John’s “post below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/02/16/a-long-dated-call/ reminds me of one of the odder conventions of American journalism. Because US journalists aren’t supposed to express their own opinions, they often need other people to express those opinions (or the opinions that will ‘balance’ out their story) for them, so that they can use quotes from these people to spin the interpretation of the facts in the one way or another. This leads to some very peculiar interview techniques from journalists. About two out of every three calls I get from journalists have a strong line in directly leading questions of the ‘would you agree that _x_ ‘ variety.
This is of course a minor example of a much more general phenomenon. A very large part of the communications and public relations industry is devoted to what you might call ‘opinion laundering’ – the job of disguising the origins of self-interested or otherwise problematic policy positions by getting apparently legitimate third parties to validate and repeat them. Which is why I get nervous every time I see a “survey”:http://www.edelman.com/trust/2009/ that purports to tell us that academics are the most trusted interlocutors on this or that issue. While this may sound very nice, it increases the relative returns to using academics as flacks rather than some other profession, and hence “helps screw up further”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/16/ghostwritten/ a set of professional norms that are valuable ones to have.
, and been a little put off by the name (remember, I didn’t read any of this stuff in grad school). But in fact the title is perfect. The conceit, obviously, is that the large comprehensive high school is a shopping mall; it is attempting to cater to a variety of consumers, some of whom want very high quality goods, others of whom want a kind of “life and let live” approach, and others still have niche needs, like children with special needs, athletes, etc. In an added twist, schools differ in the composition of their clientele (I don’t remember them using the idea of the strip mall at any point — but they must have been in those schools too!), so different schools resemble different malls. By allowing students to select classes by schedule and even teacher, the school prompts a sorting process the effcts of which are nicely explained here; by establishing “electives” within departments, the school ensures that students will choose their way into college-prep, vocationally-oriented, or non-demanding classes depending on the attentiveness and aspirations of their parents, the peer group they are in, and their own perception of their own abilities. The texture of school life is beautifully placed on display in the book, and way that “empowering” students to choose classes ends up sorting them more effectively even than tracking would is nicely…well, tracked. (One of the many things that has always puzzled me about so American left-educators is that they oppose tracking and are utterly convinced that parental choice of schools will lead to inequality, but defend student choice of classes within schools to the hilt, whereas Shopping Mall High School shows that it has much the same effect as tracking, and is driven by exactly the same dynamic as choice of schools). The book was published in 1985, and seems to have been out of print for quite a while but you’ll be lucky if you don’t recognize your local high school in its pages.