Monthly Archives: May 2013

school discipline in a democracy

I recommend an important paper by Aaron Kupchik and Thomas J. Catlaw entitled “Discipline and Participation: The Long-Term Effects of Suspension and School Security on the Political and Civic Engagement of Youth.” This is the context that concerns the authors:

Since the early 1990s there have been sweeping changes in school discipline policies and practices. Schools across the U.S. have tightened their security practices and increased the punishments they give to students …. It is now common to find armed police officers, drug-sniffing dogs, surveillance cameras, and zero-tolerance policies in all types of schools and all areas of the U.S. Existing research documents several problems with these new school discipline and security practices, including: the increasing marginalization of poor students and youth of color …, unnecessary denial of future educational opportunities due to suspension and expulsion …, and increases in the numbers of students who are formally prosecuted in the juvenile and criminal justice systems (known as the “school-to-prison pipeline”)  …. This body of research consistently finds large discrepancies in punishment rates between white youth and youth of color, where African American and Hispanic American students are far more likely than whites to be punished, even when controlling for self-reported rates of misbehavior.

The authors cite our work on how schools that serve low-income and minority students suppress civic engagement. They then use a federal longitudinal dataset to test the effects of school suspensions on voting once people reach early adulthood. They find a pronounced suppressive impact, which they explain as follows:

Following prior research, we speculate that the observed negative effect of suspension is because suspension short-circuits dialogue and student involvement; it removes a student from the school rather than responding constructively and therapeutically to problematic behavior. Research on suspension finds that it is administered in ways that alienate students from the school and from the school’s authority structure, leading them to view school staff as unfair, arbitrary, and uncaring.

It is possible that the most important reforms we could make to enhance civic engagement would not involve exciting new programs of civic education, but rather repealing widespread policies that suppress the political engagement of our least advantaged students.

a philosophy of civic renewal

In lieu of a blog post by me, here is a profile of me by my colleague Luke Phelan. It is also a brief summary of the more philosophical and theoretical aspects of my forthcoming book–and an excuse to share the book’s cover. …

“Strategy is as intellectually challenging as empirical research and moral argument, but it’s much less studied, taught, and integrated,” said Peter Levine, Tisch College director of research and director of CIRCLE.

Levine lays out his vision for the importance of strategy in his book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America, forthcoming from the Oxford University Press.  He spoke about his ideas at the Philosophy & Civic Engagement symposium.  The symposium was organized to celebrate Levine’s recent appointment as the Lincoln-Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and his secondary appointment as a research professor in the School of Arts & Sciences philosophy department.

“Broadly, civic engagement is in decline,” said Levine.  “We’ve lost the structures that recruit, educate, and permit people to engage effectively as citizens.”

However, Levine says we also live in a period of remarkable civic innovation.

“There are at least one million Americans at work right now on sophisticated and locally effective forms of civic engagement,” he said. “People are motivated to work together on public problems, but policies frustrate the best kinds of engagement.  What’s needed are strategies to change those policies.”

Philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, has a special role in shaping those strategies and defining good citizenship.

“Moral concepts are indispensable,” said Levine.  “Test scores are a good example.  Research might show that smaller class sizes raise test scores, but it can’t tell you if those tests measure something valuable, or if the cost to hire more teachers and build more classrooms is worth paying, or if the state has the right to raise the necessary revenues.  Those are value judgments, and civic engagement makes our value judgments wiser.”

Levine argues that the fundamental reason for the kinds of civic engagement that Tisch College promotes and that CIRCLE studies is to strengthen Americans’ moral reasoning and our capacity to solve social problems.

“Civil society functions best when many kinds of people bring their experiences into a common conversation, and then take what they’ve learned back to their work, in an iterative cycle,” he said.  “If individuals constantly rely on the same small number of foundational beliefs, it quickly becomes impossible for them to converse or engage. It’s easier to talk to someone with many interests, commitments, and ideas, because each of those is a point of contact, like an organic molecule with lots of surfaces where other molecules can bond.”

Rather than understanding moral reasoning as a linear sequence of steps, Levine envisions it as a network that connects nodes of concrete data and abstract values in webs of associations and configurations, tied together by implications and influences.

For example, you may have a node that “love is good.” However, love can be wrong or can lead to tragedy, as in Romeo and Juliet. Levine argues that our minds are flexible enough to manage the complex meanings and associations that come with value-heavy terms like “love.”  We have the capacity to route around conflicting assumptions.

“A strong network does not rest on a single node,” he said.  “Its many pathways allow many routes from one node to the next.  Yet, in real functioning networks, all the nodes do not bear equal importance: the most vital 20% carry 80% of the traffic.  That’s true for the Internet, the brain, and, I think, civil society.  A moral mind works like a robust network.”

Levine thinks that this network model of the moral mind captures both how deeply interconnected we are, and how social our processes of reasoning are.

“Each person’s network is at least slightly different from everyone else’s,” he said, “but any two networks share at least some of the same nodes.  So we can think of the whole community as one elaborate interpersonal moral network, full of tension as well as consensus.  Civic engagement is a process of enriching and enhancing that shared network.”

For Levine, civic engagement is most valuable when deliberation (talking and learning about public matters) is connected to work and making things, particularly collaborative efforts that produce things of public value.  Talking and working together forges relationships that he calls “scarce but renewable sources of energy and power.”

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For assembles evidence that this kind of engagement, although waning in America, actually solves social problems. The book concludes with strategies for civic renewal.

Robinson Jeffers, Hurt Hawks

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Robinson Jeffers’ son kept a wounded hawk as a pet for a few weeks in the 1920s. Jeffers wrote part 1 of this poem as a complete work before he killed the bird, adding part 2 later. It is famous for the line, “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.” Since he did shoot the hawk, Jeffers is either very sorry about what he did or he doesn’t much care for human life.

Part 1 is descriptive and relatively impersonal. There is no first-person verb and no report of the narrator’s relationship to the bird. We are addressed (as “you communal people” who have forgotten “the wild God of the world”). We have access to the hawk’s inner life, knowing what he dreams of and what god he follows. The hawk does not understand us. I think “game without talons” refers to the food that the hawk is offered by his human captors, without his having to hunt it. The bird doesn’t grasp the meaning of the gift or the people’s intentions; he knows the meat by its bare description. “There is game without talons” is free indirect discourse, the hawk’s perspective taking over the narration.

Part 2 introduces the narrator’s voice and relates how he acted, in three steps: “We fed him for six weeks. … I gave him freedom. … I gave him the lead gift. …” Now the relationship between man and bird is central. The man tries to liberate the hawk, but you can’t give  freedom to another creature. The bird returns asking for death. The man does what he is asked. At the end, he holds the dead bird, reduced to a soft object.

This poem has been criticized as didactic. In verse, you are supposed to show, not tell–or so the modernists insisted–but this poem makes general points in the voice of Robinson Jeffers. But is the author serious about the views he expresses here? For instance, did the hawk really ask for death? (Does a bird understand the concept of death as applied to itself, and can it know that a human being might put it out of its misery?) Is there actually a wild God that is merciful to the weak but not to the arrogant?

If the answer to any of these questions is negative, the poem starts to look much more complicated. We do not know what the bird thinks, only how it behaves. We have the testimony of the man about what he has seen and done, but we cannot take any of that for granted. The man has imputed ideas to the hawk and become the god of the bird’s small world. He is in complete control of what we know, just as he controls the animal’s life.

I read the poem not as a didactic statement about nature and life, but as as the unreliable report of a narrator who is unsure whether he should have killed his son’s pet hawk. That narrator is not necessarily Robinson Jeffers. We know that the poet really shot a hawk, but he might have done so without much emotion and derived the idea for a fictional story from the event. All we have is the story with its shifting, partial perspectives and ambiguities.

(By the way: why “Hurt Hawks” instead of “Hurt Hawk”? Why is the wild God capitalized?)

let’s hear from the Tea Party 501(c)4s

Newt Gingrich tells NPR, “a [House] subcommittee … should invite every single tea party, conservative, patriot group that was messed over by the IRS — every single one of them — to come in and testify, so that they build this deadening record of how many different people were having their rights abused by this administration.”

That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? It would show that the IRS used partisan search terms to identify organizations for scrutiny, which is deeply problematic. It would also reveal what all these applicants for tax-exempt status were really up to. We know they sought 501(c)4 status, which, under the Internal Revenue Code, is reserved for “civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” Under IRS regulations, “The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.” So it would be very interesting to ask representatives of the Tea Party groups, under oath, whether they directly or indirectly participated in or intervened in any political campaigns. For example, it would be interesting to ask that question of former Senator Norm Coleman, head of American Action Network, a 501(c)4 that spent $30.6 million on elections, and of Karl Rove, head of American Crossroads GPS, also a 501(c)4, which spent $71 million. If they acknowledged that they were involved in elections (!), it would be interesting to follow up with a question about how they answered this question on their 501(c)4 application forms, which they signed “under the penalties of perjury”:

Has the organization spent or does it plan to spend any money attempting to influence the selection, nomination, election, or appointment of any person to any Federal, state, or local public office or to an office in a political organizations? If “Yes,” explain in detail and list the amounts spent or to be spent in each case.

I fully acknowledge that the IRS regulations governing tax-exempt status are a tattered cloth, and left-leaning groups also take full advantage of the many holes. If I chaired the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, I would call progressive groups as well as Tea Partiers to testify. But if the Republicans in charge of the Committee want to call only the ostensible victims of IRS political bias, let’s indeed hear from Mssrs. Rove, Coleman, et al. about their “social welfare” activities.

In all, tax-exempt 501(c)4s spent $254,279,733 to influence the 2012 election. Members of Congress who were actually interested in oversight and legislation would be eager to find out how and why they did this, where they got their money, and how they presented themselves to the IRS as organizations that did not participate in or influence elections.

lowering the voting age to 16

Takoma Park, MD has lowered the voting age for municipal elections to 16. Lowell, MA, is working to allow 17-year-olds to vote, and there’s a pending bill in California that would make that change statewide.

I am in favor. Strong evidence suggests that when students are explicitly taught about voting and elections in their high school classes, they are more likely to vote and become informed voters once they reach voting age. I think schools will be more likely to teach about elections if most of their juniors are eligible to vote, and the impact of the lessons may be greater if students can put the information into practice right away.

No evidence suggests that 17-year-olds are less knowledgeable about politics or less responsible than older voters, and in fact there is the potential for current high school students to be particularly well informed because they would be studying social studies and civics around election time.

In the Washington Post, columnist Petula Dvorak has a piece entitled “Takoma Park’s new 16- and 17-year-old voters push a Cheech and Chong agenda,” in which she quotes people-on-the street saying things like, “This is the enfranchisement of Beavis and Butt-head.” Dvorak is getting lots of flack for the article and has been responding politely, so I don’t want to pile on or make her reporting the issue. But there are substantive questions here.

Like the people Dvorak interviewed, many Americans are cynical about youth as political actors. Practically every piece we publish attracts comments that mock young voters or assume a Democratic partisan agenda behind efforts to boost their engagement. Of course, if one is cynical about voters in general, that opens a worthwhile conversation. But young voters aren’t Beavis and Butt-head. Their top issues are economic. I have never seen marijuana or other behavioral issues attract significant interest as political priorities. Many (45% of the respondents in a recent Harvard poll of 18-29s) think that they lack sufficient information to vote–and they tend to disenfranchise themselves. In other words, Beavis and Butt-head will not turn out. A reform like Takoma Park’s is very unlikely to produce a mass of youth participating in local elections, but the ones who take advantage of the new right will probably be highly substantive and idealistic young people. Think of policy nerds rather than Cheech and Chong–if you have to use stereotypes at all.

In any case, it’s a worthy experiment, very well intentioned, and we will see what happens.