Non-gory cases (in philosophy of education)

This is really fascinating, thanks Henry, although being British, I now want to know how the Boston system certifies you as being middle class. Do you have to listen to a specified number of hours of radio 4 or something?

NPR shurely?

(…or a points-based framework developed from this)

Phil @5

I think in US statistical parlance “middle class” means “university graduate”, which explains a lot about the whole discourse of liberal elitism.

No, I don’t think so. First, US “statistical parlance” strictly speaking, meaning the official statistics that come out of govt agencies, probably doesn’t use the phrase “middle class” at all. In ordinary conversation about US stratification, “middle class” does not necessarily mean ‘college graduate’, I don’t think. However, in political discussion by pundits (and people who study elections and voting), “working class” is sometimes or often used to mean “not having a univ. education.” Which is a bad definition or criterion, IMO, but seems to have become somewhat standard (at least in some discussions).

I’ve been thinking of writing something about what I learned from our school choice process, but haven’t gotten around to it. My town is much smaller than Boston is, and I think choice was instituted in response to NCLB rather than desegregation. Choice means, for instance, that there have to be buses from every address in town to every school. But I assume it simplifies special ed and ESL somewhat because they can centralize programs and distribute the leftover spots by lottery. And they can reduce incoming spots in overcrowded schools without redrawing boundaries.

My understanding is that Boston’s situation is much as the article describes it. Formerly, parents could choose any school in the district, and that resulted in kids being bused long distances. There was no chance of re-instituting neighborhood schools, but there was an attempt to rein things in. And there have been complaints that the system wasn’t fair, in many ways, as I remember.

NCLB reports include rough statistics on SES in each school, and not surprisingly there’s a strong correlation between SES and percentage of unsatisfactory scores (also between number of ESL students and unsatisfactory scores on language tests).

LFC almost certainly has it right — ‘middle class’ would have to mean, in context of the Boston school system’s choice program, ‘people living in a low-poverty neighborhood.’

Modern American usage does not admit of the existence of anything called the working class. “Middle class” (generally not “the middle class” – “middle class” is typically an adjective that describes individuals, not a noun phrase that describes a social class, which we do not generally admit to having, unless we are being euphemistic about race) describes everyone who is not poor or rich. This is a pleasingly malleable definition which can be bent to support any argument you may wish to make.

In this case, “middle class” means “families who could afford to buy houses in suburban school districts or to put their kids in private schools” – anyone who has enough money for an alternative to city public schools. Since private, parochial Catholic schools are an alternative for many Boston families, plenty of people who would be working class in the English sense fall into this category.

The point of Harry’s article is that middle-class families have choices. Therefore they must be offered benefits if you want to keep them (or bring them back) to the public school system.

If the goal of a choice system was to improve the schools, this would not be necessary. You could give everyone the same choices, and if middle-class families chose to opt out, that would be their choice.

But the point of choice is not just to improve the schools. It’s to improve the students, by bringing in children who will be better prepared, have more involved parents, and have more stable home lives. And to do that you have to convince middle-class parents that the city school is a plausible option.

You don’t have to convince poor parents of anything. The poor have nowhere else to go.

“The line between ‘improving the schools’ and ‘improving the students’ is blurry, I think”

You’re right of course. And it’s less than blurry – it may not even exist. It’s brutally hard to improve schools if you don’t have the support of engaged parents. And the higher the percentage of children from chaotic or troubled homes, the tougher things are. Plus, parents whose kids go to public schools vote for school funding. So getting children of middle-class parents into the public schools is crucial.

And this is putting aside the issue of race. I remember when a colleague of mine, whose child was in a private school, made an appointment to visit a magnet (public) school that she could attend. The school authorities bent over backwards to accommodate them – that little girl was white, so her return to the public school system would improve the school’s statistics. A white child was a plus – a black or Hispanic child would have been a minus. Boston, I’m sure, has the same concerns.

I don’t mean to be cynical about the problem – it’s a horrible conundrum and I understand why the Boston authorities came out where they did.

On the main point of the post, these are great questions for consideration. Avoiding the spurious precision associated with trolley problems, but still simple enough to test ethical principles and intuitions.

An aside on amusing misreadings, when I read “(now former) elementary ed student”, my immediate reaction was “so she’s in high school now?”

An aside on amusing misreadings, when I read “(now former) elementary ed student”, my immediate reaction was “so she’s in high school now?”

Right! I also had a—wow, that’s a really articulate middle schooler!—reaction for a second.

On a very slightly tangential topic, I will put in a qualified brief for “gory” cases. It’s really what I say every time this topic comes up: what matters is not whether there’s a gory example, but how that gory example is used. Basically, if you use a gory example to “pump intuitions” and elicit a first-order normative ethical response (i.e. “this sort of thing is the right thing to do in this sort of case”), you should be held liable for professional malpractice. On the other hand, I would guess—and I would honestly love to be corrected—that a majority of the people who rail against trolley cases and fat men and drowning people, that a majority of these people have not read the Foot paper that introduced most of these cases, and wouldn’t be able to you what her point was in introducing them.

And just to be clear, I don’t at all mean to say that the problem lies only or primarily with non-philosophers. Certainly lots of philosophers have read the Williams paper with the “Jim and the Indians” case and straightforwardly drawn conclusions that Williams himself is careful not to draw.

In any case, the point about gory cases is precisely that they do elicit strong yet often conflicting first-order normative responses. So, deployed well and carefully, they can be useful for reflection on these first-order responses, and in a way that is not so easy with more mundane examples.

All that said, I am of course also completely in favor of developing the sort of “carefully constructed cases (all based on real decision problems)” that Harry mentions in his second paragraph.

Perhaps the phrase should read :” middle-class families are more likely to leave the district if they have only an equal chance of going to a good school”?

I wonder if the premise of this discussion is true: i.e. is there really a significant number of Boston residents who would move to the suburbs if they didn’t get better choices for schools? The truly affluent Beacon Hill types whose kids don’t get into Boston Latin bus* their kids to private schools in the suburbs. Presumably ditto for the gentrified South End. But my horribly out of date impression (I grew up on Beacon Hill in the 60s) of Boston Latin at the time was that most of my peers were from families that didn’t have the option of moving.

Note that this is a demographic, factual question. I like this sort of ethics example way better than the “would you push a fat man in front of a truck to save a gaggle of lawyers” sort of question.

*: It was quite amusing walking across Beacon Hill to school in the morning during the period when “bussing” was first a big deal to see all the school buses lined up to take kids out to private schools in the suburbs. There’s nothing wrong with busing if you are paying for it…

Many thanks for this “alternative” case, Harry.
I went onto the website of Justice in Schools and scanned the case study itself – in the end, though there are some tweaks that could have improved the chances of a poor child to get into a Tier I school (e.g. upping by some reasonable percentage the number of schools in their “basket” of choices so that poor children would have a chance at roughly the same number of total places), it’s clear that much thought went into it.

How can we achieve “justice” in an “unjust” system? This seems to me one question asked by applied ethics as opposed to theoretical ethics, and problems like this one are an excellent example of how one attempts not to make the system just, but to prod it into being a little less unjust.

Let’s hope that the JiS folks amass a large bank of case studies from all over the country (CPS – sigh – the “charter school” movement come to mind immediately), and that they’re used by Phil of Educ faculty and educators and parents and … students.

A couple days ago I read that Finland is revamping its entire primary-secondary education program, switching from course-based to topic-based learning/teaching. I could easily imagine a high school class devoted to this topic, with sections on math (statistics & probability), politics (school board districting, funding priorities), history (local, including the development-evolution of urban planning) and ethics.

Also, in addition to NCLB, Romney’s attempt to institute English-only education played a role (certain schools can get a waiver to do bilingual longer, some districts created special programs that avoid the requirement, etc., but everyone else has to be English-only after a couple of years). Both IIRC happened about the same time.

About gory cases:

First, they’re a relatively recent phenomenon. In works from the earlier part of the last century, e.g. W.D. Ross’s The Right and the Good, the central examples are ones like returning a book you borrowed from someone by putting it in the mail, helping a blind person across the street, etc. — almost all of them gore-free, though also schematic rather than fleshed out with e.g. the title of the book, whether you enjoyed reading it, etc.

Second, many of the best-known gory examples were introduced by women philosophers — e.g. Philippa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Frances Kamm. Likewise for fat-man examples. Any gender theorists want to venture an explanation of this?

T M @28 – “I’m a big fan on realistic, real world case studies (though in a different field) but surprisingly (or perhaps not all that surprisingly), students don’t generally seem to like them. Many of them, I hypothesize, have learned that stuff they learn in school is theoretical, useless and soon to be forgotten, and it’s hard to convince them otherwise.”

In my experience (also in a different field than Harry), my students are not necessarily happy with the “gray” zone they must inhabit when dealing with real-world case studies – most come to college with a black-and-white frame for their world – complexity puzzles and frustrates them. Those that wallow in this gray zone for a while – for a paper or a presentation – tend to come away feeling like they’ve gotten something good out of it. At least that’s what they say… and of course there are also students who don’t like this kind of work at all.

I’m always surprised when students identify as working class. I used to think it demonstrated some political consciousness, but it doesn’t (it does demonstrate class consciousness though).

My experience teaching these cases was last semester, when I used several in a political philosophy class, after a lot of discussion about justice, but without much of justice in education. It went really well. But that’s one class. I’ll report back when I’ve taught an entire course based around them.

@Tom, #29: A small bit of gender equity in philosophy, I guess? Yes, it’s always a male victim: the fat man in the cave/being pushed to stop the trolley (though Singer seems careful it’s always a drowning *child*). Curious to see how intuitions would shift if Thomson’s violinist had been a woman!

A white child was a plus – a black or Hispanic child would have been a minus.

Which reminds me of an emigre friend of mine’s comment on this – “Americans love to say they don’t have a class system, but they do – they call it ‘race’.”

Ha, good examples I know something about. MOVE’s first, 70’s neighborhood, where I lived– Powelton–was definitely working class. So was Osage Avenue, their fatal 80’s abode. If a black radical back-to-nature armed collective can get a house in your neighborhood, it’s probably not middle-class.

Fishtown, also, is working class. It easily gets called that by Murray and others, and not just “poor”, because it’s a white neighborhood. Journalists and public-intellectuals are taught somewhere that there is no black working class.

@TM #29

When we (I am one of Meira’s doctoral students) have piloted some of these cases the issue of structural constraints versus working within those constraints comes up often. They represent two different sets of questions, perhaps. On the one hand, the cases may clearly illustrate particular constraints that schools/reformers/policymakers may want to change. On the other hand, oftentimes we cannot wave a magic wand and make these constraints disappear, so there are distinct questions about what people working in unjust conditions should do. Admittedly, answers to this second set of questions are potentially in flux because conditions and structures can change, but nonetheless, these questions are valuable.

The common tendency, I think, is to drift toward proposing the structural changes that would eliminate the ethical dilemmas educators find themselves in, which is certainly interesting. It is almost cathartic. But then discussion shifts back to what individuals should do given circumstances as they are. There is typically a lot of indecision and “gray area” here, and rarely do we end with consensus. But what often happens is that people reference a range of values, some predictable others not so much, to justify their decisions. For philosophers, this is interesting to think about, at least in terms of the balancing acts that Harry mentions. For practitioners, its a different framework to talk about challenging (often divisive) decisions.

“I understand the dilemma posed by it, but I think I would need a good deal more knowledge than I have about the context (including geography, history, and demographics of the areas [i.e. the various parts of the city] covered by BPS) to reach a judgment on it.”

Not to pick on LFC, but isn’t this *exactly* why philosophers use cases with stick-figure cut-out characters?

I.e., if you want people to focus on the trade-off between a more egalitarian situation with a lower floor, and a less egalitarian situation with a higher floor, then questions of “geography, history, and demographics” all count as distractions.

Of course, an argument in favor of stripped-down, stick-figure cases is not the same thing as an argument in favor of gory cases: the gory vs. bloodless distinction is different from the stick-figure vs. richly detailed and historically specific distinction.

oldster,

Not to speak for LFC. but it would be interesting to know whether these middle class people are black or white and what their income is. Otherwise it isn’t easy to see how we can guess what values are being promoted. Is this about gentrification or something else?

I’m personally also curious how closely these tiers are really correlated to individual student performance, at the margins. If a difference of ten percentage points in low income or minority or special Ed students makes the difference between tier I and tier III, what impact does that really have on each student’s educational experience?

You notice that I was asking a question, not making a point.

Somehow I missed LFC’s first comment. Oldster’s right! But also, part of the purpose of these kinds of case (as opposed to the more standard abstract thought experiments which, I think, have largely different purposes) is to help people figure out what they don’t know that they would need to know in order to make a considered judgment. And to highlight the fact that people who have to make decisions often don’t know what they would need to know — and this is not a criticism of them, but it is, to some extent, a criticism of the social scientists whose enterprise is not optimally oriented to producing the kind of knowledge needed. One thing that the JiS team wants to do is get people more used to facing real trade-offs among values where they have imperfect information; another is to convince social scientists to produce more (of the relevant) information.

I think the criticism is that moral reasoning shouldn’t be based on contrived examples beyond any real-world connection. One would think that there are enough real world test cases – gory or otherwise – to use. And you are right to point out the uncertainty of real world situations. But this uncertainty isn’t something that could be remedied if only we tried harder, it’s an essential feature of reality and any thought experiment that abstracts away that essential part of reality (as is the case in the trolley problems, but also in economic theory) is probably useless.

Btw any thoughts concerning my other question at 29?

For the uninitiated:

Mass. pays school costs w/ property taxes. School costs are usually one of the highest single items on the whole tax bill.

The more your house is worth, the lower your tax RATE has to be to produce the same gross tax income. 5% on a 1 million house is the same dough as 20$ on a $250,000 house.

But there are functional caps on tax rates. Nobody likes to pay 20%. So that means that lower class neighborhoods tend to have less money to spend on schools, and therefore tend to have worse schools.

This creates a basic choice for parents who want their kids to go to a good school:
1) You can live somewhere cheap, and pay to send your kid to private school. You then have an incentive to vote against school funding (since it lowers your taxes.)

2) You can live somewhere expensive, which has good schools, and send your kids there. You then have an incentive to vote for school funding (since it gives a disproportionate benefit to school children, by taxing everyone.)

I guess my comment is not going to be released, and given its brevity, I assume it’s because of the topic itself, so I’ll rewrite it to this extent: he speculates about a community, named apparently arbitrarily, and further on reveals there’s a real community by that name, and provides real data about it, and apparently proceeds to discuss both interchangeably; the press seems to have decided on “fictional.”

Further to my above (#43 right now, but given how CT works, it may be renumbered soon).

I proposed a rationale for simplified cases which avoid real-world complexities: they allow the students to focus on the point at issue, without irrelevant distractions.

So philosophers use simplified, schematic cases for the same reason that physics use spheres of uniform density: if the point of today’s lesson is to study angular momentum, then it does not matter what color the sphere is, or what it is composed of, and anyone who asks “but is it a glass sphere or a steel sphere?” should be gently reminded that today’s topic is angular momentum, not materials science.

This same rationale, though, may well show why philosophers should *not* use gory cases: the goriness itself can become a distraction. Death, dismemberment and other dangers trigger our alarm mechanisms; for some of us, the ringing bells and red flags make it harder to think clearly, not easier.

Philosophers may think that the case has been simplified and streamlined so as to remove all possible distractors, but the plight of the fat man on the bridge–and the question whether it is fat-shaming and discriminatory to use a fat man at all–and the doubts about whether it is plausible that he can be fat enough to stop the trolley–and a dozen other such peripheral issues–are all acting as distractions.

Philosophers can say, defensively, “but you’re just not seeing the point! Today’s lesson is not about fat-shaming, but about utilitarian trade-offs!” I say, “if your example keeps triggering responses like this, then you have chosen a bad example.”

The only good rationale for gore is clarity. But the clarifying effects of gore are very commonly overestimated. It can contribute to clarity, sometimes, but it can also constitute a new and gratuitous source of distractions.

harry b
And –I think LFC basically gave me the term paper assignment, so thanks for that LFC!

welcome

p.s. i’ll try to respond to oldster’s pt a bit later.

56: What is disputed is rather whether trolley problems are to real life situations as frictionless spheres are to realistic physical bodies. I think the answer is no. I don’t necessarily think that moral philosophy shouldn’t talk about gory problems, if reality poses them, but why invent unrealistic ones when there are so many realistic ones to choose from?
“the goriness itself can become a distraction” – this is an interesting point. Drone strikes are gory but we don’t get to see the goriness and tend not to react accordingly. And even more so for many other moral problems, such as food stamp cuts, school closings, etc. Seemingly mundane bureaucratic decisions may cause more suffering than many a gory scenario. So focusing on gory ones – especially when they are contrived – seems a poor way of preparing students to think critically about what actually matters in modern society.

@oldster:
(1) The stick-figure (or abstract) thought experiments and the real-world cases may have different purposes, as harry b said @50.

(2) A number of commenters in this thread seem to me to be in tune w/ the spirit of the exercise as I understand it, which is, partly, to bring together philosophical questions/arguments and real-world situations. Call it applied ethics or whatever you want. I think it’s often more interesting and useful than the abstract thought experiments (whether they happen to be ‘gory’ or not).

(3) From this standpoint the facts about the real-world case are not distractions from the “point at issue”; they are part of the background one needs to argue intelligently about the point at issue. Simply asking people “to focus on the trade-off between a more egalitarian situation with a lower floor, and a less egalitarian situation with a higher floor” (to quote you, oldster, from a comment above) is not as interesting in the abstract as it is when it’s connected to a real situation.

@oldster:

A concern I have for some trolley problems is not the possibility of distractions of gore or fat-shaming etc., but that they are not schematic enough to eliminate confounding intuitions: my reaction to the prospect of killing the fat man to save others is colored by the feeling that killing him won’t actually help: really, a single body is going to stop a train? In a another example it’s supposed to be a certainty that two colliding trains will roll down a hill and kill a man in a hammock. Really?

This may be a distraction from the topic of the thread, but I’m reminded of the first time I cracked a book on operations research. Lots of textbooks in engineering and statistics contain simplified, artificial examples. The example I’m remembering was about choosing an appropriate means (or combination of means) to alleviate air pollution produced by a given factory. The optimal solution, given various costs and assuming that particulates were collected at ground level, was to raise the heights of the smoke stacks. There was no commentary in the text about any drawbacks to this solution. I thought it was interesting.

any thought experiment that abstracts away that essential part of reality (as is the case in the trolley problems, but also in economic theory) is probably useless

It’s really not, though. Any more than geometry is useless because there are no perfect circles in nature. Any real-world situation involves various variables or factors that are mixed up in all sorts of complicated ways. Isolating one or more of these and testing reactions to them is entirely useful in evaluating how one does or should react to real-world situations where these same variables occur tho not singly.