The Other 1%

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in the NY Times today about his own troubled interaction with schooling, and his dream that his son not experience the same failures he did.  Coates' parents grew up poor, but found consciousness and knowledge.  His father, Paul Coates, eventually became a black panthe,r and through his devotion to the power of literature, founded the Black Classic Press, "one of the oldest independently owned Black publishers in operation in the United States."

In his memoir, Coates describes growing up on the mean streets of Baltimore, having to force himself to act tough when his real interest lay in sports and comic books.  His father took pains to reinforce this defensive ability and enrolled him in a notoriously violent school.  One might imagine his father was not only interested in imparting street smarts, but so too a conscious perspective of black struggle.  This was the real black experience - poverty, ghettos, violent schools and thuggishness - all conspiring to deplete consciousness.  Incarceration, low-wages, single-parenthood and broken homes were all a part of the reality of the underclass, a class black people had been propelled into over centuries of oppression, and only now was it finally becoming possible to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Clearly, the work was not done, and Coates' father knew his son had to be a part of the struggle.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is now a senior editor of the Atlantic.  Although he struggled in school, and eventually dropped out of college, he picked himself up after landing a job writing for the Washington City Paper.  His is the kind of boot-strap story that America loves to tell itself.  Anything is possible.  All it takes is hard work and determination.  Anyone can be successful.  If a poor kid from Baltimore can do it, so can anyone.

Yet the reality of these stories always belie their falsity.  The truth is that Coates had advantages that most young men in his neighborhood did not.  Not only did he have a bookish temperament that would later serve him well by the norms of larger society, he was raised by a father who, though not without flaws, obviously was incredibly smart and exposed his son to a world of intellectual aspiration that was exceedingly rare.  Indeed, if every father in the ghetto had the consciousness of Paul Coates, there would be no ghettos. 

It takes no great imagination to see how the privilege of the "1%" virtually ensures their legacy of wealth for future familial generations.  Yet so too does the privilege of an intellectual 1%, imbuing as it does a consciousness that forms the basis of agency-building human capital.  This is the stuff of societal capital, a concept I return to frequently on this blog.  Paul Coates' represented great resources of societal capital that in turn allowed Ta-Nehisi to develop the human capital that would eventually parlay into future social success.

A fundamental flaw with boot-strap stories is that they assume the possibility of self-created agency - as if we somehow design our efforts to be successful.  Coates did not, as a boy, decide to be a bookworm instead of a thug.  It came naturally to him.  It comes "naturally" to all of us.  In fact, when it does not come naturally to us, it is due to some lesson of circumstance that forces upon us some new way of thinking or being.  The term naturally itself seems defined by the idea of forces beyond our control, outside our powers of influence.  Coates bookishness, combined with his father's guidance, put him far beyond his less-developed peers.

This cannot but lead to a vision of inequality as injustice, as our relative successes or failures cannot be separated from determining factors in our lives.  This uncomfortable logic worries many into denying it post hoc.  Yet when we examine human behavior, we see interactions between society and temperament that leave little room for determination that does not come from circumstance, in other words self-created self-agency.

A Difference in Framing

Non-reformer writes: "Because we know that poorly educated parents and poverty are the root causes of poor achievement."

Reformer responds: "We don't know that at all. In fact, all historical and global evidence would completely contradict that hypothesis. What we know is that poor children in the U.S. are not educated well within the U.S. public education system."

Non-reformer  responds: "Of course it is not poverty itself that affects learning but the EFFECTS of poverty ...."

Curiously, if one could sum up the education Reform mindset, it might come down to this difference in framing.  Reformers tend to want to diminish the effects of SES, and emphasize teacher efficacy.  The response from Non-reformers is generally to push back and emphasize SES.  The Reformer often calls this "making excuses", famously "the soft bigotry of low expectations".  The term reform itself has become loaded as it sets up one particular framework as being reform, and anything else as, well, non-reform.  And when everyone agrees the education system is broken, the non-reformer becomes defined by an implication that they support the system as it stands.

However, most Non-reformers I know (which also happens to be most teachers and non-teachers), actually want even greater reforms to education.  They don't see teachers as the problem, but larger social problems.  They point to all the things the Non-refomer referred to - the EFFECTS - of poverty as being what we need to reform.

Now, part of the difference in frameworks might have to do with a broader sort of political temperament.  Reformers have been so successful because they have built a coalition of conservatives and neo-liberals.  As a group, a common feature is a tendency away from radical, progressivism.  Yet this is exactly what non-reformers would champion. 

The reality is of course, that the public is in no mood for radical progressivism.  There is simply no political momentum toward an agenda of going after the EFFECTS (as Linda so succinctly put it) of poverty, which would require massive (OK, *cough* I use this term relatively!  "Imagine if they had to have a bake sale...") state spending. 

So the neo-liberal model, biased as it is towards the political *possible*, essentially has thrown in the towel on looking at SES as the real reform and emphasizing instead the marginal benefits of squeezing more achievement out of teachers.  Unfortunately, the result has been so good.  I realize my bias as a non-reformer, but there just doesn't seem to be much evidence that union-busting, charters, performance-pay, punitive testing, etc. has really done much at all.

Non-reformers would say, of course, "See.  I told you so."  And the system has been really screwed up.  Teachers feel completely demoralized, their jobs as un-meaningful as ever, expectations higher than ever yet their tasks only more daunting, humanity removed from the profession and countless punitive professional development sessions and administrators forced by their bosses into a bizarro world that fundamentally misunderstands the classroom.

Personally, I think all this "reform", based as much of it has been on an attempt to find consensus and work within political realities has not only made the system worse, but has moved the debate away from where it really should be.  To use an analogy, it would be as a bus were speeding towards you and instead of jumping out of the way, you start running in the opposite direction, hoping it won't catch up.  Well, I think it's finally caught up. 

Reformers talk about making "excuses".  However, I would argue it is they who are the real excuse-makers.  By constantly shifting the blame away from larger, more serious social problems, they excuse them.  The reality is that the achievement gap is based on a fundamental reality: SES means human and societal capital.  The advantaged have a lot more of it than the disadvantaged.  Reformers would have us believe that this inequality can be overcome simply by "better teaching".  They would have us believe that teachers in a poor community should be expected to work twice as hard - be twice as good - as teachers in affluent communities. 

Yet in the end, what this tells poor communities is that, despite your lower levels of human and societal capital, we're not going to give you any more support.  We're going to force to to rely on the same teaching pool as everyone else, even though your needs are so much more profound.   Imagine if we did this with police departments.  What if every neighborhood only got a limited number of service calls, then we blamed the police for the rise in crime rates?

That isn't reform.  It's perpetuation of social inequality by a privileged class who doesn't want to sacrifice for those less fortunate.  It's also a betrayal of what public education has always been about.

Danger, Super Vidoqo, Danger!

So, apparently Vidoqo is not so Super after all.  Well, that was kind of the point of the title*, right?  Who am I, lowly teacher with an undergraduate degree in Social Sciences and a Master's degree in Elementary Education from a state university, to think I could play with the big boys on issues as complex as race, class, philosophy and human development?  Well, in many ways I am not.  Yet in many ways I am.  I have a good deal of first hand experience with these issues, spending nearly two decades of my adult life among the disadvantaged, disabled, disenfranchised and generally dissed.  In many ways, my experience has given me insights that plenty of people with more prestigious academic credentials couldn't possibly obtain without direct experience of their own with the subjects on which they write, from behind the walls of an institution.

(*It occurs to me that I have never officially explained where the name Vidoqo comes from.  It's a pretty silly inside joke.  But it comes originally from a mispronunciation of the title (itself a mispronunciation) of a avante garde children's book I once created, titled "I am not Vidoco".  You can find the book, available for purchase here.)

And isn't this the beauty of blogging - that by simply having access to the internet and a linkable address, I can put my ideas out there for the world to see?  And I try to give you guys the good stuff.  I think a lot about these issues and when I write I do my best to bring thoughtfulness and clarity to my subjects.  But sometimes even the most thoughtful blogger makes mistakes.  Or, more generously, makes new discoveries about prior misunderstandings.  

So, why the long wind-up?  Well, one of the key areas of exploration and articulation on this blog is the concept of human and social capital.  That is why it has been somewhat unnerving for me to discover that my usage of the term social capital has been largely misapplied.  Apparently, the general consensus among sociologists and people who have spent years researching and writing papers on the subject, is that the term refers to the value of social relations.  I had been using the term, rather, to describe the value of one's external relations with society in general - a far larger and more generalized definition.

I think my original problem might have lain in trying to stretch the term out to transcend what I felt were its limitations, and thus provide a much more coherent and descriptive conceptualization, one powerful enough to functionally explain, alongside human capital, the total of human development and subsequent endeavor.  My interest was in developing a frame work for human agency, in terms of the process of input and output.  The social sciences have long found profound evidence that human agency is determined by genetic and societal forces.  Humans exist not in isolation, but rather as intimately wound players in the larger human drama.  Within this framework, there seems to be little room for determination that is neither rooted in genetics nor environment, certainly not in terms of explanatory power.

If one fears this framework to be overly reductionistic, I would caution that the explanatory claim is, like many powerful theories, not attempting to provide evidence for every human action, but merely laying the groundwork upon which any further causal mechanism might work.  For instance, we cannot possibly know with much resolution the precise causal mechanism for a vast range of human behaviors.  But we can, however, stipulate that any such behavior will have been rooted in genetic or environmental conditions.  It is then up to us to gather further evidence to increase the resolution of the causality.  An example of a similarly fundamental theory, would be evolution by natural selection.  While there are an almost infinite number of causal factors involved in the process - from the interaction of individual DNA base pair mutations up to the forces of nature such as weather patterns, and tectonic plate movements.  At the individual level, the process of evolution is quite low-resolution, yet in terms of broadly explanatory and predictive power, the theory is unmatched.

My interest in such a comprehensive narrative is largely a product not only of my readings in social science, but also in what I have witnessed in my life and career.  I suppose it should also be said that one of the imperatives of both adult civic, as well as interpersonal and self-reflective engagement, is to understand not merely what one believes but why one believes it.  At a most fundamental level, conscious life can be boiled down no further than the most basic and primary act of thought itself.  As Descrates famously wrote I think therefore I am, so too any claim we have as intelligent human actors must be derived from this basic premise: if I am what I think, then why do I think what I think?  In attempting this question, social science has been indispensable in providing evidence-based answers.

From this basic existential inquiry, arises all subsequent political, economic and cultural analysis.  No better example of this is in the frustratingly polarized political climate of our current era.  Almost every issue at which our countrymen find themselves at odds can be reduced down to fundamental questions of human development and human action.  Whether how to fairly tax the public, how to school our children, how to determine the morality of our laws, how to attack inequality and promote economic and social justice... all of these questions hinge upon the deeper question: why do men do what they do?

And here, I propose, social science has answers.  In terms of specifics, much less large-scale policy prescriptions, there is a vast amount we do not understand.  But all the evidence so far points to this very clear narrative: that human agency is a sum of Human Capital and capital that is derived from one's external resources, everything from a healthy uterus, the language spoken in a child's home, the condition of the neighborhood, the availability of health services or civic institutions, the adequacy education and social relationships that encourage emotional and cognitive development, the availability of employment opportunities, the quality of police and emergency services, and the quality and availability of government representation and journalistic inquiry. 

All of this, which I had wrongly been calling social capital previously, I will now refer to as Societal Capital. This term is, in my opinion, a much needed counterpart to the established term Human Capital.  Where the latter represents one's internal capacities, and therefore leverage and self-efficacy in society, the former represents the societal conditions which serve to either promote or inhibit those internal capacities. 

One of the main reasons the term Societal Capital is needed, is that neither term is static; neither is solely functional on its own.  One's Human Capital must often be understood in relation to one's corresponding Societal Capital, dependent as it often is both in its prior and future development.  Societal capital, likewise must often be understood in relation to corresponding Human Capital.  Without Human Capital, Societal Capital is often unclaimed, and thus unleveraged.  For instance, the ability to read is meaningless if there are no books available to read.  Likewise, the availability of books is meaningless if one is unable to read.

One of the powerful features of this framework is in its insight into the dynamic effects we see between Human and Societal Capital.  A lack in both will often produce a compounded effect that minimizes future capital acquisition, while an abundance of both will also compound, producing an increased future capital acquisition.  To return to the example of literacy, an absence of books and the capacity to read them will lead an individual to attend to other matters, and both forms of capital will likely remain dormant; no capacity to read stimulates no acquisition of books, no acquisition of books stimulates no capacity to read.  Yet capacity to read stimulates the acquisition of books, and visa-versa.

One can easily see how this dynamic, compounding effect has innumerable ripple effects throughout individual and community life.  This basic premise is a core feature of human culture and civilization, embedded in our societal relations at every level.  A defining feature of families, peer groups, communities, cities, states and countries is their implicit organization around the interaction between Human and Societal Capital.  We are a learning species.  We seek out friends and communities because of their utility in maximizing total Human and Societal Capital.  A friend calls on another friend for support in hard times, and both become stronger for it, their individual Human Capital is strengthened and Societal Capital is formed.  A government builds a system of mass transit that increases the individual Human Capital of nearby citizens, who then in turn vote to make the system better, increasing their Societal Capital.

There is of course the possibility of negative effects embedded in all of these interactions.  But the theory of Human and Societal Capital is only a general measurement designed to guide our analysis.  Some human interactions will have unintended negative consequences, and they will have to be accounted for in the design of our models.  Negative cognitive patterns of mind, for instance, are built that could be thought of as actively negative, in the sense that they actively contribute to a lowering of total individual or societal agency.  But I think it will be more practical, from a theoretical design perspective, to see these patterns in terms of being the result of a reduction in positive Human and Societal Capital.

In future posts, I look forward to continuing to hone this framework.  The term Social Capital, while certainly useful in a more narrow sense, I think fails to deal with what seems a glaring deficit of conceptualization in not taking on a role as an external counterpart to Human Capital's description of the internal mechanism of human agency.

Human Capital

I realized recently that I don't think I'd ever come across a description of what a "great" person looks like. From a determinist perspective, individuals operate according to their conscious state at any given moment. That is, every decision we make is determined by what drives us, and what drives us is in turn driven by what has driven us up until that point. So as individuals, we can be thought of as nodes of the larger evolution of our species, both through generational genetic inheritance and situational cultural transformation. Each individual is born into this swirling soup of ideas and circumstances, with the expectation that one will add to, not subtract from, the larger human enterprise of happiness and understanding.

So starting from that premise, could we not find some simple template for what a "great" person might look like, and further, what would go into creating that individual? This template would be composed of a core set of generalized areas, each extending into specific qualities. Each would be a form of capital that adds to the fulfillment of both the happiness and completeness of the individual, and also of the larger society in general. These traits should be universal enough to transcend political, religious or social ideology. In any given situation, the relative importance of one or another trait might differ, but in a general sense each trait should add to the individual's fulfillment as well as that of society.

It's not a new idea. The concept of a role-model is well established. One's mother and father are the most obvious influences. Peers and peripheral social members soon begin to play a role. But as larger fulcrums of group behavior, those from which social identity and behavioral trajectory are derived, might be deeper expressions of historical archetypes such as religious, political, military, scientific or business leaders. Of these, no single archetype might suffice. In a scientific figure we might exemplary performance in reason and inquiry, hard work and dedication, but a lacking in moral integrity or compassion. Or in a religious figure, whose compassion and depth of human understanding is unparalleled, we may not find much in the way of innovation or skeptical inquiry. Yet in all of these characters we derive a sense of what every individual should aspire towards.

Not every one is capable of fulfilling each and every requirement of this template for greatness. Some will fulfill little, if any at all, of some traits. This could be for genetic reasons, or due to physical accident. It may be life circumstances, such as geographic location or particular social events. Nor will any one individual will ever fulfill them all. But each trait will be cooperative: the attainment of any one will aid the attainment of any other. In correlation, the lack of any one skill may (but not necessarily) detract from the attainment of any other.

Most of the attributes will be acquired over a lifetime. Each individual will be born with certain advantages and disadvantages toward their acquisition. At the group level, social organization will attempt to maximize the attainment of these attributes by all. Some efforts will be more effective than others, and some will actively discourage or prevent this goal. The promotion of attainment by some will necessarily limit the attainment of others. As these attributes are mostly learned, they require the right social systems in place to be effected. These systems require a balance of resources, and distribution will always be somewhat unequal. But in the long term, just as each attribute cooperates to improve the acquisition of any other in the individual, so will the acquisition of attributes in any one member contribute to the acquisition of each member of the group.

The following is a rough list of general attribute areas, each followed by more specific list of examples that area's characteristic traits.

Human Capital

Emotional: happiness, satisfaction, compassion, generosity, self-control, ethics, integrity, confidence, courage, self-awareness

Knowledge Skills: reading, writing, math, music, art, dance, technology, mechanics, athletics, discipline, diet, hygiene, exercise

Knowledge Information: humanities, sciences, traditions, institutions, "perspective"

Social: language, protocols, empathy, self-awareness (perception of self by others)

Monetary: family income, family resources, neighborhood resources,

Biological: mental, physical, health

The list is certainly not exhaustive, and could have a more organized structure. For instance, many of the attributes apply only within one's consciousness, while others are the physical actualization, or application of specific skills. Some attributes are directed from the self, while others depend upon social or environmental resources.

If we are to recognize that humans are not the ultimate directors of their own fate, and are mere expressors of biological and environmental conditions, operating as fulcrums of a larger social "mind", then it would serve us well to define precisely what we want this "mind" to produce. We will then be able to draft political and social institutions that effectively achieve this.