StickWithANose

Policy geeks are all abuzz today over the TFA data coming out of Tennessee. For the most part, the conclusions reached by the ‘report card’ on the effectiveness of TFAer’s appears to be an outlier in that most peer-reviewed studies have found that TFAer’s are [if we put the most positive face on the data possible] on par with their traditionally-trained peers. So, I’ll state up front that I am suspicious of this report. Of course, I am suspicious of all such government reports. I’ll wait to see what the quants have to say about this one before I weigh in on the matter as I am of the qualitative bent, but I’d say the place to start an investigation of this report would begin with the value-added model used in the comparison, differences in student populations [TFAer's work in charters that have the ability to 'shape' their student body], and the degree to which TFAer’s work in test-prep institutions that do little else than train students to take state tests. [In case you're wondering, standardized assessments are a poor measure of academic success in terms of the skills required to work in a 21st century knowledge economy.]  I’m sure that Frederick Hess is banging away on a new ‘piece’ proclaiming the empirically proven success of Teach for America, but I’ll wait to see how this washes out first.

In the first episode of The Corporation, the film-makers construct their analysis on the question: If a corporation is a legal person then what kind of person is it? To answer the question they do a “psychological profile” that leads to the conclusion that the modern corporation is a psychopath. Perhaps it is time to do a profile of the American body politic… Today’s post is a sampling of dysfunction. Enjoy.

Steve Martin writes a book on art and is invited to participate in a book talk on the subject at a high-brow venue. Audience demands refund for not being funny.

If you think paying for a ticket entitles you to call the shots on how something clearly billed as a “lecture and conversation” is supposed to go, if you believe your entertainment should be as crowdsourced as Bristol Palin’s dance career, here’s the scoop: no. And to rudely demand otherwise is beyond wild. That’s downright crazy.

Economists remain immune from the immutable laws they hold so very dear…

Suppose that school teachers could keep teaching and get regular promotions year after year no matter how badly they performed in the classroom. Suppose also that there was no incentive to teach well. Economic theory predicts that we would get a large number of unmotivated mediocre teachers.

Okay, suppose that the people who design economic policy never need to worry about getting fired no matter how badly their policies turn out. They continue to hold their jobs and get regular promotions. Under such circumstances we should expect that we would get mediocre economists.

Banks and mortgage servicers remain immune from US law…

This is simultaneously laughable and damaging. The argument basically boils down to: “Gee, the fact that no one bothered to observe the contracts means they never intended to. So we’ll just pretend those provisions don’t count.” Does that mean that people who promptly went into default obviously never intended to pay, and should therefore get free houses? Or that when a borrower sends a payment a day or two late, they clearly intended to pay on time, so no late fees should apply? I think a lot of people would agree to that theory of contracts as long as it applied to consumers as well as banks.

CNN continues to circle the bowl…In this example, it is a Kindergarten-level report on federal debt that is factually incorrect.

This is what passes for mainstream journalism on this subject and it’s damned scary. But it is a good explanation as to why the country is contradictory and ignorant about the economy and the deficit. Remember, this isn’t FOX News, it’s CNN which is where the “independents” and many liberals get their news.

I remain convinced that one of the main causes of the systemic breakdown in our human organizing functions is the dumbing down of the media. When you listen to old broadcasts of journalists and politicians, they did not sound this stupid, not even the stupid ones.

Apparently, dirty hippies can open up sandwich shops in the nice part of town…

Pretty soon fans of Frussie’s Deli won’t have to cross the Henley Street bridge for their favorite sandwich.

Frussie’s plans to take up space, possibly as early as next week, at 17 Market Square, where Internet broadcasting company Knox ivi calls home.

I’ve been thinking about the hollow language of conservatism quite a lot these days. As someone who is interested in the politics of education policy and reform, I’m interested in thinking through a mode of politics capable of achieving the democratic mandate of public schooling within the context of an increasingly dysfunctional political system in which public debate over education policy is dominated by the language of political conservatism. It should be no surprise that this educational conservatism is internally contradictory and undermines its own stated goals at every turn [example], but the conclusion that I’m reaching is that this hollow language is one of the only tools available to effectively reform public schooling in the early 21st century.

The point of this long-winded introduction is that I was cruising through Tom Hoffman’s place and came across this post on how the foundational ideas of educational conservatism would be dismissed by today’s conservatives as being a fascistic-socialist plot to indoctrinate our children, or something like that.

I’ve taken a little closer look at Dorothy Sayer’s 1947 essay The Lost Tools of Learning, which subsequently became a touchstone for “Classical,” “Christian Classical” or really it should be “Neo-Classical” or something, and conservative school design after being reprinted in The National Review in the early seventies. The essay is typical of its era, when public intellectuals of all stripes were engaged in a question of immediate, visceral urgency: Can we educate our children in such a way to avoid the next Hitler, Stalin, Mao, World War III? And while it does seem like the kind of thing William F. Buckley would have liked back in the day, the appeal to contemporary American conservatives is more of a stretch.

You should really click through an read Tom’s post and the essay. What really caught my eye is that Sayer’s prescription is strikingly similar to what I’ve been saying on this blog.

I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command. To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.

The primary goal of public education should be directed away from the delivery of ‘dead’ curricular content toward classrooms that impart to students the “Tools of Learning.” That’s it. Let universities and the private sector train the next generation of intellectuals and employees. Public schooling should prepare young people with the tools they will need to succeed as human beings.

I feel quite certain that I’ll be coming back to this essay… Thanks for the find, Tom!

HatTip to The Big Picture

There is perhaps no better measure of the absolute failure of elite journalism and the Fourth Estate than the career trajectory of New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman. From the now infamous Friedman Unit to his very serious prognostications on the federal budget, Friedman represents the pinnacle of absolute ignorance branded as elite wisdom as well as the total absence of any form of accountability for elite opinion-makers who frequently and repeatedly pass off patently false information and ideas as conventional wisdom. For all intents and purposes, it would appear that once you have entered the club of the very serious pundit class there is virtually nothing you can do or say that will discredit your work or keep you from having a national platform from which to spew pure bullshit. So it is that this weekend Friedman used his national platform to spew mindless ideology on schooling and education reform. I’ll not waste my time parsing each of the many falsehoods and generalization sprinkled throughout this article, but I will point out one particularly egregious example of using a half-truth to obscure an underlying reality.

While shilling for Teach for America, Friedman frames the de-professionalization of teaching through strict adherence to reductive standardized assessments and linking teacher pay to student scores on those very reductive assessments as being just the kind of professionalization that will help attract the best and brightest college students into the teaching field.

If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”

Indeed, Finland and Denmark did bring the teaching profession into the ‘knowledge economy’, but the real questions is how did they do so. The answer stands in stark contrast to the ‘wisdom’ being propagated by Friedman. First, they created a high bar for entry into the profession requiring teachers receive a Master’s in education, that they demonstrate competency through an extended period of student teaching, and that they are capable of engaging in classroom-based research to increase student learning. Second, individual teachers were given a high degree of professional autonomy on how to reach national curricular goals, and they were allowed significant time for planning, research, professional development, and collaboration. Third, teachers were empowered to be the engine of assessment. In Finland, for example, there are no national mandated assessments for all students; the overwhelming majority of assessment is of the formative variety and is constructed by teachers themselves in relation to student needs. In short, they made significant investments in teacher training and then empowered their teachers to use that training in their classrooms. They professionalized teaching. When you compare these reforms to what Friedman is selling the differences are apparent.

Teach for America participants receive only five-weeks training prior to entering the toughest classrooms in America, and their performance reflects their inexperience. When they enter the classroom, they more often than not work in charter schools employing scripted curricula closely tied to standardized assessments, and they have little to no autonomy in how to organize their classrooms. And, most importantly, the vast majority of Teach for America ‘teachers’ leave the field after their two year commitment is up. In short, Friedman is using the example of two highly successful education systems to justify his own pet policy project when the underlying reality contradicts the very thing he is selling, and this is presented to the public as being thoughtful commentary. He’s been doing this crap for years, and he suffers no consequences for it.

[UPDATE] Schools Matter has more here…

Through the course of my research, I’ve reached the conclusion that the primary task of public schooling should not be to impart a fixed curricular package of ‘knowledge’ but should instead be focused on imparting the skills required to build knowledge. It is no small distinction. If I had my way the primary goal of public schooling would be to impart to students the four basic skills required for building a meaningful lifeworld: literacy, numeracy, critical thinking and curiosity. That’s it…

I’ve taught at all levels of our education system, and the one thing that I’ve learned from those experiences is that even our so-called ‘good students’ are usually anything but… In the upper reaches of the academy, for example, the ‘good students’ that I’ve encountered are generally [but not always] the ones who know how to play the game, and their primary goal is to find out what the professor is looking for and provide it to him/her with as little effort as is possible. Despite all of the high and mighty rhetoric often thrown around about education, the pursuit of academic degrees is now almost totally subsumed beneath an instrumental logic that renders a good deal of what passes for schooling down to performance ritual.

This blast of cynicism was sparked by this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that details the confessions of an academic mercenary who writes papers for students at all levels and who spells out in not so subtle language that we are producing crop after crop of college graduates who cannot organize their thoughts into anything resembling coherence let alone write an academic paper. As a Sociology instructor, I am constantly faced with the question: Is it my job to not only teach my content area but to also teach the 100+ students I work with every semester how to organize and write a paper?

In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

‘ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists…

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing. I have seen the word “desperate” misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you? [...]

It is late in the semester when the business student contacts me, a time when I typically juggle deadlines and push out 20 to 40 pages a day. I had written a short research proposal for her a few weeks before, suggesting a project that connected a surge of unethical business practices to the patterns of trade liberalization. The proposal was approved, and now I had six days to complete the assignment. This was not quite a rush order, which we get top dollar to write. This assignment would be priced at a standard $2,000, half of which goes in my pocket.

A few hours after I had agreed to write the paper, I received the following e-mail: “sending sorces for ur to use thanx.”

I did not reply immediately. One hour later, I received another message:

“did u get the sorce I send

please where you are now?

Desprit to pass spring projict”

Not only was this student going to be a constant thorn in my side, but she also communicated in haiku, each less decipherable than the one before it. I let her know that I was giving her work the utmost attention, that I had received her sources, and that I would be in touch if I had any questions. Then I put it aside.

Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, the two dominant fields in the social sciences [Political Science and Economics] cling to a foundational theory that renders much of the research conducted in those fields down to academic navel gazing that does precious little to illuminate the functioning of actually existing human societies. In political science, the theory is referred to as rational choice theory which is simply a variant of economics faith-based belief in Homo Economicus. The gist of rational choice theory is an assumption that humans are rational, self-interested actors seeking to maximize gains and minimize losses in both political and economic endeavours. For over a century now, theorists and researchers have continuously poked holes in this neo-classical dream to no avail, and the evidence that humans can and do act in ways that are irrational and self-defeating continues to mount. PhysOrg [h/t]

New research findings add complexity to the basic assumption that humans act in their own economic self-interest. By analyzing hundreds of survey questions from 1952 to 2006, Peter Enns, assistant professor of government, and Nathan Kelly of the University of Tennessee found that as inequality rises, low income individuals’ attitudes toward redistribution become more conservative. Their paper appears in the October issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

“It’s a bit of a conundrum,” Enns admits.

The researchers also examined public opinion data on the question: Should government increase spending on welfare, keep it the same or decrease it? “As inequality rose, the high- and low-income respondents on average become less supportive of spending on welfare,” Enns said. “And this is not because low-income people are unaware of inequality; our results show they are more aware of it than most people.”

It’s hard not to draw parallels between the militarized charter schools being pushed by ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’ alike here in the early 21st century and the American Indian schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Of course, there are differences, but not as many as you might think. Both target[ed] subordinate groups with an explicit mandate to foster in students a specific form of Anglo-normative ‘character’ based on a misguided psychological theory offering those norms a pseudo-scientific veneer, and both types of schooling use a harsh form of discipline and militarized instruction that would simply not be tolerated by the wealthy and middle-class supporters of this kind of school ‘reform’. [h/t]

Much like the Panic of 1907, the Great Recession of 2007-2009 has only amplified the contradictions of global political economy and set the stage for the bigger calamity to come… “First time tragedy, second time farce.” Archein

What we are witnessing in Europe and the US is an increasing divergence of wealth and the vast majority. Instead of a recognition that the political economy of the past thirty years, and one should argue the political economy of the past hundred, can no longer provide for the majority, we get in national economies a continued squeezing of the bottom and middle, while the top floats above in a global bubble induced by the world’s central banks. The one thing we’ve learned about financial bubbles is they don’t cause inflation, they pop, leaving a lot of worthless debt. This one will too, but how long? Place your bets, though one thing about this life is the irrational can last a lot longer than anyone would conceive reasonable.

David Brooks conjures up the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and Dean Baker reveals Brooks to be the idiot that he is… Seeking Alpha

Of course, if Brooks really wants to tell a story of national humiliation, he just has to look around beyond the streets and restaurants that he and his friends frequent. The country has more than 25 million people who are unemployed, underemployed or who have given up work altogether. Tens of millions of people are underwater in their mortgages and millions face the imminent prospect of losing their home through foreclosure.

This might not be the apocalypse, but it should be humiliating to the nation, especially since this suffering is entirely due to incompetent economic policy and therefore was and is entirely avoidable. And, Brooks doesn’t even have to wait for 2020 to talk about this picture.

Robert Shiller channels the NewSpeak of Behavioral Economics to polish the turd… Naked Capitalism

Shiller’s insistence that the public is so dumb as to confuse a windown with a bailout reveals his lack of connection with popular perceptions. The reason the public is so angry with the bailouts is no one, particularly among the top brass, lost his job, and worse, the firms were singularly ungrateful, thumbing their noses as taxpayers and paying themselves record bonuses in 2009.

An old one but a good one… Your brain is broken… The Big Picture

New research suggests that misinformed people rarely change their minds when presented with the facts — and often become even more attached to their beliefs. The finding raises questions about a key principle of a strong democracy: that a well-informed electorate is best.

Just when you think that Arthur Laffer couldn’t become any more irrelevant or intellectually dishonest, he always finds a way to deliver… EconoSpeak

The reduction in employment is because folks are voluntarily leaving their jobs? There isn’t much of an unemployment problem? If Laffer really believes this – he might write that there was a movement along the supply curve rather than say “the supply is limited”. After all, the distinction between movement along a curve versus shift of a curve is found in almost every beginning textbook given to college freshman. Or was this a shift of the demand for labor schedule? Laffer’s writing is incredibly confused.

Well, at least you can say that old Frederick Hess is being honest for once… [h/t]

The nice thing about these ventures is that they “own” their reforms and are solely committed to executing them–not to meeting every need of every child in a given geography. The 21st century “system” may well be a spider web or latticework of these.

The key here is that the ‘innovative ‘ 21st century reform being advocated by the oligarchs and dutifully promoted by their useful tools is just the latest incarnation of separate but equal. And, like its predecessor, the 21st century version of separate but equal is anything but equal.