Super Vidoqo

Dead Horses

2012-02-08T20:44:00.000-08:00

Apple Pipe in the Boy's Room

I often wonder how much I sound like a dead horse on this blog. Err... you know what I mean.

But a Bloggingheads conversation between Harold Pollack and Glenn Loury spurred me to write. The discussion lingered over Newt Gingrich's dubious statements on poor students and their behavior, and the kind of world in which the students to which he refers come from.

These are the kids I work with everyday. For instance, I nearly had a student physically assault me last week when I wouldn’t return his ipod. Many of these kids have been through so much – and continue to live through so much – that they are on a hair trigger.

Here are just a few factors in the escalation and perpetuation of their poor behavior:

- cognitively and emotionally “poor” homes: lifetimes spent with little vocabulary, world knowledge, emotional regulation and positive reinforcement modeled at home

- absent role-models: incarcerated or absent fathers, parents on drugs, or otherwise neglectful; or parents simply struggling to pay the bills working multiple jobs with little time for parenting

- negative role-models: many people in their families or neighborhoods who actively model poor behavior, both adults and peers who they are often left to be essentially raised by

- daily stress: this is huge. It could be from poor behaviors around them, but also from the circumstance of poverty, such as demeaning, low-pay occupations, or lack of health care in a population often defined by the advent of major illness or life hardship. My students’ family members seem to frequently be suffering medical problems.

- mental illness: genetic mental illness often leads to generational poverty, especially when conditions aren’t diagnosed and treated properly – especially without health care.

- cognitive deficits: learning disabilities and the effects of environmental toxins, or parent substance abuse while in utero lead to cognitive and emotional deficits

- multiplier effect: ghettos are by proxy filled with a low human/social capital population, leading to a net deficiency in social capital; the group just isn’t heterogeneous and lacks the kids of resources that might have been available were more high human/social capital individuals around.

- violence: at home and among peers, threat of violence is real and constant. Kids come to accept it and prepare for it, coming from any adult or peer.

- cultural isolation: different behavioral/cultural norms come to exist that envelop a community that are far outside normative behavior of wealthier neighborhoods. My students routinely express little regard for the property of others outside their kin group, and view drug use – especially soft drugs like pot or alcohol as perfectly normal daily activities.

This list isn’t nearly exhaustive. What should follow is the net effect this has on their brain and conscious state. Higher-order thinking is often difficult to achieve because of so much negative stimulus that the body will always prioritize. Education is often impossible because the student’s cognitive capacity has essentially been shut off. As long as they are living in this environment, it is very difficult to dial back that stress in a timely manner, so as to facilitate the acquisition of new skills.

However, as Harold points out, simply helping them learning self-regulation is enormously important. Unfortunately, it’s kind of like treating PTSD while a soldier is still in a war zone. Further, because of years of academic failure, school has become a place not of love, understanding and support, but an institution that demands what is often an unrealistic normative environment, thus setting the students up to fail. Still further, the focus on standards and superficial achievement leaves little room for the kind of non-academic learning that help teach practical human-human interaction skills.

As a science teacher at a continuation school, my task is to try and funnel in as much science knowledge as I can, while at the same time recognizing the unique circumstances these students face. All are credit deficient, with some being merely a semester behind, and others 2-3 years behind. A huge number of them test at an upper elementary grade level in reading and writing. The average science textbook is written at a 10th grade level. The state test questions are largely college-level.

Truancy is enormously high, so some students only make an appearance once or twice a week. The overall graduation rate is probably 25% if we are lucky. These students take yearly state tests, which they routinely fill in half-heartedly - no doubt torn between the idea that their teachers all want them desperately to try their best, and the knowledge that the test has zero meaning or impact on their lives as they live them.

So I must decide, on what often seems like a second-to-second basis, between raising the bar so that they might one day graduate, and that their diploma will be meaningful. For instance, I know that many students aren't getting the best education. And I know that others are put off by the amount of work I require, and might leave and never return. Yet others are learning self-control, determination, and social skills, as well as whatever content they might remember. Divining this behavioral sweet spot is a form of educational wizardry even Newt Gingrich might struggle with.

So, between the principal breathing down my neck about portions of my students failing to take notes on the lesson during my evaluation, students recounting tales of rape and violence, others hiding meth pipes in their socks, personal confessions of illegal border crossings when they were barely out of diapers, drunken parents and fisticuffs in the lobby, after a night spent worrying what to do about this or that student, I'll try to keep my eye on what is best for my students. And one day, I may find out what that is.

Origins of Compassion

2012-02-04T20:29:00.000-08:00

A small child slips and falls down a well, breaking his arm. We feel a strong pang of compassion for the boy. A grown man, after a night of drinking, walks out onto the thin ice of a pond and falls when it breaks, nearly drowning before he is finally rescued. We feel very little sympathy for him. In both cases, someone has experienced great pain and anguish, yet our emotional response is different. Though they may seem to come to us almost instinctively, an expression of our purest selves, our emotions in fact precede from a framework of logic and reason, albeit one that is often hidden in our unconscious and only discoverable through careful analysis.

So why the different emotional responses to the circumstances of boy and the man? The question is one of agency. There is little a child can do to control his reality. Even if it was unwise for him to have been playing near the well, his actions can be viewed in terms of a clear lack of intellectual and behavioral development. Past a certain point, we cannot blame him for acting in the manner he did. We would be assuming in him too much agency.

Like wise, our lack of compassion for the adult stems directly from the sense in which we assume in him greater agency. He should have known better, i.e. because of his age, he should have been intellectually and behaviorally developed enough to have made different choices, and not gotten so drunk and taken a walk on think ice.

Interestingly, when human action is viewed in terms of agency, as a matter of intellectual and behavioral development, it becomes difficult not to have compassion for everyone; if there is a clear cause of their actions (their relative cognitive and behavioral agency), there is no reason not to mourn any suffering they cause, either to themselves or anyone else.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It is logical to feel less compassion for one who brings suffering on himself. Which brings us to Mitt Romney, whose most recent campaign gaffe was to appear to be saying that he did not care about the poor. It's debatable what he was actually saying, whether he was literally making that claim. I'm inclined to believe that he - a profoundly religious man running for president of the free world - did not intend, in public remarks, to say that he didn't care about the poor. We all know that sounds terrible. But here's the thing: it is true.

Well, in large part. It is an incontrovertible fact that Republicans embrace a view of human development and behavior that tends to view the poor as responsible for their own lack of success. They will be the first to point to all the opportunities for success out there, and how this or that individual overcame great personal difficulty to find it. The implication is that if you are poor, you are probably to blame for your own situation. It is entirely logical with someone who has such a view to have little sympathy for the poor, i.e. to "not care about them".

Thus, much like our drunken man who falls through the ice, and relinquishes a good deal of our compassion, Republicans feel the poor have given up much of their claim on our collective sympathy. In so much as this is true, there is no real moral weakness on display, just as there is no moral weakness on display when we feel more compassionate towards an innocent, suffering child than a stupid adult who "should have known better".

Now, we can argue against this naive view of human development by pointing to any number of empirical facts about how the brain develops, and how this process is determinative of individual human agency. But until we win that argument, Republicans will continue to be perfectly morally coherent in not feeling compassion for those who they genuinely feel have brought pain on themselves.

We can imagine a number of ugly reasons for why Republicans might stubbornly hew to this view. Many of those reasons no doubt reside in the unconscious as biases, and are self-reinforcing and appeal to the worst of human nature. But as with any unconscious process, because of its inaccessibility, it cannot be said to be a freely-chosen line of reasoning. It is greatly ironic that the same appeal to the unconscious nature of human development and thought that points to compassion for those who seemingly make bad choices, is no less forgiving to those who fail to find their own compassion, as they too are likely caught in a causal web of unconscious bias.

Return to Sender

2012-01-25T21:03:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, I spent a morning looking for articles on continuing education and teaching poor students. While promising at first, what I found eventually led me into the weird old world of the nineteen nineties ethnic studies and radical liberalism. I read works like Herbert Kohl's classic "I Won't Learn from You", about minority student defiance. I read a paper from a UCSC grad student recounting his experience studying goings on at a poor migrant continuation school in Northern California. On a whim, I ordered a copy of Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring, by Angela Valenzuela. But I started to have a problem with the direction these articles were taking. They seemed to be framing the struggle of poor students as if the real problem was not the student's behavior or cognitive/emotional development, but rather the teachers and the curriculum's biased or cultural chauvinism. When the Valenzuela book arrived at my doorstep today, and I quickly glanced through it, the narrative was essentially the same: misunderstood kids being oppressed by "uncaring" teachers. Oh, brother. After slaving away trying to reach the most brutally screwed up kids you'll ever meet, I'm going to read this for insight into trying to help them?

The following is my Amazon review:

Depressingly Dated

OK, I have to start out by saying that I get the whole ethnic studies thing. I majored in liberal studies and am actually pretty sympathetic to the dialogue on class/race/gender/culture politics dynamics. It's much of why I got into teaching. There is a lot of inequality and oppression in society, with poor schools as the front lines. I blog about it frequently, and live it daily in my science class at an alternative education school, where most students are poor, minority and otherwise disadvantaged.

But the problem with this book, and the mentality behind it that was so in vogue 20 years ago, is that it misses larger issues in society, and ironically contributes to those problems not getting addressed. This school of thought basically believes that racism and cultural imperialism are what are keeping minority students down. Now, if you take a hugely macro view, and look at history going back centuries, yes, it does originate in active racism. But the problem today is not racism, or biased teachers, or biased curriculum. It is a lack of human and social capital development. Minorities are not disproportionately failing in school, in prisons, or stuck low paying jobs because of discrimination. They are there because of a structural inertia that has sapped their communities of social resources for so long that children are growing up without the kind of cognitively rich and stimulating, loving environments that create successful adults.

This isn't about their culture (well, mostly - there is an issue of identity and defiance there, but it is rooted in larger structural impediments). Black or Hispanic culture is perfectly suited for academic, middle class success. The ethnic studies school from which Valenzuela hails actually has more in common than it realizes in the actual white cultural conservative nationalists who would denigrate minority ethnicities by blaming their lack of success on an intrinsic incompatibility with middle-class, "Western" values. This is poppycock. The lack of success isn't to do with ethnicity, but lack of knowledge and social capital with which to leverage their families out of the ghetto. When 16 year old girls get pregnant and the dads run away, and the grandmother can't offer much support, the child gets raised in a woefully inadequate household. I see this daily in my classroom.

So, is it their fault? Hell no! They are completely disadvantaged and caught up in a system which is a direct descendant of racism. But it is also a natural byproduct of capitalism and the tendency for property values to create geographic ghettos, with correlative low levels of human and social capital. All the poor kids get shunted into the same schools. Their parents are struggling. They are struggling. There is stress. There is tension. Parents work crappy jobs. Kids resent society and feels like outsiders. They rebel in any way they can - which for boys often means fighting and gangs, and for girls it means having babies. For everyone it means getting high and not doing their work.

But this is an old story. It is the story of the underclass. Poor minorities are no different from poor whites. Poor whites have it easier in many ways, but many of the exact same disadvantages in human and social capital play out the same way. The old ethnic school doesn't realize it undercuts this larger issue by narrowing its gaze and playing guilt politics.

Look at what is happening to teachers in America today. Conservatives love to blame the government and unions, not to mention poor people themselves, instead of larger structural problems that trap the poor and hold them down. Liberals, having bought into much of the ethnic studies framing, wish to take a sort of noble savage view of minorities, and pretend that if only teachers would "care more", as Valenzuela might have put it, the achievement gap between whites and minorities in education would close. But by far most teachers do care. You wouldn't last more than a year or two in a poor school, dealing with that population of students if you didn't care. Sure, most teachers are still white. But the vast majority of us care deeply for and empathize deeply with our students.

But we can't do it on our own, with budgets slashed, and class sizes ballooning. There needs to be a larger national dialogue. Not on race, or ethnicity. I think we're actually doing OK there. But we still won't talk about class, and how it sets up generation after generation of kids to fail, especially those historically discriminated against and disenfranchised. Poor schools need massive investments that will dramatically reduce class sizes and pay for enrichment activities that their community just can't afford. Poor mothers need home visits from nurses and social workers who will help guide them toward better education and parenting practices. More than anything, poor kids feel like no one outside their community cares about them, and that the world is against them. They take their frustration out on individuals, not understanding the bigger picture of what is really conspiring to force them down. But individuals are actually pretty OK. It is the system we much change, and demand that real policies be put in place that guarantee more help for struggling communities.

Behavioral Politics

2012-01-22T20:47:00.000-08:00

A family is struggling to pay rent. The father has a drinking problem and is abusive to his wife. His hours have been cut back at work, and she makes minimum wage working as a cashier at a convenience store.The two teenage children are having difficulties in school, and acting out. The son has been hanging around with a crowd of thugs, and has been arrested for vandalism. The daughter is pregnant and planning to drop out of school to care for her baby, whose father denies responsibility. The family lacks health insurance, and relies on food stamps to afford groceries.

Unfortunately, stories like this are not uncommon in America. There are however, two very different responses from liberalism and conservatism, our prevailing political party ideologies. These responses can be broken into two elements: the behavioral narrative, and social action.

In the liberal response, the behavioral narrative is that the family is victim of social dysfunction that has limited their capacity to turn their lives around. Without outside help, their dysfunction will only be compounded, their problems leading to even greater net harm to themselves and society. Though opportunity may exist, the family is so behaviorally challenged that it is almost impossible for them to avail themselves of it. They literally cannot see the correct normative path that would lead to success, mired as they are in a variety of cognitive challenges.

In the conservative behavioral narrative, the family has indeed lost its way, but is responsible for its own recovery. It assumes that it is within the family's power to reverse its course without outside help, and that any ongoing failure to do so is a choice that the family has consciously made. Many opportunities that exist in society and culture, and all that is necessary is for the family to embrace that opportunity and follow existing social norms that lead to success. They do in fact possess the adequate cognition to make the correct choices, and thus their failure to do so represents a lack of personal responsibility.

Both liberals and conservatives take a position on social action that follows directly from their behavioral narrative.

The liberal social action response is predicated on a sense of inclusive social culpability for the plight of the family: by its structure, society has participated in the systematic creation of the family's problems. Implicit is a larger assumption that current social and economic norms are unjust, and inevitably lead to such "underclass" families. Because of the behavioral narrative of limited cognition, liberals see government intervention as
the only way to guarantee equal opportunity.

The conservative social action response is predicated on an exclusive culpability for the plight of the family: the family is solely responsible for their own plight, except for the extent to which it has been lead astray from a particular set of right-minded norms and values exclusively by a liberal culture which promotes values counter to traditions such as church, patriarchy, and obedience to time-honored norms. Conservatives tend to be quite charitable towards the down-trodden, but only if they can be sure that certain cultural and religious tests have been met by the recipients of their largess. They are highly skeptical and resentful of broad governmental programs which they cannot be confident are not administering aid to those not worthy of it, or in other words have not made the requisite religious transformation. By approving only of private (religious) charity, they can be sure their donations are spent with exclusivity. Furthermore, the claim is often made that government aid is not only wasted on the unworthy, but actively promotes a culture of dependency and irresponsibility.

If you'll notice, there seems to be some odd incoherence between the conservative behavioral narrative, which eschews gracious social determinism in favor of get-tough contra-causal free will, and their social action response, which mixes tough-love with protestations against just the sort of social determinism it denies exists. My guess is that this paradox is rooted in a deep schism between the biblical commandment to be humble, charitable, compassionate and giving, and the desire to see behavior as black and white, where cognition is freely available to all, especially in the sort of free-market utopia they like to envision America as, where meritocracy really does reign, and people's value is truly self-determined. How can it be, one might ask, that this struggling family can be both personally responsible - personally accountable - for their own situation, yet be simultaneously at the mercy of an unrighteous path, their existence bent not only by the evils of secular liberalism, but then caught in a web of nanny-state learned dependency.

The science of behavior has existed for well over a century now, and social learning theory is a simple fact. While the debate over free will still burns, with most scientists and philosophers who study it finding it ultimately rather nonsensical, the idea that a poor, dysfunctional family can be examined outside the context of social learning, with a cognition capable of understanding and dealing objectively with its circumstance, is nothing if not preposterous. Yet such is the state of discourse and political ideology in contemporary America.

In many ways, with respect to human development and behavior, certainly with respect to our scientific understanding of why people do the things they do, and why society continues to struggle with problems such as poverty and dysfunction, conservatism is in a state of deep denial. As with most forms of denial, taking it head on is often not the most effective tactic. More knowledge can actually often only entrench it further. Yet it is my belief that denial of behavioral and social determinism is at the root of our contemporary political drama.

The Modern Abbey

2012-01-15T09:52:00.000-08:00

I’ve been watching Downton Abbey, and it seems to give key insight into how Americans are able to buy into the fantasy that we live in a classless society. For, as it is said, individuals can succeed by merit, as opposed to inherited wealth and social status, and no one begrudges them for it. Yet while there may no longer be social stigma to upward class mobility, it is largely as determined as it has always been, even if there now exist many facilitating institutions and structures in society that encourage the leveraging of oneself upwards.

Let me give an example. My daughter’s public (charter!) school, in a relatively posh neighborhood, your average parent is highly educated, well to do or both. At a recent gathering, I learned that one of my daughter’s playmates parents were both ophthalmologists. There are college professors, business owners, lawyers, etc. At a poor school down the street, the average parent might be a gardener, housecleaner, or cashier. The two worlds rarely meet. And why would they? Culturally, they have little in common. Their life experiences, interests, activities, etc. are likely very different. While it is in theory possible for one to rise or fall out of these class-oriented circles, it is the exception, often owing more to chance than anything else. Because these orientations are not static, but highly self-reinforcing.

Starting at the earliest age (in utero, really, studies have shown), the children of these groups are groomed by their environment, through exposure to different varieties of parenting, cognitive activities, language skills, environmental stressors, expectations, norms, etc. My 4 year old daughter is just now really beginning to read, about nine months before her first day of kindergarten. She’s at about a first grade reading level. Her parents are not well-to do (one teacher’s salary!), but we both have graduate degrees, have traveled the world, are interested in world culture, philosophy, the arts, and generally things that will translate directly into highly leveragable human capital for our children. Furthermore, they are now being introduced into a peer community that has similar levels of capital.

Our children have not inherited noble blood, nor vast land claims, nor social honoraries that entitle them to understood social privilege. Not literally. But if your look at the way reality actually plays out, if you draw the causal lines between what environmental grooming delivers to human development, there might as well be little difference.
Children play a game called King of the Hill, in which those at the top fight to keep others down, while staying there themselves. In the rigid class systems of Downton Abbey, the business of actually fighting for one’s place was unnecessary: place was assumed. Yet while today place is not necessarily assumed, the systems of leverage upon which one reaches and stays on top are still almost as effective. Humans vary widely in their innate cognitive capacity. The lazy, the striving, the introverted, the sociable are born to rich and poor alike.

Yet even if we were to assume that fairness might lie in some innate meritocratic value – “each according to his ability” – even if we were to admire such a system, it would bear little resemblance to that which we enjoy today. The well-born lazy tend to land on their feet, cushioned in their deficit to the degree that their inherited social and financial capital has been able to provide its own kind inertia. Likewise, the poor-born striver faces a million slings and arrows all conspiring to direct his inclinations toward more dubious opportunity. In my work with poor teens, I’ve come across more than a few young minds no doubt possessing some special spark, yet which rather than alighting a road to success, has instead lit a fuse of personal tragedy or ruinous disarray. (Of course, teasing out the origins of this mystical “spark” more often than not leads not to any special innate talent, but rather to some other secret cache of social capital, in the form of a supportive parent, a family tradition of determination, or good old fashion fortuitous circumstance that resulted in the child being able to grow that particularly fruitful set of neural connections.)

“Capitalism: better than the rest”, may provide sufficient comfort to the more credulous and self-deceiving. Yet despite the objective truth of the phrase, capitalism remains an ugly facilitator of class entrenchment. We do our best to take off the rough edges (at least those of us with enough with enough skeptical inquiry and critical faculty to empathize with the plight of those pressed by position to the grinding wheel). And hindered as we are by those who would pretend the ugliness away, the problem seems to have no easy solution. At the end of the day the hill still exists, and it will always be in the interest of those of us who have been either born to scale it, or who have been born at its peak, to do whatever we can to say at the top. Be that as it may, we possess faculties sufficient to recognize our hypocrisy (oh, what good little boys and girls we have been, such hard workers we!), and at least attempt to not only attempt to smash down any extant barriers to class transcendence, but – and this now seems our most difficult challenge – to erect systems that empower those born into circumstances devoid of the requisite social capital to nourish their development.

Social Aristocracy

2012-01-13T11:05:00.000-08:00

David Bornstein has a nice piece in the NYTimes on poverty and human development. Poverty is more than simply a lack of income, or access to opportunity, but a complicated blend of social disadvantages.

Thinking about poverty in terms of human development is an essential shift. Ghettoization happens not only by income, but by social and human capital. This human tendency - our natural association with like-minded peers - reinforces a de facto class hierarchy, in which human development is imposed on individuals from socio-economic circumstance. Social immobility is thus limited not by opportunity so much as by consciousness and familiarity.

At my daughter's public school, in a relatively posh neighborhood, It isn't uncommon to find at a gathering of parents multiple doctors, lawyers, business owners, and other professionals. In a poor neighborhood, you would likely find multiple service industry workers, such as janitors, house cleaners, cashiers, etc. Within this dynamic you find a disparity in human development and skill. Compounded by the practical effects of income on the facilitation of daily life, there is the effect that forms of human capital such as vocabulary, cognition and social knowledge have had on an individual's ability to build self-efficacy and leverage ambition. In aggregate, as groups of individuals with similar levels of capital come together, the network effect is powerfully determinative of a family's ability to achieve and maintain higher levels of social status. Children of these families develop skill-sets largely in accordance with their parents' levels of capital.

Looking back over generations, what you see is a sort of social aristocracy, in which not only income, but human and cultural capital, as well as social capital, is the determinative dynamic in social mobility, or the lack thereof. Society is coming to terms with this, and naturally looking at schools as the most obvious solution. But the problem is much deeper and more complex, and real solutions will require much more than finding so-called "superteachers", able to leap tall fences of human and social capital development in a single bound. What we need are programs like those mentioned in this article, as well as a relentless effort to find innovative ways of building human capital for all. Relying on social aristocracy for human development is the antithesis of freedom.

Thinking About Parties

2011-12-27T08:24:00.000-08:00

I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I was sick of the moderation of the Clinton administration, and wanted to send my message to the Democratic party. Part of my decision rested in knowing that as a resident of Portland, OR, my protest vote wouldn't really impact what was going to be a largely progressive local electorate; Gore took Oregon. However, since then, my thinking has changed. I'm not sure my views have become any more moderate. But I think they have become more expansive, in that they are more considerate of political - as well as social - realities.

I understand the aggravation with the two parties. Yet the reality is that they each represent very different ideologies, representative of huge portions of the American electorate. I don't see how third parties change this. A parliamentary system might get more representation, but ultimately, to get anything done there will still have to be compromise, and coalitions will have to be whipped. Each of the two parties could be broken into more ideologically specific groups, but in the end they'd no doubt come together much as individual state senators and congresspersons do.

This raises a larger question though, about compromise and working across party lines. Having two parties might enforce ideological rigidity. But I'm not sure. Contemporary polarization seems as much a function of our cultural and media landscape as anything else. The less we ourselves become polarized, the less we will elect those who are. The question then, is how this happens.

Art and Suffering

2011-12-21T08:51:00.000-08:00

Van Gogh -the quintessential tortured artist

Keith Humphreys feels that only an honest reckoning of Christopher Hitchens' alcoholism would truly honor his legacy.

Hitchens’ prided himself on his honesty and his courage, so let’s honor his memory by facing up to the fact that his addictions to alcohol and tobacco are almost certainly why his life ended well before his time. The National Institutes of Health estimates that about 75% of esophageal cancers are caused by chronic heavy drinking. For people who are also addicted to tobacco (as Hitchens was) risk of this form of cancer is even higher than that grim statistic suggests.

Many alcoholics would like to believe that their problem in life is something — anything — other than alcohol. To wit, there is a joke among Alcoholics Anonymous members about the guy who gets drunk for the thousandth time and wrecks his car, leading him to solemnly swear off driving. When we put into cultural discourse the myth that an alcoholic’s problem really isn’t alcohol, whether we want to or not we are feeding the denial of people who need to face some unpleasant facts, including that among a thousand other risks they are greatly increasing their risk of dying from cancer.

He then makes the fair point that art can be a crutch for addiction:

People in the arts and culture line often buy into the idea that active addictions fuel creativity, and it keeps many of them from trying to change. But there is no evidence that this fear has a rational basis; indeed just the opposite may be true. Bonnie Raitt said that what gave her the courage to admit her alcohol problem and put the plug in the jug was seeing that Stevie Ray Vaughn was an even more soulful and dazzling musician in his recovery than he was when he was loaded. And for what it’s worth, all the people I alluded to above were more successful (in some cases, to their own surprise) after they stopped drinking. Of course whether Hitchens would have been more or less successful as a writer and social critic if he had sobered up is (tragically) not something any of us can know, but that uncertainty is all the more reason to stop spreading that myth that recovery from addiction will invariably sap a creative alcoholic’s mojo.

Society has always had a troubled relationship with artists. One the one hand, we are inspired by their often unconventional and vivacious ways. On the other, we turn our noses up at what often feels like their indulgent and juvenile behavior. The idea of the "tortured artist" is a trope that gives expression to both impulses. We want artists to bare their souls to us, but not as narcissists. That can be a hard distinction to make. Sometimes the former can only happen through the latter.

For what it is worth, the artists I’ve known have had to be quite brave in sacrificing much for their art. Most have given up on careers or stability in the hope that what they must believe is a talent will turn into something beautiful and successful. As more of an art-hobbyist myself, I feel like I truly appreciate the courage it must take to roll the dice like that. I was much too afraid of failure to make more of myself through my art. After all, you could spend decades working minimum wage jobs, scrimping and saving, just to support an art that most artists can only doubt is something great.

And what then, if you fail? You’re nearly forty years old and have little to show for your life but a handful of poorly received gallery shows, one or two quietly successful record albums known only to a handful of faithful fans, a publishing deal that you felt never got the media attention it deserved, etc. Many artists are indeed “tortured”, but sacrificing so much for your art can also be torturous. It shouldn’t be seen as indulgent, but rather a noble endeavor.

Hitchens appears to have indeed been an alcoholic, as well as a nicotine addict. But whether or not those vices were critical to his success is a counterfactual difficult to imagine. But what can be appreciated in him was not his success or specific achievements as a writer, but for his tenacity to do what he loved, to follow his dreams. Not all of us can say we've done as much.

Conservatism's Secret Logic

2011-12-21T08:29:00.000-08:00

As Ron Paul surges in the polls, old questions arise about his involvement with racist publishing. A particularly ugly quote from one of the articles published in his newsletter:

Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

Paul denies culpability, but Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn't buy it.

Had I spent a decade stewarding an eponymous publication steeped in homophobia and anti-Semitism, I would not expect my friends and colleagues to accept an "I didn't write it"excuse.

I really can't say I'm surprised by any of it. Much of conservatism is predicated on the same assumptions that would predicate racism. This is why it has always made perfect sense for there to be considerable overlap between racists and conservatives. I think the vast majority of conservatives despise the idea, yet privately rue the dogged logic that much of what they believe is entirely consistent with the racist cognitive framework. It’s a dirty truth, and the conservatives have two options: live in denial, or live dirty. The Ron Pauls, Pat Buchanans, Rush Limbaughs, Charles Murrays, etc. of the world have merely found themselves on the dirty end.

Broken Windows and Diamond Rings

2011-12-19T09:05:00.000-08:00

An uncomfortable reality of political ideology is the degree to which any given stance is predicated at least in part on economic assumptions. Try as we might to corral a sense of objectivity and rationality into our views, at some point we must admit that there is just so much we do not know about the ways in which economies work. This, even as stark and fundamental disagreement can be found among leading economists.

So take, for instance, the controversial concept of government stimulus, which in our recent case represented close to a trillion dollars of federal spending. Projections have varied widely as to how stimulative it truly was, or could have been. As soon as you begin to look closely at the underlying arguments, it becomes clear that any lay understanding is woefully inaccurate in forming anything but a shallow and fragile understanding.

And so, it is with this admittedly devastating caveat, that I, intrepid blogger, attempt to carve into the following subject.

I've long wondered about the relative merit of various forms of economic activity, in terms of their effect on overall productivity. For instance, is a dollar spent on busfare to one's employer of more value than a dollar spent on a chocolate candy? My question follows largely from the fact that as wealth has become increasingly concentrated into the hands of the rich, there has no doubt been a subsequent shift in the types of economic activity, from utilitarian spending to luxury spending. Is the former type of spending better for overall growth? It would seem that to the degree that spending is non-utilitarian, it is wasteful, and thus not only distasteful in terms of a moral reckoning in what ought to be a more fair and equitable society - as a sort of ill-gotten decadence, but distasteful in purely economic terms, as a net drag on the economy.

On first glance, one might say that there should be no real difference. In each case, the dollar spent moves into the hands of another worker, who then uses it to purchase more goods and labor, and the production continues to be spread throughout the economy. Monies spent on chocolate will fill the pockets of the chocolatier, who in turn pays his workers, buys his cocoa, etc.

Yet what about this feeling that paying for chocolate is somehow decadent? It is certainly a luxury expense. But what does that really mean? No one will live or die because of it, unlike say basic food stuffs. But no will will live or die, either, because of money spent on busfare. Yet without it, considerable hardship might befall the rider; he may lose his job; he may have to purchase a car, leading to desperate sacrifices in other areas of his life. Maybe the best way to think about the issue is in terms of the productive possibilities of each form of spending. What are all the ways in which a bite of chocolate, by itself, contributes to productivity. It surely has some merit, in that it represents a reward, something to strive for that encourages hard work elsewhere. However this is a limited effect, and in many cases, certainly to the degree that its purchase has indeed been out of decadence, having long ago lost any meaningful pull on behavior, it could have as easily been done without. Again, this is luxury spending, by definition. Busfare cannot be done with in the same way. When we look at long-term drivers of productivity, we see things like the invention of the steam engine,the automobile, the internet. Chocolate, not so much. While there have no doubt been great innovations in luxury, their utility in encouraging productivity is conspicuously unaccounted for.

In 1850, French political economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote the following parable about economic activity and productivity. To economic theorists, it is known as The Broken Windows Fallacy.

     Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation—"It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?"
     Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.
Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade—that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs—I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.
     But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."
     It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

Bastiat's Fallacy is popular among Austrian economists, and those who favor small government. Their attraction is based on the parable's illustration of hidden costs; they believe that government spending is not zero sum and represents money that could not have been spent elsewhere. While this is true enough, what ultimately matters is the projected utility of the spending. Of course wasteful government spending is a net loss in productivity. Yet government spending that directs investment in a worthwhile investment that increases productivity, such as a bridge, or public school, is a net benefit.

My interest in the parable is also its illustration of hidden costs, although I'm more concerned with the effects of concentrated wealth and the hidden costs of luxury spending. To the extent that luxury spending is by itself almost entirely unproductive, and that concentrated wealth encourages it, one can argue that the concentration of wealth leads to, as Bastiat's parable might frame it, much broken glass. Better this wealth be put to productive use. Lord knows there is no lack of need for it in today's society.

Not only are there hidden costs to pointless consumer spending, or that which has little inherent value, but so too are there hidden costs in frivolous investment. I think it fair to claim that much of what caused the 2008 financial crisis was a direct outgrowth of sloppy investment: concentrated wealth led to overflowing pools of money, the manipulation of which was coordinated by greedy investment bankers who saw an opportunity to make enormous profits from money that was primed for recklessness by its decadent acquisition.

I recognize that I'm now far out of my comfort zone in understanding the Great Recession. But one can confidently make a couple of claims. Luxury spending and sloppy banking represent poor investments, and as such are defined by their hidden costs - their monies could have been put to more productive use. There will be many who point to the many government boondoggles as evidence of waste. The response to this is that there is plenty of good that government does (and often that which only government can do), and the larger controversy has likely much more to do with ideology and one's political and social preferences. But the Broken Windows Fallacy simply reminds us that there are always hidden costs to spending. These costs place spending in moral terms, that spending represents a choice between different net social outcomes. This is a choice we make both as individuals and as citizens of a democratic government.

A Radical Reformation

2011-12-17T09:18:00.000-08:00

Diane Ravitch evokes the grinchitude of Ebeneezer Scrooge as she compares the current ed reform movement to Dickens' callous crank. Reminding us that poverty is the real issue, she points to a new paper by Helen Ladd, professor of economics at Duke, "one of the nation's leading experts on issues of accountability". Mentioning that Ladd also co-authored an excellent opinion piece summarizing the paper in the NY Times, she quotes the abstract:

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers and the promotion of competition, are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school than those from more advantaged families. Because these policy initiatives do not directly address the educational challenges experienced by disadvantaged students, they have contributed little—and are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Moreover, such policies have the potential to do serious harm. Addressing the educational challenges faced by children from disadvantaged families will require a broader and bolder approach to education policy than the recent efforts to reform schools.

While this is an excellent argument for why reform efforts are misguided and naive, it fails to offer a compelling alternative. I applaud the critique of current ed reform, but I would like to see more proposals for how this translates into policies that truly transform our broken system and address the many issues that ed reform does not.
In the paper, Ladd proposes nothing new: "early-childhood and preschool programs; school-based health clinics and social services; after-school programs and summer programs". I have no problem with any of these ideas - all are sorely needed and crucial. But I don't see any of them, even taken as a whole, as being game changing.

The problem may be primarily in the way these programs get rolled out; each is mostly isolated from the rest, with no cohesive, comprehensive intervention in the specific family. This leads to a lot of families falling through the cracks, issues not being followed up on, and chronic problems not being treated. Providing targeted interventions in a family isn't easy, but it only becomes harder the more services stay segregated and don't coordinate.

An idea I've been kicking around for a few years is a sort of radical restructuring of public schools that organizes them less by geography (which is largely a proxy for income), than by rigorous human and social capital assessment.

Beginning at birth, parents would be required to take generalized assessments - residence, income, education, substance abuse history, mental illness, health, etc. These would trigger deeper assessments as needed. From this data, we begin to identify and target areas in which family interventions are required. This could begin with environmental interventions (paint, carpet, pollution, etc.) that seek to remove and reduce contaminants. There would also be home nurse visits, and targeted parenting classes, incentivized by special coupons either for extra services or rewards - maybe sponsored by community business groups.

Yet all of this would be highly centralized and continually monitored and assessed, triggering completion or addition of new services and classes. As the child develops, he would also be monitored for developmental progress and assigned requisite services. A central database would track the family in realtime, updating things like job status of immediate family and relatives, criminal offenses, enrollment in substance abuse programs, etc.

While all of this may seem like a sort of terribly invasive totalitarianism, its goal would always be to offer scaffolding for human and social capital development. Assessments would trigger gradual disengagement by the state as needed. Currently, the "nanny" state isn't doing a very good job meeting these families' needs. Yet social expenditures on education, interventions, policing and incarceration, are still necessary - yet not organized in a way that is ultimately very productive and transformational.

As the child develops and approaches the traditional age of Kindergarten enrollment, there would be a seamless integration between the K-12 system and pre-K. Based on continued family evaluation, the child would be placed in an elementary school not by location, but by need. As it stands, geography is already a pretty good proxy for human and social capital. But there would be more differentiation between schools, and yet not based arbitrarily on income/geography, but on real family evaluation data and criteria. What this would allow for is flexibility and much more highly focused intervention delivery. As such, depending on the level of interventions offered, these "schools" would function almost as family treatment centers, where a type of human and social capital triage would take place. Psychological services would be available 24 hours a day, parenting classes, daycare, fitness and enrichment, drug treatment, etc. would all be offered along-side traditional academic elementary classes.

Yet these classes wouldn't be exactly traditional. They would be staffed by experienced, highly paid, credentialed teachers trained in poverty intervention. Curriculum would be designed accordingly, accounting for cognitive and language deficits previously assessed for in the family database. Class sizes would be dramatically reduced, again according to needs assessment, to 10-15 students. Multiple aids would be available, each trained in various special needs of students.

A major benefit of such centralized "schools" (social service centers, really), would be the availability of community resources. I could think of fewer better interventions in a struggling community than for adults in rehab or probation to come and participate in reading groups with elementary or middle school children. So much of the dysfunction and nihilism we see in these communities is a direct result of the breakdown in community bonds and cross-generational engagement. Apart from reading groups, these mentors could function as volunteers in many areas of academic enrichment - PE, field trips, art, etc.

I anticipate the following objections to this radical conception of the merging of social services and education: cost, logistics, and intrusiveness. I'd like to see a projection of what such a system would cost. My guess is what it saves in consolidation of resources and increased productivity would alone pay for the added services. But long-term, the savings that would result from a dramatic targeting and investment in human and social capital would not only generate financial capital through a more effective and educated workforce, but it would also enormously reduce the expense of rehabilitation and incarceration.

As for logistics, I'm sure a variety of models could be experimented with. Federal funding could be made available that incentivizes competition and creative solutions, fostering inter and intra--state experimentation. In my work in social services, I can only see agencies welcoming the increased ability to do their work more effectively.

Intrusiveness might be the main sticking point for a lot of people. This sounds like big-government on steroids. But so are treatment facilities, police, prisons, and of course, schools. The reality is that poor communities need our help. Their lack of human and social capital defines their need for help and intervention. To the degree that a family demonstrates no need for services, none will be necessary. I think if you asked poor families themselves, they would jump at the chance for better health care, better education, better daycare, and generally more support to be successful.

Ruin Porn

2011-12-05T21:36:00.001-08:00

In the mid-1990's I had a job delivering meals and groceries to people living with AIDS in San Francisco. Much of my job was spent filling in the gaps that volunteers could not cover. In our office, we had a map of the city, with pushpins marking all our clients. Far and away, the highest concentrations were clustered in areas of high poverty, especially the Tenderloin district, where single-occupancy-residencies (SRO's) were common.

These were tall buildings, often eight or nine stories, usually managed by an immigrant family on the first floor, protected by a cage and responsible for regulating entry into and out of the building. The buildings were old, likely nearly a century, but they had fallen into deep disrepair. The clunky elevators with manual gates would often break down; paint was peeling; carpets were torn and stained; trash piled up at smelly chutes that dripped with grime. There was air of dingy lawlessness and danger, occupants ranged from the old and infirm to young and drug-addicted, deeply psychotic to suspiciously sociopathic. Many of my clients had a triple-diagnosis: drug abusing, mentally ill, and HIV positive. Many of them came from poverty, and AIDS was merely a bi-product of their lifestyle. But many had lost it all, and gone there to die.

A girlfriend at the time had an artist friend in LA whose work was appearing in a local gallery. I was taken back a bit when I saw where the gallery was located - Fifth street, two blocks south of Market, the heart of the Tenderloin, where I worked on a daily basis. I had gotten used to many of the locals, and as we walked towards the gallery, I began to recognize some of their faces. Off the clock, on a Sunday afternoon, their lives were no longer my work, they were now my fellow citizens. I had punched out a long time ago, yet they were still here, wandering the same stretch of sidewalk, muttering the same laments, hiding from the same predatory gangsters and back-alley villains, clutching the same dirty cigarettes.

It made sense when we entered the gallery. It was a minimal space, essentially a bare storefront stripped of any refurbishment. Concrete and cracked tile floors, stained walls and rusty, leaking plumbing jutting from the ceiling. I don't recall what the art was, but it was bleak - photographs I think. The desperation and sadness of the gallery environment reinforced the intended sentiment.

Yet for me, it reinforced something else. It pained me to be existing in a state of mind, a state of conscious experience that not only was in close proximity to such tragic suffering, but that was being asked to actively benefit from it. Like blood money is the profit from violence, one might call this blood art, as it was profiting from a kind of violence done to a community.

A term for this phenomenon has been coined: ruin porn. I'm not sure where it first came from, but it seems closely tied to the popularity of art created around the decrepitude of Detroit. French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre published a photo essay in Time entitled Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline.

"St. Margaret Mary School" - Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

It isn't an inaccurate title. The photographs are beautiful. The subject is terribly sad. An obvious commentary is central to the work: a fall from grace. Just what has fallen, and maybe more importantly, why it has fallen, is left to the viewer to ponder. On the blog Hyperallergic, Kyle Chayka reminds us that ruin porn is nothing new. Art has long been concerned with death and decay. As long as architecture has been made, its inevitable slow collapse has been documented.

"Architectural momento mori exist as well in ruin porn from centuries ago. Think we came up with anything new, shooting cavernous disused spaces? These photographers would do well to catch up on their Piranesi, an 18th century architect and printmaker whose etchings of the ruins of Rome are staggeringly epic, baroquely detailed and tragically decayed, a clear forerunner to the visual language of the Detroit photographers."

Yet the ruins of Rome evidence a tragedy that occurred centuries ago, to people many generations past. What happens when the tragedy is taking place all around us? Granted, most of the viewers of ruin porn will not have lived in these neighborhoods. It isn't as if they are being entertained by the suffering of their neighbors.

But that's part of the problem. A class distinction runs right through this work. When I visited the Tenderloin art gallery, I did not have to live there. I was attending college part time; I went home to a clean, safe neighborhood; I had the luxury of taking the 10,000ft. view. With the coolness of a mortician, my palate for art appreciation was cleansed and prepped by an invisible, yet indispensable privilege.

Marie Antoinette, in the final days before her execution, was living behind walls of sublime ignorance, inhabiting a decadence in sharp contrast to the common citizenry. Many false rumors were spread of her, promoting an inflated sense of her greed and debauchery. Yet even these rumors never suggested that she might be taking pleasure in the "beautiful" demise of her country.

We, elite as we may be in our appreciation of high art and cultural criticism, are neither kings nor queens. Most of us would surely like to help those who must live with the consequences of ruin and decay. Part of the beauty we see in this art surely comes from its satiation of a deep anxiety that all members of the modern world feel. There is a sense of alienation, loneliness in modern civilization, in which one must at all times grapple with two distinct realities of our consciousness: that of our family, friends and relations, and that of the anonymous, unknown public with whom we share so much, yet of whom we know so little.

In this art we see an expression of the promise we all feel in our daily lives as we make our way through work, traffic, public engagement, digestion of current events and our identity as reflected in endlessly changing times; the ruin has come to what had once possessed so much promise: the carefully laid brick, measured and tailored edges, artfully designed color pallets and purposeful textures.

But then we see the promise destroyed. Just as our hopes and dreams seem so often seem precariously balanced on the edge not only of disaster in the form of horrible accidents, lost jobs or political defenestration, but more reliably, the simple, gradual lowering of expectations as hopes and dreams gradually slip away, steadily crushed by the weight of time and responsibility, dying the death of a thousand cuts. There is a truth here that we are proud to see exposed. Life's edges, perfect as we can ever plan them to be, will inevitably have a roughness that we cannot deny. Death is a part of living.

All of this is good. It is what art is for. But as we gaze at our respective navels, there is a world of hurt more tragic happening to people just outside this frame. We cannot allow ourselves to indulge our own private narratives on the backs of such suffering, exploiting its demonry for our own private exorcisms. We must be reminded that art can be a useful and profound representation, but that for so many, it is not a representation, but a reality.

The Retribution Mistake

2011-12-04T08:13:00.001-08:00

Many criminals - likely a large majority, in my opinion, would stand a good chance of rehabilitation if only we took the effort seriously. But then there are those that, despite our best efforts, are too far gone.

Pedophilia I think is a perfect example of this. As far as we know, it can't be cured; it seems to be a sexual preference (for prepubescent children) much like hetero or homosexuality. While different therapies can somewhat limit the behavior, the impulse will always be there.

In discussions of determinism, both sides should be able to agree that there are at least limitations on freedom; people will always have different capacities for behavior, whether genetic or learned. Pedophilia seems likely to have a genetic root. It therefore makes sense to at least have some compassion for people who have been born into a body that, due to a design flaw, makes them want to do bad things to children.

In embracing a determinist outlook, I think it is reasonable to suppose that were society at large to move in that direction, much of the stigma surrounding pedophilia would fade, and pedophiles would be more able to "come out", as it were, and volunteer for treatment. There would still be harsh penalties for offenses, as a deterrent, but otherwise people would be considered mentally ill and "prone to violence".

I think of those who argue for social retribution, in which there isn't an emotional satiation claimed, but rather a sort of "social evening"; I understand it to be a sense that the wrong committed needs to be corrected for through punishment, at the most extreme being a death sentence. The calculation seems to be made under the assumption that the individual made a choice. Would retribution still apply if the individual had no choice. A better example might be if someone had a brain tumor that destroyed his sense of empathy, turning him from an otherwise kind person into a murderer?

In other words, if the notion of choice were removed, would the desire for retribution still exist? Is there a point where retribution no longer seems appropriate? Looking at violent attacks by animals, many feel that retribution is necessary, even if the animal - a bear say, or puma - was merely behaving naturally, and could be set free into the wild. This notion seems to stretch the concept.

But I think it might argue against the concept of social retribution. For even assuming that to the degree that no personal impulse towards retribution exists in such cases, the argument could still hold that a wrong has been done against society, and must be "paid for". Of course, the debtor is a wild animal. When a tree crushes a family in their home, a wrong has also been done against society. Yet seeking retribution on the tree would be absurd.

Or would it? How much of a difference is there really between individual bloodlust and the concept of social retribution? The former seems highly biased, and therefor distasteful, but how much is the latter, seemingly more calm and rationally considered, not merely a different version of that same impulse? Human nature has been shown over and over to suffer from very peculiar and emotionally driven impulses, even in the total abstract.

Experimental studies have found all kinds of evidence for the ways in which our decisions are guided by impulses we are not even aware of. For instance, the study in which people refused to put on a jacket that was told was once worn by Hitler. Or our tendency in the trolley car experiment to greatly favor those close to us as opposed to those further away. I mention these not to necessarily illustrate that these are wrong feelings, or that we should feel them, but that they can lead us to illogical premises and bad policy outcomes.

What becomes difficult is in determining just how much this bias is at work in our thinking - especially concerning bigger philosophical issues in which it isn't clear where our thinking - our "preference" - is really coming from; in this way, politics and philosophy can be like a matter of taste, where we just "know it when we see it". I can't say for certain that the concept of social retribution is based upon a biased sense of justice - that it is more a matter of personal taste than reason - but I can see how it might be.

The Reality of "Choice"

2011-12-03T08:45:00.001-08:00

Gail Collins writes about the growth of online K-12 charter schools, the most successful being for-profit K-12, Inc.

"...a big private online education business. It was founded by a former Goldman Sachs banker and by William Bennett, the Republican writer and talk-show host, with an infusion of cash from the former disgraced junk-bond king Mike Milken. Its teachers generally work from their homes, communicating with their students by e-mail or phone. (At one point in Arizona, essays of students attending an online academy run by K12 were outsourced to India for correction. K12 says the program was a pilot and was discontinued.)"

Having taught at a charter school with a major emphasis on homeschooling, and that was increasingly moving towards an online model, I can speak to some of the concerns people have about these schools. There was little transparency in terms of how the school was run, and financed its activities. This is a critique of charter schools in general, removed as they are from conventional public school accountability. This was especially concerning to me, as I worked at one of the satellite campuses, which was located in a poor neighborhood and drew from a largely disadvantaged population. I worried that the students' needs were not being met and being given short-shrift by the charter's more middle-class, home-schooled demographic priorities.

Another concern people have with online programs is that they'll further inhibit poor brick and mortar schools' ability to serve the special needs of their populations. As with brick and mortar charters, they will further siphon off the families with means, leaving behind the families with the fewest resources. The poor are often thought of as a homogeneous demographic, defined only by financial capital. But in reality there exists a great diversity of means, in terms of human and social capital, the efficacy of individual parenting, family education levels, issues with substance abuse or criminality, etc. Statistically, only a very small percentage of poor parents have been actively trying to get their children into charter schools as alternatives to traditional public schools. These are the parents who would be raising higher performing students, and realize that their students are being subjected to the many negative social pressures and forces at work in ghettos. This is simply a function of geography and property values.

The effect of this movement of high-capital families out of poor schools is to further segregate communities by means. While certainly a great benefit to those who know how to take advantage of the process, those left behind are further isolated and concentrated in their disadvantage. For instance, an average poor classroom might have 20% of its students suffering from emotional, behavioral, and academic deficits owing to severe neglect and strife at home, and another 20% enjoying the benefits of a cognitively stimulating and loving environment at home, able to complete work and be actively engaged in positive learning. In a class of 30-35 students, this presents an enormous challenge for a teacher in differentiating his instruction to adequately meet the needs of every child. In removing the top 20% of students, you are essentially (if my math is correct) removing 100% of the highest performers, in return for a 5% increase in the lowest and 15% increase in middle performers.

Now, in a perfect world, this may not be the worst thing. There are many advantages to less differentiation, or more homogeneity in a classroom. With a smaller range of needs, the teacher is better able to manage his instructional specificity. At the site level, resources can be more focused and delivered more efficiently. Unfortunately, this doesn't really happen. The poor have a tendency to get neglected. In the classroom, more low-performing students means more interruptions, more truancy, more remediation, lower standards, and greater teacher burnout. Class sizes remain the same, only increasing the teacher's burden. At the site level, while more services are often offered, the decline in parent means translates into less local community resources, and more demand for interventions, requiring ever more services and attention. Socially, the negative pressures are reinforced, while the positive pressures are reduced. Net negativity is thus increased.

It doesn't have to be this way. If class sizes were reduced, more services were offered, and resources were made available for teachers and staff to leverage, you would have a system in which high concentrations of disadvantage and dysfunction were ripe for efficient, targeted intervention. Yet the system would have to be designed to support this extra burden. From the ground floor up, it would take into account the population's special needs, and not expect teachers to primarily bear the burden. Currently, "teacher accountability" is frequently mentioned, but more rarely is "systemic accountability". Where is the accountability when systems are in place that shovel highly needy, at-risk populations into traditional classroom environments. It is as if schools, teachers and students are set-up to fail.

I would not be as skeptical of educational innovations such as charter schools or online programs, if they were understood in the context of larger socioeconomic issues in education. For many poor parents, online schooling might make the most sense, and be a good fit for their child's needs. For many others, their children's needs may be better served by an environment that can set the bar higher, knowing that students will be able to competently meet it, as opposed to simply being set-up for failure.

I've long thought a rigorous socio-economic assessment regime could be designed that measures and then places families into school settings designed to appropriately meet their specific needs. To me, this is truly what "choice" looks like. It isn't bottom-up, in terms of parents being "allowed" to send their children wherever they like. But that concept assumes that poor families are homogeneous in their ability to best see to their children's development. The reality is that many poor families need top-down help, and giving them "choice" is a false notion, implying that poor performing families are "choosing" not to be successful. Everyone wants to be successful, even the families struggling with poor parenting skills, single-parenthood, substance abuse, etc. But they don't know how. The sad reality is that we only have two choices when it comes to many poor families - the nanny state, or the neglectful parent state. Contrary to the fantasies we would like to believe about human behavior, reality is that, due to the many disadvantages and behavioral constraints besetting poor communities, owing to numerous historical and systemic factors, we are in a position of "parenthood", in that if left to fend for themselves, too many families - and their children - will not be successful. That is the reality. That is the reality of "choice".

Me and My Brain

2011-11-27T09:57:00.001-08:00

As a longtime sufferer of depression, I've relied on pills designed to treat chemical imbalances in my brain. These pills are controversial, with conflicting opinions on whether they are really more effective than placebos. Millions of people swear by them, many claiming that they have clearly been effective in treating their depression. Of course, such data is anecdotal, as would be any that I could offer. I can say anyhow, that my depression has been somewhat reasonably managed for years.

When I first began taking the medication, about seven years ago, I did recall a significant feeling that my conscious state had been altered. Almost impossible to describe, it was as if a kind of numbness came over me, taking "the rough edges" off of things. My psychological history in the subsequent years was complicated. In some ways I did seem to feel a certain sense of relief. Yet a couple of years later, shortly after my first daughter was born, I attempted suicide. I had certainly entered a deeply depressed state, one in no small part induced by geographic and social isolation, as well as the stress of being the primary caregiver for a colicky infant, all while suffering from devastating chronic neck pain.

So in one sense the medication failed me, or at least was not effective enough to prevent suicidal depression. But the trouble with measuring the efficacy of antidepressant medications is that the population being treated suffers from an illness that is very difficult to properly diagnose, properly quantify, and much less understand the pathology of. To what extent was my depression and my behavior driven by brain chemical imbalances, and to what extent was it driven by my habit of mind, or cognitive framing of the world?

Philosophically, the debate over what consciousness is, or to what degree we can understand it, is contentious. Much of conscious human experience is not well understood, and little data exists to support hypotheses as to either what causes it, or what it even is. Thomas Metzinger, director of the Theoretical Philosophy Group and current president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, defines consciousness as "the appearance of a world". It is a good start, but doesn't offer much of a clue as to where it comes from or what it in fact is.

There are many phenomena that we can't really explain very well, and yet must start somewhere if we are to hypothesize - especially if there are real-world consequences of our assumptions either way. Critiques of materialism usually see people as assuming too much, relying too readily on a physical framework as a best guess. Critiques of the opposite - immaterialists? - see people as ignoring what seem to be perfectly reasonable logical conclusions drawn from our knowledge of the physical world.

I tend to fall into the latter camp. I'm reminded of the old creationist thought experiment, the clearly "designed" phenomenon in the natural world, such as Mt. Rushmore or a house in a desert, in which physical processes are assumed to be incapable of such complexity. This can be contrasted with a thought experiment designed to illustrate Occam's Razor, where a broken, blackened tree is found in a field - in the absence of clear evidence, one might assume any number of explanations, some more fantastic than others. Yet the most likely, the most reasonable explanation would be that lightening has probably struck it down.

Surely, many biological processes - certainly those involving the brain and/or consciousness - are lacking in a great deal of evidence. But there is also much that we do know, and would be remiss in not taking into full account, if not inferring even further material hypotheses. For my part, I look forward to advances in this exciting area of science. Not only for what medical breakthroughs it might provide in the treatment of psychiatric illness, but for what it might tell us about broader, older philosophical assumptions about human behavior and the social structures they inform.

Politics, Language and Thought

2011-11-26T07:44:00.001-08:00

As I look at conservative and liberal politicians, pundits and lay commentary, a pattern begins to emerge in which certain attitudes and cognitive "styles" seem to be more common to one side or the other.

The right seems to like certainty - as opposed to nuance, "masculine" forceful presentation and domineering conviction - as opposed to "feminine" softness and passive listening, or "openness". These seem strongly associated with traditional versus progressive social identities.

My guess is that many conservatives might disagree with that framing. Would they see any truth to it, though? Just by looking at the type of personal styles and approaches to governing and speaking, are there any patterns that they might see between liberal/conservative attitudes and personal presentations, especially that have policy consequences?

I think I see evidence for my framing. I also think you can find a lot of the language both partisan sides use that supports it as well. Conservative and liberal citizens seem to have divergent ways they see and talk about the world.

George Lakoff, a liberal linguist who has done much to popularize this discussion, at least on the left, identifies a set of words significant to partisan politics, drawn from speeches and writings. Among conservatives, the following words are given primacy:

character, virtue, discipline, tough, strong, self-reliance, self-reliant, individual, responsibility, backbone, standards, authority, heritage, competition, earn, hard, work, enterprise, property, reward, freedom, intrusion, interference, meddling, punishment, traditional, dependency, self-indulgent, elite, quotas, breakdown, corrupt, decay, rot, degenerate, deviant, [and] lifestyle.

And among liberals:

social, forces, expression, human, rights, equal, concern, care, help, health, safety, nutrition, dignity, oppression, diversity, deprivation, alienation, corporations, corporate, welfare, ecology, ecosystem, biodiversity, [and] pollution.

However, a study of the actual use of these words in political ads failed to find much of a correlation between the identified conservative language and conservative ads. However, there did seem to be a correlation between identified liberal language and liberals campaign ads. The author hypotheses that this need not undermine Lakoff's thesis, but rather illustrate the different dynamics involved in the efficacy of political advertising.

I've been reading this paper that looks at how psychologists and sociologists have tried to examine the issue over the past half century. However I'm pretty skeptical of their findings. For instance, they seem to want to suggest that there are personality types that lead to conservative or liberal thinking. Yet the personality types they identify are rather vague: conservatives = more conscientious, liberals = more "open to new ideas". But it would seem that conservative or liberal thinking leads to these dispositions. Furthermore, the tribal, identity-driven aspects of liberal and conservative communities reinforce norms that foster these dispositions. For instance, in one part of the study they cataloged the possessions of self-identified conservative and liberal grad students, and found correlations, such as more liberal students having more ethnic music in their CD collections. Yet are these students really more "open" people, or are they part of a liberal identity that has pushed them to go out and explore ethnic music? This normative pressure may indeed result in them being more "open" to different ideas, either cultural, political, etc., and thus seem to be more "open" people, but it doesn't necessarily tell us anything about an innate personality. Likewise, their findings that conservative rooms tended to be cleaner and have more sports memorabilia would seem to be evidence of conscientiousness and preference for tradition, yet these too are cultural, normative artifacts.

I'm curious how conservatives would see the issue. The psychological and sociological research appears to have been dominated by liberal researchers. Yet there is something to culture, ethnicity, normal and political partisanship. If not innate (likely), there do seem to be quite different normative pressures involved. Especially as society seems to have become more polarized, I think it is an important issue to investigate. As people become more politically polarized, both in community networks and even geographically, these norms would seem to be even more self-reinforcing. There almost seem to be many structural inevitabilities at work. Is this pattern a natural evolution of a heterogenous, democratic, wealthy nation, in which people's natural, tribal inclinations are perpetuated by their ability to self-select into political and cultural tribes?

The Elephant In the Room

2011-11-22T06:29:00.001-08:00

To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.

I was astonished when I read this quote in today's NY Times. It's from Thomas Friedman, someone you might have little reason to believe would make a claim so far outside the current neo-liberal/conservative alliance on education reform. The full column, titled How About Better Parents?, points out that the real culprit in student achievement is not poor teaching, but poor parenting. This is not a call for breaking the teachers unions, nor a call for higher standards, nor a more market-based emphasis on charter schools and teacher accountability. It is a head-on call for a change in the national debate about what really drives the achievement gap.

Looking through the comments to his piece, one gets the impression that his claim is obvious. Of course it is the parents - we all know this! Yet why does the education reform debate ignore this issue. One the one hand, it assumes that all poor parents need is more choice in where to send their children, as if a better school is all that is needed. On the other hand, it sees schools as the primary factor in student achievement, and thus the solution to closing the achievement gap, and inevitably solving poverty in America.

I think there are two historical reasons for this schizoid thinking, one each from the left and right, and they account for why parenting has been so long ignored. The right has never had a problem with blaming parents. It is the first to blame all social ills on culture and ethnicity (even, at times, genes). Its primary interest, the security of the white middle class against the barbaric poor, not to mention its fear of the secularism of the state, drove it to embrace vouchers as a way to allow middle class families to remove their children from public schools (and the children in them). Yet it found that dropping the issue of vouchers for a much less controversial, yet in many ways similar, call for charters was good politics.

Charters could be promoted without ever having to engage in the sort of victim-blame that was such red meat for the base, yet turned off the majority of American voters. In fact, charters were a sort of win-win: not only were they a way of breaking unions (and big-government democratic ambitions), but they could be held out as quasi free-market solutions to poverty and the achievement gap.

The left, for its part, has never been comfortable with blaming the poor. It's been too busy trying to argue the structural issues with a capitalist economy, as well as fighting for multiculturalism and the right wing notion that other cultures and ethnicities - even immigrants, brown people! - are as important and have as valuable a place at the American table as any. So the idea that the low success rates for poor students can be traced to their poor home environment and lack of quality parenting, and not racism, discrimination, or exploitation, the idea that the poor are to blame for their own lack of academic success, would seem to undermine everything they've always fought for.

Yet this doesn't have to be the case. What both sides are missing is the scope of the problem. While the left wants to ignore the contemporary, active dysfunction among the poor, the right wants to ignore the historical social and economic structures that have conspired to create, and actively perpetuates a population which has been leeched of its human and social capital, and thus its ability to leverage in the world. The children, the students of this population are simply the current inheritors of what is essentially our collective failure to establish an equitable distribution of human and social capital.

My desire is that Friedman's words will not fall on entirely deaf ears. He surely isn't alone. The words he speaks will make intuitive sense to any who reads them. Yet what must be transcended is our fear of embracing a difficult and messy truth about America, both past and present. The problem - nothing less than poverty and social disadvantage itself - has always been humanity's greatest challenge. Solving it will require a serious reckoning not only with what kind of institutions and governmental structures we seek, but, and more fundamentally, with how we perceive human agency itself. This is the elephant in the room.

Give Us Our Freedom Back

2011-11-20T07:20:00.001-08:00

Kevin Drum reflects on a NY Times article on the pattern of economic segregation and polarization over the last few decades.

"It was similar in my neighborhood. My father was a university professor. Our neighbor on one side worked at a local factory. Our neighbor on the other side owned a machine shop that made airplane parts. Our neighbor across the street was career Navy. My best friend's father was a Caltrans engineer.
"You don't see that kind of thing as much anymore. Today the middle and working class folks have stayed or perhaps moved down, while the dentists and stockbrokers and professors and engineers all live together in upper middle class neighborhoods with great schools and great services. And this self-segregation works in other ways too. I remember reading once that if you have a college degree, the odds are that virtually all your friends do too. So I tested that once. At a party with about 20 of our friends, I mentally went around the room and ticked off each person. Sure enough, all but one of them had a college degree, and about a third had advanced degrees of one kind or another. Given all this, it's hardly surprising that the report finds that 65% of families lived in middle-income neighborhoods in 1970 and today only 44% do."

He finishes his piece without any suggestions for either what might have caused the problematic phenomenon, or what we might do about it.

It's a toxic trend, and it's one that's increasingly reflected not just in our social lives, but in our economic lives and our political lives too. It's not clear what, if anything, can slow it down.

I don't know that I can do much better. There have obviously been major shifts both in culture and the economy in this period. The right wing explanation for the phenomenon, as usual, avoids structural critiques and pins the blame on secularism, progressive loosening of mores, and well-intentioned yet ill-conceived government interventions, and of course, a basic lack of personal responsibility. Government, it is claimed, has contributed to this breakdown in traditional values by removing moral hazard from personal responsibility, via welfare or other forms of social safety netting.

Charles Murray, darling of the right, and infamous author of the Bell Curve, which argued that some races are genetically superior in IQ to others, thus explaining disproportionate poverty rates, is coming out with a new book on the issue. At a recent talk at the American Enterprise Institute, he expanded upon his thesis. Conservative blogger Roger Selbert outlines Murray's description of the problem:

"Marriage: In 1960, 88% of the upper-middle class was married, versus 83% of the working class, a negligible 5% gap. Today, 83% of the upper-middle class is married, but among the working class, marriage has collapsed: only 48% are married. That’s a revolutionary change, as is the percentage of children born to working class single women (from 6% to nearly 50% in the last 50 years).
Industriousness: The percentage of working class males not in the workforce went from 5% in 1968 to 12% in 2008. Among those with jobs, the percentage working less than 40 hours a week increased from 13% in 1960 to 21% in 2008.
Religiosity: The percentage of Americans saying they have no religion increased from 4% in 1972 to 21% in 2010. A substantial majority of the upper-middle class (58%) retains some meaningful form of religious involvement, whereas a substantial majority of the working class (61%) does not.
Honesty: The great increases in crime and incarceration over the past decades have overwhelmingly victimized working class communities, while hardly touching upper-middle class communities."

It's hard not to see this outline as a portrait of traditionalist, authoritarian values. If people, it asks, were simply married, more industrious, religious and honest, they would be more successful. What's missing, however, is a larger picture of social and economic realities. While it is true that marriage is a valuable form of social capital, it isn't necessary for life success. Divorce rates have obviously increased, especially among the working class, but this could just as well be explained by an increasing social consciousness and individual cultural independence that fosters dynamism. Think of the added value successful women have brought to the workplace.

It isn't at all clear that iIndustrious as measured by declining work hours represents a lack of industriousness. It is a well-known fact that many businesses purposefully limit their employees hours and rely on temporary labor to maximize profits. This has had a devastating impact both on salaries and eligibility for health care.

While religion can be a powerfully motivating and empowering social institution, it can also severely limit free thought, again acting as a bulwark against the dynamism and social progress that is fundamental to economic growth. A strong case can also be made that it is a fairy tale. Useful maybe, but a fantasy nonetheless.

As for honesty, it isn't at all clear that working class people have become less honest. If anything, crime is a function of social debasement and perceived lack of opportunity. Blaming poverty on crime is like blaming a cold on a runny nose.

What seems to be at the root of this analysis his less an attempt to find explanations for rising inequality, and more about an attempt to reinforce and define traditionalist values and identity. Amanda Marcotte speaks eloquently to this authoritarian obsession:

I won't pretend to have any good answers as to why income inequality and geographic and cultural isolation is happening, much less give anything more than an off-the-cuff prescription. But I would begin with looking at human social capital - those elements upon which real social mobility is always leveraged, and then look at structural issues that our system faces. People have not chosen to become less successful, less honest, or less industrious. Marriage as an institution has certainly weakened, but only as horizons for personal identity and ambition have risen. Traditional careers, especially those in low-skill yet high-paying areas of the economy have disappeared. Cultural, social criticism has grown, and people are less credulous. We are less provincial, more expansive, less likely to have as much in common with our neighbors than we once might have. Our system of property values has steadily solidified geographic "classification".

As I said, I'm not comfortable assigning causality, less comfortable prescribing solutions. Yet we can ease these modern burdens: family planning, child care support, better access to health care, cleaner streets, parks, libraries, differentiated public schooling - all paid for with more progressive income taxes. Each of these, while not a solution, is a clear path to increasing the equal distribution of social and human capital. We cannot stop progress, whether for good or ill, but we can strive to fashion it into more of what is really important. Instead of vainly crying for a nostalgic, rosy vision of the past, we must look to our core values of liberty, equality and egalitarianism, and embrace solutions that truly aid in their revivification.

When Freedom Emerges

2011-11-15T06:43:00.001-08:00

The free will debate continues in yesterday’s NY Times. The author argues a compatibilist view, choosing to define free will as

“a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them.”

This framing of the issue has always been somewhat bothersome to me. Because what he describes is not actually free will, but rather the process of will itself, the process of choosing which actions to take. The mere act of choosing is not necessarily free at all. My computer makes choices every time I touch the keypad.

Yet what apparently makes choice free is that it be free from “unreasonable external or internal pressure”. What the heck does that mean? One imagines being forced at gunpoint, or suffering some physiological imperative. Yet must we understand the complexity of human thought and feeling in such black and white terms? We know for instance, that the unconscious is a profound influence on human behavior. Is the unconscious an unreasonable pressure? We also know that our cognition – the way that we think, is largely learned and thus limits the structure of our thought. Is that unreasonable pressure?

It seems that what free will really is about is our attempt to rectify our conscious perception with our ability to choose. We experience ourselves as deliberative creatures. Yet we know that a vast degree of our thinking is subjected to unconscious, or cognitively constrained pressures. The real question is whether any of our thinking is free from those pressures at all. And considering that it is very difficult to determine what pressures have been applied to any given conscious thought, we should have little reason to believe that those thoughts are free at all. We can't simply assume they are free because we don't know much about how they have arisen.

The Whole Story

2011-11-12T07:16:00.001-08:00

Matt Yglesias points out something interesting that is often overlooked when we discuss important people: place. He refers to a concept in the economics of cities known as "agglomeration externalities", "basically the idea that individuals and firms obtain productivity boosts by clustering together." He sees the ways in which a Steve Jobs could not have existed outside of his particular place and time.

"As a sophomore in high school, for example, Jobs worked at an electronics store called Haltek that Isaacson describes as “a scavenger’s paradise sprawling over an entire city block with new, used, salvaged, and surplus components crammed onto warrens of shelves, dumped unsorted into bins, and piled in an outdoor yard.” The presence of an excellent electronics stores is helpful to the young Jobs as he builds his skills. But there would be no gigantic electronics specialty store except in a place with an unusually high concentration of people interested in electrical engineering. The presence of the engineers creates the market for the store, which drives the interest of the younger generation of engineers."

These patterns exist throughout history. Often emerging organically, serendipitously, they tend to gain their own momentum, as others are attracted to what has become something important. Aside from no small element of happenstance, this process can be best explained by the interaction of human and social capital. In Silicon Valley, individuals with the human capital - the educated, success-minded parents, combined with the concentration of technological resources, created a tinderbox of creativity and enthusiasm for building new technologies.

In America there seems a curious resistance to this notion of social collectivity. There seems a preference for the vision of solitary genius and individualism. One wonders how much this has to do with the immigrant experience, and the forced severance of connections to our past. Of course, despite the attractive notion of the immigrant going it alone, succeeding on his own merits, this is rather the exception to the rule. The history of immigrant communities is one of networking, cooperation and group goal orientation. Where individuals have succeeded without family help, they have done so despite the odds.

And yet, the fact remains that America is incredibly heterogeneous, with great generational mobility, and a national character defined in no small part by communal isolation. A number of known cognitive biases could contribute to this tendency to see American success in isolation, removed from communal context. A basic impulse of the sentiment could be a desire to deflect the painful experience - the anxiety, the stress - of "going it alone", by remembering events as not just better than they were, but as positively productive. In this sense, one's trials and tribulations are not seen merely as unfortunate handicaps, but actual necessities for personal success.

This is certainly not a valid model of social activity. Success is almost always built from human and social capital resources. To the degree that it is not, more often has to do with good fortune. Now, there certainly is an element of success-inducing tribulation. Being forced to make do with little can be profoundly inspiring of creativity and tenacity. But tribulation alone does not equate with success - that is surely absurd. A crucial component in leveraging tribulation is sufficient human and social capital to allow for both its weathering and subsequent creative transcendence. To a large degree, this capital is formed by an individual's family - how he is raised, but also by community resources and availability of alternative options. Where there is success, no matter how devoid of opportunity an environment may appear at first glance, there will always exist an underlying story of human and social capital.

The Good Old Days

2011-11-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post on things that had once been considered acceptable, but that are now not. He comes up with:

1. Spitting on the sidewalk.
2. Drunk driving.
3. Wife-beating.
4. Most indoor smoking.
5. Ethnic denigration.
6. Not cleaning up after your dog.
7. Not wearing seatbelts or bike/motorcycle helmets.
8. Coming back to work drunk after lunch.
9. Taking sexual advantage of workplace and classroom power.
10. Purchasing sexual services.

One of his commenters observed that many of these could have been ripped straight from Tea Party-Republican-Limbaughian talking points. Considering how much progressivism is about social change, and conservatism is about the opposite, it's a profound insight.

I imagined the right-wing list would be things that are not now acceptable because of wimpy political correctness, and that should be acceptable again.

It made the list a little easier:

Treating women as mere sex objects.
Defining masculinity by how “tough” a man is.
Acknowledging that there are many valuable non-European cultures in America.
Treating gays as decent human beings.
Accepting that atheists or non-believers, or God-forbid… Muslims(!), can be moral, decent people.
Caring for and respecting the environment.
Recognizing that foreign citizens have human rights.
Making accommodations for the disabled.
Acknowledging that might does not make right, and that expressing one’s feelings is often the clearest path to peace.
Peace.
The idea of the unconscious.
The concept that tradition isn’t an argument by itself.

This could go on for quite a while. An item surely to be included on the list ought to be corporal punishment, something the right has been pining to return to for decades, and upon the lack of which it blames all manner of ills.

Not Free to Bully

2011-11-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

The Michigan senate's passage of an amendment to an anti-bullying bill that allowed for a religious exemption is drawing criticism. The full ammended text is as follows:

“This section does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil and parent or guardian.”

I'm not as convinced as others that this gives open season to bullying. But I do agree it is very dangerous. However, Neal McCluskey at CATO apparently doesn't. He thinks it's an issue of free speech.

"[A]s odious as one might find the religious beliefs of many people, they are entitled to freedom of speech the same as anyone else. That is a basic American right, and all the desire in the world to protect kids from hearing things that might make them feel badly must not change that. Abridge that right, and any speech becomes imperiled if a majority simply deems it unacceptable."

Actually, students aren't as entitled to free speech as anyone else. Kids in public school do not have the right to say whatever they want to anyone. It isn't a black/white issue, but courts have consistently found that schools have considerable authority to limit student speech. It's worth remembering that students are required by law to be in school, and would thus in a sense be "required" to listen to speech that they otherwise would be able to avoid.

It's also worth remembering that kids can be downright evil to each other, and do things to one another that would get them serious jail time as adults. Therefore we must have the utmost respect for the vulnerability of innocent students, who often face great peril on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the worst bullying goes on out of sight of adults, and thus any kind of hate speech has a good chance of merely being the tip of a much more brutal and dangerous iceberg. Allowing verbal bullying to continue is not only cruel to individual students, but it paves the way for the escalation of much worse.

Closing the Crime-Gap

2011-10-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias puts his foot in his mouth when he suggests that progressives wouldn't complain if we talked about corrupt, abusive, "bad" cops the way neo-liberal education reformers talk about bad teachers.

What I have in mind, of course, is perennial internecine fighting over K-12 education policy in the United States. This is obviously a complicated subject. But my experience is that a lot of people on the left, rather than arguing the merits of the issue, seem to take it as self-evidently un-progressive to try to improve the performance of a public agency in part by doing things that the people who work at the agency don’t like. When it comes to big city police departments, I think a much healthier attitude exists. Not one that says cops shouldn’t have rights in the workplace or that “cops are bad,” but one that recognizes a substantial tension between the liberal desire to have police departments work well and the police officers’ desire for high levels of job security and low levels of accountability.

The analogy is terrible for countless reasons. Firstly, the "Bad" teacher, as the term has come to suggest, generally isn't corrupt or abusive. In the main though, the analogy tries to compare police abuse with teacher efficacy, assuming that both represent the efficacy of their respective institutional missions. The criticisms of neo-liberal education reform are not that we shouldn't hold abusive teachers accountable, but rather that the assumption that the achievement gap in America is driven by bad teaching is wrong - just as it would be wrong to assume that different crime rates in different neighborhoods are caused by bad policing.

As far as I know, no one is in favor of protecting abusive teachers. Rather, protection is sought for institutions such as tenure and unions, both of which provide a foundation for grassroots, bottom-up teaching practices and sustenance of professional community and solidarity, something very important in a field in which so much is sacrificed for the common good.

But the analogy of teaching and policing is actually quite illustrative, in ways that Yglesias obviously missed.

If we talked about crime like we talked about education,

we'd blame America's high crime rate on bad policing and their unions.
we'd spend roughly the same resources on wealthy neighborhood policing as we do on poor neighborhoods.
we'd then say to people who point out that socioeconomics drives crime are just "making excuses", and call it the "soft bigotry of low expectations".
we'd begin shutting down police departments in favor of private contractors.
we'd seriously consider giving people vouchers to spend on private security.
we'd talk about closing the crime-gap through better police training, punitive evaluations and performance pay

just for fun: In my last post, I whipped up a little graphic detailing the correlation between neighborhood income, property values and school performance.

How much do you want to bet it also correlates with crime?
Yearly average crime rate (per 100,000)
Santa Monica:       282
Downey:               318
Huntington Park:   513

Well, what do you know?

Child Development in America

2011-10-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

A common problem in education debate is the failure to make a distinction between demographic populations. Deborah Meier recounts what she has witnessed in the past 40 years of education:

I entered teaching in 1963 during the early civil rights movement and allied myself with a growing new progressivism. Sometimes called "open education," its advocates were given a warm reception in some places of power for about five years, maybe 10. By 1985, I thought we were on the cutting edge of a transformative movement. I was dead wrong. We were declared to be too slow in showing test success and our vision hard to mandate from the top down. The New Reformers decided on a different path, which they have pursued now for between 20 and 30 years of unprecedented attention and resources.

Performance map of Los Angeles, CA

Open education requires in children high levels of development in a variety of spheres (emotion, cognitive, language, etc.). Yet American communities are developmentally quite diverse, generally arrayed across this spectrum along socio-economic lines. The difference between communities with high levels of child development and those with low levels is quite extraordinary. In one classroom 90% of students might have a minimal vocabulary, uneducated parents who work for low pay, and live in a neighborhood in close proximity to drugs and violence. In another classroom 90% of students might have an enormous vocabulary, highly educated, professional parents, and live in a safe neighborhood with access to many highly academically stimulating activities. Thus, in some communities, Open Education is going to be much more successful, as it falls within the boundaries of the childrens' respective zones of proximal development, while in others the students aren't as prepared for it.

Yet, as Deborah points out, the alternative - rote, scripted - education, hasn't been dramatically more successful either, even if it is at least more attentive to traditional academic skill-building.

But after more than two decades of these New Reforms—more and more testing, higher stakes, charters, and mayoral control—we do know some things for sure:
(a) Test scores have not risen, and the test-score gap hasn't narrowed.
(b) We have moved further away from building a profession that retains and uses its experienced teachers well.
(c) We are witnessing unimaginable hours spent on test-prepping and a narrowing of the rest of the curriculum while cheating is being ignored and teachers are being demoralized. Hardly trivial side effects.

(Another critique would be that it is overly cold, authoritarian, punitive and dehumanizing, especially for students who come from communities that don't model the sort of "life-long learning" and joy of academic discovery that school is in part designed to inspire.)

I think the real question, and one with no easy answer, is how exactly to differentiate our provision of education to such developmentally distinct communities. Of course, these are generalities, and there will always be diversity within communities. This would be one of the problems in designing a policy of proper differentiation. But the fact remains that our neighborhoods are designed to self-differentiate by socio-economics and class. Ignoring this fact, pretending that everyone in America is somehow, naturally "free" is harmful wishful thinking; it leads us away from seriously grappling with what is maybe the one fundamental goal of public education: how to properly ensure that every citizen grows up with access to developmental resources that allows him or her to be an equitable participant in our country.

Our traditional model has been one classroom, one teacher, one group of 25-35 students. Within this framework, we fiddle about with pedagogic strategies and interventions, yet the basic framework remains. Yet given the degree of developmental diversity across communities and schools, relying on this model for the entire developmental spectrum seems crazy. Any teacher who has taught at both ends of the spectrum (almost certainly in two different socio-economic communities) knows that these are two completely different teaching experiences. This is why unions scream when all teachers are expected to deliver equal outcomes. It's absurd.

Personally, I find Open Education model the absolute pinnacle of what education should be, encouraging in children self-reliance, skepticism, engagement and ultimately, joy of discovery that should last a lifetime. Yet to implement this in different communities, a different model must be used. I have theories as to what models might work, and they would be, in the short-term, rather expensive. But if all we really care about is results, they would ultimately be more than worth it.

A Greater Inequality

2011-10-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

The Occupy Wall Street movement is no doubt about many things, but I think it could be said to be at its core about income inequality. My greatest problem with income inequality may have less to do with actual equality of income, but rather the inequality of opportunity it represents.

The ownership of capital gives one an advantage in a capitalist economy. We can accept that a certain amount of private capital is necessary to a healthy, competitive, robust marketplace, as its incentive structure tends to foster innovation and efficiency, often towards the common good. But this is not necessarily the case, as it can also hamper innovation and efficiency, generally as accumulated wealth tends to accrete into entrenched interests.

But something I think is often missing from this part of the discussion is the degree to which human capital also accretes and gives structural advantage to the few. I recently wrote about this in response to Eric Cantor's evocation of his poor Jewish immigrant grandmother's overcoming poverty to live out the American Dream through her grandchildren. He speaks - as so many often do - of poverty in purely financial terms, as if financial capital is the only leverage point in capitalist society, and it is possible for anyone without it to begin to accumulate his or her own leverage.

Yet there is another, more powerful form of capital that needs to be leveraged in order to even begin to compete in a capitalist economy. This is human capital. What Cantor didn't mention (although was implicit in his narrative), was the amount of human capital his immigrant grandmother possessed. Malcolm Gladwell raises the point in his book, Outliers, that Jewish immigrants in early 20th century New York tended to have access to human capital that other immigrants, such as Italian and Irish, did not. Ironically, because of their oppression and marginalization in European society, they did not have the "luxury" of relying upon low-skill labor in the countryside, and instead were forced to develop skill-intensive occupations such as tailoring, jewelry, etc. This provided an enormously useful form of capital they could then leverage in America, as such corollary skills, such as accounting and business-management, enabled them to make a profitable new life.

The problem the notion of human capital poses to the traditional economic debate is one of human behavior. It makes a case that even in a relatively competitive and "free" market, even when you overcome the problem of access to capital, you're still faced with the dilemma of human means, where it simply isn't the case that "everyone" can succeed, because everyone does not have access to the same levels of human capital - that which allows them to leverage themselves in the economy, their ability to work hard, play by the rules, learn new skills, apply their knowledge, have productive social interactions, plan for the future, delay gratification, etc. These are all skills that have little to do with inherited traits, but rather what they have learned from family, friends, neighbors and cultural interactions.

Most damning of all, just like financial capital human capital has a tendency to accrete. Not only is the capital self-leveraging (healthy self-esteem = determination = study skills = more knowledge = more self esteem), but it brings up those around it, whether children or friends and neighbors, or schoolmates. And because property values tends to create communities of homogeneous financial capital, so too do they create communities of homogeneous human capital. So you end up with communities either both low in financial and human capital, or high in financial and human capital. The clearest evidence of this can be see in public schools, where academic progress, the product primarily of human capital, aligns almost perfectly with financial capital.

It is a fact that opportunity is a product of human capital. Without these core skills, one has no real self-efficacy. Thus, to the extent that American citizens are growing up in families and communities which are failing to provide them with human capital, all the objective opportunity in the world will be essentially inaccessible. It is rather like dangling fruit just out of reach of one whose legs are simply not long enough to reach.

The situation is clearly unfair. People are growing up without opportunity. For them, there is no real American dream. Likewise, there are those who have been privileged with an abundance of human capital, and have been able to leverage it into great wealth. The million dollar question is not whether this is fair (it obviously is not), but whether there is anything we as a society can do to help them. Public education is a great first start. Other social programs that aim to guarantee access to the means to build human capital are equally important. But it remains to be seen how effective any of these programs can really be.

So the next question that must be asked is whether a sort of "palliative care" might be owed to those lacking both human capital itself, and for whatever reason the means to develop it. First on this list might be access to health care. Millions of Americans will be stuck in poverty wage jobs with no access to it. They will not have the means to develop sufficient human capital in the foreseeable future. This will lead directly to great hardship as they inevitably become sick and injured. Other quality of life issues can be remedied through such things as parks, libraries, public museums. As this population will continue to be at risk of financial catastrophe, a basic social safety net will be required.

A case can be made that provision of these services runs the risk of disincentivizing the development of human capital. However, I find claims that the strongest factor in the development of human capital is the desire to avoid the punitive effects of life without healthcare, food stamps or temporary welfare to be quite weak. Millions already live in dire poverty, without these supposed barriers to human capital development, due to their acquisition of menial, poverty-wage labor, and obviously are not climbing out of poverty in large numbers. American generation poverty is vast, and multi-causal. Structural concerns are much more deterministic than the paltry government assistance offer.

For instance, take the example of a common problem in poor neighborhoods. A single parent household, in which children return home from school and are essentially left unattended, to roam the streets with neighborhood peers. This will more often than not contribute to a net weakening of human capital. Some strengths will be gained, but many more will likely be lost, or rather, weaknesses gained. Many forms of human capital will be gained that provide some real benefit in the context of the norms of that marginalized neighborhood - such as fighting, acting tough, becoming fluent in cultural norms - but these will more than often represent patterns of thinking and behaving that are obstacles in wider society. Even to a family with the best intentions, a child may not be able to avoid developing these negative behaviors and attitudes, sometimes referred to having been "lost to the streets". This is a problem of structural failure, when even high degrees of human capital in a parent are overwhelmed by its opposing forces in other areas of a child's development.

Not only is capitalism, or free marketism, not competent to address this age-old dilemma, but it often actively contributes to it, through the accretion of unequal distributions in human capital and structural impediments to its formation and leveraging.