On Cosmos

Last week, Neal deGrasse Tyson's reboot of Carl Sagan's classic science series Cosmos aired its first episode. If you're interested in watching it you can check out episode 2, Some of the Things That Molecules Do, on Fox tonight at 9pm. I highly recommend it, not because it is super super in depth, but because deGrasse Tyson and his team work very hard to instill a sense of wonder which science lacks for many in our culture. If you are a cord cutter like me, go get an Antenna at Wal-Mart or something and watch it for free over the air.

Spoiler Alert: I'm going to write a bit about episode 1 of the series. I don't know that's it's possible to spoil things like the age of the universe or whatever but if you're really holding out then don't read anymore.

Episode 1, Standing Up in the Milky Way, serves as an introduction to, well, the universe. Again, I need to point out that accessibility and awe are prioritized over the nitty gritty of physics. After hearing from deGrasse Tyson about the origin of the series and the merits of the scientific method, we are treated to a macroscopic vision of the universe we inhabit. We leave Earth and our solar system after brief stops by each planet (not pluto, obviously) and are quickly looking at local galactic clusters and eventually the multi-verse. The show is very clearly trying to communicate a sense of scale and vastness in a way that is fairly easy to understand. There's no time spent calculating light-years and how long it would take to go from one point to another; well done visuals and deGrasse Tyson's chromed-out spaceship (with a bridge straight out of the Mass Effect series' Illusive Man's home) are all that is needed to show just how big we're talking.

Space, as the show's subtitle suggests, is only one aspect of the cosmos. Time is the other. Humans are rather inefficient when it comes to estimating and understanding the passage of time. We've all experienced minutes which felt like hours and hours that seemed to last seconds, so helping an audience with varying levels of understanding comprehend the vastness of time is a challenge. Cosmos uses the tactic of fitting the entirety of the past into a one month calendar. While I've seen similar approaches before, fitting the emergence of life into a 24 hour period, I think the calendar is both visually and cognitively easier to understand. The grid of boxes which deGrasse Tyson walks around on is laid out like a large floor calendar with most of the interesting stuff taking place on the last day.

Between the two sections on space and time, we are treated to a bit of a history lesson about how science challenges prevailing notions of the universe. Using an animated sequence reminiscent of graphic novels, Cosmos tells the story of Giordano Bruno, an Italian Monk who thought a finite universe was disservice to the infinite nature of God. He's shown as a spiritual man who comes to these conclusions seemingly by accident and is then laughed out of the Church and various other places for his whole life. Later he is imprisoned and burned alive. The message seemed two-fold. First, as I noted above, it shows how trying to learn more about the universe can challenge prevailing notions of reality - often with poor results for the early challengers. Second, and perhaps more important for the creators of Cosmos, Giordano Bruno's insistence that the infinity of God and the infinity of the universe are complimentary is a central, although hidden, argument for the whole series.

Let's step out of the show an look at the context in which it is being shown. 21st century America is divided over everything except the idea that everything is wrong. We're convinced of our decline and one big "proof" of that decline is poor performance of our students compared with students in other parts of the world. While I take issue with that claim, that's not what I'm going to argue about here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a vocal proponent of improving science education in schools. He's also adamant that students need to be passionate about what they're studying. Yes, scientific literacy is important, but our next generation of scientists needs to love science and not be forced into it. Otherwise they all move to San Francisco and make sexting apps for a living. Enter the Hayden Planetarium and now Cosmos. Science is cool again! Let's learn!

What does this have to do with Bruno and his infinite God? Smallness. People are used to feeling important. They're big and have friends and people know them! If you suddenly place them in context of some huge impersonal universe that sense of importance is shattered. You make people feel small and insignificant. deGrasse Tyson has a response to that, a sort of pop-existentialism. Late in the episode he points out that each of us is made of atoms forged in the heart of stars, just like Mjollnir! Okay, he doesn't mention a space hammer but the point is deGrasse Tyson is trying to stop people from feeling insignificant because that's just as big of a barrier to scientific interest as shitty teachers. Here's a great interview with Terry Gross where he discusses all of this.

Furthermore, some Christians stand opposed to this style of science education because it diminishes their version of God. Whether they're YE creationists or just skeptical of science as a way to undermine faith, a common Christian response to scientific explanations of the universe is that it removes meaning and specialness from God's most significant creation, man. While I tend to think that we overstate humanity's specialness, I can understand where those Christians are coming from. Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't trying to fight the war; he's trying to say the war isn't necessary. That God and science are compatible, largely because both inspire awe at their vastness and complexity. That understanding the universe can be seen as trying to understand God.

Good for him. I hope it works because the larger good, encouraging people to embrace science and students to passionately study science, is sorely needed. Discourse in our country is broken because neither side wants to understand the position of the other. They're content to yell and close off discussion. We need more people like deGrasse Tyson who are interested in finding the common ground.

Silicon Valley and ideology Part 2

If you're interested in what's brought me to think about this post and to do some of the deep diving that I explain below, take a look at Part 1.

tl;dr summary of Part 2
Silicon Valley is essentially the second pole in American power right now. You have the "Acela Corridor" of Boston (Ivy League Schools, Academia), New York (Wall St., Media), and Washington (political power) and then you have Silicon Valley. It's progress-at-all-costs technological utopianism is the subject of frequent criticism but there is another undercurrent to the culture out there. We find it both at the top of the corporate and financial structures but also permeating the internet and discourse which happen "organically" in the world most closely associated with technology. We find it in online sexual abuse culture, in libertarian leaning tech enthusiasts who police the chatrooms and social media universe, and weird places like the Seasteading movement or attempts to make the Bay Area it's own state. What I'm seeing is something which does clearly set Silicon Valley apart from everywhere else. It's a move toward what I can only describe as Oligarchical Fascism. They truly believe they are better and more capable than people everywhere else for a variety of reasons: meritocracy, genetics, work ethic are among the top. They consider their pursuits hampered by democracy and favor a political system where they are irrevocably in charge.

Dipolar America

Identifying places of outsized influence on American culture, economics, and politics is nothing new. For most of my politically aware life, I've seen america divided into red and blue states. Most often the right claims the liberal elites in the northeast and the hollywood dreamers in LA are ruining the country and then the left claims that flyover states are actually the once ruining the country. Blah blah we've heard it before.

I'd like to throw a spin on that trope and argue that the true poles of influence are the good old fashioned east coast media/culture/finance/politics establishment which which we are all familiar and the much newer The Silicon Valley / Bay area high-tech culture.

The amount of money and economic influence of the tech sector is obvious. These companies are some of the most valuable and wealth in the history of the world. The innovations driven by tech companies have created entire economies based on products they sell - the app economy is completely nuts! I think the saga of Flappy Bird is a great look at the insanity that is the app economy. Many people, myself included, find this kind of thing completely delusional as billions of dollars are spent by consumers and billions more by companies acquiring app developers but absolutely nothing of lasting value is created. Similarly, the companies themselves sit on vast war-chests of money giving them the ability to buy competitors, develop new product lines almost overnight, or do just about anything. Throughout the Great Recession, technology stocks, led by apple, grew to be some of the most owned and most heavily weighted stocks in funds world wide. At some point in 2012, as much at 25% of some indices value was attributable to APPL alone. If you have a 401k, IRA, or any other basket of funds, it is very likely that your money was largely tied up in the tech sector.

With that new and growing economic influence came political influence. Leaders of tech companies began appearing in front of congress on a regular basis testifying about issues from net neutrality to surveillance to copyright, healthcare, trade deals, and, most recently, immigration reform. Tim Cook frequents the White House and Google's founders are big supporters of the President. Obama recently used their Hangouts product to conduct a question and answer session with the public.

Silicon Valley's culture and the impact of technology appear heavily in education. Perhaps I am a bit predisposed to focus on education since I am an educator but I find the area to be a unique confluence of all these issues. Economics, culture, policy, and technology weigh heavily on the classroom. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the emergence of Massively Online Open Courses. MOOCs are off to a rocky start but they promise to revolutionize the way education happens. I've written about them before and I'm generally skeptical of their efficacy. In addition to pushing MOOCs, there's also an effort by Silicon Valley to get technology related skills into the classroom. While this isn't a bad idea, it is another example of the tremendous pull they have. Also, it could just be a tactic to flood the market with programmers and software engineers to pouch down labor costs.

The final area of influence is on our culture. Whether it's memes, youtube, social media, or deeper parts of the internet like 4chan and Silk Road, the way that technology impacts our culture is significant. And it isn't always positive. Cyberbullying of children, sexual harassment, revenge porn, and various kinds of malicious social hacking are an outgrowth of the interconnected world technology enables.

I know this section is very heavy on lists and somewhat rambling but I want to make the point that technology is a very important part of our lives and that the place most associated with it, Silicon Valley, is the second pole of cultural, economic, and political power in America.

The Deep Dive finding neo-reactionaries in Silicon Valley

I think it's no secret that there's a good degree of utopianism surrounding technology. What we don't see is it's darker side. Underneath Silicon Valley's somewhat progressive corporate PR and somewhat libertarian internet culture lurks a belief in, of all things, Monarchism and an aristocracy ruled by those who have benefited most from the digital revolution.

I first learned about its existence from Arnold Kling, a libertarian blogger who found himself at odds with some of these neo-reactionary precepts. Indeed, his label of this line of thought as neo-reactionary has become something of an accepted term for this kind of thinking. For some reason the link is his post is broken so I dug up the original. It hails from the American Spectator, a conservative publication. Angelo Codevilla, the author, argues along lines I have often argued myself. He rejects the influence of industry insiders and revolving door regulators on our political process. Codevilla bemoans the lack of real political representation for the majority of voters and seems to see our democracy as a failed project. I don't necessarily disagree though his invocation of a "ruling class" and a "country class" smacks of Sara Palin's "real America" comment. There's some petty straw man stuff about progressives being a self serving elite which seeks to contain "the rest of Americans [who] are retrograde and racist". Typical of right wing invective, the progressives are out to create economic dependence on the state and to destroy families and religion. His solution is to promote the values and policies of the country class:

Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the country class that government is not its friend. Negative orientation to privilege distinguishes the corporate officer who tries to keep his company from joining the Business Council of large corporations who have close ties with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the company to grow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to the trough. It sets apart the schoolteacher who resents the union to which he is forced to belong for putting the union's interests above those of parents who want to choose their children's schools. In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you. It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.

Again, there's a lot to find attractive, especially in the closing of the second paragraph but the article as a whole is very typical of right wing rhetoric. If we'd just return to the state of affairs which supposedly existed in the white-bread suburban 1950s, all of our country's problems would be solved. So far, there's not much going on to link this to the culture of technology.

Returning to the imaginary 1950s is not the only solution offered to the problem of the farcical kleptocratic state. Writing in another conservative publication, The Week, Matt Lewis wonders what's gone wrong with American Conservatives. He begins:

Something weird is happening on the American Right. Over at Politico Magazine, Michael Auslin, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has penned a column titled "America Needs a King."

Had Auslin's strange desire not come on the heels of Pat Buchanan's paean to Vladimir Putin, or an anti-democracy movement being championed by tech libertarians like Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, one might see this as merely an example of an academic being intellectually provocative. In other words, "trolling" us.

But this isn't mere trolling. It's a trend.

Now, there has always been an element of the Catholic Right with monarchical tendencies. But, for a variety of reasons, this fringe idea seems to be gaining some mainstream traction.

Auslin's fundamental proposal is to create a position above the presidency, to which he assigns the rather Orwellian title "our First Citizen." This would be a symbolic post meant to unite Americans around something they have in common, even as public opinion is split over our more partisan political officials. "Let America's presidents be politicians — slinging mud, cutting deals, and knifing others in the back," he writes. "Just don’t let them pretend they represent all of us."

Now, I don't agree that this is a new trend in conservatism. Just watch an episode of Downton Abbey and you'll see that being a monarchist has a fairly long tradition in conservative circles. Perhaps it is the recent addition of fairly liberal values to American conservatism which "weird". Lewis' mention of Peter Thiel indicates the connection to Silicon Valley. Thiel is famous for saying that freedom and democracy are incompatible. He's also famous for wanting to create an underwater city called Rapture  floating enclaves free from national laws and regulations. If we put the reactionary views of Codevilla together with the Monarchist views of Auslin and the "going Galt" preferences of Thiel then we get the neo-reactionary movement.

The connection to Silicon Valley is somewhat tenuous at this point in the post. Perhaps now is a good time to point out that I am painting with a rather broad brush. I don't know how many people involved in the tech industry are actually in the neo-reactionary camp but, as I continue explaining their worldview below, pay attention to how familiar much of the rhetoric seems. It's not just language on the fringe right or the Ron Paul libertarians. Many fairly normal people express aspects of these views.

Neo-reactionaries hold that democracy can't ultimately provide a high degree of freedom for its citizens. Any time freedoms do exist under democracy, it's a temporary state of affairs at best. Indeed, the old adage, often misattributed to Tocqueville, that democracy will survive until the people discover they can vote themselves money is a great summation of the neo-reactionary view of democracy. At some point either the lords of finance and industry or the masses will compromise the ability of the government to secure broad freedoms and begin seeking to use the state for their own purposes rather than for freedom. The way they (whether corrupt corporations or the corrupt masses) do this is through taxing the wealthy and the productive members of society. Now we begin to hear the libertarian strains of thought reemerge. 

One primary goal of abandoning democracy is to establish a more stable society in which productive people are free from both the threat of tyrannical taxation and from economic collapses. One core belief is that a sufficiently good monarch or aristocracy would lead to a stable economy. More importantly, though, economic growth and stability isn't the end goal. Putting, well, all of history aside for the moment, let's see what the neo-reactionaries have to say. Michael Anissimov, glad recipient of the neo-reactionary label, wrote recently:

Traditional monarchy is not totalitarian. It would be less totalitarian than our current republican state. The republican state consumes 40% of GDP, whereas an incipient monarchy would more likely consume around 20% of GDP, lowering to 5% or less in the longer term, once it had built up some capital.

As I’ve stated previously, I do not think it is likely that the United States as a whole could ever become a monarchy, nor would I want it to become one. More likely than not, a monarchy would be revived in some European country that is compelled to make a desperate move. Perhaps Greece or Romania.

The primary motivation behind establishing a new monarchy would be for a cultural aesthetic and nativist benefits, not economic maximization.

Don't let the seemingly self contradictory title fool you. Anissimov and others wholeheartedly that traditional monarchies are not inherently totalitarian. A monarchic state should be small, technologically advanced enough to ensure safety and some degree of economic prosperity (defined in a classically liberal sense I guess, it's not very clear to me). Social order and peace are more important than, say, self determination or free speech. Essential to this project is the ability of people to move freely from one small monarchy to another. Similar to "voting with your feet" or a self-regulating free market where inferior products are not purchased, people not sufficiently happy in on monarchy would move to a different one. They promise that no monarch would stop the flow of people. Actually, no. They don't promise that. I'm not sure what the guarantor for free movement would be.

Who runs this society? Who is the monarch? Who are the aristocrats? In the past, classical monarchies the Divine Right of Kings could be invoked. Kings were Kings because God made them that way! Religion is not necessarily a part of the neo-reactionary vision so who gets the be head honcho? If you guessed Peter Thiel, you are on the right track. It's not him exactly but it may well be people who look and sound a lot like him. Neo-reactionaries are big into natural order (no, silly not Natural Law, though the effect is largely the same). Those who are smarter, more productive, and more able to unite a community behind them will inevitably rise to the top. Under democracy this makes them a target of the rest. Under a neo-reactionary model, this man becomes king and his followers become the aristocracy. The models vary from advocate to advocate but the overall gist is the same.

Similarly, Mencius Moldbug (a pseudonym), the godfather of this whole neo-reactionary movement argues that just about every problem in the world is an engineering problem, especially problems of governance. So who better to run the world than engineers? Here he Godwins himself:

Hitler, for instance. We may not have Hitler. We may not be Hitler. But we could cloneHitler! (And if the Russians have lost that skull fragment, we can back-breed a new race of Hitlers. Indeed, this has already been done - with cows.) Without any field-testing at all, with only one try to get it right, can we satisfy ourselves that the result of the Procedure will be actual sane government - and not Hitler?

Indeed we can. But not through hope, good thoughts and the power of positive thinking. There is only one dark, half-magical art that can produce reliable quality on the first try. It uses no newt blood at all. It is called engineering.

The Reaction is Hitler-free because its engineers the Hitler-phenomenon understand precisely, and to avoid it take precautions effective and redundant. Unlike Wernher von Braun, we at UR care where the rockets come down.

Rocket science is a perfect analogy. Every time NASA fires off some colossal shoulder of techno-pork to some random, godforsaken interplanetary destination, it ships one or two hundred custom widgets, each of which is designed to work perfectly on the first try. Often, all do. Sometimes, one or two fail. Then backups take over, and work a little less well.

Political engineering is rocket science, too. It demands no less cogency and care. In particular, romantic illusions are as misplaced in the political engineer's cubicle as a topless calendar in the gynecologist's office. The reactionary takes the biped as she is. Reality alone - bleak, elegant, mindless reality - is the null device on her black flag. Anyone who tells the truth, who believes her own lying eyes, who knows whereof the fsck she speaks, is in that moment as bitter and uncompromising a reactionary as ever put foot on the earth. 

When Moldbug writes about The Reaction, he is referring to the moment when a society decided to undo it's democratic structure and turn toward a monarchy. So yeah, avoiding having a Hitler as your king is merely a feat of political engineering no different than launching a rocket. The engineers, therefore, are the ones who run the show, they organize The Reaction and establish the post-democratic state which will be perfectly engineered to avoid bad outcomes. There's a lot more to his posts but I don't have room here. If you really want to, go read them. 

I will take this opportunity to post a link to the Geeks for Monarchy post at TechCrunch from last November. The article is a brief primer on neo-reactionaries and it contains a link to numerous resources both supporting and critical of neo-reactionaries. If you are at all interested, it's a great place to start. 

Masculinity, Neo-reactionaries, and Internet Culture

Weirdly, there's a big gender role push wrapped up in the neo-reactionary movement. Among the Five Principles of Reactionary Thought listed by Anissimov we get this:

4.  Traditional sex roles are basically a good idea. 

It’s tiresome to go into this one, since the feminists are so rabid about it, but reactionaries basically approve of traditional sex roles.  In traditional societies, women did in fact take on some jobs and roles that might be considered careers by today’s standards. They were not all stay-at-home wives, and even if they were, many were extremely industrious. I’m not sure why staying at home, making clothing, cooking, gardening, and raising children is any less empowering or worthwhile than male activities like digging ditches, welding, or sitting at an office desk on a computer all day.

Conversely, if a man chooses to stay home and raise children, many other men will think less of him. No amount of progressive propaganda and reeducation camps will change this, because it’s hard-coded into our brains through millions of years of evolution. Men respect other men who go out into the world and do masculine things. Similarly, the pressure to conform to gender norms is stronger in all-girl schools than in mixed schools, exploding the myth that it is men who instigate and police gender norms, to the detriment of women. People can and do create bizarro-world bubbles where these roles are turned upside-down, but they are not very stable.

In my mind, focus on gender roles is the link between the fairly classic conservative preference for monarchy and centralized power and the decentralized, anonymous nature of internet culture. We've seen over the years an almost rabid anti-feminist and anti-woman trend in various online forums. Recently, the online threats of rape and sexual violence have spilled over into the real world. Women are harassed at conventions and in the workplaces of large tech companies. Twitter meekly tries to cut down on threats with a report button. Police flat out decline to track down individuals behind posts which threaten rape and murder. Assessing these issues, Ross Douthat writes: 

Cases like Watson’s [the woman harassed at a Skeptic's conference]  suggest that there’s a chauvinist attitude in play here, a kind of crypto-ideology of sex and gender, that doesn’t map neatly onto what we usually think of as culture-war divides. This attitude is “liberal”  in that it regards sexual license as an unalloyed good, and treats any kind of social or religious conservatism as a dead letter. But at the same time it wants to rebel and lash out against the strictures it feels that feminism and political correctness have placed on male liberty, male rights. 

Now compare that with neo-reactionaries concept of The Cathedral (a term coined by Moldbug):

Neoreactionaries believe “The Cathedral,” is a meta-institution that consists largely of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times and various civil servants. Anissimov calls it a “self-organizing consensus.” Sometimes the term is used synonymously with political correctness. The fundamental idea is that the Cathedral regulates our discussions enforces a set of norms as to what sorts of ideas are acceptable and how we view history — it controls the Overton window, in other words.

That's practically the same persecution complex we see explained by those defending the online misogyny as free speech. Nobody wants to be told their views are wrong so they attack the whole system as political correctness and "thought police". Additionally, neo-reactionaries dismiss the traditional left-right divide and consider elites of both parties to be part of the problem.

Really though, just like rape, this argument is all about making an individual feel powerful. The people who harass and attack women online are attempting to exercise power over them. They want to make them uncomfortable or even fearful because it's an exercise of power. Just as the rapist seeks to overpower his victims, the neo-reactionary insistence on traditional gender roles is an exercise of power over all women. Rather than address counterarguments on their merit, neo-reactionaries attack their critics as part of The Cathedral.

Given the seemingly vast culture of misogyny on the internet, I wonder how widespread this ideology could become. We see criticism of the internet and the companies behind it as being excessively male. We see the tendency of those in these companies toward utopian thinking and toward various forms of "gong Galt". I don't think this strain of thought is going to live on the fringes much longer.

There are many issues relating to neo-reactionaries that I didn't cover here which I find interesting. For example, neo-reactionaries often justify the superiority of the monarch and aristocracy using poorly understood genetics - basically that the people who rise to power are genetically superior to everyone else. I encourage you to take a look at the various linked resources and see what comes up. Neo-reactionism is quite a rabbit hole but I think it sits at a unique moment in our culture and nation. It's rhetoric is attractive and it shares much with anti-Wall St. populism and anti-government libertarianism. This isn't the last we've heard from these guys.

Silicon Valley and political ideology: Part 1

Before I jump into the meat of my post, I'd like to share a few things I've read recently which sort of lead me to this point. I'll follow that by a tl;dr summary and then the content will be in Part 2.

Provoked thoughts:
1. Venture Capitalist Tom Perkins is in the news again this week. You may recall that he got a lot of flack for comparing Campus Censorship to Kristallnacht in a letter to the editor. Moreover, he chalked this censorship up to progressive attacks on the 1%. Two days ago he went on record in an interview with Fortune's Adam Lashinsky as being in favor of giving votes only to taxpayers and that more taxes paid = more votes to cast. Although this is obviously a tactic for getting the "right" kind of publicity, there are a number of people who probably do believe in this kind of governance.

2. I posted to Google+ a few weeks back about an article in Pando Daily. Basically, tech firms have a wonderful, decade long history of conspiring to artificially depress wages of software engineers and others. What also stood out to me was +Alex Sharenko's comment on my post:

it's much worse even than this really, Bill Gates or one of his buddies is in front of congress every 6 months dicsussing the doom the US economy will suffer if the number of H1B visas isn't expanded when really Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. just want to import more engineers that will work for less, further depressing wages.

He reminds me that tech companies like very much to pretend that they're different from the big evil banks and blue chip companies who've captured so much of the Washington regulatory and legislative apparatus. They make hay about net neutrality and governmental surveillance - they're totally on the side of the little guy! They support transparency and open societies and mildly populist ideas! While, in reality, they are playing the same games as every other company. Silicon Valley is the same as Wall St.

3. The Great Stagnation, as explained by the term's originator, Tyler Cowen, is the predicted future whereby technology makes some workers incredibly productive and most workers obsolete. He argues that the easy technological challenges, education innovations, and labor improvements have been figured out and only the difficult tasks remain. One characteristic of solving difficult problems is inequality. The conversation about inequality and technological change is certainly not new but has been getting some really strong coverage recently. I liked yesterday's OpEd by Joe Nocera if you're looking for more reading. A taste:

Is digital technology destroying middle-class jobs? Does it exacerbate income inequality? Does it boost economic growth and productivity — without creating the jobs that ought to come with economic growth?Last month I gave space to a book titled “Who Owns the Future?” by the computer scientist Jaron Lanier. His answer was an unequivocal yes. He tellingly compared the great photography company of the analog age, Kodak, with the hot photography company of the moment, Instagram. At its peak, Kodak employed 140,000 people; Instagram had only 13 employeeswhen it was bought by Facebook (for $1 billion!) in 2012.

4. The Economist ran a review of two books/studies about Social Mobility, a close corollary to inequality. Indeed, I'd argue that a society will tolerate a good amount of inequality if social mobility is sufficiently high. I found the reviewed book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility to be very interesting. Here's the gist of it:

Mr Clark draws upon research that uses surnames to track status over centuries. The academics he follows have mined sources as varied as the Domesday Book, the Royal Society’s records, even membership of the American Medical Association, in order to find surnames that are over-represented in elite positions. Researchers then track how long it takes those monied surnames to lose their wealth-predicting power.With surprising consistency across countries and eras, mobility is found to be painfully slow. Birth has predicted more than 50% of one’s income or education status, Mr Clark reckons. Erasing the legacy of past prosperity takes 10-15 generations rather than the three or four implied by sunnier estimates. So the shadow of 18th-century wealth still darkens income distributions today.That is the most unexpected finding. Efforts to democratise education and eliminate discrimination over the past century appear to have had no discernible effect on mobility, leading Mr Clark to conclude that mobility is strongly linked to underlying social competence—an “inescapable inherited” trait. Only the intermarriage of people who are more prosperous and educated with those less fortunate will dilute the genetic resources of well-off families, slowly pushing them back towards the average and preventing the rise of a permanent overclass.Oddly, Mr Clark judges the world to be “a much fairer place than we intuit.” He explains this by stating that the rich acquire their wealth because they are clever and work hard, and not because the system is rigged. The world is less corrupt and nepotistic than people might think.

While I don't know much about the credibility of his methods in social scientific circles, it's certainly an interesting point. I firmly believe that events far in the past have lasting effects. American slavery and the decimation of the South after the Civil War are two prime examples. I'm also of the opinion that an aristocracy still exists under the cover of a meritocratic myth. As I noted above, societies which are sufficient mobile will tolerate a good deal of inequality. The myth of meritocracy in America is that most, if not all, people have access to the same opportunities; therefore, those who succeed are those who made the most of their opportunities. Pay no mind to the fact that it's the same sorts of people succeeding generation after generation - at least it's not strictly hereditary! Anyone paying attention, of course, realizes that opportunities are not distributed equally and that a wide variety of factors influence success. The Son Also Rises indicated that the myth of meritocracy has roots hundreds of years in the past. It also provides the necessary transition to the next part of my thinking.

tl;dr summary of Part 2
Silicon Valley is essentially the second pole in American power right now. You have the "Acela Corridor" of Boston (Ivy League Schools, Academia), New York (Wall St., Media), and Washington (political power) and then you have Silicon Valley. It's progress-at-all-costs technological utopianism is the subject of frequent criticism but there is another undercurrent to the culture out there. We find it both at the top of the corporate and financial structures (see no. 1 and 2 above) but also permeating the internet and discourse which happen "organically" in the world most closely associated with technology. We find it in online sexual abuse culture, in libertarian leaning tech enthusiasts who police the chatrooms and social media universe, and weird places like the Seasteading movement or attempts to make the Bay Area it's own state. What I'm seeing is something which does clearly set Silicon Valley apart from everywhere else. It's a move toward what I can only describe as Oligarchical Fascism. They truly believe they are better and more capable than people everywhere else for a variety of reasons: meritocracy, genetics, work ethic are among the top. They consider their pursuits hampered by democracy and favor a political system where they are irrevocably in charge.

So yeah, that's what I'll be arguing in Part 2.

On Constructivism

This post is going to get a little bit wonky and will be very long. I want to organize my thoughts about the changing educational landscape in America and a good bit of it has to deal with and area of educational psychology/philosophy called Constructivism. I call it a philosophy because, although probably never intended this way, Constructivism has come to guide all of mainstream educational thinking. The Constructivist way of thinking sits beneath every major trend in education right now. Constructivism guides the push for widespread standardized testing and accountability. Constructivism girds the ubiquitous Common Core Standards. Most, if not all, degrees in education take Constructivism for granted as the one way students learn. The push for online courses assumes a Constructivist model of learning.

The Theory:

What is Constructivism? In it's simplest form, Constructivism is the belief that people, especially children, actively construct their learning from their environment. As a psychological theory of learning, Constructivism came as a mid-twentieth century response to behaviorism. Behaviorism held that people could essentially be trained based on positive and negative stimuli. Pavlov was a big behaviorist. 

I suppose it is important to mention at this point that there is now a rift within Constructivism. Early Constructivists who researched children, namely Piaget and Vygotsky, are the forerunners of most modern educational thinking. But, they are considered separate from the mainstream of cognitive psychology. Wikipedia has a great statement which adequately sums it up:

Many people confuse Constructivist (learning theory) with social constructivism. Constructivist learning theory is associated with high order learning of mature learners, androgogy or heutagogy, not early learning as discussed by the Cognitivist, Piaget^[39] or Vygotsky,^[40] whose research focused on children and sequential learning. Social constructivism is not congruent with the Constructivist learning theory. Dewey, Montessori, and Kolb represent the Constructivist learning theory where experiential learning occurs through real life experience to construct and conditionalize knowledge, and a mentor guides the mature learner. Piaget, Bruner, and Vygotsky are Cognitivist who work with young children and base their learning theories upon sequential development of mental processes scaffolded by an instructor.^[41]

In short, Piaget believed that all children go through the same developmental stages, though the pacing may vary. As they aged, their learning should be guided by those with an understanding of the stages so that children could learn optimally within their cognitive ability. Vygotsky, somewhat differently, believed that children needed to be within an environment with a variety of challenges. Some challenges should be easy and others should be beyond that individual's capabilities. He thought that only through being around and observing others who could function at a higher level would the weaker individuals learn how to overcome new challenges. Collectively, learners could overcome any challenge by leveraging the strengths of each individual for the betterment of the group. It should be obvious why Vygotsky was a popular Soviet psychologist but that is a topic for another post.

Their theories are not wholly without merit and I do not mean to suggest that I reject the entirety of their view of learning. I do reject what their theories have come to be in the modern day educational world. Three major concepts have filtered down into classroom instruction from Constructivism: scaffolding, zone of proximal development, and differentiated instruction.

Scaffolding comes directly form Piaget. He argued that a child's learning must be scaffolded - carefully planned so that one learning experience builds upon prior experience. Piaget meant for this to be a lifelong process but the modern classroom believes that every lesson can be scaffolded. Each lesson should begin with accessing prior knowledge, then transition to sequentially more difficult tasks which depend on the one just before it. Most importantly, the learning must be student centered. Each child must construct the learning for him or herself. The teacher is merely a facilitator: a person who creates the learning environment and steps aside to let the learners flourish.

The zone of proximal development comes directly from Vygotsky. He thought that placing children in groups and having them face a series of taks of varying difficulty will allow them all to learn from each other. The ones who do't know how to do something will learn from the successes of the other students. The modern classroom brings ZPD into the way teachers create groups. Creating groups of mixed level students is assumed to be the best way to foster learning. 

Differentiation is sort of a hybrid of the two approaches. It's been around in some form or another since the 1970's and a way to bring these two theories into the classroom without having them completely conflict with one another. Differentiation grew out of the completely false belief in learning styles. Each child learns in a way conducive to his or her learning style. If lessons are created to target a variety of learning styles each student will latch onto the style which is best for him or her. That way, a class of students can all be learning the same thing at roughly the same pace (Piaget) while the variety of learning tasks (differentiation) will allow the strengths of each student (learning styles, differentiation again) to be shared with the group (Vygotsky). It is under the label of differentiation that increasing class sizes are justified. What's the difference between teaching 20, 30, or 40 kids if you create lessons which appeal to each child's learning style?

In The Classroom:

If you think back to your own schooling, you probably remember many such experiences. You get to class. The teacher has you working in groups, usually with kids you hate because they're lazy and you'll end up doing all the work. All around the room are a variety of modules or stations or whatever and you go from task to task which are loosely related to what your'e learning. Then you go to your next class and end up with a group project. You're in another group, maybe more to your liking, maybe not. You have a variety of tasks, possibly you get to pick from a set of options, and at the end of it your group needs to have some kind of finished product. Maybe you present it to the class. Throughout these experiences, your teacher mostly steps aside. He or she probably explains all the components and is available to answer questions but the whole experience is largely up to the students to complete.

You probably also remember how confused you were. Maybe how some teachers didn't really explain what they were looking for or how you thought you did a great job only to have a bad grade because you didn't do it right. Or maybe you loved it because it was usually really easy so long as your group either pitched in or stayed out of your way.

Because the truth of it is, Constructivism in the modern classroom is bullshit. We're facing a generation of kids whose background knowledge is so weak, whose experiences are so different from each other, and whose will to succeed is nonexistent that the Constructivist model of teaching is failing. When you could depend on a group of children who were roughly similar in motivation, background, and experience, you could depend on most of them succeeding in the classroom. What I see are teachers utterly unprepared to handle a style of teaching which went out of style 40 years ago. Namely, teaching skills explicitly.

Instead, we have people trying to reform their school through gimmicks, through accountability, and through increasing standardization.

The Gimmicks:

I cannot think of a better example of the effects of Constructivist thinking than my team teacher. I'm not going to comment much on his approach in particular because I believe that he is trying his hardest to make a meaningful change. Having worked with him for a whole school year, he is a dedicated and reflective teacher and someone from whom I learned a lot. I do not mean to present his project for ridicule or with any malice. We merely disagree about what really makes a difference in students' learning.

If you want to learn more about Scott's project I recommend checking out his Indegogo page or this article from the Huffington Post.

Throughout our nation's schools teachers are trying their best to reach students through a focus on creativity and self expression. They're trying to build experiences where students will be comfortable taking risks and tackling challenges. And it's all straight out of Constructivism. What I see in the classroom, the average classroom, is a total lack of basic skills: kids who are in 9th and 10th grade and can barely write sentences and barely comprehend grade level text.

On our final exam, students had to read an article about the effects of isolation on the body. It was a great pick because we've been reading Macbeth and Of Mice and Men, both great studies of isolation. The first question we asked was for students to summarize the passage. On the half of the tests I graded, the majority of students could not summarize the article. Most wrote something along the lines of "about isolation" or "it's about being lonely". Those aren't summaries of the article anymore than a summary of Harry Potter would be "it's about magic".

The Alternative:

Knowledge of basic reading and writing skills is an essential prerequisite to any creative writing, literary analysis, or formal research. Hell, it's a prerequisite to the rest of these kids' lives. The Atlantic ran a special debate last fall about just this issue. It's titled Why American Students Can't Write. I highly recommend reading all of it but I want to highlight two big points.

The first is an article by a teacher who resigned from teaching elementary school because he was fed up with a system which didn't teach what his kids needed (see if this sounds like Vygotsky to you). Robert Pondiscio writes in How Self Expression Damaged My Students:

We have become accustomed to thinking of educational failure as a function of a teacher's lack of effort, talent, or training. But sometimes the problem lies specifically in what we train teachers to do. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we teach reading and writing to some of our most vulnerable students.

Every day, for two hours a day, I led my young students through Reader's and Writer's Workshop. I was trained not to address my kids as "students" or "class" but as "authors" and "readers." We gathered "seed ideas" in our Writer's Notebooks. We crafted "small moment" stories, personal narratives, and memoirs. We peer edited. We "shared out." Gathered with them on the rug, I explained to my 10-year-olds that "good writers find ideas from things that happened in their lives." That stories have "big ideas." That good writers "add detail," "stretch their words," and "spell the best they can."

Teach grammar, sentence structure, and mechanics? I barely even taught. I "modeled" the habits of good readers and "coached" my students. What I called "teaching," my staff developer from Teacher's College dismissed as merely "giving directions." My job was to demonstrate what good readers and writers do and encourage my students to imitate and adopt those behaviors.

The second is the debate headliner from Atlantic writer Peg Tyre, The Writing Revolution: 

During her freshman year at New Dorp, a ’70s-style brick behemoth near a grimy beach, her history teacher asked her to write an essay on Alexander the Great. At a loss, she jotted down her opinion of the Macedonian ruler: “I think Alexander the Great was one of the best military leaders.” An essay? “Basically, that wasn’t going to happen,” she says, sweeping her blunt-cut brown hair from her brown eyes. “It was like, well, I got a sentence down. What now?” Monica’s mother, Santa, looked over her daughter’s answer—six simple sentences, one of which didn’t make sense—with a mixture of fear and frustration. Even a coherent, well-turned paragraph seemed beyond her daughter’s ability. An essay? “It just didn’t seem like something Monica could ever do.”

For decades, no one at New Dorp seemed to know how to help low-performing students like Monica, and unfortunately, this troubled population made up most of the school, which caters primarily to students from poor and working-class families. In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level. Students routinely scored poorly on the English and history Regents exams, a New York State graduation requirement: the essay questions were just too difficult. Many would simply write a sentence or two and shut the test booklet. In the spring of 2007, when administrators calculated graduation rates, they found that four out of 10 students who had started New Dorp as freshmen had dropped out, making it one of the 2,000 or so lowest-performing high schools in the nation.

When I read this, I see cause and effect. There is a very clear connection between failure to prepare students for reading and writing in lower grades and high dropout rates in high school. When kids don't have the skills necessary to read and write, they fail. Once they enter high school, their failures become more consistent and more damaging. Kids find themselves having to take and retake standardized assessments as they fail one after another. Although these articles are both from New York, I have seen the same thing in two Georgia high schools. Ultimately, it's all a logical result of Constructivist approaches to education. Get the teacher out of the way and let the students express themselves. The result is confusion, discouragement, and failure.

What did New Dorp do about it?

And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects. Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page.

...

Pass rates for the English Regents, for example, bounced from 67 percent in June 2009 to 89 percent in 2011; for the global-­history exam, pass rates rose from 64 to 75 percent. The school reduced its Regents-repeater classes—cram courses designed to help struggling students collect a graduation requirement—from five classes of 35 students to two classes of 20 students.

The Standardization:

By now Common Core is the name of the game in 44 states and Washington DC. On the surface, it's nothing more than a new set of statements about what students should know by what grade levels (sounds an awful lot like Piaget). The focus is on putting most schools on the same page when it comes to learning. Ideally, kids should be receiving the same quality of education regardless of where they go to school and the standards are the next step in a long line of attempts to reach that goal. The big issue being hashed out in many states, especially in Georgia, is whether or not this amounts to a federal takeover of education. They're wrong on a few levels: first, Common Core is run by a consortium of states not the feds; second, the standards don't dictate curriculum or how a teacher can teach. What they really should have objected to was the federal funds from Race to the Top which contained huge stipulations to institute more standardized testing, overhaul teacher evaluations, and create a merit pay system. Again, though, that's a discussion for another time.

The real idea put forward by the standardization movement is that the teachers and students don't matter. It's odd, I know, because the whole point is to improve those students but it is just another extension of Constructivist educational philosophy. If all that is needed is a sufficient educational environment, then why not mandate that all education environments everywhere are the same? It's not about having a good teacher because teachers really don't have a role beyond curating this environment. It's not about the students (their income, academic preparation, or background) because they just need the right environment to aid in their construction of knowledge. Common Core and the reforms from Race to the Top are pushing for that standardization of environment.

Testing, too, is a product of Constructivism. When all students are assumed to have the same Constructivist cognitive processes, it is not unreasonable to expect them all to master the same skills and knowledge at the same rate. In the new RttT parlance, students must "show growth" on these tests year after year. Most teachers and parents understand how absurd this is. For example, how does one take World History in 10th grade, and then show growth in 11th grade when he takes US History? Although there are shared skills, the content junior year is not necessarily constructing n the foundations laid sophomore year. Or take the sciences for example. Students take biology freshmen year and physical science sophomore year. Again, related but not to the point where the testing is going to be meaningful.

We're at the point where the physical and curricular environment doesn't matter to the policy makers and agenda pushers. When they talk about the learning environment, they're really asking whether or not a teacher is getting to all the standards. Let me put that more simply: Standards = Learning Environment. If you put what the standards dictate in front of the students (and scaffold, and ZPD, and differentiate effectively) then the it is assumed that the students learned the standards. Again, the teacher and student don't matter in this Constructivist world, only the environment.

For Profit Education:

Furthermore, the growth of charter and for-profit public schools is heavily steeped the in the language of Constructivism. For example Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone charter network at the center of Waiting for Superman:

Called "one of the most ambitious social-service experiments of our time," by The New York Times, the Harlem Children's Zone Project is a unique, holistic approach to rebuilding a community so that its children can stay on track through college and go on to the job market.

The goal is to create a "tipping point" in the neighborhood so that children are surrounded by an enriching environment of college-oriented peers and supportive adults, a counterweight to "the street" and a toxic popular culture that glorifies misogyny and anti-social behavior. 

Again, environment is key. But unlike HCZ, many of the schools being launched nation wide are merely aping the language of Constructivism to gain access to state and federal education money. Often times they are no more effective than traditional schools yet they are just as expensive. Here's a great example from Students First, the "non-profit" company started by Michelle Rhee after she abandoned Washington DC schools:

Michelle summed it up this way: "We very, very strongly believe at StudentsFirst there is no shortage of great educators who are out there. We know that every kid can learn regardless of what obstacles they face, if they're in a good school environment. The bottom line is that they're forced to operate in this incredibly bureaucratic environment that is driven by antiquated laws and policies."

Which vision sounds more like an "incredibly bureaucratic environment that is driven by antiquated laws and policies?" One in which local schools and districts are able to make independent decisions about how to teach their students or Rhee's solution: more standardization, more centralization, and more accountability measures based on Constructivist ideas of learning, like Common Core:

Common Core makes it possible to measure the progress of students from state to state against the same metrics, enabling policymakers to make better decisions regarding everything from adoption of instructional methods to resource allocations to professional development.

My vote for bureaucracy goes with the system planning to "measure progress" and track "metrics" to guide "resource allocation". Under the guise of Constructivist educational language, big money is being made by test prep companies, charter school conglomerates, education management corporations, and consultancies like Rhee's. If only the environment was right, the kids would learn. If only these pesky teachers and bureaucrats were out of the way, the kids would learn. Nothing else matters beyond exposure to the right stuff.

The Mass Produced Learning Environment:

This has numerous implications. Districts nationwide are pursuing online options to reduce costs and increase course offerings. Some states have approved public high schools which are completely online. Although there's nothing inherently wrong with online education, the products being delivered to students' screens are, frankly, terrible. It's obvious there's not quality control and no accountability on the company manufacturing the software. All they have to prove is that they expose students to standards.

Over the last few years I've had the misfortune of working with various online platforms from my county. Some are designed to be test-prep software for the yearly standardized exams. Some are whole courses taught through the computer as remediation for students who failed a class. Overall, my impression is very, very negative. Not only is the content of the programs often confusingly presented or outright wrong, but no meaningful learning takes place.

This past week, a student of mine was trying to finish an online class so he could attend graduation. Due to final exams we had half days all week and he came to my room after his exam each day. Together we worked on finishing his online class to make up for second semester of 9th grade English. It was easily one of the most frustrating experiences of the year. Working on this program was right up there with visiting the DMV.

The semester was broken down into 5 units and a final exam. Each unit consisted of a variety of learning tasks and a quiz. Unit one would be about, say, pronouns. He would click the first link, watch a narrated slide show, and the get sent back to the start page. That opened the second link which were several practice questions. You could try as many times as you liked but the end of unit quiz would only open if you scored higher than 70%. There was no indication of which questions you answered correctly or why those answers were correct. The end of unit quiz was the exact same questions but you could not retake it. You could not skip questions or go back after you answered them. If you did not make a 70% or higher then you did not pass the unit. Moreover, if you did not pass the unit, you could not unlock the semester test and could not, therefore, complete the course.

The defacto result of this brilliant online learning environment was that failing a single quiz on a single unit results in failing the course. My student had completed and passed every unit but one and had been trying since February to pass the unit quiz so he could unlock the semester exam. Every time he took that unit quiz and failed it he had to go to the office and meet with our school's graduation coach and ask him to unlock the unit so he could try again.

This year, my district is running all of their summer school classes through the same online portal.

You may be asking what this has to do with Constructivism. Everything. Once we head down the Constructivist path, all of education collapses into exposure. "Are the kids exposed to the right learning environment?" becomes "Are the kids exposed to the standards?" If all that matters is that the kids are exposed to a skill or idea outlined by the standards, then the classroom ceases to matter. In the Constructivist world, where Learning Environment = Standards, it doesn't matter whether a student is exposed to the standards by a teacher or an online platform. In the Constructivist world, the result should be the same.

Summing it up:

This post is long winded and probably not a comprehensive as I want to be. I hope I've at least made my case: that Constructivism is the central, unifying philosophy which connects everything that's happening in education today. The bigger point, though, is that it doesn't have to be. As I'll begin presenting later, modern science is quickly discovering how our brains function and how learning really works. It's shining new light on old methods of teaching which probably seem ore familiar to the baby boomer generation than to ours. We're at the beginning of a new era of teaching which harkens back to the educations our grandparents received: an education rooted in skills taught by skilled people. An education grown out of the community students' lived in instead of a board room at a Wall St. hedge fund. We're at the start of the Neo-Classical period in education. 

A week for tears

Being a teacher puts you in weird situations pretty frequently. Just the other day I found myself having to explain why I was not going to explain what circumcision was. Then I had to explain why they weren't allowed to look it up over the school's WiFi without explaining what it was that they were going to find. At that point they realized it must be something bad which only increased their desire to know.

"Ok, it's when they cut skin off of your penis." Goddammit, I thought.

Blank stares were followed by shrieks and pandemonium as the kids conducted image searches for circumcised penises on their various devices. The situation was only exacerbated by little Jonathan announcing to the class that he was circumcised because he was Jewish. I'm still surprised by how much commotion seven kids can make.

Next year I will avoid teaching the root word circum regardless of it's cross-curricular relevance.

Nothing really prepares you for days like that but, over time, you get used to handling the daily insanity. Tears aren't quite as easy. I hate seeing people cry and it sticks with me for days. Thankfully, crying isn't that common among high school students. At least not publicly. There's too much at stake to be seen crying by classmates; they'll put that shit on Facebook and ruin your whole week That's why this past week stands out: I have observed crying on three separate occasions. A year's worth of tears in a single day.

It's a state exam week. Students are taking tests called End of Course Tests which account for 20% of their grade in my class. I don't write the test. I don't know what's going to be on the test. I've written about testing plenty of times so I won't go back into detail. It suffices to say only that students whose global language skills average out to be about the same as a 1st grader have no business taking a 9th grade language arts End of Course Test.

The exam week is traumatic for another reason too, the kids schedules are changed. Their classrooms are moved. They don't take tests with teachers familiar to them (because we'd cheat). It's a real bitch for Special Education students who thrive when they have routines in place.

The first tears belonged to Mandi, a recent transfer from out of state. Mandi has cerebral palsy, walks with a limp, and has huge memory issues. She was crying at my door because she'd been wandering around the school looking for her class for an hour. She was supposed to be testing but could not find the classroom where she had been assigned to test. Since she was an hour late, Mandi would have to make up the test at a later date or take a zero. Later that week, she suffered from a seizure in the middle of her math End of Course Test. I guess she'll have to make up that one too.

Two days later, the next set of tears belonged to Palma. It's been a rough year for Palma. She was the first student back in my classroom after finishing the End of Course Test for my class and she was sobbing.

"Are you alright? Did something happen?"

"I didn't know it," she heaved through her sobs, "I just clicked to the end."

Goddammit, I thought.

"You know, last year, I had a girl only get one question right on the whole test and she still got a 51%," I explained, trying to comfort her.

"I didn't answer any," and the tears came back full force.

The third set of tears belonged to a coworker. I definitely was not prepared for that. I was returning to the "Secure Testing Distribution/Collection Location" after finishing my shift as proctor to sign off chain of custody for the tests. When I opened the door, Dr. Melody, our volunteer testing coordinator, turned to look at me and tears were pouring down her face.

She whispered "sorry."

"No, don't be. What's up? Can I help?"

"No. I saw the tests. They're all going to fail it. I didn't teach anything on these."

Dr. Melody is a Special Education math teacher and is generally regarded as the best among us. Seeing her cry is something I don't think I'll ever forget. She wasn't crying for herself. How could she know which of the myriad principles, formulas, and skills the test takers would choose? Math, especially, has had a hard time in recent years because Georgia has had three different math curricula in six years. The kids, especially our kids, have huge gaps in their knowledge. Dr. Melody was crying for them. She understood, as I now do, that these kids are used to failure. Her sin was to have them expect success. The test crushed them and the thought of these kids looking at the test and not knowing how to do any of it was crushing her.

Next week is another testing week. Not content with one week completely wasted, End of Course Tests now occupy two whole weeks of instructional time.

Goddammit.

Margarita soda and candy-grams.

"Mister, can I go to the bathroom?"

"Yeah, did you finish your warmup though?"

"Please, I have to pee."

"Ok, go. Write a pass."

He didn't write a pass. He also didn't think I saw it but I did. As Christian turned to go out the door, he tried to shift the open Coke can from being hidden behind his body to being hidden in front of his body. Why would he need to take a Coke to the bathroom?

"God damnit," I thought.

Testing, accountability, and a libertarian calling for more state control.

Tyler Cowen (an amazing Econ. and general interest blogger at Marginal Revolution) wrote an op-ed for the New York Times yesterday which touched briefly on education. Here's the relevant excerpt:

Politics based on lobbying stacks the deck against lower-income groups, who are often outmaneuvered. For instance, one of the biggest problems faced by the poor today is inadequate K-12 education. They need improved public schools, more school choice, or some mix of both. Over time, such improvements would help deal with many other social and economic issues, including global competitiveness, domestic unemployment, public health and the budget deficit, because quality education has many beneficial effects.
Instead, the current system of transfers offers to the poor various sops in place of more effective reforms. Fundamental improvements to education would involve more challenging changes to residential zoning, teacher unions and certification systems, and might also take some educational finance and control out of the hands of local municipalities. It is no surprise that well-off families want to keep a system that has done very well by them, and that the poor often lose political battles over education.

The general point of the column is the growing power interest groups have over politics and how they use that power as "takers" rather than "makers". The end result of this lobbying is policies which hurt the poor. I think it's telling that Cowen leaves out some of the biggest interest groups - banks, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, defense contractors - and choses to harp on teachers, homeowners, and "government oriented professionals." What strikes me most, however, is his solution: more centralized control. Looking at the excerpt above, Cowen calls for "Fundamental improvements to education would involve more challenging changes to residential zoning, teachers unions and certification systems, and might also take some educational finance and control out of the hands of local municipalities."

Central control vs local control of school districts is a battle that's been raging for decades. What's unique about the modern incarnation of this fight is the bipartisan consensus about what makes good education policy. I've written about the accountability push before here and here. Libertarians like Cowen, republicans, democrats, and everyone in between (except pretty much all teachers) believe that standardized testing, teacher accountability, and increasing central control are the best way to fix schooling. Here in Georgia there's a big ballot measure in november about whether or not local school systems have the right to grant charter schools their charter. The state contends that it should have the authority to open charter school without going before a local board. The local boards want oversight because the local schools systems, not the state, have to pay for charter schools. It is, principally, a debate about centralizing control over school system budgets and school accountability.

Because of Race to the Top, Obama's big education push which granted money to states that implemented various reforms (merit pay, increased testing, reformed teacher evaluation), Georgia is rolling out new annual subject area tests in all the core content areas. These tests are designed to determine the value added by each teacher a student has over the course of her education. If Susie is learning comparably to her peers up until 5th grade and then she suddenly sees her math and science scores drop in 6th grade, these tests will show that her 6th grade math and science teachers aren't "adding value" to her education. If this trend continues across multiple students and through multiple years, that teacher will be removed.

Sounds good in principle but the real problem is in the testing. The most significant problem I find in our standardized testing regime is test validity. Validity is the measure of whether or not a test actually assesses the material it is intended to assess. Validity can be broken down into three types:

1. Construct Validity: Does the test produce a result in accord with an established theory? This type of validity is more important in scientific and psychological testing than education but basically it means that a test should be designed to tell if something is or is not true. In education, this would mean designing tests which assess learning rather than some other factor, like, athletic ability or something.
2. Content Validity: Does the content of the test measure what it is supposed to measure? I find this to be the weakest link because there are too many variables involved. Remember, standardized tests aren't being implemented to test students. They are being implemented to test teachers.
3. Criterion Validity: Does a test match up to other known measurements of the same characteristics?

Content validity is pretty weak right now because the content of the tests is based on the students' knowledge of a subject but the goal being measured is teacher effectiveness. That's why these tests are do disdained by teachers. We don't want to be held accountable for every kid's learning because we don't think we have enough of control over every kid's learning. I teach students with varying types of disabilities. Many of them can't read past a 3rd grade level. Why should I be accountable for their test scores on a 9th grade Literature (or Biology, which I also taught last year) exam? For whatever reason, every single kid in every school, with every educational background, and regardless of disability must take the same test. Does it matter if scary Tony is back in prison or that Jose only comes to school two days a week? Teachers think it should. Teacher accountability advocates think it should not.

I get very confused when I think about educational policy because of things like this. Why the ham-fisted approach to accountability? Why doesn't anyone consider obvious problems with pretending that every kid is identical? With constantly touting the need to refocus education on a career path but refusing to give school credit for kids who graduate with vocational training instead of college prep? With claiming that we need more school choice and curricular freedom while simultaneously calling for nationalizing school standards and centralizing control?

I guess I still don't know sh*t about education.