Rethinking School Boundaries

Now that DC is taking up the delicate question of whether its boundary lines for neighborhood schools needs revisiting — the first time they’ve done so since 1968 — it’s worth thinking through the issue with them.

This morning, I was part of a public radio conversation that featured DC Deputy Mayor Abigail Smith and local parent activist Evelyn Boyd Simmons. You can hear that 30 minute conversation here. But you might also want to read Mike Petrilli’s 2011 piece about controlled choice, or Rick Kahlenberg’s research into the feasibility of race-neutral admissions policies, or one school’s use of a zip code lottery to ensure an even representation from kids throughout the city it serves.

What other policies or programs are worth looking at?

Planet of the Technocrats

There’s a great book out by Harvard’s Michael Sandel on the moral limits of markets (I wrote a long piece about it and its implications for school choice here). But Sandel’s book also contains a lot of interesting information about incentives, and the ways our use of them has both grown and revised the traditional economic thinking that began with Adam Smith’s original 1776 notion of an “invisible hand.”

As Sandel explains, we’ve substantially revised our definition of economics itself — from the 1958 textbook notion of “the world of prices, wages, interest rates, stocks and bonds, banks and credit, taxes and expenditure,” to the modern notion of “a group of people interacting with one another as they go about their lives.”

Because of that tectonic shift, incentives have become the primary weapon in modern social-science policymaking. As Freakonomics author Steven Levitt has written, incentives are now “the cornerstone of modern life.” And economics, he continues, “is, at root, the study of incentives.”

For all of us who care deeply about American public education – and who worry about its future – that shift in understanding should say EVERYTHING to us about what is happening in modern society in general, and modern school reform in particular. Indeed, from No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top, our increasing use of incentives to drive behavior change is the central factor reshaping American schools. Anya Kamenetz made this point in her review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, when she said:

I know there are hard-core right-wing Republican Tea Party/Grover Norquist/ALEC privatizers within the education-reform complex. I agree with Ravitch that the governor of my hometown state, Bobby Jindal, is probably one of them. I also agree that there are always plenty of people out to make a buck who need to be reined in.

But I think the big tent, the big umbrella, the unifying force here is a fascination with technology and innovation, not privatization per se. . . Technophilia explains why the ed-reform complex loves tests so much. It’s all that data, the number crunching that really gets them going.  That is why they love charter schools: to pilot new ways of doing things. That is why they love to give tax money to private business owners; they believe that innovation thrives among private entrepreneurs and not in the public sector. That is why they love software and computers in classrooms and online teaching and learning.

I think Kamenetz is onto something there. In fact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of the word “incentivize” has risen by more than 1,400% since 1990, and whereas Bill Clinton only used the word once in his eight years in office, Barack Obama used it twenty-nine different times in his first three years.

The logic behind this changing worldview was captured well by Obama’s former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, who actually said the following in public, apparently without embarrassment or shame:

We all have only so much altruism in us. Economists like me think of altruism as a valuable and rare good that needs conserving. Far better to conserve it by designing a system in which people’s wants will be satisfied by individuals being selfish, and saving that altruism for our families, our friends, and the many social problems in this world that markets cannot solve.

Did he really say that? Does he really believe that?

Yes, yes he does. So fellow advocates for a more humanistic sort of K-12 landscape, take note: when we describe Neoliberal school reformers as two-dimensional greedy privatizers, we obfuscate the real emotional center of their movement, and their primary motivations. As Anya Kamenetz put it, “Bill Gates was a ruthless CEO, but first he was a brilliant software engineer. Is it so hard to believe that in his third act, spending his personal wealth to try to tackle the world’s biggest problems, he’s influenced as much by the latter experience as by the former?”

 

 

Why We Need to Look Back — and Ahead

There are two different articles in today’s New York Times that I would consider must reading for anyone interested in better understanding who we are, who we have been, and who we may become.

The first, “Obama and the Debt,” outlines Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz’s interpretations of the current crisis, and of its Constitutional underpinnings. Regardless of whether you love the Fourteenth Amendment (as I do), and regardless of whether you agree with Wilentz’s advice to President Obama (go hard or go home), I would offer this Op-Ed as very tangible evidence of why we need historians, and why there is great value in looking back to better understand that path that has led us to this particular moment.

The other article is in the Arts section, and it’s a review of David Cage’s new video game for the PlayStation 3, “Beyond Two Souls.” The game itself features star turns from two well-known Hollywood actors, Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. And the article struck me because it hints at the Brave New World we are entering, one in which a creator like Cage excitedly imagines the development of a “Scorcese algorithm” that would imitate the filmmaker’s iconic camera style and recreate it on demand, and one in which he describes his game as “an interface that will allow you to play life.”

I understand our infatuation with unadulterated self-direction, and I worry sometimes that it’s eroding our commitment to understand, on a broad, shared level, where we have been and what we have decided. And I share the disorientation so many of us feel when we hear of an algorithm that can codify the creative genius of Martin Scorcese in order to improve the narrative flow of a video game — and I can see why such a development could be very, very cool.

Both trends bear watching, and remembering, and questioning, by all of us.