Monthly Archives: September 2013

for reform of testing

Leave a reply

Over at the National Journal, Fawn Johnson reports that the Common Core standards for English and math have become controversial because of testing. “Now that it’s time for states to actually measure how their students are doing, it’s a lot harder to gloss over the problems with feel-good talking points.”

In an invited response, I argue that the existing standardized tests are bad–19th century tools–and the Common Core offers the opportunity to improve them. Progress may be halting, controversial, and painful, but I still favor innovation. In my comment, I argue that the existing tests are bad because they are separated from learning; overly standardized; completely private (so that they don’t assess how children communicate and collaborate with each other, even though that’s actually the purpose of English/Language Arts); and secret in ways that reduce legitimacy.

why engineers should study Elinor Ostrom

Leave a reply

(New Haven) Next week, I will lead a discussion of the Nobel-Prize-winning research of the late Elinor Ostrom. I will be with a group of engineers, natural scientists, and social scientists who are concerned about water, one of the basic scarce and contested natural resources.

Ostrom studied water-management, but she was a political scientist concerned with “civic engagement,” especially the practices that ordinary people develop to manage common resources. Why should an engineer or a scientist concerned with water care about civic engagement, as Ostrom analyzed it?

One reason is that ordinary people’s deliberate and creative action is a more important condition of successful resource-management than analysts had thought before Lin Ostrom wrote. The dominant 20th century view held that resources were either public or private. If they were private, the owners would have incentives to protect them (although market failures might occur under specific conditions). Public resources, however, would be destroyed by the Tragedy of the Commons in the form of free-riding, overuse, underinvestment, etc. Thus public resources had to be privatized or else governed by a central state. Water was quasi-public because you can’t own the oceans or clouds (“fugitive resources”), although you can own a gallon of water or a spring. Applying the theory that public goods were doomed, 20th century regimes either privatized or nationalized forests, grazing lands, and water. The results were frequently catastrophic, contributing to mass human and animal death. (See Governing the Commons, p. 23. All subsequent quotes are also from that book.)

Ostrom discovered that, contrary to the simplistic theories of collective action, people were capable of managing public goods, including waterways and fisheries. They did not always succeed, but they did not always fail, either. Variation in the ways that they worked mattered to the outcomes. To succeed, they needed institutional arrangements, skills, norms, motivations, and habits. All of these factors then became important predictors of preserving or destroying natural resources. An engineer or a chemist cannot ignore these factors if she actually wants to contribute to good water management. Discovering a process or inventing a technical system does no good unless someone uses it. That someone cannot be an omnicompetent and incorruptible state, because there is no such thing. Somehow, people have to adopt any technical innovation, and often they can contribute to designing it as well.

An example is a crisis of overfishing off Alanya, Turkey (pp. 19-20). The fishers solved the problem through an ingenious system of randomly assigning all the licensed boats to specific starting points and rotating these locations on a fixed schedule. Privatization could not have solved the problem because this was already a system of private boats and workers, and the fish are a “fugitive resource.” Nor could it have been solved by the state, except at high cost. The fishers knew exactly where to put each location, and the state would have had to recreate that knowledge—assuming that it acted fairly and without corruption. The best solution was a self-created one.

If the first reason to read Ostrom is that she studied citizenship and found that it mattered, the second is that she was a citizen. She was a scientist who won countless NSF grants as well as the Nobel and a MacArthur “genius” award. But she was a scientist who wanted to improve the world, and that made her a model citizen. For instance, after introducing the prisoner’s dilemma, she writes, “As long as people are described as prisoners, policy prescriptions will address this metaphor. I would rather address the question how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedy (p. 7).”

This is a complex pair of sentences, worth unpacking. Ostrom’s ultimate goal is to avoid “remorseless tragedy.” The stakes are high, and they are defined in moral terms, even though Ostrom is a scientist. To avoid tragedy, she will not propose direct solutions. Instead, she wants to “enhance the capabilities of those involved.” These people will not merely act within a system, discussing issues and making choices. The limiting case of a person who makes a choice within a fixed system is the prisoner in a prisoner’s dilemma. “Individuals who have no self-organizing and self-governing authority are stuck in a singe-tier world. The structure of their problems is given to them” (p. 54). In contrast, Ostrom wants people to change the rules. And she is part of that process, because she discloses her own goal in the first-person singular: “I would rather address. …” In real life, Ostrom actually worked with peasants and fishers because she had to learn from them and because she wanted them to benefit from her findings.

In short, Ostrom not only discovered that complex social/environmental systems involve deliberate human collective action. She also treated social science as part of those systems, and herself as one of the human beings who was trying to manage the commons.

Other insights from Governing the Commons:

“Instead of presuming that optimal institutional solutions can be designed easily and imposed at low-cost by external authorities, I argue that ‘getting the institutions right’ is a difficult, time-consuming, conflict-invoking process” (p. 14).

“… as long as analysts assume that individuals cannot change … situations themselves, they do not ask what internal or external variables can enhance or impede the efforts of communities of individuals to deal creatively and constructively with perverse problems such as the tragedy of the commons” (p. 21)

“Empirically validated theories of human organization will be essential ingredients of a policy science that can inform decisions about the likely consequences of a multitude of ways of organizing human activities. Theoretical inquiry involves a search for regularities. … One can, however, get trapped in one’s own intellectual web” (p. 24)

“The basic strategy is to identify those aspects of the physical, cultural, and institutional setting that are likely to affect [the results.] Once one has all the needed information, one can then abstract from the richness of the empirical situation to devise a playable game that will capture the essence of the problems the individuals are facing” (p. 55).

Discovering Justice

Leave a reply

I am proud to have joined the board of Discovering Justice and will attend my first board meeting later today. Discovering Justice teaches younger children about the law and the justice system in ways that increase their appreciation of legal norms and institutions while also encouraging them to use “the power of their own voices.”

Civic education is delivered by the 165,000 full-time social studies teachers in American schools. It is funded by states and localities as part of the general education system. However, independent nonprofit organizations serve important roles in producing materials and lesson plans, developing new models and approaches (“R&D”), convening and educating teachers, and advocating for supportive policies. For instance, I am proud to serve on the board of Street Law, Inc., and my organization works closely with iCivics and Generation Citizen on their evaluations.

Discovering Justice is highly unusual in focusing on younger children. Although some of the other civics NGOs have programs for grades k-8, they all emphasize adolescence. Much less is known about the civic development of young children and the lasting impact of providing civic education in the early grades. As the eminent political scientist Sir Bernard Crick lamented in 1999, “there is no political Piaget.” The way to find out what actually works is generally to develop, test, and refine interventions that may work. Usable research almost always begins with practical experimentation. Discovering Justice is doing that work for civic education k-8.

how to teach 9/11

Leave a reply

Last year, I wrote a piece for CNN on how to teach 9/11 in public schools. That article will be part of a Twitter chat this evening at 9 pm eastern. The hashtag is #PTchat.

In brief summary, I argued that states should not require the teaching of 9/11, because states should generally refrain from requiring specific historical topics at all. If they go down that path, then everyone who thinks that X is important will demand that X be included in state standards to prove that the government cares. That’s why Illinois requires teachers to discuss Leif Erickson, the Irish Potato Famine, and the importance of trees and birds.  Long lists prevent curricular depth and diversity among schools. For instance, in Boston, 8th graders will focus on Reconstruction for several months, in partnership with Facing History. That would be impossible if they had to race to cover 9/11 by way of many other specified topics.

However, 9/11 is an example of a good topic to cover. It has the advantage of being recent, and too often, history class stops at World War II or the 1960s (in part because the accumulated state requirements take too long to cover). Ending more than a generation ago conveys the message that history is over and students have no role in it.

If teachers do elect to discuss 9/11 in social studies class, it should be treated relatively dispassionately, in a scholarly way, and students should be encouraged to consider the related controversies (such as whether the US should have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq as a result). We don’t want to indoctrinate kids with any particular view, but we do want them to learn to deliberate and reason about complex and contentious issues.

One subtle question is what counts as a legitimately open question for discussion, as opposed to a question that should be considered settled in a social studies classroom. (Diana Hess is the expert on this topic.) For instance, slavery is a settled question, but same-sex marriage, even though I strongly favor it, ought to be presented as unresolved. The suggestion that 9/11 was a US government conspiracy should not be treated on a par with the idea that al-Qaeda attacked the US. A student who thinks 9/11 was a conspiracy should be held accountable for providing very rigorous evidence (which I believe will be impossible). Nevertheless, the attack can be understood in several broader political contexts, and students should be encouraged to explore the controversies with due respect for evidence and logic.

threats, negotiations, and deliberation: the case of the Syria crisis

Leave a reply

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. — Hamilton, The Federalist #1 (first paragraph)

Here are three modes of interaction that apply to the Current Emergency:

1. Making credible threats to deter bad behavior. The Geneva Protocol to the Hague Convention bans the use of chemical weapons. President Obama called that a “red line.” There is a case for drawing red lines and credibly threatening to punish people who cross them. Mark Kleinman lays out an argument for Congressional authorization based on this idea of credible threats. Kleinman doesn’t consider his argument determinative, but Ross Douthat does. Douthat writes that a “no”vote in Congress would “basically finish off the current American president as a credible actor on the world stage” because he could no longer make credible threats.

[Footnote: I wish that no one would say “bombing Syria” or–in Kleinman’s phrase–“an attack on Syria,” because that is a euphemism for “killing human beings resident in Syria.” Syria is an abstraction that cannot die or suffer. As Hannah Arendt and George Orwell taught us, euphemisms are deadly in politics. Maybe we should kill people in Syria, but let’s call that what it is.]

2. Zero-sum political struggle between the President and Congress. That is the implicit model that people imagine when they think that by asking Congress to vote, Obama already weakened himself, and a “no” vote would be a humiliation that would embolden the Republicans to oppose him on all other fronts. “Negotiation” is an appropriate word for nonviolent zero-sum interactions. In this case, the president wants a yes. He and his people are busy negotiating with Members of Congress and will either succeed or fail.

3. An open-ended discussion about what to do. This is the model that people invoke when they say that the President prompted an important national conversation about military intervention by asking Congress to debate a resolution on Syria. If that model applies, the administration must honor the results of the vote, but any result could be called a victory for the process.

My origins are in deliberative democracy, but I try not to be naive about it. Deliberative moments are rare and fragile and depend on cultural norms and formal structures. You can’t deliberate with Assad (which doesn’t mean that you are required to bomb his army). You can’t necessarily deliberate with Congress if they are in a mood to wreck your administration or if the constitutional structure is dysfunctional. It is harder to deliberate if pundits are standing by with political scorecards, ready to call a “no” vote a humiliating defeat that ends your presidency.

On the other hand, the deliberative model has value. We ought to prize what Madison called “the mild voice of reason” whenever it has a chance. If Congress rejects the president’s proposal, that is not actually a defeat for him. We could commend his decision to go to Congress as a courageous and enlightened form of leadership. Certainly, in a family, a neighborhood, or a workplace, admirable leaders often delegate tough decisions to groups and agree to accept the results. We do not call that weakness; it can be wisdom. But it won’t be seen as wise unless someone says it is.

Politics cannot be pure deliberation. However, if we fail to recognize the deliberative moments, they have no chance at all. Regardless of the results, I am preemptively celebrating the president’s decision to go to Congress and I am preemptively denouncing all the reporters and talking heads who will score it as a win or a loss for the White House. Let’s pay attention to whether the bombing would be good for Syria and whether the debate is good for our democracy.