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?

Child Development in America

A common problem in education debate is the failure to make a distinction between demographic populations.  Deborah Meier recounts what she has witnessed in the past 40 years of education:

I entered teaching in 1963 during the early civil rights movement and allied myself with a growing new progressivism. Sometimes called "open education," its advocates were given a warm reception in some places of power for about five years, maybe 10. By 1985, I thought we were on the cutting edge of a transformative movement. I was dead wrong. We were declared to be too slow in showing test success and our vision hard to mandate from the top down. The New Reformers decided on a different path, which they have pursued now for between 20 and 30 years of unprecedented attention and resources.

Performance map of Los Angeles, CA

Open education requires in children high levels of development in a variety of spheres (emotion, cognitive, language, etc.). Yet American communities are developmentally quite diverse, generally arrayed across this spectrum along socio-economic lines. The difference between communities with high levels of child development and those with low levels is quite extraordinary. In one classroom 90% of students might have a minimal vocabulary, uneducated parents who work for low pay, and live in a neighborhood in close proximity to drugs and violence.  In another classroom 90% of students might have an enormous vocabulary, highly educated, professional parents, and live in a safe neighborhood with access to many highly academically stimulating activities. Thus, in some communities, Open Education is going to be much more successful, as it falls within the boundaries of the childrens' respective zones of proximal development, while in others the students aren't as prepared for it.

Yet, as Deborah points out, the alternative - rote, scripted - education, hasn't been dramatically more successful either, even if it is at least more attentive to traditional academic skill-building.

But after more than two decades of these New Reforms—more and more testing, higher stakes, charters, and mayoral control—we do know some things for sure:
(a) Test scores have not risen, and the test-score gap hasn't narrowed.
(b) We have moved further away from building a profession that retains and uses its experienced teachers well.
(c) We are witnessing unimaginable hours spent on test-prepping and a narrowing of the rest of the curriculum while cheating is being ignored and teachers are being demoralized. Hardly trivial side effects. 

(Another critique would be that it is overly cold, authoritarian, punitive and dehumanizing, especially for students who come from communities that don't model the sort of "life-long learning" and joy of academic discovery that school is in part designed to inspire.)

I think the real question, and one with no easy answer, is how exactly to differentiate our provision of education to such developmentally distinct communities. Of course, these are generalities, and there will always be diversity within communities. This would be one of the problems in designing a policy of proper differentiation. But the fact remains that our neighborhoods are designed to self-differentiate by socio-economics and class. Ignoring this fact, pretending that everyone in America is somehow, naturally "free" is harmful wishful thinking; it leads us away from seriously grappling with what is maybe the one fundamental goal of public education: how to properly ensure that every citizen grows up with access to developmental resources that allows him or her to be an equitable participant in our country.

Our traditional model has been one classroom, one teacher, one group of 25-35 students. Within this framework, we fiddle about with pedagogic strategies and interventions, yet the basic framework remains. Yet given the degree of developmental diversity across communities and schools, relying on this model for the entire developmental spectrum seems crazy. Any teacher who has taught at both ends of the spectrum (almost certainly in two different socio-economic communities) knows that these are two completely different teaching experiences. This is why unions scream when all teachers are expected to deliver equal outcomes. It's absurd.

Personally, I find Open Education model the absolute pinnacle of what education should be, encouraging in children self-reliance, skepticism, engagement and ultimately, joy of discovery that should last a lifetime. Yet to implement this in different communities, a different model must be used. I have theories as to what models might work, and they would be, in the short-term, rather expensive. But if all we really care about is results, they would ultimately be more than worth it.

A Greater Inequality

The Occupy Wall Street movement is no doubt about many things, but I think it could be said to be at its core about income inequality.   My greatest problem with income inequality may have less to do with actual equality of income, but rather the inequality of opportunity it represents.   

The ownership of capital gives one an advantage in a capitalist economy.  We can accept that a certain amount of private capital is necessary to a healthy, competitive, robust marketplace, as its incentive structure tends to foster innovation and efficiency, often towards the common good.  But this is not necessarily the case, as it can also hamper innovation and efficiency, generally as accumulated wealth tends to accrete into entrenched interests.

But something I think is often missing from this part of the discussion is the degree to which human capital also accretes and gives structural advantage to the few.  I recently wrote about this in response to Eric Cantor's evocation of his poor Jewish immigrant grandmother's overcoming poverty to live out the American Dream through her grandchildren.  He speaks - as so many often do - of poverty in purely financial terms, as if financial capital is the only leverage point in capitalist society, and it is possible for anyone without it to begin to accumulate his or her own leverage.

Yet there is another, more powerful form of capital that needs to be leveraged in order to even begin to compete in a capitalist economy.  This is human capital.  What Cantor didn't mention (although was implicit in his narrative), was the amount of human capital his immigrant grandmother possessed.  Malcolm Gladwell raises the point in his book, Outliers, that Jewish immigrants in early 20th century New York tended to have access to human capital that other immigrants, such as Italian and Irish, did not.  Ironically, because of their oppression and marginalization in European society, they did not have the "luxury" of relying upon low-skill labor in the countryside, and instead were forced to develop skill-intensive occupations such as tailoring, jewelry, etc.  This provided an enormously useful form of capital they could then leverage in America, as such corollary skills, such as accounting and business-management, enabled them to make a profitable new life.

The problem the notion of human capital poses to the traditional economic debate is one of human behavior.  It makes a case that even in a relatively competitive and "free" market, even when you overcome the problem of access to capital, you're still faced with the dilemma of human means, where it simply isn't the case that "everyone" can succeed, because everyone does not have access to the same levels of human capital - that which allows them to leverage themselves in the economy, their ability to work hard, play by the rules, learn new skills, apply their knowledge, have productive social interactions, plan for the future, delay gratification, etc.  These are all skills that have little to do with inherited traits, but rather what they have learned from family, friends, neighbors and cultural interactions.

Most damning of all, just like financial capital human capital has a tendency to accrete.  Not only is the capital self-leveraging (healthy self-esteem = determination = study skills = more knowledge = more self esteem), but it brings up those around it, whether children or friends and neighbors, or schoolmates.  And because property values tends to create communities of homogeneous financial capital, so too do they create communities of homogeneous human capital.  So you end up with communities either both low in financial and human capital, or high in financial and human capital.  The clearest evidence of this can be see in public schools, where academic progress, the product primarily of human capital, aligns almost perfectly with financial capital.

It is a fact that opportunity is a product of human capital.  Without these core skills, one has no real self-efficacy.  Thus, to the extent that American citizens are growing up in families and communities which are failing to provide them with human capital, all the objective opportunity in the world will be essentially inaccessible.  It is rather like dangling fruit just out of reach of one whose legs are simply not long enough to reach.

The situation is clearly unfair.  People are growing up without opportunity.  For them, there is no real American dream.  Likewise, there are those who have been privileged with an abundance of human capital, and have been able to leverage it into great wealth. The million dollar question is not whether this is fair (it obviously is not), but whether there is anything we as a society can do to help them.  Public education is a great first start.  Other social programs that aim to guarantee access to the means to build human capital are equally important.  But it remains to be seen how effective any of these programs can really be.

So the next question that must be asked is whether a sort of "palliative care" might be owed to those lacking both human capital itself, and for whatever reason the means to develop it.  First on this list might be access to health care.  Millions of Americans will be stuck in poverty wage jobs with no access to it.  They will not have the means to develop sufficient human capital in the foreseeable future.  This will lead directly to great hardship as they inevitably become sick and injured.  Other quality of life issues can be remedied through such things as parks, libraries, public museums.  As this population will continue to be at risk of financial catastrophe, a basic social safety net will be required.

A case can be made that provision of these services runs the risk of disincentivizing the development of human capital.  However, I find claims that the strongest factor in the development of human capital is the desire to avoid the punitive effects of life without healthcare, food stamps or temporary welfare to be quite weak.  Millions already live in dire poverty, without these supposed barriers to human capital development, due to their acquisition of menial, poverty-wage labor, and obviously are not climbing out of poverty in large numbers.  American generation poverty is vast, and multi-causal.  Structural concerns are much more deterministic than the paltry government assistance offer. 

For instance, take the example of a common problem in poor neighborhoods.  A single parent household, in which children return home from school and are essentially left unattended, to roam the streets with neighborhood peers.  This will more often than not contribute to a net weakening of human capital.  Some strengths will be gained, but many more will likely be lost, or rather, weaknesses gained.  Many forms of human capital will be gained that provide some real benefit in the context of the norms of that marginalized neighborhood - such as fighting, acting tough, becoming fluent in cultural norms - but these will more than often represent patterns of thinking and behaving that are obstacles in wider society.  Even to a family with the best intentions, a child may not be able to avoid developing these negative behaviors and attitudes, sometimes referred to having been "lost to the streets".  This is a problem of structural failure, when even high degrees of human capital in a parent are overwhelmed by its opposing forces in other areas of a child's development.

Not only is capitalism, or free marketism, not competent to address this age-old dilemma, but it often actively contributes to it, through the accretion of unequal distributions in human capital and structural impediments to its formation and leveraging.

Invoking the Myth of Means

In a speech to a student newspaper, Eric Cantor uses his poor grandmother to remind us that, as he sees it, the American dream is still alive and well in America.

"Widowed by age 30, she raised my father and uncle in a tight apartment above a tiny grocery store that she and my grandfather had opened. She worked day and night and sacrificed tremendously to secure a better future for her sons. And sure enough, this young woman – who had the courage to journey to a distant land with hope as her only possession – lifted herself into the ranks of the middle class. Through hard work, her faith and thrift, she was even able to send her two sons to college."

I assume that by referring to his poor grandmother, Cantor was attempting to overturn what he likely considers the myth of means. That is, that one does not need means to become successful - that poverty is no excuse.  Yet this is a misunderstanding of socio-economics. It isn't necessarily the fact that someone is poor that makes success difficult. It is what is so highly correlated with poverty - things like single-parenthood, lack of education, lack of parenting skills, lack of cultural knowledge, etc. Cantor's grandmother no doubt possessed many forms of social capital that she was able to leverage into social capital for her family.

In this sense, she would have been financially, but not socially impoverished.  The former is a hardship, but no where near as devastating as the latter.  Without knowledge, one is indeed powerless.  What Cantor assumes in his grandmother, he assumes away in what he would no doubt consider the "undeserving" poor: he assumes she made her own social knowledge, as he assumes others can make their own.  Yet this type of knowledge is not self-made.  It comes from generations before you, and generations before them.  In America we have poverty - social poverty - that goes back generations.  Despite whatever convenient faith Cantor and other conservatives claim to have in the individual, their faith cannot overcome the reality of finding oneself without the knowledge and power to be successful.

Bleak Post

By now it's an old story to talk about the death of American manufacturing and our losing economic war with a third world more than happy to slave away for an existence we couldn't even dream of.  Automaticity and new technologies have allowed us much greater efficiency and productivity.  But it doesn't seem to be trickling down much, aside from fancier consumer electronics and discounts off bulk purchases.  We've seen the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class lose whatever sense of job security it once thought it had.  As New Jersey Governor Chris Christie famously asked, "Who gets pensions any more?"

The whole field has indeed changed, and I'm not sure we can cope as a culture/society. In the past a blue-collar family could count on a simple high school education providing entrance and exit into a stable income. This essentially took care of a pretty vast swath of American humanity.

But the kind of economy we're seeing pan out is pretty brutal to these kind of family traditions. Essentially, the bar for human and social capital has been raised significantly higher than it ever was. It's all too common for commenters to make vague proclamations about needing to "fix" education, as if the problem was output. But the truth is that it is input. We simply don't have the capacity of quality families that can produce children that can excel in academics.

Now, as a teacher, don't believe for a second I'm not trying. And I honestly don't think I'm saying today's generation is any worse than it was in the past. We've always had these families, and their kids didn't need degrees to find quality careers. But it is as if we are trying to cram a square peg into a round hole. Sure, you can always tweak the education model. But the margin of improvement has far less to do with what you can do in the classroom compared with the reality of where society simply is at. 

The term "class warfare", as a rhetorical device, has been in the news lately.  But a real class war has been raging for decades.  Having lost the battle long ago to smart machines and overseas labor, blue collar American families found themselves forced to compete with the well-read and groomed upper socio-economic classes, despite a severe disadvantage in human and social capital.  Without an academic culture and strong support at home, preparing for college isn't something most can do completely on their own.  Those eventually managing to find "the world of the mind", and then going on to graduate, have found an over-saturated job market without enough supply to meet demand.

Despite the many shiny new trinkets that globalization has placed upon our shelves and inside our screens, we seem to be taking two steps back for every one forward.  Add to this our ideological spectrum bending relentlessly rightward, and our government expenditures on things that used to take the rough edges off an unforgiving economic platform - like roads, schools, police and health care, and the future looks bleak indeed.

A Real Parent Revolution

 Diane Ravitch weighs in on the "Parent Trigger",

It is another one of those deceptive schemes that comes packaged with an alluring name, but whose true purpose is to undermine public education....

In early 2010, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California, the state legislature passed the "Parent Empowerment Act." This law is commonly known as the Parent Trigger. It allows a majority of parents in a low-performing school to sign a petition that leads to various sanctions for the school: firing all or some of the staff, turning the school over to charter management, or closing the school. These are similar to the options in the U.S. Department of Education's School Improvement Grant program. All of them are punitive, none is supportive of changing the school for the better, and none has a shred of evidence to show that it will improve the school. Neither the Parent Trigger nor the federal SIG program offers any constructive alternatives to unhappy parents, only ways to punish the school for low scores.

 A controversy erupted earlier this year when the charter-school affiliated group "Parent Revolution" tried to shit down a school in Compton, gathering parent signatures.  The charter school movement, like the voucher movement before it, seeks to transcend the public education system, yet ultimately undermines it.  Schools are a socialist enterprise, in that they are built on the belief that every citizen deserves a good education, funded by the state.  Citizens with access to wealth and privilege, human and social capital, have never had to worry about educating their children.  It is the poor and ignorant who must receive this social help from the rest of us. 

And so, these reforms miss the real problem: "Bad" schools overwhelmingly align with poverty, not with bad teaching or administration.

I'm sure you've heard this line before.  But it is still true.  Just because we don't have a good solution to poverty doesn't mean we don't try.  But nor does it mean that we can pretend it isn't the major factor in the education gap, and one which teachers are given little in the way of resources to attend to.

The bottom line is that one thing could make these parents' school better: them.  If their community was capable of raising its children right, then their student's achievement would be through the roof. 

Now, this sounds terrible, right?  The truth is painful.  But you know what is more painful?  Being unwilling to face the truth and to face it head on.

This community is busting its ass, for low pay, crappy work, suffering more than anyone else.  It is poorly educated, and lacks access to the social capital necessary to pull itself out.  Its problems are compounded geographically, as the entire neighborhood is populated with people lacking in social and human capital.  Its kids are likewise shoved into schools filled with others just like them.  Teachers - often those with the least experience and lowest on the totem-pole, having not had a chance to transfer to an easier population - are being asked to teach the same classroom numbers as more affluent neighborhood schools, whose kids' combined human and social capital is exponentially greater. 

So instead of truly targeting these communities for intervention that takes their challenges into account, giving them access to services that other neighborhoods don't need or take for granted, providing support that they need, we ignore all of this and tell ourselves - and them - that it's all the teacher's fault.  We simply pretend that these huge social problems don't exist.  We pretend that we can have entire sectors of the economy built upon the backs of the working poor, who then get funneled into geographically isolated and capital-incapacitating neighborhoods,  and expect our meager poor schools - affording little more (if even) than the same resources than wealthy schools - to close the gap.

This is the real tragedy, and one that education "reformers" continue to ignore, even after their many failures to make even a dent in the problem, and who ultimately are doing these communities a disservice by not addressing real needs, giving cover to those who still won't face the enormity of the social problem eating away at our core.  A real revolution in education would be to finally take our social responsibility seriously, and reach out helping and supportive hands to these parents, not offer them imaginary hopes based on little more than resentment and victimhood.

Indulging Hypocrisy

It seems to me that there is a huge gulf between the radical right, who truly believe the anti-all-government crap that seems the lifeblood of contemporary right-wing rhetoric, and the mainstream right, who enjoy the same rhetoric, while not actually believing it.  They actually believe in libraries, schools, medicare, social security, etc. But the radical right is so energetic and passionate... here's the question: why do moderates let them get away it, why do they pretend to agree?

On the left, there doesn't seem to be at all this kind of schism. You rarely hear for the outright abolishment of business. And if you did, the rest of the left wouldn't dream of pretending to agree.

I tend to think this is historical. Communism as a politically correct philosophy died a long time ago. Total free marketism is alive and well, despite routinely demonstrating massive failings. Reasonable people understand this, and advocate a mixed economy. So again, why does the right allow radical idiocy to invade their rhetoric?

I'm reminded of the radio right, in which half-truths are routinely bandied about, with a sort of wink-and-nod - we don't really think that (or do we)? It's a comfort with factual relativism that seems to baffle the left.