Monthly Archives: March 2009

Arne Duncan on schools as community centers

I happen to be flying to Chicago today for a meeting on young people and civic engagement. The Chicago Public Schools were led by Arne Duncan until President Obama made him Secretary of Education. Many people who want to elevate democratic (or civic) education from its lowly status in the Department have hopes for Secretary Duncan. He was, for example, supportive of the Mikva Challenge, a great program that enlists Chicago teenagers in constructive political action and teaches them academic and political skills. In the clip below, he eloquently defends the idea of the school as a community center–also a concept with roots in Chicago, the city of John Dewey and Jane Addams.

I got this clip from the excellent Coalition for Community Schools, which has landed the Secretary for its conference.

an accelerating cascade of pearls (on Galileo and Tintoretto)

This is a detail of Tintoretto’s “Tarquin and Lucretia” (1578-1580), which belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago but is now in Boston for the astounding exhibition entitled “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice.” (Probably never before have so many comparable paintings by these competitors been hung together.)

In the detail, pearls are strewn across Lucretia’s clothes; Tarquin has just broken the strand. The spheres are caught on their way downward, spaced at growing intervals.

People have always known that objects move, and have always depicted motion in still images–since the ancient cave paintings. But I think Tintoretto’s painting may reflect a new way of thinking about motion and space. The image represents a precise instant at which each pearl would occupy a different and predictable location because of the mathematical laws of nature. The objects are frozen, but their locations allow us to infer their movement.

Galileo revolutionized science by claiming that nature was a book written in the language of mathematics. Tintoretto painted Galileo’s portrait from life in 1605-7, which shows that the two geniuses knew each other. By 1638, Galileo had proved (either in a real experiment on the Tower of Pisa, or in a thought-experiment) that objects of different weights would fall at the same accelerating rate. And forty years later, Tintoretto was interested enough in this Galilean conception of time and space that he painted pearls accelerating down Lucretia’s chest. It was another thought-experiment.

In Tiepolo’s “St. Dominic Instituting the Rosary” (1737-9), the rosary itself plummets at high speed from an enormous sky painted on the ceiling of the Gesuati Church in Venice. That is an excellent example of baroque theatricality, but not a unique one. By then, Europeans automatically thought of motion in Galilean terms. Tintoretto was perhaps the first to paint that way.

making tests

I’m at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ, helping them to cook up a test. There are many cooks at work on this particular broth. In fact, what strikes me most about the process of designing a national student assessment is the enormous complexity of the process. There are laws, policies, rules, budgets, curricular standards and objectives, “items” (i.e., questions of various types), answer keys, trainings and guides for scorers, data from preliminary laboratory tests of items, pilot tests of whole exams, statistical results from the pilot tests, revised items and instruments, final results, statistical scales, summary measures, and reports. There are content experts, item-writers, statisticians, psychometricians, scorers, trainers, trainers-of-trainers, and various layers of contractors and government agencies and reviews.

If you are prone to distrust or dislike pencil-and-paper exams (and I understand and respect those arguments), all this apparatus may seem like a bureaucratic and technocratic nightmare. Indeed, any test involves countless value-judgments, guesses, and compromises, often buried in technical or administrative jargon. There is something extremely “Weberian” about a government-sponsored exam or assessment. It is a classic example of the effort to standardize and measure in order to control and improve.

On the other hand, if you are not directly acquainted with the process of test-design at the federal level, you might not realize how many different people struggle to develop and implement tests that reflect ethical principles of fairness, reliability, relevance, and social significance. The result is, if nothing else, the product of a lot of hard work.

the administration’s civic engagement agenda

This is a very interesting report of a meeting convened by Beth Noveck, the new director of the White House open government initiative. Participants included many of the best scholars and practitioners in the field, and the discussion summary is available for all to see. Beth apparently began by saying, “We’re looking for ideas and recommendations on how to create a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government.”

Meanwhile, the civilian service agenda continues to move forward. There was money for AmeriCorps in the stimulus package, and the GIVE Act (HR 1388) is moving in the House. [Update at 5:30 pm: it passed today.] This is the equivalent of the Senate’s Kennedy-Hatch Serve America Act. It would dramatically enhance the quality and quantity of service opportunities and would direct federally-funded service toward three major social objectives: carbon reduction, health care, and high school dropout prevention.

I see these as two important planks of a “civic platform.” I have spent considerable amounts of my own energies in support of transparency and online engagement, on one hand, and service, on the other. In fact, my first national summit on service was in 1988, when I was an undergraduate; and my first full-time job was at Common Cause, where I worked on disclosure issues.

But I think these two planks are inadequate on their own. They will enlist specific subcategories of Americans in civic engagement. Certain people will get very excited about commenting on federal policy in interactive websites; others will spend a year of their lives tutoring or building houses. The vast majority of citizens, however, will do neither. Besides, neither commenting/discussing nor direct service exhausts the types of work that active citizens should do. In the worst case, the active commentators online will develop ideas that no policymaker can enact, and the AmeriCorps volunteers will provide direct assistance without addressing deep social problems. Both groups may be discouraged.

Other important planks should include:

  • National (and also local) discussions of issues that involve recruited citizens who represent the population as a whole.
  • Training programs and conferences that help federal civil servants to collaborate day-to-day with community-based groups.
  • Changes in key federal policies such as the Federal Advisory Committee Act to encourage and improve events like public hearings.
  • Grants programs within the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, and the National Science Foundation that promote citizen work.
  • Greater focus on the acquisition of civic skills in the US Department of Education and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (lately known as NCLB).

Finally, I would describe all the workers who are paid from stimulus funds–including the majority who work in the private sector–as active citizens and would call on them to discuss, plan, collaborate, and serve.