Monthly Archives: January 2010

class, culture, and education

I am writing about the tendency of social problems to interlock, so that each problem can be seen as a symptom of the next one. I think I will take the Washington, DC schools as my starting point–mainly because I know them pretty well.

Educational outcomes in DC are very poor: less than half of public school students graduate on time. Spending per student is quite high (approaching $13,000), but the actual services delivered at the school level are worth much less than that. Many of the city’s schools are chaotic and sporadically violent. There are excellent teachers–much more skillful and dedicated than I would be–but the system as a whole seems dysfunctional.

Two experiments are underway. First, one third of the city’s students are now in charter schools, which are independent of the central bureaucracy. Second, the controversial chancellor, Michelle Rhee (who sweeps her symbolic broom in photographs for national news magazines) aims to clean up the bureaucracy itself. One strategy uses decentralization and choice; the other, efficient central management.

I hope one or the other solution works, but I am concerned about how embedded the schools are in broader problems. Thirteen of every 1,000 babies born in the District die in infancy, twice the rate for the United States as a whole. More than one third of the city’s children are obese. The death rate for teenagers is more than twice that of the United States as a whole, and the violent crime rate is more than three times as high. Each of these problems can be seen as a symptom of the other ones.

There is also a question of motivations, which can lead to different diagnoses. The opening point is to ask why as student (under very difficult and often demeaning circumstances) should align his or her efforts with what the schools expect.

There was an answer half a century ago. In 1950, just as today, more than half of 19-year-olds in the District had not graduated from high school. But the city then housed 35,000 industrial workers, including more than one thousand each of machinists, typesetters, and automobile mechanics. Washington was not an industrial city (compared, for example, to nearby Baltimore, where 30,000 men used to work in the Sparrow Point steel mill alone). Because of the federal government, jobs like “stenographer” and “office boy” provided more positions in DC than factories did. Young people could obtain these jobs without college diplomas–sometimes without graduating from high school.

Because most adults held working-class jobs, there was a general atmosphere of order and respect for authority in the community. It was easy for young people to envision concretely the benefits they would obtain from completing school. There was crime and academic failure, but it was marginal, not prominent. Most adults would end up collaborating in teams of other people of similar background, with distant, middle-class authority figures keeping an eye on them. Work life was thus a continuation of classroom life, with foremen and office managers replacing teachers and principals. Youth culture reinforced a sense of solidarity, compliance, and limited trust for authority. Skills were concrete and could be learned on the job.

Today, only about three percent of the city’s jobs are classified as “construction, extraction, maintenance, and repair,” whereas more than half are “management or professional.” If you obtain skills for the business and professional world and credentials to demonstrate those skills, you have wide opportunities in DC and elsewhere. Sex, skin color, and age are less profound obstacles than they once were. But it is a long way from a DC school to the professional world; the curriculum is much to easy to prepare students for college, and there are few role models in the community. Thus it is pretty much unrealistic that most teenagers will be self-disciplined enough to delay gratification and get themselves through school. Even if they do, the benefits will be hard to see. If most other students basically doubt the social contract and do not want to participate, it is difficult for any individual student to do comply.

Culture and class strongly determine educational progress. In her brilliant book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Annette Lareau argues that middle-class parents, without regard to race, use a strategy of “concerted cultivation” to raise their children. They devote almost every waking minute of the day to giving their kids educational experiences. The children are very heavily scheduled with organized after-school activities, to the point that they lead hectic lives with much rushed traveling and many overlapping or conflicting appointments. Even ordinary conversations are opportunities to develop kids’ cognitive and language skills. Parents use persuasion and negotiation to influence their children’s behavior–a laborious and slow way to get them to comply, but one that constantly challenges them mentally. Kids talk as equals with adults, including teachers and physicians. In Washington neighborhoods like Georgetown and Cleveland Park, “concerted cultivation” can be observed on every street.

Working-class and poor parents, on the other hand, attempt “the accomplishment of natural growth.” They are just as loving and concerned as middle-class parents, but they are much less likely to arrange activities, to teach verbal skills, and to negotiate. They protect their kids’ health and safety and then leave them to be kids. They defer to schools and medical professionals to diagnose and address any problems that arise.

Lareau evidently likes all the kids in her study; she depicts them all sensitively and sympathetically. Nevertheless, her findings support strong and perhaps unexpected comparative value-judgments. The poor and working-class kids are in many ways more attractive than the middle-class ones. They obey their parents’ (relatively infrequent) instructions without whining–which is the bad side of negotiation. They are creative and skillful in organizing their own activities, including complex games. They are almost never bored. They fight with their siblings much less than middle-class children do–in fact, they rely on their relatives for support and entertainment, and enjoy one another’s company. They play happily in groups of mixed ages. Their parents like them to have free time because they don’t want them exposed (yet) to the daily grind of adult life. An attentive observer can find just such behavior in the working class neighborhoods of Washington.

In contrast, the middle-class kids are immediately bored when not provided with organized activities. They compete for attention with their siblings. (After all, when Mom is at brother’s soccer practice, she’s not doing anything for sister.) They constantly bargain with adults, including authority figures. They have a pervasive sense of entitlement to expensive goods and individualized services. They lack experience working with others of different ages or solving problems without adult intervention. Again, each subject is a likable human being, but many aspects of middle-class family childhood are unappealing.

Although the middle-class kids are less attractive than the poor and working-class children, their parents’ investment will probably pay off for them. The children of Georgetown and Cleveland Park have precocious skills of verbal expression and negotiation, time-management, and public performance that will serve them well in the white-collar world. They consider themselves entitled to excellent services and demand it from adults and institutions. Their expectations and behavior are perfectly in synch with those of middle-class professionals (teachers, coaches, and physicians), who respond to their needs. As kids, they are tired and quarrelsome. As grownups, they will prosper.

In Washington, DC, middle-class families that use a strategy of concerted cultivation almost exclusively send their own children to private schools or move to the suburbs once their kids each the middle grades. The students who are left in the public school are being raised according to “the accomplishment of natural growth,” in a setting where the “natural” outcome is poverty.

This is just an example of the complex entanglements of culture, class (and also race) with public problems and institutions. It all makes me believe that only social movements–not the reform and restructuring of institutions–can really make a difference.

addressing homelessness

Today I was with 75 formerly homeless young women, mostly mothers, who analyzed the causes of homelessness and developed action plans to address it. (I was one of several facilitators of their discussions.) They were struck by the fact that the state of Massachusetts spends $47,000 per year for each family in a shelter, for a total shelter budget of $113 million last year. But the average housing voucher that allows the recipients to stay in their own home costs the state just $7,200 per year. It would seem that by paying for permanent housing, the state could spread $113 million around a lot more poor people and improve their welfare. (Staying in shelters is linked to educational, health, and mental-health problems.) Recognizing this situation, the federal stimulus bill provides money for “Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing” as an alternative to shelter.

The women I worked with were very well-informed and smart about analyzing this issue. They saw various aspects and problems–and they asked tough questions about who benefits from the existing system, which they find indefensible. But I have my own theory about why the current system exists and will be hard to change.

Entering a shelter is something people try very hard to avoid. That puts a lid on how many people seek shelter–only the very desperate. On the other hand, many people would like–and, in my opinion, deserve–$7,200 in subsidies. If people could get subsidies by demonstrating need and a risk of homelessness, lots of people would qualify, and the state would have high costs. Instead, we are willing to spend $47,000 for each family that ends up in shelter, knowing that it is such an unpleasant experience that people will do anything they can to avoid it.

It’s exactly like the old workhouses of Victorian England–you have a right to food and shelter, but you have to suffer and be degraded to get it.

the French Encylopedia vs. Wikipedia

L’Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751-1772) was a major contribution to Enlightenment civil society. Not only did it contain much knowledge (and maybe a dose of wisdom), but it specifically expanded civil rights and liberties by promoting classical liberal positions contrary to absolute monarchism, the army, and the church. It had 28 main authors, brilliant philosophes including Voltaire and Diderot, most of whom were amateurs in the sense that they were not paid to write–but they were a privileged and exceptional few. By my calculation, a new copy of the multi-volume first edition (beautifully bound in leather and illustrated) cost about as much money (456 livres) as an unskilled laborer earned in 16 months of work. The French Encyclopedia included many ground-breaking, highly original and even iconoclastic articles that changed disciplines and are still read today

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has about 318 times more articles and roughly 85,000 active contributors. It is completely free for anyone with Internet access, and it expands freedom not because of a particular editorial commitment to liberal values, but because it is a massive, uncensored, public forum. Although it was set up for traditional encyclopedia articles, users now create live news pages as well. For example, as Clay Shirky notes, the terrorist bombings in London in 2005 were tracked in real time on a Wikipedia page created within minutes of the first explosion.

Wikipedia announces, “Visitors do not need specialized qualifications to contribute. Wikipedia’s intent is to have articles that cover existing knowledge, not create new knowledge (original research). This means that people of all ages and cultural and social backgrounds can write Wikipedia articles. Most of the articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by clicking the edit this page link. Anyone is welcome to add information, cross-references, or citations, as long as they do so within Wikipedia’s editing policies and to an appropriate standard.”

Wikipedia and other peer-produced forms of knowledge demonstrate that sheer numbers of people can generate knowledge of great value. The value that they create is different from the contributions of the philosophes who wrote the Encyclopédie. I’m not sure there is a common coin with which we can compare the two, yet Wikipedia is certainly worthy of being named alongside the Encyclopédie. As proof, consider that the Wikipedia article about the Encyclopédie is itself a really good read.

There are also some interesting similarities. Although editors of the French Encylopedia chose authors, and Wikipedia is wide open, a Power Law applies in both cases–the most prolific 10% of authors contribute the majority of the content. In the former case, a man called “Louis de Jaucourt … wrote 17,266 articles, or about 8 per day between 1759 and 1765.” He sounds much like one of the dedicated enthusiasts who produces a vast supply of Wikipedia entries and keeps the whole thing alive.

here comes everybody?

Over the winter break, I finally read Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Its virtues include good stories, a clear and accessible–rather aphoristic–style, relevant application of social theories (including Coase’s theory of the firm, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and social capital) and balanced value-judgments. The basic phenomenon that interests Shirky is the dramatic fall in the cost and difficulty of organizing groups. Shirky recognizes that this change is not all for the good, but he argues that its effects are already profound. “Our principal challenge is not deciding where we want to go, but rather in staying upright as we go there. The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change, and more like an event, something that has already happened. As a result, the important questions aren’t about whether these tools will spread and reshape society, but rather how they do so” (p. 307-8).

I get the theoretical argument and find the examples persuasive, even exciting. But I am still struck by how little change has actually occurred so far. Maybe we are in a formative period and about to see some really big shifts. I don’t see them yet.

Easy group formation should allow people to create valuable goods without organizing themselves into firms with costly overhead (HR departments, legal offices, executive suites). We should therefore see economic growth, with the engine being informal networks, like the programmers who create and refine Linux or the volunteers who build Wikipedia. Indeed, these are valuable and fascinating goods. Yet the last decade was one of the worst in the economic history of the United States. And the chief corporate rival of Linux, Microsoft, remains the third most profitable company in the whole country, with $17.68 billion in profits in 2008. I suppose you could argue that we don’t count GDP correctly because goods like Wikipedia aren’t priced. But it’s evident that the economy is worse off, overall, than it was 10 years ago.

Easy group formation should have political effects; it should weaken authoritarian regimes and expand freedom of association, even under duress. One of Shirky’s examples is the campaign to bring down President Alexander Lukashenko, dictator of Belarus. Its most remarkable and innovative feature has been its use of flashmobs. People assemble for harmless activities like eating ice cream, and the government arrests them because it cannot tolerate organized assemblies. That is a fascinating development–but Lukashenko is still firmly in charge four years after the flashmobs began in Belarus. I devoutly hope that the Green Revolution in Iran will be more successful, but if it is, I think the cause will be a split in the clergy, not just the availability of Twitter and Flickr.

Easy group formation should have sociological effects, making people feel less isolated and more trusting. Yet according to the General Social Survey, the proportion of Americans who feel they can generally trust others fell from 46% in 1972 to 32% in 2008. The decline has been fairly smooth and steady, and 2008 was the worst year on record.

The one really profound change that has already happened is the decline of metropolitan daily newspapers in the United States, caused by Craiglist and eBay. That’s a perfect illustration of Shirky’s thesis: individuals have been able to avoid the overhead costs (and profit margins) of the newspaper industry by selling directly to one another. So far, the net effects of that change seem bad to me–we have lost our main way of financing journalism. I can well imagine that we will end in a better place, with news peer-produced by citizens. Again, I don’t believe we’re there yet, and progress seems far from assured.

this blog turns seven

My first blog post was on January 8, 2003. Since then, I have rather obsessively posted every single work day (except when we’ve been on family vacations). The archives of this blog have accumulated 1,377 posts and 969,405 words.

I try not to be self-referential, but once a year, on my “blogday,” I reflect a little about this forum. In 2009, the big change was my decision to have each post automatically reprinted on Facebook (and, later, tweeted on Twitter). I’ve enjoyed the Facebook feed because it’s an unobtrusive way to tell people about new posts; and then it’s easy for them to comment or show that they “like” something I’ve written. I now direct people who want to comment on my blog to my Facebook page. I also waste a whole lot of my own time on Facebook ….

I don’t think the content of my blog changed appreciatively during its seventh year. I wrote somewhat less about electoral politics and young voters, because there was no national election. I still tried to serve up a mix of news from the field of civic engagement, reflections on current events, some philosophy, some arts, and a bit of light verse.

In 2009, there were 83,800 visits to the main blog page. That doesn’t count people who read the blog on Facebook or via RSS feeds. The number of visitors was almost exactly the same as in 2008, but there are huge seasonal variations. I know from seven full years of experience that I always get many more visitors in the spring and fall than in the winter and summer. November is typically the peak month, especially when an election draws people interested in youth voters. In November 2008, there were 13,186 visits to the main page, or 440 each day. The daily average for the year 2009 was just 230.

Would-be bloggers shouldn’t seek my advice, since I’ve never built a large audience myself. But for what it’s worth, I would advise thinking about your archive as much as your current posts. After a while, you will build up quite a store of text that search engines index. If you blog about only current events, your archive will be swamped by unimaginable quantities of other people’s writing. No one finds my old posts about Bush and Kerry by Googling for those search terms. But if you blog about somewhat offbeat topics, your archive becomes a store of accessible material. I guess that 80% of visitors to my website do not look at my post of the day, but rather arrive at an old post via a web search. Of late, they have been looking for Nabokov heroines, my late friend Cole Campbell, what parents want for their children, and the Spanish Renaissance painter Juan Sánchez Cotán. I am happy to oblige such tastes.