May 18, 2008

Seeing Like A State, Not Like An Educator

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 10:43 pm

Some weeks back, Eduwonkette set off a small firestorm of controversy with a series of posts [here, here and here] on the interconnections in a group of inside the beltway education policy think tanks and advocacy organizations. Prominent mention was given to Education Sector [with a strong blog presence at Eduwonk and the Quick and the Ed], the conservative glossy education journal Education Next, Education Trust, Checker Finn’s Fordham Foundation [with a new hyperactive blog, Flypaper], the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools [blogging at the Charter Blog], and The New Teacher Project.

Eduwonkette’s posts were met with accusations of conspiracy theorizing from Eduwonk’s Andy Rotherham [here and here]. At EdBizBuzz, Marc Dean Millot weighed in with a four part commentary [here, here, here and here]. More recently, the issue has been resurrected in a number of different of forms, including these posts [here and here] on an AERA convention session comparing and contrasting think tank advocacy, journalism and education school research.

While the accompanying noise may obscure its import, Eduwonkette has raised an interesting issue worthy of some serious reflection — the political significance of the inside the beltway education advocacy organizations and think tanks that have emerged over the last two decades. But the conceptual lens she has applied to the issue is limited, and it left her thoughts vulnerable to the caricatures of it that have been raised in response.

Eduwonkette’s analysis is reminiscent of the power elite analysis of G. William Domhoff. Domhoff mapped out the social, economic and political ties among the wealthy — that they intermarry, live in the same few neighborhoods and have summer homes in the same resorts, attend the same small number of elite schools and universities, belong to the same churches and synagogues, and are members of the same associations and clubs. From this web of interconnections, Domhoff concluded that there is a coherent class which rules America, and that it sets the fundamental parameters of social and economic policy.

While there were important insights in Domhoff’s analysis, they were overtaken by an implicit determinism, an assumption that ideas follow more or less automatically from social and economic conditions. But if that determinism were true, it would have to apply to the subordinate classes which are the great majority of the society as much as to the dominant class. Ideas which reflected the social and economic conditions and interests of working people would be more widely held and advocated in society. The fact that this is clearly not the case tells us that the relationship between ideas and conditions is much more mediated and complex than Domhoff’s reading allows. If we are to make sense of the process by which some ideas and policy initiatives become hegemonic while others do not, there is a need for a far more robust political sociology and sociology of knowledge than Domhoff provides.

Like Domhoff, Eduwonkette’s analysis made important points, such as the existence of what one might call the Washington ‘echo chamber’ effect — the way in which particular educational policy perspectives are given credibility when a rather small circle of influential individuals prominently located in the network of inside the beltway think tanks cross-endorse and cross-promote each others’ initiatives. One can often see that echo effect in parts of the educational blogosphere. But ultimately, Eduwonkette’s analysis suffers from the same problem as Domhoff’s: it assumes that evidence of the interconnections among the different advocacy groups is, by itself, explanatory. In short, Eduwonkette does not offer a compelling account of the ideological common ground among the organizations she has linked. This is an essential task, the more so given the most common response to Eduwonkette’s analysis — that these advocacy groups are not of the same political hue, but range from conservative to neo-liberal centrist.

Tom Medvetz’s paper on the sociology of think tanks, “Hybrid Intellectual,” provides a fruitful point of departure for an analysis of the inside the beltway educational think tank. [Hat tip: Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber.] Medvetz locates think tanks at the juncture of the worlds of politics, academics and journalism, as a hybrid mixture that has produced an entrepreneurial model of policy development. Two aspects of this model shed some light on the discussion here.

First, insofar as the education think tanks are entrepreneurial, they are selling their product — education research and policy initiatives — to foundations and school districts that are prospective funders. Just as there is a relatively small circle of individuals prominent in these organizations, there is also a relatively small number of foundations and school districts that fund their work. [Eduwonkette did an excellent job of dissecting that reality in this post.] The agenda of these funders drives the advocacy of these think tanks. In particular, the influence of foundations on the ideological far right, such as the Walton Family Foundation [the Wal-Mart money] and the Bradley Foundation [established by a member of the John Birch Society], is crucial, since there is no equivalent presence on the left — like the inside the beltway think tanks they fund, the main education foundations range from the neo-liberal center to the hard right. It is also important here to understand that a small number of school districts which large budgets can play the role of funders: under Joel Klein, the NYC DoE has supplied millions of dollars in no-bid contracts to The New Teacher Project, which then provides faithful service to the DoE in the field of labor relations.

Second, as Medvetz explains, inside the beltway Washington think tanks function as the policy arms of shadow national governments and shadow departments of the national government [such as the Department of Education or the Department of Defense], developing and promoting model policies with the ultimate goal of their adoption by the government entity. This is an important insight, because it allows us to see how think tanks representing quite distinct political factions, such as the Fordham Foundation with its ties to Republican conservatives marginalized by the Spellings DoE and the Ed Sector with its ties to DLC neo-liberal Democrats, still share a common structural position in Washington’s educational politics.

What is more, when think tanks function as a shadow governmental policy making agency, they have a natural and powerful tendency to embrace the organizational logic of that entity. In the words of the title of the classic James Scott text, they “see like a state.” Their vision is one of direction, control and change from above, from the top down; it is an administrative world view, rooted in the standardization of the objects it seeks to rule and manage from a distance. In the instant case, those objects are schools and classrooms, educators and students. When one “sees like a state” one reduces the rich and thick complexity of each particular learning community to a few statistics, which can then be compared to similar numbers from other learning communities. The state “sees” schools and classrooms through the prism of statistics much like an urban planner “sees” a city through the prism of a map: it imposes a simplifying, singular rational order on a world of incredible diversity and multiplicity. In the case of educational think tanks, this simplifying and reductionist vision is facilitated by the fact that in the ranks of the educational think tanks, actual educators — women and men who taught real students in real schools for any meaningful length of time — are few and far between.

This is a new chapter of an old story, but perhaps one not well known enough. The birth of the modern era brought with it the new science of ‘political arithmetic,’ the collection of numbers as an instrument of governance in a world where the state had the ambitious goal of remaking society. The emergence of political arithmetic marked a far-going expansion in the scope and the reach of the state, fueled directly by a massive increase in the state’s capacity to engage in instrumental calculations. Perhaps there was no clearer manifestation of this new science than the birth of the modern census, the counting of populations with a thoroughness previously unimaginable. Data was collected on births and deaths, on the formation and dissolution of families, on the movement of peoples and their location in the urban landscape, and on the relative numbers of immigrants and different races, ethnicities and even religions. Influential liberal and utilitarian thinkers such as Condorcet, Bentham, and Mill saw such new knowledge as the foundation upon which the state would construct its economic and political policies aimed at reshaping that same population, at remaking it into its ideal. The new term which eventually came to replace political arithmetic — statistics — reflected this intimate relationship between the collection of numbers and the purpose and vision of the modern state: it was derived from the German term for political science, statistik, itself taken from the Latin statisticus, or state affairs.

As Max Weber pointed out so well, the modern state is a bureaucratic state, organized along principles of instrumental rationality. Within a bureaucracy, statistics are a — perhaps, the — key technology of power. The state “sees” society, the object of its power, through statistics, and through them, learns how to intervene in society in order to remake it. As a speaker at the 1860 inaugural International Statistics Congress said, “I think that the true meaning to be attached to ’statistics’ is not every collection of figures, but figures collected with the sole purpose of applying the principles deduced from them to questions of importance to the state.”

Like literacy itself, statistical literacy or numeracy is thus an exercise of power — and not just political power in the hands of the state. The targets of state intervention can not ably defend themselves and advocate for their own policies without a command of statistical knowledge. This is especially the case when one is confronting technocratic ideology, the notion that distant technical experts — rather than the lay public or the professional practitioner with real, immediate stakes — should be making the important decisions. To challenge successfully the legitimacy of technocratic policy, one must be able to do battle on the statistical terrain. Longtime readers of Edwize will recognize how we have exposed the serious flaws in the DoE’s school progress reports and class sizes, to cite just two examples, with careful statistical analysis.

But knowing how to fight on the terrain of the state and “seeing like a state” are not the same thing. At the end of the day, education is about particular relationships, teacher and student. This is the reality that educators live every day, and why we insist upon the importance and preeminence of the qualitative analysis that captures the richness and the complexity of those relationships. It is why we fight so hard to defend the principle that the appropriate way to evaluate teaching is to observe it, and why we maintain that standardized tests are poor measures of students’ learning. On both of these fronts and on related issues such as NCLB, we have found ourselves in conflict with the inside the beltway education think tanks, who have a faith almost religious in the thin statistical measure. That is because they see like a state, not like an educator.

5 Comments »

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  • Political science/political philosophy and education policy…

    I was going to spend some time last night connecting my weekend entry on hubris to the debate over whether a preponderance-of-evidence standard is right for policy, when I discovered that the macrotheoretical gap had already been filled by Leo Casey’s…

    Trackback by Sherman Dorn — May 19, 2008 @ 8:35 am

  • Qualitative data on schools…

    Yesterday’s story in the Washington Post (hat tip) on in-person reviews of schools by external committees is one step in the right direction for accountability: using in-person eyeballs instead of statistical eyeballs to see what should be done. Rhee …

    Trackback by Sherman Dorn — May 21, 2008 @ 11:42 am

  • Eduwonkette’s original post was in February, and other evidences of the interconnectedness between private organizations, corporations and the ed sector have been written up in recent posts on The Chancellor’s New Clothes blog (avoicecriesout dot com).

    These bloggers are not union executives, yet in just a couple of months, they’ve been able to shine a very large spotlight on the powerful force these private entities have become in determining educational policies in this country.

    The UFT has chosen to go along with many of the corporate initiatives, as in the case of charter schools, and put up a belated and/or feeble opposition against some of the most egregious attacks coming from the business models in the private sector (data processing, test mania, diminishing autonomy in the classroom, outside ed contractors, etc.).

    Thank you for joining the discussion, Mr. Casey. You offer much to think about.

    But as usual with this union stewardship, it comes years too late. And no matter how good the analysis is, it won’t do anything at this point to stave off the corporate aggression and restore the dignity of the profession.

    Comment by JW — May 22, 2008 @ 9:02 pm

  • [...] Edwize post would be pretty rich at any time, but it’s downright hilarious on the heels of this and [...]

    Pingback by Update: Irony Still Dead at More About Education — May 27, 2008 @ 12:07 pm

  • [...] of their leaders, Leo Casey, seems to have no problem finding time to writing on EdWize, the UFT blog, long, very long theoretical critiques of G. William Domhoff’s analysis of the [...]

    Pingback by Free Doug Avella! « PREA Prez — May 29, 2008 @ 6:28 pm

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