Monthly Archives: September 2012

ideology in the Chicago teachers’ strike

I understand–from personal contacts and from articles like this one by The Nation‘s Matthew Cunningham-Cook–that teachers who share a pretty strong ideological orientation took over the Chicago teachers’ union by democratic means. Offering a systematic critique of current trends in education, they wanted to confront a prominent representative of those trends, such as their own combative mayor, Rahm Emanuel. In other words, they were looking for a fight. They wanted (writes Cunningham-Cook) “a union founded on the principles of member-directed communal action, mutual solidarity and systemic analysis.” Their analysis yielded this nicely written, 55-page manifesto. Their “communal action” took the form of a strike.

I am for systematic analysis and a revived left, at least as a counterweight to other forces. Sometimes a public struggle over core principles is worth the costs. So the fact that the union is ideological does not bother me.

But we’re entitled to ask whether their systematic analysis is right. I would say: only in part. I am moved and persuaded by the teachers’ attack on the criminalization of youth and the whole punitive disciplinary system. I share their endorsement of a broader curriculum, although I wish they had mentioned civics and democratic education as well as arts and physical education. Most of their recommendations would cost money, and that is a reasonable thing for a union to demand. Chicago Public Schools say that they spent $13,078 per student in FY2010–not a small amount, but Rondout Elementary School, near Lake Forest IL, spends $24,244 per child for a much more privileged student body. Middle-class families who move out to Lake Forest think it’s worth spending $11,000 more per kid than Chicago spends, and the union ought to challenge that.

But what bothers me is the very broad and simplistic ideological framework. A whole range of reforms uncomfortable to teachers are lumped together as “neoliberalism,” and the union’s goal is to resist them all. The result is a basically conservative vision, predicated on protecting schools against rapid change, even though the authors are angry at those same schools for being segregated and oppressive. Not only is the analysis defensive, but it is unclear because it names too many disparate ideas with one label.

For instance, is Rahm Emanuel neoliberal because he wants a longer school day? Neoliberals wants less government; longer school days mean more government. Is he a neoliberal because he wants to use standardized tests for teacher assessment? Neoliberals want to take decisions away from centralized government bureaucracies. Classically, social democrats and left-liberals are the ones who want to measure and assess government performance in the name of equity. The Chicago teachers write, “Standardized testing as a tool to segregate educational opportunities is not new. Standardized testing grew
out of the American tradition of using ‘intelligence quotient’ (IQ) as a pretext for racist and exclusionary policies.” I do not disagree with the literal content of those sentences, but they don’t tell the whole story. Standardized testing is also a means to make sure that poor and minority kids are getting the education they need. Although the national civil rights groups now take complex positions regarding the federal testing requirements of NCLB, they were originally among the strongest proponents of those requirements. As recently as 2007, people like Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, and Peter Zamora, a regional counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, were involved in efforts like this:

As the Senate stalls debate on the future of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Campaign for High School Equity, a coalition of high-profile civil rights organizations, will present a case for protecting and strengthening the accountability contained in NCLB through a series of briefings and roundtables titled, “A Stronger NCLB in 2008: Critical for High Schools and Students of Color.” The first briefing in this series, “High School Accountability and Equity in NCLB,” will propose strategies for ensuring that high schools are held accountable for preparing students of color for success in college and work.

Finally, is Rahm Emanuel a man of the right because he is pushing a union to give up some benefits and protections? Or is he a man of the left because he is pushing a group of middle-class professionals to provide more services to low-income, minority youth?

I am basically on the teachers’ side, but that is because I share many of their substantive views of testing, funding, and the curriculum. I do not find it helpful to describe them as progressive and the mayor as neoliberal and to read the strike as a showdown between those two movements. The questions should be taken one at a time: How should we assess teachers? How long should the school day be? How much do we need to spend per student? And how is the available money being allocated?

Ideology has a place; it’s about big ideas and core principles. But ideological analysis must be valid and insightful. Better than a sloppy ideology is a pragmatic investigation of what works, for whom, at what cost.

the Times gives attention to non-student youth

About 40% of young people don’t attend college at all. In a classic example of a vicious cycle, these young adults are largely ignored by campaigns, reporters, policymakers, and even academics. As a result, the non-college 40% tend not to vote–their turnout, even in the relatively good year of 2008, was only 36%–and that makes them even less influential. They are, for instance, unlikely to show up as “likely voters” in election-season polls, so no one cares about their preferences for candidates and issues.

Since CIRCLE was founded in 2001, we have focused consistently on non-college-attending young adults. We’ve been trying to break the vicious cycle. After all, there’s no law that says that because people are politically marginalized, you have to marginalize them further with your reporting and analysis.

Our latest ambitious report is entitled That’s NOT Democracy: How Out-of-School Youth Engage in Civic Life and What Stands in their Way. It was four years in the making, and we released it on August 23. Before that, we had shared an embargoed version with the New York Times‘ Susan Saulny. She was persuaded to conduct her own reporting, with contributions from Times reporters Robbie Brown, Dan Frosch and Steven Yaccino and photographers Jeff Swensen, Brian Blanco, and Darren Hauck. The result is a story by Saulny headed “Struggling Young Adults Pose Challenge for Campaigns,” which is currently the lead on the Times online version. It includes the following paragraphs about our work, but the most important contribution is the Times’ own reporting, which may help to make working class young adults more visible:

Experts say that the segment of young working-class people who are struggling may appear disengaged, but that they are also highly persuadable. “Extensive research shows that if you ask young people to volunteer or vote, they respond at high rates,” said Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

In a report released in August, researchers from the center found that the most important factor in explaining low levels of civic participation may not be apathy but merely “an absence of opportunity and recruitment.” The report suggested that being “personally and explicitly asked” is perhaps the most important catalyst that motivates young people without college degrees to take political action.

Coverage begets coverage: because of this story, I was on CBS drive-time radio this morning as well.

taking the president seriously about citizenship

My new Huffington Post piece is entitled Taking the President Seriously About Citizenship. In it, I cite our recent work on the economic benefits of civic engagement and connect that to the President’s speech about citizenship in Charlotte. An excerpt:

Mr. Obama’s talk of citizenship usually draws applause and cheers, as it did when he accepted the Democratic nomination in Charlotte. But pundits and policymakers never pay attention to it. They regard talk of citizenship as a politician’s cliché — like saying you are delighted to be in New Hampshire in January. The only question reporters asked about the Charlotte speech was whether it had fallen flat or done the job. Nobody wrote about the substance of the citizenship idea.

I see two reasons for their lack of interest: pundits doubt that active citizenship has important consequences, and they don’t see its relevance to policy.

Scholars who empirically study the consequences of civic engagement can demonstrate that it has important consequence …

After summarizing some of those consequences, I argue that we need a concrete policy agenda for citizenship.

(I am obsessive about blogging here every day, and this was supposed to be yesterday’s post; but the Huffington Post can take more than 24 hours to approve submissions–hence the delay.

all that matters is equanimity, community, and truth

I’ve come to think that the necessary and sufficient conditions of a good life are equanimity, community, and truth.

Equanimity means a good inner life, marked by something like happiness, satisfaction, or peace. Unless individuals achieve satisfactory inner lives, even a perfectly just society is a nightmare.

Community encompasses all valuable relationships among living things, from the baby on her parent’s lap to a fair and efficient economic order that integrates all seven billion people and does justice to the animals, as well. Love and justice are two of the virtues that turn relationships into communities.

By truth, I primarily mean knowledge about the way things actually are–empirical knowledge–because I would assign knowledge about the good to the other two domains.

These three principles are necessary because, unfortunately, they are not perfectly compatible. If they were harmonious, we could perhaps reduce the list to a single underlying principle. But alas, truth can make equanimity and community harder. Relating well to others can undermine internal peace. Valuable relationships sometimes depend on fictions. These and other tensions among the three principles partly explain why it is so hard and rare to achieve a good life.

The three principles are sufficient because other good things are only good insofar as they benefit the three. For example, beauty is probably necessary for a rich and satisfying inner life; good communities possess and produce certain kinds of beauty; and the truth is sometimes beautiful. But beauty can also be false, unjust, or distressing. Insofar as beauty does not support truth, community, or equanimity, its pursuit is no part of a good life.

How do I reach these conclusions? Not by way of arguments from first principles. Arguments are made within the three domains, not in favor of them. For instance, all large societies need the rule of law and individual rights, among other things. That is the kind of conclusion that can be grounded in evidence and reasons–but one must assume that it matters whether communities are good, in the first place. If you deny that justice toward others has any relevance to you, no argument can prove that it should. (Here I draw on Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.)

The same is true of truth. Nietzsche liked to demonstrate that the pursuit of truth was a choice. If one makes that choice, the scientific method commends itself. If not, there is no argument for the scientific method. Finally, reasoning about how to achieve equanimity is fruitful, but there is no argument for seeking it in the first place.

Despite the lack of arguments for the three principles, all three tend to emerge in rich and mature traditions, from ancient India to the Hellenistic Mediterranean to modern Europe and many other places, even when someone tries to deny one of the three. For example:

Classical utilitarians defined the goal of life as pleasure and argued that a society could maximize the pleasure of its members by getting its markets and laws right. In other words, they dispensed with equanimity and relied only on community and truth. But the young John Stewart Mill blamed his depression on that oversight and developed a richer account of utilitarianism in which equanimity regained its independent standing and was no longer a mere consequence of community.

Certain anarchists and libertarians, such as Ayn Rand, have denied the virtues of community. But I once heard the libertarian philosopher Loren Lomasky compare libertarians who ingest Rand to snakes who eat pineapples. Rand takes a while to pass through the system, and you are better off when she is gone. A more sophisticated libertarian, such as Friedrich von Hayek, begins by recognizing that people are social animals, intrinsically connected to one another and needing strong ties for happiness and welfare. Hayek simply criticizes the state as a buttress of community, arguing that governments lack adequate information and trustworthiness to make beneficial decisions. In other words, community returns to libertarianism once one reflects more maturely.

The post-structuralist generation in France raised serious questions about truth. But I doubt that authors who mainly debunked truth (like Derrida and Baudrillard) will last. What will continue to matter is Foucault’s long and hard struggle for truth. To be sure, Foucault asked whether truth was always just a function of power, and thus made science and reason seem more problematic than they had seemed before. Yet his intellectual biography shows a constant pursuit of truth; that was the impetus for his skeptical questions in the first place. The world was obdurate for Foucault; he would not simply ignore it. The virtue he defended in his late (1983) lectures was parrhesia, speaking truth in the face of danger–in other words, truth that upsets equanimity.

The constant return of three principles (even when smart people try to dispense with them) suggests that they are deeply rooted in human experience. Yet it is wishful thinking to believe that they coexist easily. Our struggle is to pursue all three.

speaking at the National Conference on Citizenship

I’ll be live shortly at the National Conference on Citizenship in Philadelphia. Along with federal reserve governor Sarah Bloom Raskin and others, I will be discussing the relationship between civic life and unemployment. Our new researchindicates that civic health helps lower unemployment. You can watch the entire event live and you can participate in the conversation online by using #NCOC.