The Over Managed School

                As schools across the country start doing the first parts of the NCLB mandated testing, I think we should stop for a moment and consider what it is we have normalized as part of public education.  In spite of all the blathering about improving schools and learning outcomes, all this testing does is add to the bureaucratic control of schools and enrich the textbook and testing companies that feed this insanity.  These tests are not about student learning or better education.  They reinforce the socioeconomic status the students bring with them to the school, and they are used to put a very early limit on how much most students can ever be expected to achieve.  They are part of what happens when a politically motivated managerial class takes over a school.  The ‘data’ collected just becomes part of an endlessly recycled and recalibrated set of numbers that administrators use to justify their salaries and positions in the hierarchy of the school.  It doesn’t make schools better and it doesn’t make students smarter.

                Since 1983 and the publication of A Nation At Risk, we have been wringing our hands over how bad our schools are.  Most of the blame has been placed on the teachers, who went from respected members of the community to fakers and frauds living on the public dole.  We all know the tune.  First, we produce some suspect data about how bad the students are, and then we find an appropriate villain to start in the revival.  Teachers are almost always the villains.  Even though we spend less on real education (after deducting the money spent of government mandates and administration) than before, we somehow always come to the same conclusions:  the schools are terrible and the teachers suck.  Bush’s NCLB program upped the volume and made this charade into a major Broadway production.  Now public schools are caught in the endless cycle of testing that leads nowhere.

                What happens during these testing cycles is that the teachers, still wearing the black hat, spend less time teaching and more time filling out reports so administrators can fill out still more reports to justify the pitiful amount of state aid coming their way.  Every second spent on this nonsense is time away from what the teachers are supposed to be doing: teaching children.  In ‘bad’ schools, the teachers can’t even choose the pace of sequence of the lessons because the managerial class has decided they know how to do it better.  More and more teachers leave the profession, and schools keep failing in the same places and for the same reasons as before.  If any of this worked, even a little bit, wouldn’t the problem be solved by now?

                Public education is supposed to be the life blood of a democracy.  It can’t serve that function if it is instead held hostage to political agendas that are more interested in preserving the economic fortunes of a few over the democratic interests of the majority.  Far from improving or saving schools, we have drained them of their relevance and importance.  While we have been playing this shell game with education, the disparity in wealth in the country has become more severe and the democratic institutions we rely on have eroded.  Mobility in America is lower than in any other industrialized nation, except maybe Britain.  School is not a social or economic engine of democracy, it is instead a place where students go to learn their place.

                It’s past time to call of this to a halt.  There is no validity to the testing regime we are currently practicing.  There is no value to vocationalizing education to the point of losing democratic values and political citizenship.  The next time, and their will be a next time, you hear that test scores are down and the budget requires that we lay off teachers, let’s do this instead.  Let’s stop giving money to the giant textbook and testing companies, lay off most of the central administrators and give the schools back to the teachers.  They’re the only ones who are in this fight for the right reasons.  They’re the only ones who can make a school a school.  If your kid is taking a computerized test this week, ignore it.  Look in their eyes and make sure they are still excited and still want to learn.  Don’t feed the monster.

The Molar Phase

                In their seminal work of postmodern pragmatics, A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss the way that cultures change.  One of their contentions is that change happens in unpredictable and ‘nomadic’ episodes that occur when social stratifications break down and make alternative realities and possibilities available.  The stratifications, or plateaus, can be things like institutions and traditions, but they also include the cultural sense of inevitability that things are normal or meant to allows be this way.  When that inevitability crumbles, they refer to those cultural events as becoming molar or in flow.  I think one way to look at American democracy is to say that we’ve entered a molar phase.  That is, many of the reliable and time-honored assumptions about our institutions and values are in flux.  They have been upended by political operatives who no longer believe in or follow those assumptions.

                We are now in a moment where none of the protocols or rules of democratic practice can be depended on to produce the intended result.  We have a president who refuses to follow or even acknowledge the written or implied those rules.  He is supported by a party who looks the other way and routinely defends the indefensible.  Some of his supporters, who should be jailed for sedition, are even trying to encourage the fringe militia movements to take up arms to fight impeachment.  Clearly, things are not normal.  When something becomes molar, the least likely outcome is that it will return to the state it was in before the disruption.  The plateau has been crumbling and weakening for awhile before it breaks loose and lets go.  Now that it has, we need to think not in terms of an unlikely return but in anticipation of new possibilities.  Now that we’re in a molar phase, a major reorganization and disruption is all but inevitable.

                Most of us, facing this kind of upheaval, tend to look for what used to be the norm and try to shore up the foundations of the failing institutions and practices.  I think that is exactly the wrong way to approach this.  We should embrace this moment and the opportunities it presents.  This is not a minor blip on the timeline of democracy, it is a five-sigma disruption that only comes along every 200 years or so.  No matter which way this disruption leads, it will be fundamentally different from where we were.  It may be that the forces that undercut the old normal will win out.  If they do, the direction they plan to move is pretty clear.  They intend to reduce the power of the electorate and continue consolidating wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people.  They will drain every ounce of fossil energy from the earth and choke on their own stupidity.  Their course is set.  They have one playbook, and we’ve seen what it is.

                Those of us hoping for another direction have a lot of possibilities but no clear vision has emerged.  There have been ideas, the Green New Deal is an example, that have gained some traction but are far from achieving a consensus.  The more important issue is what a coalition of people who oppose the destruction can agree on.  The other side is organized.  They will continue on this well defined and mindless trajectory until it kills us all.  To live in this molar phase and combat that outcome means that the things we normally argue about have to take a back seat to a more pressing concern.  What will unite us?  What can we imagine the future becoming?  A molar or nomadic moment demands imagination, and imagination demands courage.

                We are either going to settle for the worst and most dystopian elements of what we are now or forge a new vision.  It is past time to discard the corruption and environmental degradation of the fossil fuel industry.  But that means our ideas about wealth and energy have to be reshaped along with a shift to new energy sources.  Living in this molar phase is both scary and invigorating.  I think the first steps are less about the specifics of policy and more about the realization of where we are.  We are nomads in search of a new oasis.   

               

Fractal Democracy

                One of the interesting aspects of looking at complex systems using fractals is that the different levels of the system do not necessarily all have the same organizing principle.  Each level of the system is an iterative construction of some fractal structure, just not necessarily the same structure on every level of the system.  I think that is a good way to think about how a radical democracy could organize itself to be both systematic and diverse.  One of the failings of the formal democracy that was constructed in our country is that it tries to reproduce exactly the same structures at every level of the system.  Concepts such as laws, freedoms and rights are supposed to operate the same way everywhere, but they never do.  As a result, they become more and more vague and indefinable.  If we understood that some parts of the system would operate differently in different contexts, maybe we could start to conceptualize a democratic system that was both coherent and diverse.

                We know that in our current system we all have a right to equal representation, but we also know that lobbyists and money drive the system.  We all have a right to an equal education, but we also know that your parents’ wealth pretty much determines what kind of education a child actually receives.  In short, the Euclidian view of social life promoted in a formal democracy is never what it claims to be.  Trying to reach the potential of a diverse political, social and economic culture is constantly being frustrated by our insistence that every piece looks exactly like every other piece.  All kinds of privileges are baked into the system on the basis of race, gender, religion and sexual identification, but calling them out is always frustrated by the false concept of equality.  The way that affirmative action was labeled as an unfair advantage in a society of blatantly unfair advantages is a good example.  The only way a formal democracy can think of us is to think of us as all the same, even though we obviously are not.

                If democracy is going to morph into a viable expression of diverse but equal people it has to find another way to model what it is going to think of as consistency.  Our political and legal dialog has degenerated into a childish game of who got more cookies than the other.  It is particularly ineffective when we can see that the folks that started with the most cookies in the first place can use the game to extend their advantage.  Why do we construct political arguments around issues such as abortion as a zero-sum game?  Why does there have to be only one way of adjudicating an issue?  No one is running into anti-abortion communities and demanding that people have abortions, but it seems perfectly natural to us as part of our legalistic formalism to demand that other communities follow one set of laws.  All this does is to create obviously hypocritical arguments about life and rights that are as tedious as they are flawed.  A radical democracy has to allow for differences on those issues.

                Communities can have different organizing principles as long as two conditions are met.  The first is that the organizing structure of the community cannot threaten the structural organization of another community.  Issues surrounding climate or war or food have to be protected and adjudicated at the most comprehensive and powerful level of the democracy.  Other issues can be settled in smaller communities as long as people have the right to leave or join the community as they choose.  That means that there are some communities that will do things that you (and me) find objectionable, but as long as the people in the community aren’t coerced into compliance, as long as they have a chance to leave, we should accept that.

                The two forms of purity that threaten American democracy are Puritanism and identity.  Both are a result, although in opposite ways, of trying to make everyone the same.  The most onerous is Puritanism, which tries to impose a moral judgement on anything that violates the dominant value of the community.  Morality is often just an intergenerational reaction to change.  The supposed right of any one value system to dominate another, as long as some basic principles and free association are real alternatives, should be resisted.  If that were the case, the fierce battle over identity might be avoided.  In our culture identity is driven by the difference generating forces of capitalism and the uniform suppression of difference in our politics.  It is a schizophrenic charade.  If we could see ourselves as multiple, as having different organizing structures within ourselves, we could move toward a democracy that is both radical and fractal. 

Unstructured

                As schools in Michigan move past ‘count day’ and start to stabilize their budgets, another right of fall begins.  Schools in the state, indeed all over the country, are starting the first round of standardized testing.  That means children as young as 5 years old are sitting at a computer or tablet answering questions that will determine how the educational system labels and treats them.  Setting aside the fact that children this young don’t have a clear developmental status and the tests are biased by wealth, education of the parents, race and gender(and that’s a lot to set aside), the bigger problem is that the tests promote an idea of intelligence and learning that is antithetical to the lives these children are going to live.  They are not going to be sitting at computers spitting out predetermined answers.  They are going to confront some of the biggest and most fundamental changes in history.

                It’s one thing to structure an educational system this way in a stable culture with a low rate of change and a high rate of dependability and confidence in the information taught.  Perhaps, most of our history has demanded just such a system.  There were aspects of Egyptian tomb painting that remained the same for over three thousand years.  But this is ancient Egypt.  We live, and our children are being educated in, one of the most unstable and changeable periods imaginable.  There is little that these children will face that can merely be settled by established precedent or practice.  The environmental issues alone will force them to think in ways that we never had to contemplate.  Far from the structured environment of computer testing, our children and grandchildren face a completely unstructured future.

                Living in an unstructured time demands different intellectual and pattern recognition skills.  There is less value in stock answers and more emphasis on adaptability and creativity.  There is less value in individual intelligence or genius and more importance placed on collaborative and community- based thinking.  We are failing our responsibility to prepare them for any of this.  Even where the educational system has adopted ‘group work’ and collaboration, the final measuring stick always goes back to those tests of those computers, because that’s where the money is.  Unstructured thinking isn’t just a cool unit in the curriculum stuffed between reading and science, it is an entirely different approach to learning.  We tend to start with answers, and unstructured learning starts with patterns and problems.

                The fact is that we don’t know what they need to know.  We can help them, but we can’t direct them.  Instead of drilling the enthusiasm of learning out of them by taking away their curiosity and initiative, we should be developing a transgenerational network of interests and possibilities they can build on and we can contribute to with our experience.  Instead of a room full of silent children staring blankly at screens that score their responses instantaneously, imagine a school full of children and adults in play and conversation.  We know what their test scores are going to be before they even take the tests in many cases.  All we’re doing now is confirming and locking in the social and economic status they were born with.  They need discovery and not judgement.

                Dewey called this blending of ideas, ages, ethnicities and genders inquiry.  He thought it was the heart and soul of a democratic culture that was always striving to improve and be more inclusive.  Sometimes, the most important questions come only in the aftermath of failure and confusion.  We never let our children experience the positive outcomes of either of those.  In the world that is emerging, learning isn’t acting out someone else’s agenda (particularly if that agenda is driven by text- book and testing companies) but in setting your own.  We have trapped generations of teachers and students in a zero-sum game of predictability and statistical illusions.  We have drained the life out of schools and the love out of learning.  There is no need for every school to be the same or for every teacher to teach the same unit on the same day.  That isn’t accountability; it’s sterile and pedantic. 

                The problems of democracy are all unstructured problems.  We shouldn’t be surprised that as the American political system comes unraveled, so many people are confused and indifferent.  We’ve been teaching them to be that way from a very early age.

               

Rebuild

                The only way democracy survives after Trump is to rebuild it.  That’s true whether he is impeached, defeated in the next election or finishes out a second term.  The damage that he is personally responsible for is obvious, but it is also obvious that the foundations of American democracy were already rotting.  Trump’s presidency is so disastrous precisely because the form of democracy we practiced was created for a different reality in a different time.  We never imagined a president so dismissive of the laws and restraints of the office.  We never imagined a major political party that would be not only complicit but an active participant in the attacks on democracy.  We never imagined a system so corrupt that the richest of the rich, after stealing almost two trillion dollars in the great recession, would come back with a tax bill to steal a couple trillion more.  But here we are.

                We have been taught to revere the founders and the vision they crafted in the constitution, but every vision has an expiration date, and we’ve reached ours.  We have been amending and patching the flaws in our constitution, expanding the franchise and protections, for over two hundred years; it’s time for a teardown rehab.  Even the founders imagined and made provisions for new constitutional conventions, so they must have realized the compromise form of republic they were able to piece together would need major adjustments down the road.  Maybe as long as there was a consensus that we should take the original document and intent seriously and try to live to its standards, the prudent thing to do was not to make to many changes.  Maybe that made sense before Moscow Mitch and The Donald, but it doesn’t anymore.  We are trying to resurrect a two-party system when one of the two parties has decided to opt out of any responsibility or ethical commitment to the process.

                Our constitution was written for a class of agrarian oligarchs more interested in their own immediate economic future than the political fate of the masses.  It was written on the back of 17^th century notions of individualism and the social contract that simply don’t translate to a diverse and inclusive democracy.  The house we inherited may have looked like a Greek temple, but it doesn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, let alone an internet connection.  Institutions like the Electoral College are vestiges of the way the founding oligarchs saw the rest of us.  If you can Google yourself, we should be able to create a secure, instantaneous way of respecting the popular vote.  Being ‘democratic’ is more than a form of government; it’s a way of life.

                I have no illusions how messy and terrible this might be.  Like every major renovation there will be delays, unexpected problems and cost overruns, but the roof is leaking and the furnace is broken with winter only a month away.  This may not be the most opportune time to undertake this rebuild, but we don’t have a choice.  We thought democracy was a given, a birthright of being an American, but we have never really invested in the work and commitment that a democracy demands.  Less than half of the eligible voters even show up at the polls.  Government, whether it’s the Federal Government or the local Zoning Commission, is somebody else’s problem.  We flaunt our ‘rights,’ but we have no problem shirking the duties and responsibilities they are based on.  There is a lot that could go wrong, but the current situation is not sustainable.

                As the impeachment proceedings pick up steam and Trump does his best imitation of a feral pig trapped in a pit of quicksand, the temptation will be to see it as a ‘one off’ presidency.  I think that is a mistake.  This is the third impeachment proceeding in less than 50 years.  We went almost 200 years with only one caused by the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln.  This place is a mess.  Trump’s presidency is only possible in the first place in a broken system.  In no other era would he be seen as a credible candidate for the job.  As we work our way through whatever is going to happen next, we cannot be content to only do part of the job.  If we want to live in a democracy, we have to redesign one that fits our time and our challenges, just like those agrarian oligarchs did 240 some years ago.

               

               

               

               

The Revolution Next Time

                In the 60’s, it was common to talk about revolution, that was before we turned 30 and became investment bankers and helicopter parents.  In the heat of the moment, revolution sounded like the bold and romantic alternative to a world of uptight hypocrisy and war.  It seemed properly defiant in a world where National Guard troops shot students, cities were in flames, and the war was in your living room every night.  So much of what was wrong could be reduced to one word, Nixon.  Now, the same animosity and revulsion is associated with Trump.  Just as in the 60’s, the idea that it might take a revolution to change the course of democracy is gaining popularity and credence.  I think it’s important to compare these moments of revolutionary rhetoric, because as naïve and inconsequential as the revolutionary calls in the 60’s turned out to be, what we face now is entirely different.

                Nixon was impeached in a world that was violent and corrupt, but it still had both a cultural and economic coherence that is missing in today’s political theater.  Although they were famously slow to react, it was Republicans who forced Nixon from office.  Viet Nam had strained American political solidarity, but it was still a force.  Even though it was coming to an end, the economic expansion following WWII meant that the culture wasn’t fragmented so much that a majority of folks thought they had nothing left to lose.  In Trump’s America, the forces that eventually held sway in Nixon’s impeachment have all been hollowed out and the center is too weak to hold.  The revolution this time will be the real deal and not a youthful fantasy of cultural liberation.

                Nixon and Lee Atwater launched the ‘southern strategy’ in ’68 that set the modern Republican party on the path to embracing minority rule.  Even though there are other elements of the coalition Atwater assembled, such as Evangelicals, abortion, and conservative ideology, the core of that coalition was and is racism.  It created a block of committed and active voters who, even though they have always been a minority of the population, have dominated the politics of the nation for the last 50 years.  They have become more violent and vitriolic while becoming less and less tethered to reality.  They have their own news and their own ‘alternative facts’ that make it impossible to engage them in civil discourse or democratic compromise.  Nixon and Atwater started undermining the institutions of American democracy, and the weight of Trump’s lawless and venial presidency has brought it to the point of collapse. 

                What Trump and the Republicans make obvious every day is that the ‘nation of laws’ that we have always thought we lived in no longer exists.  Trump’s impending impeachment is about to make that painfully clear.  There will be no statesmanship or patriotism that saves the day this time.  This time the battle will be fought and resolved on entirely different grounds.  In some ways that is both healthy and predictable.  American democracy has gone through several resets along the way.  We moved from a confederacy to a republic.  Civil rights and labor rights both reconstructed democracy to include more voices and level the playing field.  But the biggest reset was obviously the Civil War, when there was no way to reconcile the competing visions of what the country should be.  Without being unduly alarming about it, that’s where we are now.

                Clinton’s impeachment was a charade, but it was a political charade of no constitutional consequence.  Trump’s impeachment is going to make our whole system of government and its dependence on law and procedure into a charade.  I don’t think there is any way to avoid this.  We have been traveling down this path for 50 years; we can’t turn back now.  Finally electing not just a corrupt but a thoroughly incompetent president has broken the institutional framework of what we called a democracy.  There will be a lot of talk about how to restore those institutions.  It can’t be done.  More to the point, it shouldn’t be done.  We have tried to legally and institutionally construct a democracy based on diversity and we have failed.  We have to win this fight – never underestimate the depths of depravity to come – but when we win it, we have to start building something new, something different.  Jefferson thought a little revolution every now and then was a good thing.  After 230 years or so, a little revolution probably isn’t enough.

How Fantasy Baseball Ruined America

                Back in the day, when they were still referred to as Rotisserie Leagues, I was in a fantasy baseball league.  We were a loose collection of friends who also played poker, golf, softball and basketball together.  We met at someone’s house once a month and drank beer and tried to scam each other in outrageous trades.  We lied and blustered and had a great time.  Bill James had only recently started writing about ‘sabermetrics,’ an idea that would lead to “money ball” and analytics.  Today, fantasy leagues are everywhere, often an online collection of people who don’t know each other and have nothing in common but the destruction of civilization.  The innocent evolution of fantasy baseball is a small part of an obsession with an abstraction of experience that destroys what it is meant to describe.

                I’m not arguing that numbers are all evil.  If you’re down to the final out and you have to choose between a pinch hitter who has whiffed every time he’s faced this pitcher or someone who has lit him up every time he’s had a chance, those would be good numbers to have.  It is invaluable to know when our perceptions correspond to reality and when they don’t, but relying on statistics instead of experience and emotion can lead to an empty and soulless life.  Fantasy baseball and analytics have turned baseball into an empty game.  Fantasy owners care less about the game than they are the statistics the game generates.  Their ‘teams’ exist in a twilight zone of numbers that are never real or realized.  There is no joy or surprise in the game that analytics has created.  Several years ago when Cabrera became the first player since Yaz in ’67 to win the triple crown, the sabermetrics folks thought Mike Trout should have been the MVP.  This was based on a completely fabricated analytic called WAR, or wins above replacement.  There is no such thing as WAR, it is not part of the game.  It is an idealized bit of statistical fluff that has never swung a bat.  It was created by people who’s lives would be at risk trying to field a routine fly ball.  But in fantasy league world it has replaced the greatest single offense season in this century. 

                If it was just baseball, which is doing a good job of killing itself off, maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal.  But this statistical infection can be seen everywhere.  We evaluate children using invalid and improperly proctored tests to determine how ‘smart’ they are.  We use numbers instead of observations to diagnose patients.  We have replaced experience with a parallel statistical reality that is neither all that accurate or exciting.  We want to know who wins instead of enjoying the game.  Sure, it sucks to lose, but games are games and humans who play get something out of it that people who measure but never set foot on a field cannot understand.

                Democracy is a relational and not a statistical endeavor.  The people I interact with every day are not the composite of their income, IQ or credit score.  In the college I used to teach at, they would occasionally put together a statistical analysis of the ‘typical’ student, based on age, background, test scores and income.  That student never existed.  That analytic never once helped me engage the actual students that were in my classes.  They were all in some way an outlier, an anomaly in their own right.  Knowing them and teaching them meant I had to abandon whatever preconceptions I had and meet them where they were.  Democracies can and should do the math on who gets what, but they can never let the numbers replace the actual people.  We still have to go out there every day and make the connections and do the work it takes to understand each other.  A statistical parallel constructed by and for an elite class of managers is not the same thing.

                The team I drafted in my rotisserie league had seven eventual Hall of Famers on it, but it never shared a warm evening at the ballpark.  It never delighted or inspired a kid to play the game or practice for hours on the off chance they could play one day in the show.  It never did anything but pile up statistics.  It’s a poor substitute to watching a game with a friend or filling your grandsons up with all that crap your parents wouldn’t let you eat.  It can never recreate the magic I still remember the first time I trudged up the beer stained concourse at old Tiger Stadium and saw that amazing green field for the first time.