Beyond Fatalism

Allegoria Della Vita Umana, Guido Cagnacci (1601 - 1663)

Getting hung up on fatalism seems one of the biggest problems people have in accepting the determinist view (that there is no free will; the choices we make have been fully caused); even if they see it as rational, they worry the implication will be so dire that to accept it would be embracing something immoral.

This is incredibly flawed logic, of course, in that it puts the cart before the horse, and accepts the idea that you don't have to accept reality if you don't like it - as if your views had any bearing on the laws of the physical universe!

But it is also flawed in that it assumes that determinism implies fatalism. For me, rather it implies compassion, empathy, understanding of the ego, and the path to making better decisions. It implies humility and the recognition that we are all doing the best we can. It implies that our positive and negative actions are merely consequences of larger dynamics, and thus allows us to better understand how to ultimately shape those larger dynamics and increase human happiness.

I was reminded of this after the recent school shooting. At the end of the story, the newscaster noting the grief being experienced throughout the small town community, his final words were that the "community was left grappling with one question: why?" It occurred to me that this question is at the root of so much human despair and anguish. When something painful is not understood, it is in our nature to agonize all the more over it. Feelings of fear mix with anger and frustration into a toxic concoction. These emotions cloud our judgement, and often lead to an impulse of retribution, likely itself an attempt to banish the uncomfortable emotions.

Yet as I heard the newscaster's question, and sympathized with the sentiment, I was experiencing none of the angst to which he referred: there would clearly be a reason why, there always is. The boy was disturbed. Whether it was from a personal history as the victim of abuse, or his suffering from mental illness, or dysfunctional cultural influences, or, more commonly, a mixture of all three, he was clearly created by his genes and their interaction with the environment.

Any of us who has ever thought, "well, I would never do something like that", intuitively grasps this notion, that the self is relative: the reasons you would never do such a thing yourself are precisely the things that were absent from the shooter's self.

Parents also intuitively grasp this notion whenever they take the time to provide guidance to their children: they recognize that their child's behavioral development is a physical process dependent on positive multi-sensory stimulation: touching, hearing and seeing the world in ways that stimulate the positive brain growth responsible for improved cognition, emotional regulation, etc. These things don't happen by accident - everything in our cultural and religious heritage since the dawn of history has evidenced that, as advanced primates, humans are practically defined by our ability to learn, and teach, so as to pass on specific behaviors and development that we desire in successive generations.

So, while the question"why" is interesting from a scientific perspective, as there is clearly an infinite number of things to learn about the process of consciousness and individual choice, the larger, existential, question has clearly been answered. We know in a general sense why "bad" people do bad things, as well as why good people do "good" things: because they have been made that way.

This may all lead to a refutation of the second claim in the worry about fatalism: that acceptance of determinism will lead not only to despair and meaninglessness, but to a morality devoid of personal responsibility.

Even if one believes (knows?) that life unfolds according to physical processes beyond our ultimate control, one's practical experience is remarkably unchanged.  One still has needs and desires.  Surely the fact that I do not choose to become hungry, or that my taste buds have been designed to respond to make certain foods pleasurable, doesn't mean that I cannot enjoy a delicious meal.  Or, that my pain receptors have been designed to give me discomfort when they are stimulated by injury?  I cannot escape this fact of human life.


But what of the choices I make?  Here lies what may be the nub of the issue.  Every conscious choice I make is essentially a selection among a variety of options, each given variations of "weight" towards my ultimate goal of making the "best" choice.  This is at one level a physical, mathematical process, in that there exist multiple variables that are adjusted and defined according to discrete relationships, so as to give each meaning in context of the others.  Our brains have been designed to "learn" to make these choices as unconsciously as possible, firmly laying down complex routines and sub-routines, so as to maximize efficiency and free up mental resources for expanded conscious capacity.  For instance, when first learning to ride a bike, 100% of conscious attention is required to manage the feedback of innumerable stimuli.  Yet once bike riding is "learned", the routines have been laid down to the degree that it is now possible to ponder direction, carry on conversations, or ruminate over other, more transcendent concerns.  What began as a complicated series of conscious decisions (keep pedaling, lean left, lean right, watch out for the tree!), has become entirely unconscious.


Yet many decisions in life are unique, and require more sophisticated analysis.  Surely picking a president, or deciding to get up on time to go to work, or to quell one's anger so as not to go on a killing spree, or to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior, require more conscious choice.


Or do they?  Individual decision-making is difficult to track, especially on complex, dynamic issues such as religion, politics, or motivation, where a seemingly infinite set of variables come to bear.  But when people are looked at as a group, in categories defined by set variables such as family history, education, wealth, culture, mental health, etc., patterns begin to emerge.  It becomes increasingly possible to predict the likelihood that any given individual in a group will make particular decisions.


What this implies is that people, no matter how conscious they might regard themselves to be when they get out of bed in the morning, or step into the polling booth in the afternoon, are in fact much more determined than they might themselves recognize.  Knowingly or not, they are on courses of patterned behavior that their brains have been evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to establish systematically.  


Can we break free from these determined patterns?  This is actually the question the fatalist gets at:  If one were to, after accepting that he is fully caused and thus not ultimately responsible for any of his behavior, commit murder in cold blood and feel no guilt or shame?  

He certainly could, but only if he were able to completely extricate himself not only from everything he has ever learned from society regarding the immorality of murder, but also from the biological structures in his brain responsible for the human emotions of empathy, compassion and love for others.  He would have to be the proverbial "superman".  

Not only would this be a highly unlikely development in any average man, it would have to be entirely deterministic.  That is, he must recognize that whatever behavior he undertakes to choose, it will have arisen from his own special circumstance as a "self" that had been created under the precise conditions so as to allow him to carry out such a morally radical action, one in direct opposition to biological and social norms that society has not inherited arbitrarily, but largely having been designed with regard to maximal individual interest.  

The decision to flaunt this design would be tantamount to denying one's biological imperative to eat, or even move.  If there is truly no point to anything, as we are all determined, then why should we do anything at all?


I tried this once, when I came to a similar conclusion at the age of 18.  I remember sitting on a chair in my bedroom, realizing that I could find no clear, rational purpose to life, other than to fulfill preordained social and biological (at a certain point these blur together) impulses.  I had no real option other than to adopt a catatonic posture towards waking reality, and simply let nature take its course.  I moved to the floor, laying down onto my back.  I had to breath - that was largely a autonomic response anyway.  I didn't need need to pee just then, which in retrospect was probably a bonus, as I would have had to wrestle with the thought of allowing my bladder to release its contents of its own volition.  


So, there I was.  Waiting.  For what, to die?  I imagined my then girlfriend arriving home and finding me there, inevitably arguing with me to get the hell up off the floor (maybe by then lying in my own excrement).  It began to dawn on me that what I was undertaking required enormous willpower.  By choosing to make no choices, I was stuck in a paradox.  Any behavior would be chosen behavior.  This was simply a physical reality of being human.  And any choice I made was going to be dependent on prior choices, or naturally occurring stimuli.  If I were to truly stay in this catatonic state, and I suppose eventually be taken away on a stretcher, I would have to have process enormous amounts of prior learning and have managed to re-route those innumerable sub-routines.  To do so - and here is the bottom of it all - would have all been entirely determined anyway; reaching this point would have required a specific set of environmental and biological processes to occur that would have caused me to make whatever choices I was pretending not to make.  Maybe it was because I read Camus.  Maybe because I rebelled against my parents' religion.  Maybe I was simply depressed. 


In the end, I could not escape choice.  I would have to then take responsibility for the choices that I did make, even if they were ultimately chosen for me.  I thought first of my girlfriend, and my loving feelings for her. I thought of the sunshine.  I thought of bagels and cream cheese, and riding my skateboard.  I thought of making others happy, of doing good deeds, and of all there still was to learn in the world.  These were all things that gave me pleasure.  They were, of course, all products of my life up until that point.  They were the final result, the now, of the particular way in which all the elements that originally spun together, accreted into the planet Earth, assembled into lifeforms, evolved into humans, and over thousands of years gave rise to little old "me".


As I rose up of the floor, I felt a sort of ecstacy.  I had found an answer to the question "why".  It may not have had much explanatory power - that would come as I continued to live my life, learning and digesting the world before me.  But it was an existential answer.  It integrated my self with the natural world around me.  It established, through reason, a purpose for my existence.  Above all it elevated humility, a word rooted in the basic understanding that we are all only human.  Not only need we not be anything more, but we simply cannot be any more.  As Descartes famously wrote, "I think, therefore I am".  No matter that my thoughts came from some determined place in the past; I am my thoughts.  I am not omnipotent, and I must be satisfied with that limitation.    I must be satisfied with these physical limitations, even as I seek to expand my consciousness - that which is defined by the relationship between the self and it's own immediate history.  

Just as a serpent cannot eat its own tail, the self cannot think itself away.  It is trapped in its own causality.  All we can ever do is try to understand as best we can that which we have come from, that which makes us, as it will lead to the kind of fulfillment we cannot help but desire.  What this fulfillment is, or even how to attain it, is nothing less than the human project.  We are involved in it whether we like it or not.  It is indeed fate, but it is a fate much more profound and dynamic than we can hope to understand.  All we can do is go along for the ride, our contribution, in no matter what capacity, preordained.  


And there is beauty.  


Of course.

 

Designed to Fail

On a lark, I recently took to investigating the local industries here in the Coachella Valley, so as to possibly prepare for a career change (at the mention of which my wife went quietly ballistic - "You're a damn teacher!").  I didn't find much of interest in terms of employment.  But I did encounter a fascinating perspective on the regional economy.

In an article responding to a recent regional economic initiative, I found this profound little description of the valley's socio-economic dynamic:

....did you know there are 500,000 people living in the Valley during peak season?
In fact, some of the cities are very high-end resort communities. Cities like Palm desert, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells, and La Quinta. The Coachella Valley also has farmland, and also some lower income areas, and cities, which helps provide all labor for the major hospitality industry during the winter months when everyone comes to stay and play. Indeed, there are 200 golf courses in the Valley.

I suppose this is in many ways a mundane, obvious observation.  But it gets at something far more profound about the way our society functions, and the pressures that citizens face in striving to live their lives with dignity and equality of opportunity.  

 

A major talking point in the current Republican primary race is the idea that conservatism emphasizes "equality of opportunity", while liberalism "emphasizes equality of outcomes".  This framing is flawed in that its rhetorical design is to elicit agreement that conservatism's ideological framework, and subsequent policy prescriptions, is superior - a notion that is of course debatable.  However, on its face the framing isn't exactly incorrect, and might even be useful in understanding the deeper nature of our ideological differences.

Liberalism argues that equality of outcomes - a basic fact of our society - are determined by factors including, but not limited to, personal initiative.  In fact, personal initiative itself would be argued as the result of larger factors that shape individual citizens' sense of self-efficacy.  So while there may be in theory an equality of opportunity, an individual may not be able to access it because of socio-economic forces that have conspired to inhibit his personal agency, his ability to take advantage of those opportunities.  

 

In emphasizing the current inequality of outcomes, liberalism argues both that this is the result of socio-economic dynamics that are alterable, and then what policy options are available to broaden access to equality of outcomes.  This policy would ideally find the greatest point of leverage in a given negative dynamic and then design a program that effectively removes it as a negative factor in the individual's ability to affect positive outcomes.  

 

In educational pedagogy, new forms of learning always require what is termed "scaffolding".  A student is not expected to succeed with complete independence at the beginning of the lesson.  First, the teacher provides a model of what is expected.  Then the student is slowly given an opportunity to perform the task himself, but with the teacher right beside him giving him support; some of the scaffolding has been removed.  Finally, the teacher allows him to work completely independently, as he is now competent to succeed independently; the scaffolding has been completely removed.

This analogy is not necessarily meant to equate the learning process with a citizen's intellectual or behavioral capacity, although sometimes behavior is indeed a factor in the dynamics of access to opportunity.  Rather, it is meant as an analogy to the realities of socio-economics.  

 

So, for instance, lets take the example of a young single mother with a high school education, who makes minimum wage.  Laying aside for a moment the social dynamics that first led to her position (that is water under the bridge now anyway), let's examine the socio-economic dynamics of her situation that make it difficult for her to access the opportunities that might exist, yet which for her are circumstantially impractical.

Because of her low pay, she is unable to afford a car, babysitter, health insurance (for both herself and her child), or schooling for her child.  She can only afford to live in the poorest of neighborhoods, and struggles to pay for groceries.  Without government programs designed to help her and her family (her child), her life prospects would not be good, and she would be unable to access the majority of opportunities for betterment, should they even exist.  

 

With government, however, she has a decent chance of leveraging herself and her family to a better, more equal life outcome.  Public transit allows her to get to work without a car.  Subsidized health insurance allows her child (at least) to get the medical care he needs to stay healthy and prevents a medical issue from devastating her fragile situation.  Subsidized child care allows her the time to take classes at the local community college.  Public parks, libraries and community centers in her neighborhood allow a measure of quality of life and opportunities for her and her child.  Food stamps supplement her paltry income, allowing her to at least better feed her family, and possibly even save a little money in the bank.  Public education allows her child to get an education that she would not have been able to pay for privately, nor afford the time to spend homeschooling him - were she even to be competent enough to do so.

Conservative scolds will likely point out that her situation is her own fault.  She shouldn't have gotten pregnant, at least not without marrying first.  That might help.  However, two parents earning minimum wage are still hardly enough to support a family.  They might also point out that the provision of government services likely contributed to a sort of irresponsibility in family planning on her part, in that she must have known that, in the end, she would be taken care of.  

 

However, all we need to do is to is look back to a time before the modern liberal state, before these programs were in place, to see that illegitimacy and poverty were just as much problems then as they are today.  In fact, the research on what actually drives human behavior and life choices, there are much more profound socio-economic factors than the existence of government support.  Things like family background and education level are far more predictive of behavior than the prospect of government dole.  While we ought not discount this critique entirely - I'm sure it does play some role, the reality is that an analysis of the cycle of generational poverty shows that profound deficits in both human and social capital are by far the biggest drivers of impulsive, dysfunctional and short-sided behavior.

One of the most coherent and broadly negative of these dynamics is the geography of poverty itself.  Essentially, what we have in every region of the country is the isolation and stratification of citizens with low levels of human and social capital into communities along socio-economic lines.  These communities become highly reinforcing of negative behaviors, including out-of-wedlock birth, violence, substance abuse, mental illness, low education, inadequate parental involvement and guidance, etc.  (at the opposite end, you have more affluent communities concentrating individuals with high levels of human and social capital - education, savings, networking, mental health, physical fitness, impulse control, etc.).  To be raised in one of these neighborhoods, to fraternize with one's peers, attend school together, etc. is to be raised in a deficient, depleted, and more often dysfunctional environment.  Government programs or no, the sense of self-efficacy and agency, not to mention one's actual physical, emotional, behavioral, moral, academic, etc. development is still going to be massively malnourished.  Whether or not government programs can ever sufficiently remedy this socio-economic deficit - that translates into practical, thus literal opportunity and outcome depletion - is reasonably debatable.  But the larger issue is the structure of our economy itself.

Let us return now to the Coachella Valley.   

....lower income areas, and cities, [help] provide all labor for the major hospitality industry.

This is nothing less that a large-scale, macro-socio-economic recipe for continued poverty and inequality.  As long as there exists a market for low-wage services, there will be low-wage workers who live together in low-wage neighborhoods.  Thus all those who, for whatever reason (lack of education, lack of mental health, behavioral development, etc.) can do no better than work in low-skill, low-wage jobs will continue to make up an underclass of citizens for whom opportunity is inaccessible, and outcomes will be unequal.  We will continue to wrestle with the problems they inflict both on themselves and us in the form of crime, lost productivity and dysfunction.  Yet until we begin to wrestle with the ways in which we - as a society with a distinct social and economic structure - have inflicted problems on them, lasting solution will continue to elude us.

Fools Among Us

Three Fools of Carnival, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Keith Humphreys has a devilishly funny piece up about a terrible old colleague of his who never seemed to learn to be much of a good person and, regrettably, died a fool.  Pompous and rude, cruel and vain, he apparently took to wearing a toupe late in life, even as his trophy wife mocked him in her affairs with younger men.  For whatever reason, his words brought out in me some cathartic schadenfreude from my own recent tribulations.

   Instead of defining career success in absolute terms, Omphalus had an entirely relative view. Being smart and successful wasn’t enough. Rather, he felt the need to be smarter and more successful than everyone else, and to meet that standard forever. This transformed each generation’s arrival in his field from a source of stimulation to a terrifying threat. Where some saw new colleagues and new ideas, he perceived only a wave of potential usurpers. As he grew older and his powers began to wane, his fear of losing what he considered his eternal throne only intensified....

   Did he die happy? Perhaps he did. His self-delusions may have been strong enough to resist the evidence of his senses, present every time he put his fake hair on his hoary head in the mirror, overheard the increasingly derisive whispers of his colleagues, and saw his young wife wince at his withered body’s efforts at physical affection.

   What I do know though, as mid-life begins to recede in my rear view mirror, is that I do not want to emulate the many Dr. Omphalus’ I have known, whether they are inwardly happy or not. Partly it is because I regard their selfishness as inherently immoral, but I am equally influenced by my desire to have my physical aging be matched with progress in wisdom and maturity beyond what I possessed as an adolescent.

Always wanting to see the best in people (maybe worrying too much that they won't see the best in me), I’ve always had a blindspot for men such as this. I mean, surely I’ve known them, but I’ve always underestimated the extent to which they walk among us, seemingly successfully and capably despite what seem devastating character flaws.

I was just fired by one a few days ago.

Well, as a teacher, I was not “elected” for rehire. I’ve thought long and hard about what it was that he thought I lacked, after numerous observations and reviews, trying my best to divine just what exactly it was that he was looking for, I finally failed to measure up. Sure, I have my weaknesses, and much of the problem may lie in pedagogical or philosophical differences. But in the end it may just be that he is a small man with a chip on his shoulder, and who wants to take it out on the world (in this case, the untenured teacher who has no leverage other than the support of students and staff).

He’s the type of guy who never smiles, wears sunglasses indoors, walks around with his palms backwards (ala G.W.), and spends 10 minutes of every staff meeting regaling his audience with rock-climbing stories. I have no data on the actual size of his penis. It could be quite long. But metaphorically, these are the guys with such fragile egos, so ravaged by narcissism, that one can only assume their life is spent in perpetual unconscious agony over the fortitude of their member.

Sometimes life can feel like nothing but a string of painful reminders. These men (and women) walk among us like moral aliens, in so much as we’ll always fail to understand the root of their dysfunction, try as we might. And every once in a while you get cornered by one, outmaneuvered and run off the road.

Here’s to getting back up.

I Had A Dream

Adam Elsheimer, "Jacob's Dream" (16th century)

I received an email the other day from a district official.  After reading my thoughts in their yearly teacher survey on school quality in their district, specifically on my site, my principal and what I felt they could do to better support my efforts to improve student achievement, they were so impressed that they wanted to talk to me in person.  They felt I had key insight into the roots of low student achievement and were intrigued by the transformational nature of my suggestions.

My comments from the original survey:

Our students come to us in various forms of crisis, such as mental illness (depression, anxiety), substance abuse, chaotic home-life, emotional trauma, stemming from a variety of original causal factors.  Many of them have elementary-grade levels of academic, behavioral and emotional development.  We try and address their needs as best we can and provide excellent instruction.  But their needs are often much more severe, and cannot be addressed by teachers alone. 

I think it critical that each student receive comprehensive intervention ASAP (hopefully this would have been happening years prior in their academic career).  Site-level triggers ought to be established that target families in need for referral to the district to be assessed for intervention.  Most students likely have siblings that are in the same environment and thus it would be more efficient to intervene at the family level. 

Interventions would be differentiated according to need, and support services would be brought together in a holistic way, so that substance abuse, counseling, parenting, English classes, after-school programs, etc. be examined and recommended for the family according to need.  Incentive programs could be offered that reward reluctant parents for engagement. 

These district-level efforts would support teachers in a fundamental way that gets at the roots of issues that make student achievement - certainly at our site - often impossible for many students (truancy, substance abuse, defiance, etc.).  But as far as site-level support, apart from referral to intervention measures described previously, the teachers at our site could use the following: more security in the hallways, more prep time for phone calls home (we used to be able to do home-visits), smaller class sizes for more individualized instruction and personal relationship-building, a shift from professional development geared towards data-driven instruction that is based on "bad" data (i.e. data that is not reflective of the specific academic realities of our incredibly complicated student body) and towards data-driven instruction that accounts for their unique situation and needs.

In short, talking about student achievement, especially in the context of school and district policy, simply can't ignore the reality that student achievement is inexorably tied to home life.  For too long we haven't taken this aspect of academic achievement seriously, assuming it intransigent.  Yet there is much that can be done at the district and site level to facilitate the kinds of interventions that will ultimately lead to greatly increased student achievement and allow teachers much more room to leverage their capacity through quality instruction.

 They provided me with a sub for a day, and I met them at the district office.  I came prepared with copious notes, evidence from studies and journal articles, as well as my own writings and thoughts.  I held forth on the current state of the conversation on education and how I thought it repeatedly missed the fundamental crux of the issue: the fact that poverty correlates with a severe lack of human and social capital, and that these deficits manifest in the school performance of children from poor families.  I then proceed to outline my prescription for school policy: a shift away from endless professional development meetings, and instead to a focus on intervention teams established to quickly and comprehensively respond to specific needs of families identified at the site level for further evaluation and support.  Intervention strategies would include home visits, parenting classes, school-family liasons and dynamic integration with community and government social service networks.  This would be a radical shift in priority and organization structure for the district, but by tackling the root problems head-on it would be enormously more effective and ultimately cost-effective.

The district officials told me that my vision was just what they had been looking for.  For too long, they told me, they had been struggling to keep up with NCLB policies and reform efforts that piggy-backed on its flawed emphasis on test scores as a measure of teacher quality, as opposed to a serious look at the root causes of the achievement gap.  They asked me if I would like to join a task force responsible for designing the kind of district-level intervention program that I had been arguing for.  They were prepared to invest resources in development and implementation, and wanted our team to begin researching similar programs in other communities, and would arrange airfare for us to visit promising district initiatives if need be.

I left the meeting with a full heart, knowing that - finally - teachers, students and families would be getting the kind of support that they needed to truly achieve success, and find for themselves the freedom of opportunity, leveraged from elevated levels of human and social capital, that our country should have been offering long ago.

I reached into my pocket for my car keys, my mind still reveling in the good news - but they were gone.  A strange sensation of panic began to creep up into my chest.  I looked down and saw that the ground beneath me appeared to be falling away.  Either that, or I was floating into the sky.  The cars, people, buildings and roads receded from view.  I closed my eyes.  When I opened them I was staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, lying in quietly in bed.

There had been no meeting.  No task force.  No airfare to innovative programs across the country.  With any luck someone might read my survey response and nod in agreement.  But there was no reason to think that anything would ever come of it.  The conversation, the political will, the funding - was too misguided, too weak, too paltry to even begin thinking about such a radical proposition.  One day, maybe.  But for now, only in dreams.

For the Public Good

Recently, a union leader, New Jersey Education Association Executive Director Vincent Giordan, made what at first blush appeared an insensitive remark. When asked how he felt about the fact that poor parents can't afford to pay for their children to go to private schools, he replied: "Life's not fair."

While seemingly harsh he was in fact stating the reality of living in a capitalist system.  The original discussion had been around the issue of vouchers, and whether parents ought to be able to use them to leave their local public school.  School "choice" is basically the contemporary version of that argument.  Yet this sort of "privatization" framing of public goods misses the point.  There's nothing quite like public education, but imagine if approached public parks, or community centers similarly, offering paid tickets for country clubs and movie theaters.  These are public goods designed around the fundamental principle of guaranteeing access to the least among us, who would normally be shut out by market forces. 

The assumption behind school "choice" has always kind of irked me.  As I see it, the problem in education - certainly the achievement gap - is a simple matter of demographics.  SES essentially equates with high performance.  Public schools are an essentially socialist enterprise, in that they provide a free basic service to everyone and bill the taxpayer, much like roads, parks and traffic lights. 

Yet what we don't do, as we are not a communist country, is provide "free SES" everyone.  Citizens still must rely on their own income to pay their bills and pay rent.  Property values, largely a function of neighborhood SES, enforce and perpetuate SES segregation.  Thus, neighborhood schools will not be heterogeneous by SES, and achievement will be pulled up at schools with high social capital, and pushed downwards at schools with low social capital.

What we are currently doing is assuming that schools as traditionally designed can remedy the effects of low SES.  Attempts at "choice" and selective chartering play a sort of shell game in which parents who may be economically poor, yet are actually  high in social and human capital (have better parenting skills, more coherent and functional families, etc.), are given what amounts to a special pass out of the neighborhood school placement that their income would otherwise have enforced.

I'm not necessarily opposed to this in principle.  I'd like to see every student's (and parent's) needs be met.  I'd also like to see every family be able to afford a house out of a poor neighborhood.  But, "life's not fair", right?  The system as presently designed isn't capable of remedying the effects of low SES. 

So let's make it more fair.  School "choice" isn't doing this.  It is, at the margins, for those few higher SES poor parents who can take advantage of it.  But for the rest, well, "life's not fair".  I want a system that is actually fair. 

There seems an irony of school "choice", in an implicit behavioral assumption: that poor parents "choose" low performance.  What else explains the low achievement at poor schools?  Bad teaching?  How could it be that all the bad teachers end up at poor schools, lowering achievement, while all the good teachers end up at more affluent schools, raising achievement?

So, how could we truly make life fair for poor parents - the whole spectrum - whom for whatever reason aren't able to prepare their children for academic success.  We start with differentiated classroom models.  Three things are proven to be crucial for low-SES students: smaller class sizes, experienced teachers, and school wide interventions.  On top of this, things like after-school programs, truancy intervention, home-visits and parent outreach would be even better. This means a dramatic restructuring of how we fund schools, with much more funding going to pay for these increased resources.  Currently, when you look at the breakdown of measurable levels of social capital between a high-SES and low-SES school, the disparity is enormous, with highly predictable effects on development of human capital among the student body.

It isn't at complicated as it seems.  But a dramatic shift away from the current model, towards one of differentiation across districts, emphasizing SES-based intervention, is a radical shift towards meaningful reform.

Dead Horses

Apple Pipe in the Boy's Room

I often wonder how much I sound like a dead horse on this blog.  Err... you know what I mean.

But a Bloggingheads conversation between Harold Pollack and Glenn Loury spurred me to write.  The discussion lingered over Newt Gingrich's dubious statements on poor students and their behavior, and the kind of world in which the students to which he refers come from.

These are the kids I work with everyday. For instance, I nearly had a student physically assault me last week when I wouldn’t return his ipod. Many of these kids have been through so much – and continue to live through so much – that they are on a hair trigger.

Here are just a few factors in the escalation and perpetuation of their poor behavior:

- cognitively and emotionally “poor” homes: lifetimes spent with little vocabulary, world knowledge, emotional regulation and positive reinforcement modeled at home

- absent role-models: incarcerated or absent fathers, parents on drugs, or otherwise neglectful; or parents simply struggling to pay the bills working multiple jobs with little time for parenting

- negative role-models: many people in their families or neighborhoods who actively model poor behavior, both adults and peers who they are often left to be essentially raised by

- daily stress: this is huge. It could be from poor behaviors around them, but also from the circumstance of poverty, such as demeaning, low-pay occupations, or lack of health care in a population often defined by the advent of major illness or life hardship. My students’ family members seem to frequently be suffering medical problems.

- mental illness: genetic mental illness often leads to generational poverty, especially when conditions aren’t diagnosed and treated properly – especially without health care.

- cognitive deficits: learning disabilities and the effects of environmental toxins, or parent substance abuse while in utero lead to cognitive and emotional deficits

- multiplier effect: ghettos are by proxy filled with a low human/social capital population, leading to a net deficiency in social capital; the group just isn’t heterogeneous and lacks the kids of resources that might have been available were more high human/social capital individuals around.

- violence: at home and among peers, threat of violence is real and constant. Kids come to accept it and prepare for it, coming from any adult or peer.

- cultural isolation: different behavioral/cultural norms come to exist that envelop a community that are far outside normative behavior of wealthier neighborhoods. My students routinely express little regard for the property of others outside their kin group, and view drug use – especially soft drugs like pot or alcohol as perfectly normal daily activities.

This list isn’t nearly exhaustive. What should follow is the net effect this has on their brain and conscious state. Higher-order thinking is often difficult to achieve because of so much negative stimulus that the body will always prioritize. Education is often impossible because the student’s cognitive capacity has essentially been shut off. As long as they are living in this environment, it is very difficult to dial back that stress in a timely manner, so as to facilitate the acquisition of new skills.

However, as Harold points out, simply helping them learning self-regulation is enormously important. Unfortunately, it’s kind of like treating PTSD while a soldier is still in a war zone. Further, because of years of academic failure, school has become a place not of love, understanding and support, but an institution that demands what is often an unrealistic normative environment, thus setting the students up to fail. Still further, the focus on standards and superficial achievement leaves little room for the kind of non-academic learning that help teach practical human-human interaction skills.

As a science teacher at a continuation school, my task is to try and funnel in as much science knowledge as I can, while at the same time recognizing the unique circumstances these students face.  All are credit deficient, with some being merely a semester behind, and others 2-3 years behind.  A huge number of them test at an upper elementary grade level in reading and writing.  The average science textbook is written at a 10th grade level.  The state test questions are largely college-level.

Truancy is enormously high, so some students only make an appearance once or twice a week.  The overall graduation rate is probably 25% if we are lucky.  These students take yearly state tests, which they routinely fill in half-heartedly - no doubt torn between the idea that their teachers all want them desperately to try their best, and the knowledge that the test has zero meaning or impact on their lives as they live them. 

So I must decide, on what often seems like a second-to-second basis, between raising the bar so that they might one day graduate, and that their diploma will be meaningful.  For instance, I know that many students aren't getting the best education.  And I know that others are put off by the amount of work I require, and might leave and never return.  Yet others are learning self-control, determination, and social skills, as well as whatever content they might remember.  Divining this behavioral sweet spot is a form of educational wizardry even Newt Gingrich might struggle with.

So, between the principal breathing down my neck about portions of my students failing to take notes on the lesson during my evaluation, students recounting tales of rape and violence, others hiding meth pipes in their socks, personal confessions of illegal border crossings when they were barely out of diapers, drunken parents and fisticuffs in the lobby, after a night spent worrying what to do about this or that student, I'll try to keep my eye on what is best for my students.  And one day, I may find out what that is.

Origins of Compassion

A small child slips and falls down a well, breaking his arm.  We feel a strong pang of compassion for the boy.  A grown man, after a night of drinking, walks out onto the thin ice of a pond and falls when it breaks, nearly drowning before he is finally rescued.  We feel very little sympathy for him.  In both cases, someone has experienced great pain and anguish, yet our emotional response is different.  Though they may seem to come to us almost instinctively, an expression of our purest selves, our emotions in fact precede from a framework of logic and reason, albeit one that is often hidden in our unconscious and only discoverable through careful analysis.

So why the different emotional responses to the circumstances of boy and the man?  The question is one of agency.  There is little a child can do to control his reality.  Even if it was unwise for him to have been playing near the well, his actions can be viewed in terms of a clear lack of intellectual and behavioral development.  Past a certain point, we cannot blame him for acting in the manner he did.  We would be assuming in him too much agency.

Like wise, our lack of compassion for the adult stems directly from the sense in which we assume in him greater agency.  He should have known better, i.e. because of his age, he should have been intellectually and behaviorally developed enough to have made different choices, and not gotten so drunk and taken a walk on think ice.

Interestingly, when human action is viewed in terms of agency, as a matter of intellectual and behavioral development, it becomes difficult not to have compassion for everyone; if there is a clear cause of their actions (their relative cognitive and behavioral agency), there is no reason not to mourn any suffering they cause, either to themselves or anyone else.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It is logical to feel less compassion for one who brings suffering on himself.  Which brings us to Mitt Romney, whose most recent campaign gaffe was to appear to be saying that he did not care about the poor.  It's debatable what he was actually saying, whether he was literally making that claim.  I'm inclined to believe that he - a profoundly religious man running for president of the free world - did not intend, in public remarks, to say that he didn't care about the poor.  We all know that sounds terrible.  But here's the thing: it is true.

Well, in large part.  It is an incontrovertible fact that Republicans embrace a view of human development and behavior that tends to view the poor as responsible for their own lack of success.  They will be the first to point to all the opportunities for success out there, and how this or that individual overcame great personal difficulty to find it.  The implication is that if you are poor, you are probably to blame for your own situation.  It is entirely logical with someone who has such a view to have little sympathy for the poor, i.e. to "not care about them".

Thus, much like our drunken man who falls through the ice, and relinquishes a good deal of our compassion, Republicans feel the poor have given up much of their claim on our collective sympathy.  In so much as this is true, there is no real moral weakness on display, just as there is no moral weakness on display when we feel more compassionate towards an innocent, suffering child than a stupid adult who "should have known better".

Now, we can argue against this naive view of human development by pointing to any number of empirical facts about how the brain develops, and how this process is determinative of individual human agency.  But until we win that argument, Republicans will continue to be perfectly morally coherent in not feeling compassion for those who they genuinely feel have brought pain on themselves. 

We can imagine a number of ugly reasons for why Republicans might stubbornly hew to this view.  Many of those reasons no doubt reside in the unconscious as biases, and are self-reinforcing and appeal to the worst of human nature.  But as with any unconscious process, because of its inaccessibility, it cannot be said to be a freely-chosen line of reasoning.  It is greatly ironic that the same appeal to the unconscious nature of human development and thought that points to compassion for those who seemingly make bad choices, is no less forgiving to those who fail to find their own compassion, as they too are likely caught in a causal web of unconscious bias.