Harry

We’ll be hosting one of our book events on Erik Olin Wright’s new book, Envisioning Real Utopias (UK) in the Fall (probably late September), so I thought I’d let people know that the book is out (and excellent) so you can get hold of it and read it in time, if you want to.

Erik has spent a long time working on the book, and even longer on the ideas (I remember a meeting in 1994, in which he announced his decision to name the broader project of which this is a part the “Real Utopias Project” — predating, I think, Rawls’s use of the phrase “realistic utopianism”). At the core of the RUP (more details here), and of the book, is a recognition that the anti-capitalist left has been strong on critique of capitalism, but weak on the presentation of feasible alternatives, and in particular on providing the kind of detail about those alternatives that demonstrates both how they would realize egalitarian values and makes them open to scrutiny and critique. Envisioning Real Utopias is both a manifesto and a guidebook, if you like: an argument for taking institutional design seriously, and a guide to how to do that. Its a book that sociologists will want to read, but also, frankly, that everyone in political theory and philosophy should be reading too (even if they do not think of themselves as egalitarians). To be honest, I’ve been living close to the book so long that it I realize my endorsement may not be unbiased. Here, then, is what Swift says about it on the back cover:

Hugely rich and stimulating, Envisioning Real Utopias is may books in one: an incisive diagnosis of the harms done by capitalism; a masterful synthesis of the best work in political sociology and political economy over the past thirty years; and innovative theoretical framework for conceptualizing both the goals of progressive change and the strategies for their achievement; and inspiring story of actually existing challenges to capitalism that have arisen within capitalism itself; and a compelling essay on the relation between the desirable, the viable and the achievable. Anyone interested in the future of leftist politics has to read this book.

I agree.

And here is Erik introducing the book:

Envisioning Real Utopias from West Coast Poverty Center on Vimeo.

The charter school debate has been conducted in public (in the US) almost entirely in terms of whether charter schools do better than regular public schools in terms of the performance of their students on standardized tests (reading and math). Its looking very much that, taken as a whole, they don’t have much effect one way or the other on test scores. This doesn’t mean, of course, that some charter schools mightn’t have considerable effects. It is entirely plausible that, even if charters as a whole do not improve student outcomes, some particular kinds of charters do, and we could, presumably, find out which ones and promote them (and promote their magical qualities, perhaps, even among non-charter schools). For example, Roland Fryer’s much discussed study (to which I’ll return later) indicates that the Promise Academy schools in the Harlem Children’s Zone has had significant effects on math scores in particular, and attributes that gain (plausibly) to the school itself. The Obama administration is so taken with the “high commitment” schools of the kind found in the Harlem Children’s Zone that it required applicants for Race to The Top money to remove barriers to the formation of charters, and has included expansion of charters in its plans for the re-authorization of ESEA.

Let’s go back to Perry Pre-School for a moment. The main lesson people have drawn from Perry Pre-School is that it is worth investing in high quality early childhood programs, not just for what they do for the children, but because they are a relatively high yield economic investment. In fact, new work by David Deming (pdf) concludes that it is even worth investing in lower quality early childhood programs, for the same reason.

But there’s another lesson, which bears in a rather unnerving way on the charter school debate.

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Its a long time since the first installment, I know. At least I’m not embarrassed by having to post recommend another David Cohen book straightaway — that can wait till the third installment.

This recommendation is Tony Wagner’s book The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need–and What We Can Do About It The reason I read Wagner’s book has nothing to do with what I found so valuable about it. I was preparing a talk for teachers at a local high school on educational equity, and I knew that one of the teachers was obsessed with the “achievement gap” between American and foreign students, so wanted to learn more about it. And, indeed, Wagner is very clear about the kinds of things that our schools (and colleges) could be doing better for even our most advantaged students — in particular failing to create opportunities for higher order cognition, and structuring their learning to produce the traits and skills that will serve them well in a global economy. He includes a nice, and in my experience quite accurate, critique of the AP History exams (I don’t think my colleagues in English all agree with me, but AP English seems much better at eliciting the kind of curriculum in which students learn things that are valuable).

What grabbed me was none of that, but his description of the Change Leadership Group that he runs at Harvard.

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Radio 7 is running this brilliant re-imagining of the origins, and simultaneously running some of these “early years” stories from B7 productions. The first beginnings story is only up for another 24 hours; you have longer to catch the rest. The Avon early years story is especially recommended.

A conference announcement that will be interesting to some of our ethics and political philosophy readers here, with more details here (pdf). Submission deadline is November 1, 2010, so plenty of time.

It’s always nice when one’s parents arrive at a taste that one has also arrived at, but independently. Neither my dad nor I read a lot of fiction, but once a year we find out that we’re reading the same novel, rarely a recent one. With my mum its usually the radio — and she told me the other day that I might like Shappi Khorsandi (whom I am on record as adoring). She caught her on teenage diary and, indeed, she is not only loveable, but there are two moments when I started crying with laughter. Sorry, its only available for a few more hours.

Update: aha — and here she explains that her teenage poetry was inspired by Adrian Mole, which, indeed, it sounds like it was.

A discussion at Leiter’s site, prompted by an admittedly alarming letter from an anonymous correspondent focuses on whether teaching counts for anything in a large research university. Here’s the prompt:

(1) “Teaching counts for nothing.” It was a shock to me how dishonest research schools are about teaching: on the brochures, to parents, in official pronouncements the line is that we care about teaching deeply. But in private all my colleagues, even at the official orientation, have said teaching counts for virtually nothing for tenure purposes, for merit raises, etc. (Exception: if your student evaluations are truly awful that might hurt a bit.) In other words, there is hardly any institutional concern for teaching, i.e. concern that manifests itself in aligning incentive structures with good teaching. It’s not 50-50 research/teaching, it’s 100-0 or maybe 90-10. Experiment: try explaining to your non-academic friends, neighbors, legislators that our top universities basically ignore teaching in their evaluation of teachers. I often wonder whether our actual policies could survive publicity.

Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy, in their excellent Remaking the American University muse about why it is that despite the fact that tuition costs, especially for elite colleges, have risen fast over the past couple of decades there has been no evidence of improved quality of instruction over the same period. They give what seems to me the most likely explanation:

Critics of higher education, and to some extent higher education itself, have misunderstood the core business of these institutions. Whereas most believe the task of universities and colleges is to supply quality educations at reasonable prices, their real business is to sell competitive advantage at necessarily high prices.

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Frequent CT commenter John Protevi has an excellent piece about the proposed closure of the the Philosophy Department at Middlesex University at IHE and the THES. For those who don’t know, the University administrators are proposing to close the Department despite the fact that it is the highest ranked department in the University according the RAE, and seems to be heavily in the black. Of course, that it is in the black turns out not necessarily to work in its favour: apparently, due to a quirk in the RAE system, the university will continue to receive its RAE money from Philosophy for the next 6 years even if it closes the department. Protevi explains:

Philosophy at Middlesex received the highest rating of any programme in the university in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, a periodic exercise conducted by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which determines disbursement of government funds for research. Middlesex Philosophy had 65 per cent of its research activity rated “world-leading” or “internationally renowned”. This put Middlesex philosophy 13th of 41 programmes in the UK, at the top of all the other ex-polytechnics or “post-1992 universities”, and ahead of established heavyweights such as Sussex, Warwick, York, Durham, and Glasgow. To cut such a programme, while bragging on its website about its commitment to research excellence – that was just too much administrative hypocrisy for even many hardened American academics to bear.

When word got out that at Middlesex from 2008 to 2009 academic staff has fallen from 748 to 733, while administration has risen from 888 to 890; that the number of senior staff with total compensation above £100,000 increased from 7 to 13; and that total compensation for the VC increased from £223,000 to £246,000 – all these facts rang an all-too-familiar note with American academics as well. And it certainly didn’t help the administration’s image when people learned that consultant fees increased from £2,321,000 to £3,122,000 in that time period. (Details on these figures may be found here, in the university’s financial statement.)

Another outrage was learning that philosophy produced a yearly revenue of some £173,260 for the university from its excellent results in the 2008 RAE. Incredibly, the university will continue to receive that sum yearly until the research excellence framework, to be held in 2014 or perhaps even 2016, even if it has closed the philosophy programme! This was an all too blatant case of ripping off the labour of the philosophers. Then it came out that the “subject group” composed of philosophy (six faculty members) and religious studies (one member) contributed 53 per cent of its revenue to central administration in 2009-10 and was projected to contribute 59 per cent in 2010-11. The central administration requires 55 per cent, so it is willing to cut its most highly rated research programme for a temporary 2 percentage point shortfall. Veterans of penny-pinching, short-sighted, and arbitrary administrations winced with sympathetic familiarity at this sort of “reasoning”.

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Mike Harding is good this week. Around 45 minutes in you can hear an astonishing version of Ewan Macoll’s Moving On Song (by the internet-unfriendlily named Pbs 6 — go on, try googling them); then, at 56 minutes, a song I’d never heard about Desperate Dan (that makes 3 songs I know that refer to DD, the others being by the Kinks and the Bonzos — any more?).

Continuum has just published Educational Equality (UK) which is composed of a lead essay written by yours truly, with commentary by James Tooley and Ken Howe, and really nice clear bookends in the form of an informative introduction and a concluding analysis by my excellent former colleague Graham Haydon. The main essay is a revision of a pamphlet I wrote more than 10 years ago for the IMPACT series put out by the PESGB. The original was focused on criticizing the then-still-newish system of parental choice in the UK, and the selection that it resulted in, within the context of a philosophical argument in favour of a particular principle of educational equality. The new book is in a series which reprint the IMPACT pamphlets with commentaries, but when I was approached to do that I felt that my philosophical views had changed quite a bit (largely in the context of the long collaboration with Swift), that the policy context had changed quite a bit, and that I could say something useful about the US as well — so the revised essay is quite a bit different from the original. Tooley criticises sort of from the right, Howe from the left (that package gives the not-entirely-accurate impression that somehow what I have to say belongs to the centre); I like both their essays (which I have only just seen). It is short (maybe 30k words) and accessible to students and the general public (it is being marketed as a textbook): and I, at least, think that there is enough about both the US and the UK that parochial readers in each country should not feel shortchanged, while cosmopolitan readers can learn something new. This is the second book I’ve been involved in publishing this year (see this announcement) — and the last, I promise.

And, apparently, Labour enters talks with the Lib Dems. Telling that his resignation takes effect only on the election of a new leader, and not immediately. Presumably, no caretaker was forthcoming. So much for Alan Johnson having no ambition.

My wife announced that she wants a GPS system for her birthday (its ok, she studiously avoids reading CT). Well, which GPS system should I get for her? Are there any differences? Looking around I am bewildered. (Ideally I’d like to avoid having one with a posh female English accent, both because it irritates me and because it induces my wife to mock mercilessly).

Here for 6 more days. Ernie, apparently, was an obsessive archivist, who then left everything in a box in his garage. Delightful.

Here’s the “singing in the rain” sketch they refer to after 30 minutes or so to cheer you up:

Chris Brooke is on a roll again. Responding to fears that Cameron will demand the PMship if there is a hung parliament in which the Tories have the largest number of seats, and force Brown’s, or the Queen’s, hand:

People are making analogies with the presidential election in the United States in 2000 — but what was striking then was far more the spinelessness of the Dems rather than the unscrupulousness of the Repugs. The bottom line is that politics is about power, and if the Tories are the only ones willing to play hardball, then – bluntly – good for them. If the Queen discredits herself along the way by being pressured into being openly partisan, then that’s a good thing, as it’ll work to hasten the end of this stupid monarchy. And if voters disapprove of what the Tories are doing, then they’ll punish them when they get the chance. That’s democracy.

This reminded me, for no particular reason, of what happened immediately after Labour’s unexpected victory of 1945. Morrison (appalling grandfather of the magnificent Mandelson) tried to involve Bevin in staging a coup against Attlee. Bevin forewarned Attlee (to whom he was intensely loyal) and in the end Attlee just sat through Morrison’s demands to be given a shot at becoming PM. Bevin was stunned by Attlee’s relaxed attitude. When Morrison was done, Attlee just said something to the effect of “Well, I’m driving to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen will invite me to form a government” (not exactly — he didn’t drive, his wife did — she was, apparently, a crazed driver, and his colleagues would occasionally try to stop him allowing her to drive him — while he did the crossword).

I doubt that whoever goes to the palace on Friday will be driven by a wife, or will be doing a crossword puzzle.

Anyway, read the whole thing.