Harry

The criticism of philosophers in the discussion of Michele’s post, specifically from our own Daniel that not much of the discussion was about how philosophers might listen to people from other disciplines, reminded me that I have been meaning to say something about one of my favourite books that I didn’t read in graduate school, Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood. Like another of my favourite books I would notice it in piles of textbooks for other departments in the university bookstore while I was in grad school, and spurned it mainly for its title. About 6 years ago, my wife read it for a class on children’s literature, and her rendering of the thesis that childhood was socially constructed made it sound so preposterous that I was compelled to read the book.

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Those who enjoyed our reading group on Rescuing Justice and Equality can now listen to the Center for the Study of Social Justice conference honouring G.A. Cohen on your ipods, courtesy of Oxford University podcasts (scroll about half way down the page to the Department of Politics and International Relations—if someone can find a handier way to link to them, please tell me). Speakers include John Roemer, Seana Shiffrin, Michael Otsuka, Cecile Fabre, Paula Casal, David Miller, David Estlund and Andrew Williams. The audio quality is a bit rough in places, but mostly good, and always good enough. (You can also get there on iTunes, but I can’t figure out how to link to that. In the iTunes store just search for CSSJ. As a bonus, if you search for Hartry Field, you get to his 2008 John Locke Lectures). As a bonus, you can hear Roemer explain why he came to believe that all philosophers are idiots.

Burton Weisbrod and Evelyn Asche have an entirely sensible oped in yesterday’s IHE on the fuss about Clemson University’s shocking attempts to game the US News and World Report rankings:

Watt, according to reports, literally drew gasps from her audience when she revealed that when Clemson administrators fill out U.S. News reputational rankings survey, they rate other universities lower than Clemson across the board. Why not? Reputation accounts for fully 25 percent of a school’s ranking score. Watt’s statement that she was confident that other colleges do the same is perfectly plausible.

Inside Higher Ed reported Monday that the University of Southern California inflated the number of National Academy of Engineering members on its full-time, tenure-track faculty. Because the number of NAE faculty is a criterion for U.S. News rankings, USC has good reason to include NAE faculty who are not full-time or tenure-track.

If we step back from higher education, we will see the same dynamic of gaming a performance measurement system in many other spheres. Hospitals receive “report cards” that measure their performance in many areas, including their mortality rates. A little thought reveals the easiest way to improve the mortality rate is to keep terminally ill patients from being admitted to the hospital in the first place or discharge them prior to death. In fact these events do occur. Nonprofit hospitals receive large tax exemptions but are expected to provide charity care to indigent patients in return. Their substantial tax benefits are currently being scrutinized in the courts and in Congress, so hospitals are certainly scrambling to alter their accounting procedures to increase their charity care levels

Academics based in the UK can correct me, but it seemed to me when I was there that both the RAE process and the system of for evaluation the quality of quality control of teaching were designed to be gamed; US News and World Report has to be aware of the many ways that Universities and some of their component parts (those I’m especially aware of are Business and Law Schools), game their rankings: a narrative account of the ways they suspect the rankings are being gamed might go some way to discouraging the most egregious and visible tricks. (I don’t really see how to eliminate the incentive artificially to undermine one’s close rivals when ranking them).

A more suitable pick for the Reith Lectures I cannot imagine. Sandel’s first lecture is online here, and if, like me, you’re pushed for time the transcript (with comments and questions from Ed Miliband, David Willetts, Baroness Williams, Oliver Kamm, and someone called Owen) is here. The bio for Sandel contains this surprise:

A more unusual claim to fame is that Professor Sandel is believed to be the inspiration for the nuclear power magnate Montgomery Burns in The Simpsons cartoon.

Anyway, feel free to discuss Sandel’s first lecture. Cohen seminar rules apply (i.e., read the bloody thing before commenting—unlike Cohen’s book its free, short, and an easy read).

…Simon Singh is appealing the finding that he libeled the British Chiropractor Association by denying that chiropracticionariness is evidence-based medicine. (More details here). (Beware, Daniel—you’ll have the scientists suing you if you’re not careful). Fortunately, he has the greatest living Englishman on his side, so there is some hope that justice will be done.

Via Laura, I see this kitchen table math post on Richard Elmore’s paper on “high performing” schools. Elmore observes that so-called high performing schools in affluent communities that he works in often seem very similar to low-performing schools in low-income communities, and very unlike successful schools in low-income communities. Here’s Elmore on successful high-performing schools:

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A colleague (in Philosophy) just sent me this interview with Michele Lamont about How Professors Think (which just arrived in my mailbox but I still haven’t read). The book is based on interviews of academics who serve on funding panels, and teases out the differences between several disciplines in how they think of their standards and apply them, among other things.

It’s all worth reading. I was particularly struck by this:

Philosophy is a problem discipline, and it’s defined as such by program officers. Philosophers do not believe that nonphilosophers are qualified to evaluate their work. Perhaps that comes out of the dominance of analytic philosophy, with its stress on logic and rigor. Philosophers think their discipline is more demanding than other fields. Even its practitioners define the discipline as contentious. They don’t see that as a problem; argument and dispute are the discipline’s defining characteristics.

All that conflict makes it difficult to get consensus on the value of a philosophy proposal — or to convince people from other disciplines of its merits. The panels I studied are multidisciplinary. Nonphilosophers are often frustrated with the philosophers. They often discounted what philosophers had to say as misplaced intellectual superiority.

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I prevaricated. [Update 1] Do you congratulate someone who has avoided the limelight? Or do you risk providing it? In the end, if he didn’t want it, he should have avoided it more successfully. Anyway, many happy returns to him.

[Update 1] JQ says I vacillated. He’s right.

Watch both their faces. Delightful. She seems to be, rather brilliantly, boxing them into a corner.

I’ve been invited to give a talk—and was asked to provide a reading—on educational equity, by an equity team in a local high school. I couldn’t find anything short enough and comprehensive enough, so I rewrote this post. The person who asked me had already read it and knows I’m a philosopher, so she knows what she’s getting. What follows is a slightly longer version of what I’ve written for teachers’ consumption (my wife told me to cut out the long Rothstein quote, but I like it, so it’s back in for CT; she also told me to remove a list of promising reforms, which I haven’t reinserted). It is different enough from the original post that I thought I’d post the revised version here:

The draft of Madison Metropolitan School District’s Strategic Plan Statement of Beliefs says “We believe that academic achievement is not predicted by race, class, disability, sexual orientation, gender or home language.” The draft of the strategic priorities contains the related comment that “we will eliminate the achievement gap by ensuring that all students reach their highest potential.” These comments might suggest a full-fledged commitment to educational equality. But in fact the word “equality” never occurs in the drafts – instead, the beliefs draft says that “resources are critical to education and we are responsible for their equitable and effective use.” Why equity, rather than equality? What does it mean to close the achievement gap? And how responsible are schools for doing it?

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Maureen Corrigan reviewed sometime CT commenter George Scialabba’s new book What Are Intellectuals Good For? on Fresh Air last night. I’m only about half way through it myself, and am reading in the chaotic way that I tend to read collections (moving randomly between chapters at whim—though to be honest I read just about everything other than detective stories the same way), but I agree with her very positive review so far, especially enjoying the several invocations and discussions of Matthew Arnold whom Scialabba admires greatly. She says:

What Are Intellectuals Good For?, has been published in a beautiful paperback edition by the tiny Pressed Wafer. No one could expect it to be a stealth best-seller. But if you’re at all interested in 20th century thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Dwight Macdonald, William F. Buckley, Ellen Willis and Christopher Lasch to name a few, and in the larger question of whether the world would be poorer if they’d never written a word, then you’ll find Scialabba’s ruminations here invigorating. In fact, just reading Scialabba’s collection will make you feel smarter — even if it’s not clear if that kind of smarts has any direct social utility.

In fact I’d take issue with a little bit of that. It makes me feel stupider, not smarter, but I like books that do that. And I don’t, really, see why it shouldn’t become a stealth best seller. The in-progress CT book event will, no doubt, transform it at least into a stealth pretty-good-seller. (In fact, at time of posting it is #112 at amazon, no doubt somewhat helped by her review).

A story that circulates in some evangelical and homeschooling circles concerns a boy who was told, in a public elementary school, that he could not read the Bible during his free reading time. One version of the story has him being sent home. In some versions of the story (that have been told to me directly) the courts find in favour of the school. I’ve heard the story for quite a while, and assumed there was a grain of truth in it, but have never done the work to find the details (I assumed that the “sent home” version was embellishment, and that the “court finding for the school” bit was… well, at best remarkably ignorant of the law). But now I look for the story, I can’t find any version in what I regard as a reliable news source. Here is the Thomas More Law Center’s version of its own work, which must be true, surely. But google the boy’s name and you get lots of blog posts, but nothing from, for example, the Chicago Tribune, or AP, or.. (There’s the Catholic News Agency, which I might regard as reliable if it weren;t the only source). More mysteriously I’ve heard versions of the story for at least a decade, whereas this version seems very recent. I’m not the best googler or wikipedia user, but am surprised I haven’t found more. Do any readers know the true story?

Dolly, a play by Christopher Douglas (aka Ed Reardon and Dave Podmore) about the events surrounding Basil D’Oliveira’s selection to play for England (described and analysed rivetingly in Peter Oborne’s Basil D’Oliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy: The Untold Story (UK) which I discussed in detail here). With Douglas himself as Peter West.

Lots of schools these days have “equity and diversity” committees My guess is that no-one wonders much what diversity is in “equity and diversity” because we all have a pretty good sense of what it is – acceptance, toleration, and perhaps celebration of the various ethnic, racial, national, gender and sexual orientations in our midst. But what on earth is equity?

People (teachers, education students, other scholars in education) ask me this reasonably often, because they think that, as a professional philosopher who thinks a lot about education I ought to have an answer. I used to shrink from the question because the term “equity” is on that I never use, but recently I have become bolder. A School of Education recently asked me to prepare a lecture on “Equity, Equality, and Social Justice in Education”, and in the talk I just talked about equality and social justice, and said, bluntly, that I don’t understand “equity” and wish people would stop using the term.

After saying that, I thought I should do a couple of bits of research. The first was to run a search in amazon for books with the words “equity” and “education” in the title. 7,235 results. Fortunately, most of them seem not actually to have equity in the title, and when I looked at the 107 books published in the last 90 days I found that many only use “equity” somewhere in the text, and a few of those (including Hidden Markets by my colleague Patricia Burch) use “equity” in the way that is standard in finance circles, to mean capital. But there’s enough to confirm that equity in education is a standard phrase that ought to be easy to understand. The second thing I did was to read a bunch of books by scholars concerned with school improvement and the internal life of schools whose work I admire, to see how they use the term “equity” and figure out whether there was some obvious meaning that I was missing (Ronald Ferguson’s excellent Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap, which I promise to review in the “Books Every Teacher Should Read” category when I get a chance, is the only one with “equity” in the title, but all the school reform improvement/reform books I’ve read recently use the term, and most of them prefer it to equality).

Having done that research I think I was wrong to wish that people stop using it, even though I’ve been right to resist using the term myself. It is a vague concept, but the best authors who use it do so knowing that it is very vague, and feeling, rightly, quite comfortable with that. I’ll explain.

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