Teachers in the Hood

Peter Moskos, who writes the blog "Cop In the Hood", is a former Baltimore police office who teaches in the department of law, political science and criminal justice at CUNY, has an excellent piece in which he argues that we should be more worried about the crime rate.  He goes into some political details, points out why some on the left and right might be trying to spin it.  But what really impressed me was how he brought his own experiences to bear on the subject.

Among academics, it's quite uncool to blame criminals for crime or give police credit for crime prevention. But then how many statisticians who use the UCR Homicide Supplement can point to a specific row and say, "Yeah, I handled that one.".... How many Harvard PhD students have the intimate experience of sorted through a victims' clothes? Clothes that are literally dripping with blood and yet still reeking of body odor. You're trying to go through everything, looking for pockets, for any sign of identification of the life that used to be. And then there are the death notifications.

The piece is dripping with the kind of heartfelt, front-line experience that is crucial to our understanding of the intersection between poverty/race/violence/etc. and our public debate.  I was a teacher for years at poor schools, and this was exactly how I felt when I heard the education "conversation".  It was always missing the kind of nuanced picture of what life is actually like for the families and teachers who actually worked together day in and day out.

I ended up leaving, and am now a behavioral analyst working with many of the same populations (yet with a vastly more effective set of interventions, but that's another story).  I left teaching disillusioned and frustrated.  In the liberal studies courses I had taken I had been led to believe that a good, loving, non-prejudiced teacher with high expectations was all that was needed to turn these kid's lives around - Stand and Deliver was so inspiring!  The only real problem was racism and teachers who didn't care!  Yet the reality is so much more complex.  The disadvantage in the lives of vast numbers of kids leave them with severe cognitive and emotional - not to mention academic -  deficits that grade-level placement in standard coursework becomes increasingly absurd.  And in a classroom of 30 kids, the majority of whom have little regard for a grade, refuse to do homework, and calls home are received by parents who have zero control over their children, the situation is a recipe for failure for all but the most miraculous of teachers.  These students have already been removed from the upper-level courses (those, by the way, that Escalante taught), and generally get warehoused in the lower-levels.

When a kid curses at the teacher, hits or pushes another student, throws things at them, or consistently disrupts class, there must be consequences, and repeated consequences must increase in severity.  These students, by definition, are the most disadvantaged students: this behavior is a result of their environments.  And they are far more likely to be poor and minority.  Yet what you hear in the public conversation is that either the teachers are biased and picking on  minorities (the left), or that minorities have gotten themselves into this bad situation and need to get themselves out without intervention (the right).

There is an element of truth to both of these perspectives.  In all honestly, towards the end I did find myself almost expecting minority students to be more likely to cause trouble - I did my best to check this regularly, many teachers would not.  But both perspectives miss the larger social picture, which isn't about blame, but about what are the actual causes of the problems, and at least point us to what interventions might be appropriate.

I won't pretend that simply being there on the front lines: that working and talking to the families and kids on a daily basis is somehow enough for one to understand the problem.  It probably is as likely to lead you draw incorrect conclusions.  But it is however, essential to the discourse.  When we talk about schools, teachers and kids, we need to have an intimate understanding of what these relationships look like.  They will both disabuse us of faulty assumptions, as well as grant us special insights into the particular difficulties these complex social relationships present.

So my point is not that the problem is hopeless.  I have plenty of ideas about what we can do.  But rather, that the "conversation" we have is abstracted, removed from the front lines, and burdened by theoretical and ideological baggage that is insulated from reality.

This post illustrates this phenomenon beautifully.  Not in education, but in policing, where a larger "conversation" is also occurring, yet which too often feels like it is only coming from a ridiculous pro-police versus anti-police perspective, where there are only good guys versus bad-guys.  The reality is that there are only people doing what they know how to do.  There are innocent minorities being unfairly treated, as well as those who are acting poorly and need to be dealt with in an aggressive manner.  There are police who are being prudent, there are police who are being hot-headed and callous.  There is also a larger system in which babies are born into extreme disadvantage, and will grow up to act terribly.  We as  a society need to find a way to deal with them respectfully but firmly, all the while searching for ways to improve our system so that more babies aren't disadvantaged, and so fewer police will be required to navigate such dysfunctional communities.

Ultimately, what saddens me most is also what comes across in Moskos' piece: when we fail to properly identify the problem, we are failing the actual victims.  In his case, the victims of crime, or in my case, the students themselves.  But the victims are also all of those affected by dysfunctional behavior - from those whose lives they burden, to the perpetrators themselves who could have been more.

Closing the Crime-Gap

Matt Yglesias puts his foot in his mouth when he suggests that progressives wouldn't complain if we talked about corrupt, abusive, "bad" cops the way neo-liberal education reformers talk about bad teachers.

What I have in mind, of course, is perennial internecine fighting over K-12 education policy in the United States. This is obviously a complicated subject. But my experience is that a lot of people on the left, rather than arguing the merits of the issue, seem to take it as self-evidently un-progressive to try to improve the performance of a public agency in part by doing things that the people who work at the agency don’t like. When it comes to big city police departments, I think a much healthier attitude exists. Not one that says cops shouldn’t have rights in the workplace or that “cops are bad,” but one that recognizes a substantial tension between the liberal desire to have police departments work well and the police officers’ desire for high levels of job security and low levels of accountability. 

The analogy is terrible for countless reasons.  Firstly, the "Bad" teacher, as the term has come to suggest, generally isn't corrupt or abusive.  In the main though, the analogy tries to compare police abuse with teacher efficacy, assuming that both represent the efficacy of their respective institutional missions.  The criticisms of neo-liberal education reform are not that we shouldn't hold abusive teachers accountable, but rather that the assumption that the achievement gap in America is driven by bad teaching is wrong - just as it would be wrong to assume that different crime rates in different neighborhoods are caused by bad policing. 

As far as I know, no one is in favor of protecting abusive teachers.  Rather, protection is sought for institutions such as tenure and unions, both of which provide a foundation for grassroots, bottom-up teaching practices and sustenance of professional community and solidarity, something very important in a field in which so much is sacrificed for the common good.

But the analogy of teaching and policing is actually quite illustrative, in ways that Yglesias obviously missed.

If we talked about crime like we talked about education,

• we'd blame America's high crime rate on bad policing and their unions. 
• we'd spend roughly the same resources on wealthy neighborhood policing as we do on poor neighborhoods. 
• we'd then say to people who point out that socioeconomics drives crime are just "making excuses", and call it the "soft bigotry of low expectations". 
• we'd begin shutting down police departments in favor of private contractors. 
• we'd seriously consider giving people vouchers to spend on private security.
• we'd talk about closing the crime-gap through better police training, punitive evaluations and performance pay

just for fun: In my last post, I whipped up a little graphic detailing the correlation between neighborhood income, property values and school performance. 

How much do you want to bet it also correlates with crime?
Yearly average crime rate (per 100,000)
Santa Monica:       282
Downey:               318
Huntington Park:   513

Well, what do you know?

Social Retribution and Justice

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Prisoners_whipped.jpgIn discussing criminal justice philosophy, it was brought to my attention that I had been ignorant of the larger debate surrounding retributive justice.  In further reading, I was stopped dead in my tracks.  I'm now having a very difficult time wrapping my head around the arguments for retribution.  Although they're seeming unavoidable.


Noah Millman sums up the argument for retribution, which he refers to as "satisfaction" thus:

Satifaction. A crime is a harm – to the individual victim, but also to society, and arguably to God – that must be retributed. Fit punishment means exacting a consequence upon the malefactor proportionate to the offense, satisfying the offended that they are “even.” This is usually not presented as a consequentialist argument, but there is an implict consequentialism in any version that does not invoke the deity, in that the reason why the offended party must be satisfied (in general, even if not in every individual case) by public justice is that otherwise confidence in public order will be undermined, and recourse will be made increasingly to private justice, or vendetta. (Versions of the argument that invoke the deity may also be consequentialist if your theology takes at face value the many biblical assertions that offense to God risks His wrathful response.)

While it was easy for me to see how punishment for a violent crime would involve emotion and thus retribution, what then about crimes, such as auto theft, where the emotional impulse isn't as strong, yet damage is clearly done?  If justice is solely based on social protection, deterrence, and rehabilitation, how do you determine rehabilitation?  You could easily see a murderer rehabilitated in less time than a mere thief.

So, how do you get the punishment to fit the crime, without resorting to the concept of social retribution and "just desert" - ideas I still find very squishy and problematic?  What is interesting is one can see how appealing they are to the right, for a number of reasons.

The first is the emphasis on traditional social order.  The individual act is not just seen as having consequences between victim and actor, but for the larger social order, which is defined by the codified response.  Ironically, this seems the base argument for hate-crime laws, which tend to be frowned on by the right, yet exists to emphasize the special perniciousness of the crimes on the social order.

The second is, as Hector referenced, the emphasis on free agency. Conservatism is built on the acceptance of contra causal free will.  If one believes that man has free agency, then it is much easier to embrace the idea of retributive justice.  While the two are not dependent on each other, they do support one another.  What contra causal free will is basically saying is that one knows both all of their impulses to act and then all of the consequences of their actions.  Obviously this is absurd, and the argument will be that not all impulses and consequences must be known.  But what then to make of the fact that everyone has different levels of this type of knowledge - which one can broadly call "consciousness"?  And since the degree to which one is conscious of their impulses and consequences is determined by their environment and biology, we end up with an argument for determinism.

Retributive justice is much easier to embrace if one feels the actor had full awareness of the context in which the crime was committed: both their impulse and consequences.  Thus if one "knew full well" that they should not have acted, yet did so anyway - violating the social order, then any demand for retribution is really justified.  I think this is where you find so many on the right edging closer to the totalitarian concept of harsh sentencing.  California's "three strikes" law is predicated upon this impulse: if you knew it was wrong you shouldn't have done it, thus you accept whatever punishment, no matter how harsh.  The obvious problem with this is that it overlooks the fact that certain populations tend to be overrepresented in the criminal population, pointing to a social imbalance in impulse/consequence consciousness.  Basically the determinist argument.

Yet I'm still stuck with the concept of social retribution in the first place.  What does it mean to "repay one's debt to society"?  Certainly, if someone stole my car, I would want to see them punished.  But why?  People ought to be deterred - if laws were not punished there would obviously be more criminal behavior.  And society ought to be protected.  But what to make of my desire for "justice"?  I'm very skeptical of my own emotions.  I would prefer there to be some more objective reality upon which to base social policy.

I wonder, however, if there isn't an easier solution: what if punishment is based on a reasonable level of deterrence?  While I understand this would be difficult to determine, it doesn't seem much more so than determining punishment based on the squishy notion of social debt.  My guess is that punishments would line up pretty well.  A minor offense might be deterred by a minor punishment, while a major offense would require something more severe.

Of course, the failing here would be in determining "reasonable deterrence".  Some people are simply not going to be deterred.  Yet there is just as much flaw in the concept of social debt.  How is it that certain demographics end up owing so much more social debt - especially considering that the worse life circumstances are, the more likely one is to offend.  In that sense, society should forgive the offense, considering them even!  The harshest punishment should go to those who have benefited most from society, and thus owe the most.

Non-Retributive Justice

Tom Clarke has a post up on causation and culpability. He laments the common reluctance, on grounds that people could no longer be held accountable for their actions, in allowing that free will does not exist.

I'm always amazed at how difficult it is for many people to grasp the concept of non-retributive justice. We do this everyday with our children (or so we try!). Of course this is because we know full well - it is plainly obvious - that they are not the cause of their actions.

Imagine how tiresome it would be to have to summon for children the same sort of anger and vengefulness that we so easily dish out upon adults.

Our greatest human achievement, the Golden Rule, is predicated upon our ability to create a model of conscious being in others. It is the source of our greatest courage, our greatest humility, and our greatest compassion. By looking at our own lives, and realizing that we could only ever have made the choice that we indeed made - even if in the future we choose differently, we can thus realize in others the same model. We are them and they are us.

Like children, we are all learning to be human. If at times this means we must be rewarded handsome salaries, then so be it. If at other times it means we must be locked away in prison, then so be it. But neither will be because we have deserved anything at all. It will be so that we may learn, and others may learn by us, and nothing more.