(Phoenix, AZ) I’m here for the final stages of administering a federal educational test. That’s an immensely complicated business, with more steps and people involved than I would ever have imagined. To mention just one glimpse into the whole operation: students complete short essays that must be scored by human beings. The scorers must be hired (which requires giving them standardized tests) and then trained. The training requires a detailed scoring guide for each test item, with many examples of real students’ work. The training also requires trainers, who must be selected and trained. The trainers of the trainers, in turn, must be selected and trained. They all need guides and materials. As each group does its work, their performance is monitored by computers, and discrepancies are identified and rectified.

The guiding principles are consistency, standardization, reliability, and transparency. This is all very Weberian–it is a highly refined bureaucracy. And so it must be: test-takers and the public deserve consistency and transparency, and therefore everything must be recorded, disclosed, standardized, and tracked. Fittingly, we meet in a windowless room off a highway in suburban Arizona, surrounded by vast banks of computers. (More than 1 million individual essays will soon be scored at this center.)

The contemporary philosopher Jürgen Habermas distinguishes “system” from “lifeworld.” The system must be organized and structured along Weberian principles. The lifeworld is authentic and human, but disorganized. As my colleagues and I review real samples of student work for the purpose of creating general “system” policies, the lifeworld emerges. The scanned copies of handwritten essays contain idiosyncratic outbursts, cute misunderstandings, and wild misspellings–evidence of life that it’s our job to codify.

Habermas argues that system and lifeworld should be mediated by the “public sphere,” by open and fair discussion of values. The design and implementation of federal tests involves countless value-judgments–for example, whether and how to define students’ race. We on the federal advisory panel discuss such issues, but we have limited discretion, because legitimate decision-making power lies with the Congress and the public, not with any so-called experts. To the greatest extent possible, I would like to see educational standards, assessments, and statistics be topics of public inquiry and debate. None of it is secret, but the public debate is frustrated by an excessive deference to experts, superficial media, and a narrow focus on a few hot-button issues.

(Phoenix, AZ) In my forays into social science (I am trained as a philosopher), I tend to read and write about variables that can be attributed to individual human beings. Individuals vote or don’t, they graduate from high school or drop out, they live in Massachusetts or Texas, they support or oppose health care reform. I am interested in the distribution of these variables across populations, how they interrelate, and what causes them to change.

Reading Dynamics of Contention by Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly (2001) helpfully reminds me that there is more to life than that. These authors are concerned with the causes and courses of “contentious politics”: social movements, revolutions and revolts, secession, communal violence, and waves of strikes.

They analyze mechanisms, processes, and episodes. Episodes are large historical events like the collapse of the Soviet Union or the achievement of political rights by African Americans. Mechanisms are specific phenomena that occur during episodes, such as competition among factions, repression by authorities, radicalization, or the diffusion of unrest from one community to another. A specific example (as an illustration) would be “cultural appropriation.” When the French revolutionaries beheaded aristocrats and displayed their heads on pikes, they were appropriating the ancient ritual of execution used for treasonous nobles. When African American pastors began calling volunteers to the front of the church for civil disobedience, they were appropriating the traditional “invitation” period at the end of a revival meeting. These acts of appropriation were mechanisms within episodes.

In between mechanisms and episodes are processes, which are concatanations of mechanisms. For example, the Civil Rights struggle in the American South between 1955 and 1964 was a complex process that included many mechanisms (diffusion, violent repression, recruitment, brokering among groups, etc.). McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly emphasize that mechanisms combine in various unpredictable ways to create processes, whose outcomes are also unpredictable. There is no general pattern, such as rise-and-fall or radicalization-followed-by-collapse. But the mechanisms have general properties and logics.

For students of social change, the lesson is to look not only at individual attributes but also at group-level phenomena. A survey might never identify a historically momentous process, because only a small number of people may be involved, and even they may not know what they are doing until it is all over. The Patriots at Lexington and Concord knew they were defending some weapons; they had no idea they were creating a new nation. A survey taken in 1775 would have missed the process entirely.

For activists who want to change the world, the lesson is not only to promote changes in populations or in members of specific groups and programs. We must also use the best available and practicable mechanisms in the best combinations to achieve good outcomes. Learning to identify appropriate recipes seems an essential task for both research and practice.

(Philadelphia) In preparation for his visit to Tufts on March 17 (which you should attend if you are in the area), I have been re-reading Doug McAdam’s book Freedom Summer. It is one of my favorite works of social science, combining sensitive and moving narrative history with a persuasive quantitative method to generate numerous important insights.

One of McAdam’s significant themes is the role of the roughly 1,000 Freedom Summer volunteers in creating the New Left and the Counterculture of the late 1960s. In 1964, the volunteers were deliberately recruited from high-status universities and well-connected, rich or comfortable families. (The goal was to bring media attention and federal assistance when such elite students were arrested and beaten.) They arrived in Mississipi in chinos and short hair, often motivated by mainstream religious doctrines, and believing in the essential soundness of national institutions. They left radicalized, not only in their political opinions and diagnoses, but also in their career commitments and their ways of life. They literally left Mississipi in blue jeans, ready to form communes on their home campuses, where they were received as heroes and leaders.

Take the blue jeans: McAdam explains that seasoned SNCC staff wore denim in Mississippi to fit in with the agricultural workers whom they were trying to register. There was nothing cool about jeans in mainstream youth culture in 1964. But the SNCC staff seemed enormously cool to the 1,000 Freedom Summer volunteers, who imitated their clothes and idioms. Pretty soon they were back at Harvard and Berkeley, wearing denim and saying “dig it.”

And the communes: McAdam writes that the original plan was to place the volunteers in African Americans’ homes. That worked in some cases, but because of the violence or threats that host families suffered, it became necessary to house some volunteers together in group homes. Under conditions of exhilaration, terror, anger, and constant internal struggles among volunteers and staff, these homes became hotbeds of conversation and exploration. From cans of shared food money, to midnight meetings, to sexual experimentation, the Counterculture was born.

McAdam received attention recently for his study of Teach for America, which found disappointing effects on the participants. Comparing TFA and Freedom Summer only goes so far: nothing can (or should) rival the impact of joining a mass political movement that is the major national news story of the season and that–following the murder of three participants–changes American politics. I am struck, however, by the differences between being young in 1964 and 2008. No recent event compares to the intensity of experience, the deep generational fault-lines and generational identities, or the comprehensiveness of the changes that young people led in the mid-1960s. Many Millennials’ parents weren’t even born in 1964, yet I think the hangover lingers even today.

The Administration has sought the help of Edward Tufte in designing Recovery.gov. Tufte is the genius expert on how to present information visually. His books are visually stunning and persuasive. As a result of his guidance, Andrew Romano writes in Newsweek, Recovery.gov is “perhaps the clearest, richest interactive database ever produced by the American bureaucracy.” It quickly tells you, for example, that very little of the money has been spent so far and that tax cuts are a bigger component than “contracts, grants, and loans.”

It seems important for Americans to know these things, so that they can properly judge the use of their $787 billion and the Administration’s stewardship–and perhaps also improve the performance of government through their advocacy. But in general, we are asking ever more of citizens and expecting them to be able to absorb ever more information. Disclosure of stimulus funding is one example; another is the Supreme Court’s assumption that shareholders can discover the political positions of companies and withdraw their investments when displeased. (Apart from other problems with this decision, the duty to survey companies’ political positions will impose steep new cognitive demands on citizens.)

I think better displays of information are promising and should be saluted. But using public information also requires skills and motivations (no matter how clear and attractive the graphs may be). Civic skills are very unequal and inadequate in the United States, and motivation is uneven. Although some individuals just happen to enjoy using public data, most people are motivated only when they are recruited into organizations or movements that have political or public agendas. Such movements are scattered and relatively weak today. So the paradox is better information, presented better, to a smaller number of interested people.