Category Archives: education policy

thinking like a citizen–about schools

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In Education, Justice & Democracy, edited by Danielle S. Allen and Rob Reich, all the chapters address the topic of educational equality in the US. The section headings are “ideals,” “constraints,” and “strategies.” In a longish review essay for Theory & Research in Education, I argue that good citizens explore just these three issues whenever they consider any important topic. In fact, you might define good citizens as people who take  ideals, constraints (or, I would say, “facts”), and strategies seriously and act accordingly. However, the three issues are badly segregated in modern intellectual life, with whole disciplines given over to the assumption that one should seek value-free facts, other disciplines happy to explore values without thinking about strategies, and some professional programs focused on strategies with a narrow conception of ideals. What we call “Civic Studies” is a deliberate effort to reintegrate thinking about social concerns from a citizen’s perspective, which inevitably combines ideals, constrains, and strategies. I chose to review this volume because it exemplifies Civic Studies, although I offer some critical thoughts about parts of the book.

My review is in Theory and Research in Education, July 2015, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 235-238, or on Academia.edu.

from soft skills to agency

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I’m very pleased to see a blog post by Andy Calkins, Deputy Director of the Next Generation Learning Challenge, entitled “It’s Time to Trash the Terms ‘Non-Cogs’ and ‘Soft Skills.'”

Partly in response to the hegemony of standardized testing, some organizations and individuals have been pushing for “non-cognitive” or “soft” skills (e.g., collaboration, grit, participation) as important measures and goals of education. Theirs is a valid goal, but I agree with Calkins’ critique of the terminology. The kinds of skills that have been named “non-cognitive” actually require advanced cognition; the skills that have been labeled “soft” are, in every sense, quite hard.

But it’s not his critique of terminology that makes me recommend Calkins’ post. Rather, it’s the alternative master term that he recommends to replace “non-cog” and “soft.” Calkins chooses “agency,” which is indeed an apt word for the individual student outcomes that have been overlooked in the era of narrow assessments. Agency comprises an individual’s ability and motivation to interpret and change the world. But it is not an only individual matter. Agency has to be political (in the broadest sense), because individuals are truly effective as agents when they work together.

Thus we can say that citizens have agency; and people who exhibit agency in public contexts are citizens. Doris Sommers, who visited Tisch College earlier this week, would argue that citizenship is “cultural agency”: intentionally shaping the common world together. And Harry Boyte and Blase Scarnati write, “Agency can be understood as a form of empowerment that has conscious political dimensions, or as effective and intentional action that is conducted in diverse and open settings in order to shape the world around us.”

In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (pp. 27-8), I write:

A master question for social theory during the twentieth century was structure versus agency: whether people’s voluntary choices made any difference in politics, or whether underlying “structures” determined everything. This question divided, for example, French existentialists (who preached the value of intentional political acts) from French structuralists (who thought that political events, including major elections and revolutions, were superficial perturbations on the permanent structures below). But the question for the twenty-first century should be different: not how much impact agency has, but how that impact can be expanded. The reason to expand it is not that agency is intrinsically good. Hitler was an effective political agent. Rather, deliberate and effective human action is one necessary condition of a worthwhile human life. If there is no agency, life can have no point.

In the context of education, “agency” moves us from a purely individualistic framework to a recognition of collaboration, social capital, networks, public discourse, and other outcomes for groups and communities.

This argument is important coming from the Next Generation Learning Challenge, which is influential, hard-nosed about measures and methods, and involved with enhancing students’ success as currently measured. (For full disclosure, the NGLC funded us for a randomized experimental test of iCivics’ Drafting Board module, which we found to be effective.) It would be easy and unremarkable for me–a civics and democracy guy–to endorse agency. For the NGLC to choose it as a master term is much more valuable.

See also: “from the achievement gap to empowerment“

why we miseducate children to think of values as opinions

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In “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts,” Justin P. McBrayer observes that his second-grade son has been taught to distinguish between facts (which can be “tested or proven”) and opinions (which are just what “someone thinks, feels, or believes”).

In the category of “opinions” are placed all moral claims, including “Copying homework assignments is wrong,” and “All men are created equal.” Presumably, if a child says it is wrong to kill someone for the fun of it, that is labeled an opinion.

McBrayer notes that the same school that teaches his son to view moral claims as opinions also insists that it is really is wrong to cheat and really important to protect other students’ rights. I assume that the school not only proclaims these ideas explicitly but also builds them into its “hidden curriculum” of norms, expectations, punishments, and rewards. By teaching moral values while defining them as opinions, the school contradicts itself.

McBrayer has not just discovered an educational fad or a politically controversial agenda being pushed lately by a small group of adults under our noses. The fact/opinion distinction, as it is taught to his son, is a troubling hallmark of our age.

For instance, education is deeply influenced by standardized testing. What is tested will determine what McBrayer’s son learns in school for the next decade. I have been involved in writing exams, such as the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Civics. This is an excellent instrument, supported by impressive science. Much skillful effort is devoted to identifying questions that yield good statistical results. Proposed questions that produce anomalous scores get cut. Based on their scores, the higher-performing students are labeled as “proficient” or “advanced.”

But each item on the NAEP is fundamentally a value-judgment. Should a citizen know the text of the Second Amendment, how many votes it takes to pass a law, or the history of racist violence in the US? Is a young person who understands half of these topics a “proficient” citizen, or “below basic”?

There are no scientific answers to those questions. They are matters of value, on which the entire edifice of testing rests. Yet all the official discourse about standardized tests skirts value questions and dwells on the statistics.

A Nazi civics test could be scientifically valid and reliable. It could work beautifully to identify young Nazis. It would be evil, whereas our standardized tests are at least reasonably decent—but the difference is not scientific. It is a moral matter.

Going beyond tests, the whole educational system that serves Prof. McBrayer’s son is built on techniques and practices scrutinized by science. The No Child Left Behind Act (still the governing federal law on k-12 education), favors forms of instruction supported by “scientifically-based research.” Randomized experiments count as the most scientific.

Thus, for example, experiments endorsed by the federal government show that paying teenagers to stay in school can cut their dropout rates. Another approach that also seems to lower dropout consists of “weekly after-school discussion groups … on personal, family, and social issues,” such as those arranged by a program called Twelve Together.

These very different programs are both presented as proven by science. But it is not self-evident that completing high school is a valid target, especially given the kinds of schools we actually provide. To identify graduation as the goal is a judgment. If such judgments are mere opinions, then there is nothing more to be said about them. But surely we can reason about the ends of education.

We should also reason about means. Could paying teenagers to stay in school “work” (boosting their graduation rates) yet still be wrong? Could it be an example of treating human beings as objects rather than autonomous subjects?

Finally, nothing just “works.” Ideas that are ready to be scientifically evaluated have always been designed, advocated, funded, implemented, tweaked, and refined. That implies effort by teachers or other front-line practitioners, administrators, and social scientists. A wide range of ideas can be made to work if the investment is sufficient and skillful.

But what we should invest in is a value question. We could start by paying teenagers to stay in school and work to make that a highly effective program. Or we could start by teaching them philosophy and refine our methods until that keeps them in school. Which approach we should try to make work is again not a scientific question but a moral one. All the scientific data on “effective practices” follow from our fundamental moral choices.

I have used educational examples here to connect to McBrayer’s article, but the same modes of thinking will be found in health, environmental protection, labor—indeed, all domains of policy and practice. A simplistic fact/opinion distinction influences sophisticated scholars and policymakers as much as 2nd graders and their teachers.

To be sure, budding social scientists are taught that values matter; they influence people’s behaviors and actions, and they influence social science itself. But this influence is treated as a problem. In the “limitations” section at the end of a scholarly article, the authors may confess that they have a “bias” in favor of certain values.

But moral commitments are not limitations; they are preconditions of decent scholarship. The difference between valuable and harmful social science is that the former manifests good values.

Science has achieved prodigious successes in understanding and controlling nature. It can also debunk certain assertions that are morally problematic, for example, that white people are biologically superior. But science cannot demonstrate most moral claims.

For instance: every child in second grade has the same moral value and importance. Looked at from a scientific perspective, that statement makes no sense because value is not a scientific idea. Or perhaps the statement is scientifically false, because science translates “value” into something like capacity or functioning, and not every second-grader does function at an equivalent level. We can try to equalize their capacity by devoting care and resources to the children who need it most—but science provides no reason to do that.

The influence of a simplistic fact/opinion distinction is not the fault of philosophers, who have always viewed the topic as complex. But it is philosophy’s responsibility to challenge the distinction that is so prevalent today. Otherwise, not only will we teach second-graders to view morality as mere opinion, but we will build massive social institutions on the same untenable premise.

civic education and deeper learning

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Today, Jobs for the Future (JFF) a national nonprofit that advocates for all youth to gain the skills they need to succeed in the economy, releases a paper entitled “Civic Education and Deeper Learning” by me and CIRCLE Deputy Director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg. This paper was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as part of its Deeper Learning Initiative. It was discussed at a Harvard Graduate School of Education event: “More than College Readiness: Engaging Students in Work and Civic Life.”

The Hewlett Deeper Learning initiative envisions k-12 students “using their knowledge and skills in a way that prepares them for real life.” When deeper lear`ning occurs, students “are mastering core academic content, like reading, writing, math, and science, while learning how to think critically, collaborate, communicate effectively, direct their own learning, and believe in themselves (known as an ‘academic mindset’).” Deeper Learning should occur in all disciplines and should encourage interdisciplinary learning.

In “Civic Education and Deeper Learning,” we argue that k-12 civic education must be strengthened to meet these goals. The best civic education exemplifies deeper learning, but many students receive more superficial and less interactive forms of civics. For its part, the deeper learning agenda must encompass civic education, because among the topics that students must learn to think critically about, discuss, and collaborate on are social and political issues.

We argue that aligning civic education with deeper learning points the way to pedagogical, curricular, and policy innovations that will be overlooked if we think of civic education as merely the acquisition of basic facts about the political system—the view that seems to drive such policies as requiring students to pass multiple-choice civics tests.

the monumental task that confronts a high-stakes testing state

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Let’s say you don’t especially trust teachers to assess their own students, because their ratings can be inconsistent and biased. So you want to use validated and standardized assessments to evaluate students, schools, and teachers. Let’s say, furthermore, that your state authorizes about 4,000 different courses, from kindergarten through 12th grade. (A subject like science in 3rd grade counts as a “course,” by the way.) Each course encompasses many different content areas; for instance, an American history course covers the Revolution, the Civil War, civil rights, and so on. For each topic in each course, you need assessment “items” (questions or prompts of various kinds). You need more than a few items for each topic; one question does not yield a valid score. You can’t repeat items without allowing kids to cheat by looking at old tests. And you will be testing frequently–more than once per year in each course if you consider the need for make-up tests and practice tests.

The upshot is that you will need at least several hundred thousand assessment items to make the whole system work. See Florida’s Race to the Top Assessments page for some of the documents on which my estimate is based. Thus …

  1. You face an expensive undertaking, and if you skimp, you will get poor items, written by people who are not sophisticated about the content or well trained in writing assessments. Pilot-testing items costs even more money.
  2. Even if you spend enough money, writing several hundred thousand items is a human enterprise. Error is inevitable. Some proportion of your items will be flatly incorrect or invalid in other ways. Many will be too easy or too hard, or inadequate to assess the desired skills and knowledge.

On its own, this is not an argument against high-stakes testing. The best argument in favor is that measuring pretty well is better than not measuring at all. But the cost and frailty of the whole system must certainly be taken into consideration. After all, the power of the state stands behind these assessments. If a kid cannot move on to 8th grade, or if a teacher loses his job because of test scores, that is a state decision. I think people may reasonably view it as almost a juridical process.

In the corporate context, employers are always assessing employees, and vice-versa. It is not OK if an employer’s assessments are biased or arbitrary, but using standardized measures may at least reduce inevitable bias, and the market does offer a theoretical solution to injustice (the employee finds a different job). In contrast, if a state moves from not making high-stakes assessments at all to doing so badly, it’s like imposing a new juridical regime that makes arbitrary decisions. I see a serious threat to justice.