schools

JEFFERSON CITY -- The State Board of Education voted this morning to take the first step to intervene in the St. Louis Public Schools, despite parents and teachers who disrupted their meeting...

...an appointed board could be running the St. Louis schools by this summer, relegating the elected School Board to the sidelines...

[Some board members] also expressed concern that the board has no St. Louis representative at the moment, after a state senator refused to support Gov. Matt Blunt's nominee, a woman who has been active in efforts to help students switch to private schools.

"Where is the voice of St. Louis? It's not here," St. Louis Superintendent Diana Bourisaw said after the vote."

This is a story with many facets, most of which (not being familiar with the backstory) I don't understand. But the gist of it is, Missouri's Republican governor has decided to strong-arm the city into running its schools his way, whether they like it or not. And that apparently involves putting privatization advocates on the board.

And the subtext here is even more troubling -- see, the City of St. Louis is in an odd position, because its official city limits are tiny. The vast majority of metropolitan St. Louis' population lives outside it; the city proper is mostly just office buildings and slums. (Thus it is one of the few major cities in America whose population technically shrank in the 20th century, rivalled only by Hartford, Connecticut.)

St. Louis is 51% African-American and has a median household income of $29,000. By contrast, the state of Missouri on the whole is 87% white and has median household income of $38,000.

So what we have is an impoverished, heavily African-American city, whose sovereignty over its education is being forcibly usurped by a heavily Caucasian (and Republican-governed) state -- which, as noted above, intends to operate these schools through a board which has no members from St. Louis at all.

Draw your own conclusions.

Bush's Two Failed Wars

Not content to screw over a nation with one war, President Bush has one-upped predecessors by f-ing up two wars. The other I am talking about is, of course, the war on drugs.

In today’s New York Times, Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociology professor, has an editorial (which you might not be able to access because of Times Select) devoted to the Bush administration’s other botched war. The current focus of anti-drug measures that seeks to destroy drugs at their place of origin (Patterson focuses on Jamaica) has resulted in a catastrophic socio-economic crisis for both countries. As well, the incarceration of drug dealers at home does little to actually rehabilitate or educate. Nearly 50% of drug offenders are re-arrested upon their initial release, it doesn’t take a genius (something we all agree Bush is not), to realize something is amiss.

As with Iraq, the strategy is flawed in its conception and execution, made worse by a refusal to change course in the face of failure. It strongly emphasizes eradicating the source of drugs, interdiction of traffic and draconian punishment for offenders. It neglects what nearly every expert believes — and European experience has shown — to be the only successful strategy: a demand-side emphasis on preventive programs and rehabilitation of addicts.  

…

America’s unwillingness to recognize the socioeconomic context of the drug crisis at home and abroad, to see that being surrounded by failing states threatens its security, to provide aid where it is most effective, and to acknowledge that the root cause of this hemispheric disaster is not supply but its own citizens’ insatiable demand for illicit drugs, is as incomprehensible as the quagmire in Iraq.

Way to go, Bush administration, way to go. 

Gen Ed, Liberalism, Usefulness, and the Good Society

Harvard is moving, impelled, as it were, by a lingering resentment with a Core curriculum whose chief weakness seems to be no more than the fact that it's old. But I can support that: out with the old, in with the new; we're a society on the move, after all, and no use being stodgy old Harvard standing in the way. So we've found ourselves all hot and bothered about these terribly important questions about the 'meaning of education', crooked ourselves up over what we should and shouldn't be stamping our graduates with, and finally, at the end of it come up with a plan for ... stunning mediocrity. "A bold new vision," my ass. The new Gen Ed report is a flaccid hate-child of misplaced pragmatism and desperate but empty self-reflection. And it's bad news for American higher education.

The new fan of general education requirements orbits around a common theme of 'relevance', a damn ambiguous term if there ever was one, but also one that's more sinister than you might think. 'Relevance' is what sends people to learn to become auto mechanics and accountants. These are both honest professions, and I mean no slight to them by mentioning them here—but I would wager that few feel it should be the purpose of a liberal arts education to prepare students for these jobs.

Relevance at Harvard means, on its surface, studies which can prepare us for the world. Hence, out with East African art studies and in with nanotechnology. Students don't need to be thinking about sonography—so the thinking goes—but about econometrics. This'll make us—uh, relevant—and ready to jump into the market to discover things and buy Volvos.

There's a double problem here, in my view: first of all, Harvard's clearly responding to the fact that the Harvard education is carrying less and less of a premium in today's labor market, and Harvard grads are increasingly finding themselves in good, but not great, careers. I think that's a problem because I find it a supremely stupid thing for Harvard to be caring about in the first place. But you might think otherwise. Fine. The second, and more pressing problem, is that the direction we seem to be heading isn't going to fix that problem. The new Gen Ed program is, if nothing else, pedagogically buzzwordy, seemingly crafted to educate us in the fields that might be 'happening' in the next few decades. Witness 'Religion and Faith.' It's as if the Faculty took a quick scan of some headlines or read some Tom Friedman, and decided we'll learn what's hep and fresh these days.

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