Monthly Archives: November 2011

an experiment with teachers and students and text messaging

I spent part of Monday and Tuesday with the team of OneVille, who build tools for high school students, their peers, teachers, and other adults to communicate on the students’ behalf. Lots of people have stakes in the welfare of each kid. Everyone has different information, and it’s important for them to be able to communicate easily and effectively. That process cannot be centralized or bureaucratized, but rather ought to be seen as a dense network of ties. The new electronic communications tools have potential (as well as limits) as ways to strengthen those ties.

OneVille diagram

The main example we discussed was an experiment to get students and teachers texting each other. The pilot site was an alternative school for students who have been expelled from, or opted out of, the main public school. It has a small student body and tiny faculty. They  used Google Voice as the texting service, which meant that the messages were archived. Having an archive creates advantages for the students and teachers (they can go back and see what they wrote), and it enables research. It may also have some disadvantages. Among other things, it creates a record that may have to be disclosed to parents under certain circumstances.

We reviewed anonymized transcripts of teachers texting students to wake them up; students disclosing health problems and depression to teachers (and explicitly preferring to communicate by text as opposed to voice); and a traditionally angry teenager thanking his teacher by text. Clearly, the medium affected relationships and power hierarchies, although not necessarily in a uniform way. Whether the changes were educationally beneficial is one big question. Another question is what would happen if the experiment moved from a small, alternative school to a regular high school in which each teacher briefly meets more than 100 kids every day?

a complaint about ceilings in modern architecture

Tracery in Gloucester Cathedral Choir (ca. 1350)

In many buildings constructed before 1950, the ceiling is the aesthetic focus. Even when the walls are plain or are devoted to practical purposes, the ceilings are available for decoration. Our eyes are drawn upward.

My two examples (quickly selected from a multitude of possibilities) date four hundred years apart and differ in materials, style, color, and most other respects. But both exemplify the ceiling as an opportunity for free play.

Pilgrimage Church Wies, Bavaria (ca. 1750)

My contemporary example (below) is unfair: just a typical drop ceiling from an office. But I have noticed that even when an architect designs a contemporary space and the walls and floors are meant to be enjoyed, the ceiling is often an afterthought–an array of panels bearing a random assortment of sprinklers, lights, and audio speakers. It’s as if, by convention, one does not look at the ceiling when assessing a room aesthetically. In fact, it’s hard to find photographs online of fine contemporary rooms that even show the ceilings: photographers choose angles that conceal the upper plane.

This seems like a waste to me.

Drop Ceiling (ca. now)

webinar on non-college youth, seminar on civic education in a connected world

(Logan Airport) On November 29 at 2 pm Eastern, I’ll be part of a Webinar produced by the Alliance for Positive Youth Development on the topic of “Helping Non-College Youth Become Engaged Citizens.” It’s free and open to the public, but you have to register here.

On December 5th at 6 pm, I’ll be speaking at Harvard’s Berkman Center on “The Fate of Civic Education in a Connected World.” This will actually be a moderated discussion, not a set of presentations, and the other panelists will be Charles Nesson, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Harry Lewis, my friend Elizabeth Lynn, and Juan Carlos de Martin. Free and open to the public.

 

why no Keynesianism anywhere?

For all the billions of bytes devoted to criticizing Barack Obama’s economic strategies (Why wasn’t the stimulus bigger? Why didn’t he get the debt limit raised earlier?), there seems to be hardly any discussion of a much more significant question: Why hasn’t any major industrialized democracy employed a Keynesian response to the Great Recession?

The economic argument for a Keynesian stimulus says that typical recessions are driven by weak demand and confidence. Governments can help by borrowing and spending temporarily. An argument from justice says that human needs rise acutely in recessions; governments can assist by spending wisely. And a political argument says that people want the state to do something now even if it has to borrow. In fact, one might fear that democratically elected governments would always borrow and spend (regardless of the merits of that policy) and so would grow in every crisis until they became tyrannies.*

Instead, we see the European democracies cutting their budgets in a time of recession or near-recession. President Obama won the passage of a stimulus package, but it was equivalent to less than 6% of GDP, one third of it was devoted to tax cuts, it was largely offset by cuts in local and state spending, and after less than two years, the opposition won an election vowing to repeal it. This Brookings report describes the stimulus policies of the US, China, Spain, and Saudi Arabia as “large.” They mean relative to other countries. There were also “modest” stimulus packages in a few other democracies, such as Germany (3.4% of GDP; two-third devoted to tax cuts) and Canada. I believe all of these were short-lived.

Here are three possible explanations for the lack of Keynesian policies in almost all advanced democracies–or, to put it another way, three reasons why Barack Obama, despite engineering an inadequate recovery package, strikes Kevin Drum (who is a Keynesian) as the best or second-best leader in the whole world today.

1. The Keynesian theory is wrong, and leaders are wisely rejecting it. This Wikipedia article provides a sample of that position plus rebuttals. I don’t buy it because the Keynesian theory makes sense to me and because various influentials (the president of the World Bank, the Chancellor of the UK, the head of China’s Central Bank, and the President of the United States) explicitly recommended stimulus policies. By the way, here’s a primer in rap form on the substance of Keynesianism:

2. Political systems are manipulated by economic interests (corporations and wealthy individuals) that don’t want governments borrowing now and taxing them later. That could certainly be the case, but it raises some interesting questions: How is it that such different democratic systems have all become more susceptible to wealthy interests over time? (Mobility of capital, perhaps?) Also, how do these special interests coordinate their efforts to make them effective? Many corporations actually benefit from stimulus policies. Low taxation is in the interest of wealthy people, but they all share that interest. Game theory predicts that no individuals will actively lobby against a stimulus if they bear the cost of the lobbying but share the benefits.

3. Voters have lost trust in government and so don’t believe that a stimulus will work. Actually, the lack of trust is a fact, demonstrated by consistent survey data. But we could ask whether distrust makes leaders leery of stimulus policies. A second questions is where that lack of trust comes from. Some would say that the special interests noted in #2 have deliberately delegitimized governments through propaganda: Fox, Murdoch, Mediaset. But note that other special interests have explicitly advocated stimulus: Goldman Sachs, for example. I think it’s more likely that a) governments have performed badly and b) the fundamental shift toward individualism and choice in the 1960s biased people against hierarchical organizations.

If you’re a Keynesian, you should work to reelect President Obama (who’s your best available ally) and try to figure out what deep, structural factors explain global resistance to Keynesianism today.

* I thought I could quote Hayek to this effect, but he doesn’t specifically target Keynesian stimulus policies in the Road to Serfdom, and Keynes, intriguingly, wrote to Hayek to thank him for a “grand book.” Keynes said, “Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement, but in a deeply moved agreement.”

badges for civic skills

Here are two proposals for “civic badges” entered in the Digital Media and Learning Competition. Public comments are being welcomed on the DML site–please click through to read and discuss:

(For full disclosure, I played a role in drafting both proposals and might be involved in the work if either was funded.)

Background: Major organizations such as the MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla (which produces the Firefox browser), and the US Department of Commerce are interested in “badges.” The idea comes originally from scouting: scouts win badges for skills or accomplishments like packing a backpack or raking neighbors’ leaves. But in an age of sophisticated and stylish computer games, the “badging” concept no longer feels childish. Youth and young adults are now accustomed to attaining levels of competence and success online.

In the educational context, badging offers several potential advantages: 1) It is an alternative to high-stakes testing. It can motivate people to learn–and schools to teach–without creating new ways to fail. 2) It can make labor markets work better by indicating exactly what skills an individual has. It can thus help people obtain jobs they would otherwise miss–and help firms find the right workers. The same advantages would also apply to unpaid civic work. 3) It allows the tasks of education and assessment to be shared or distributed, instead of being assigned to schools alone. The same badge could be awarded by a school, a church, or a private firm.

I see special advantages for civic skills. They are ignored by today’s high-stakes tests, yet adding new civics exams would simply create new ways for students to fail. Also, teaching active citizenship has traditionally been a shared responsibility of schools and civil society. With badges, many organizations could teach and assess citizenship. Finally, civic skills are intrinsically controversial. Some people think that occupying Wall Street is a valid skill, while others see it as a threat. The same is true of organizing prayer breakfasts in public schools. If states must provide standardized curricula and tests in civics, they will try to strip out all controversy. But a badging system is flexible: diverse groups can create and award badges, contributing to a rich and contentious democracy.