meta: automatic writing; topic: book pitch

As an eighth-grade teacher, I used to have students practice their writing skills by doing timed writings. I would give them a length of time (generally short--five or ten minutes most times) and tell them that they had to be writing that entire time. If I saw them stop writing, I would tell them to write anything, even if it was "I don't know what to write" or their name over and over again, and (with the exception of the students who thought it the greatest act of rebellion to spend the entire time writing their name for the entire time) for all students, even the most stuck, the simple act of forcing something out would eventually bring them around to writing something; so much so that at the end of the time I would tell students to put their pencils down and they would continue to write, begging me for long enough to finish the sentence, or for one more minute.

You would think that I would be smart enough to recognize that the same technique can work for dissertations; but you'd be wrong. For some reason, even though I can pitch a pretty convincing argument in the paragraph above for just sitting down to write, I can't seem to actually sit myself in front of any verbal recording apparatus long enough, or with enough consistency, to actually write something. So this post is an attempt to force myself to practice this art--what Jack Kerouac called "automatic writing" (though for him, it was more a Zen-like experience about creating a narrative without using the conscious mind).

I don't know what to write; I don't know what to write; I don't know what to write (I have to admit, there is a certain, perhaps Zen-like, beauty to just repeating that sentence.) I feel like my thoughts about the dissertation have been a more elaborate variation on that exercise--"reformulating my question" again and again, but essentially, each time coming out with another version of "I don't know what to write." So in attempting to try to get out of the trap I think I'm setting for myself, I'm trying to think of the dissertation, not as a "research question" or "what I want to learn" but as a book proposal: what am I trying to pitch to my committee (as a "publisher") to convince them that there's an audience for.

In that spirit, Ch. 1 would be about "who cares" or "why does this matter", where I would talk about how 1) most policymakers haven't studied education; 2) most people feel that because they experienced education, they're qualified to make judgments about its proper execution (ignoring the concept that things may have changed in the thirty years since they experienced it); 3) most people's experience with education policy is through the media; 4) that most journalists are more concerned with fulfilling the norms of journalism than with explicating the philosophical worldviews inherent in different policy prescriptions; 5) [note how I'm focusing on just keeping writing--this would be a rather unwieldy first chapter, no matter how structured] 6) there is no six; 7) therefore, the way media talk about education matters.

Ch. 2 would talk about how the way we talk about things matters (either the theoretical orientation, or maybe the lit review--since it's about who's involved in this conversation). So there I'd want to cover some of the basic stuff like Frank Luntz's points, as well as some of the more abstract philosophizing like Gramsci.

Ch. 3 would then try to show how what's out there in the media is presenting an inadequate version of education policy: one way (maybe in a chapter all to itself) could be to do "reframings" (something I've done a time or two before where I try to basically adhere to the tone of a typical newspaper story and cover the same event from various perspectives--highlighting some things and minimizing others). Another way could be to show how the same perspectives keep getting all the play and how competing perspectives are silenced (either "quantitatively" by pointing out the number of times and ways a given perspective shows up, or "qualitatively" by talking about what rhetorical structurings make it more powerful in the debate or less so--or both...but how much is too much to bite off here?) Another way could be to do a different type of "reframing", one where I take a current, non-education issue, and I frame it in the terms of current education debates (ex., a parallel to NCLB's achievement testing in the medical field would determine if the hospital was a good one by the state of all the patients on a given Tuesday in March at 10:14a.m. Hospitals with too many patients in the ICU would be seen as not working hard enough to get those patients well--"because all patients can recover", and anyone who doesn't believe that is simply abandoning hope on our most vulnerable patients and causing them to lose out on the "high standards" of care that they deserve. To prevent that, we would strip hospital funding if everyone in the hospital wasn't healthy by 2014. And so on...). These "thought experiments" (if you will) can help non-policymakers understand the issues policymakers are really facing without forcing them to follow an elaborate constructivist worldview argument.

OK, time's up...how's that?

Meta: Humanities Lit Reviews

My current dilemma of living between two worlds (humanities and social sciences) centers on the lit review. Because the social scientists are all hung up about causality and other quantitative issues, they're having a hard time with questions I'm asking about what counts as a lit review....How would you define a lit review in the humanities? In the social sciences, the definition of a good literature review is supposed to be a narrative that tells the story of who's talking about what (in the field as you conceive of it), but there's an argument that says that such work doesn't count as research (though some are willing enough to substitute the term "scholarship"). But as I think about most of the papers I wrote for two different literature degrees, they start to sound pretty close to their definition of literature reviews. Is this a function of the fallacy where high school teachers talk about "research papers" but really mean lit reviews (since the quality and quantity of original thinking required is pretty much nil)? Is this a snobbery about how much "original thinking" is required (or what counts as original thinking--i.e., if one can't make causal claims one is simply describing the world as we already know it)?
So I've been trying to make sense of what differentiates a literature review in English (or the humanities generally) from "original research"...is it just the lit review is the narrative of what's missing and the original research is where you fill the gaps with your own interpretations?
If one rejects the attempt to make the dissertation resemble the hard sciences' lab report (where great attention is paid to describing how the "experiment" is put together so that it can be reproduced to gather--ostensibly--the same data), how does one define the section that represents original research without positing a collection of data and interpretation of that dataset. In other words, if I don't count something (quantitative), or at least interview someone (to go the qualitative route), and I just make a list of thinkers that I'm going to apply to this given situation (phenomenon, if you like), and then make sense of how these different thinkers inform our understanding of that situation (and give us a new understanding of that situation--hence creating original scholarship?), is that act of gathering the thinkers a lit review or a description of the experiment? Is the description of the situation the declaration of the parameters of the dataset?
How do I map these required concepts (that don't really fit the experience of working in the humanities) onto what I'm looking to do?

Topic: immigration and education

I’m beginning to think that I need to figure out how to integrate these two parallel tracks about rhetoric: on the one hand, public education is about what sort of citizens we want other people’s children to be. On the other, the current anti-immigrant rhetoric has defined citizenship to the level of taxpayer (“I work hard and pay my taxes, and these immigrants come and use all the services”). But when you point out that immigrants actually pay more in taxes than they use in services (through Social Security taxes they won’t collect, sales taxes, etc. they pay, and through their reluctance to use services for fear of deportation), the argument doesn’t go away. The rhetoric is more powerful than the data. In the same way, the Global Economic Competitiveness narrative (promulgated by Nation at Risk) defines education as the task of creating good employees who become good taxpayers. (See the connection to the immigration narrative?) And, as in the immigration narrative, when you point out that there’s no evidence of a connection between education and economic development, the rhetoric still doesn’t go away.

So my challenge is how to create a “research question” that shows that no matter what data you have, if you don’t have a driving metanarrative it can fit into, it doesn’t change the argument. I think of it as a problem of making a humanities argument to a social scientist. Since social science tries to make predictions about the empirical world, it’s inherently quantitative (though it is becoming receptive to the need for qualitative analysis). In one way, I think that the humanities are like the “reality based media” of the Bush administration source in Ron Suskind’s article; they’re about making sense of world, while the social sciences are “an empire” attempting to “make reality” (bow to their will). So I’m trying to reconcile myself to the idea of a dissertation that doesn’t “solve a problem” but one that creates a compelling narrative (which I think is actually solving a problem, since really a dissertation is the act of creating a narrative that compels people to believe that you’ve actually defined the problem appropriately and that your solution solves the problem).

One solution a member of my committee suggested was to view it as a “translation equation” (those formulae that help people understand ideas that come from other disciplines). The act of putting various thinkers together is a creative act that can help others understand ideas they haven’t encountered in their discipline previously. That sounds convincing to me, but of course it would, wouldn’t it?

Topic: citizenship rhetoric

OK, as I think about this some more I'm thinking about based on the following thoughts:
1) Lisa Delpit's assertion that schooling (as an institution) is always about "other people's children". The premise inherent in this is that "we can raise our kids right, but we can't trust those people to do it right." (Which ties nicely into my previous post about the trope of threat as a driving force for education--see below.) 2) Especially since we're talking about publicly funded schooling, we're talking about what sort of future citizens are creating?

So my topic is really about what definition of citizenship (i.e., what sort of citizens) are we calling forth in the rhetoric of our education policy?

So what intrigues me about A Nation At Risk, is that it calls forth citizens who are conceived of as contributors to a global economy (or more accurately, contributors to American supremacy in the global economy)--and really little else. This is important in that it marks a move away from rhetorics that define a citizen's duty as more than a taxpayer--from ones that conceive of the duty as a citizen to create social justice, extend democracy, etc.

This is important on one hand because (one of) the inherent premise(s) in NAR's rhetoric, is that the competition in this global economy is fundamentally fair, and it elides any critiques (thereby obviating the citizen's need to address them as well) of the system as a way to maintain economic inequality.

But I think one my most vexing problems is how to help the reader of it (who will presumably be coming from an education background--how many other folks do you suppose will pick up a dissertation about education policy?) will see it as talking about rhetoric (first and foremost), rather than talking about a particular policy, or as an argument for a certain type of citizenship, etc.--since that's what I'm really most interested in.

Tangent: excellence and minima

This doesn't mean that we have to say that it's painfully easy—basic training is, by and large, completable by everyone who gets into it (and part of that is the selection criteria—very few quadripelegics enlist), but it's not easy. But it is "basic"; there are different levels of training (e.g., Ranger training) that is more difficult, and where the fact that not everyone can do it is part of its appeal. American egalitarianism makes it hard for people to admit that there are things that we shouldn't expect every 18 year old to be able to master. The new push toward not awarding high school diplomas until students get accepted to college is becoming an example of that.

Tangent: clarification of excellence rhetoric

OK, I totally admit that this is just me being pedantic and cranky, but the fact that "excellence for all" doesn't seem to ever be pointed out as a linguistic oxymoron drives me crazy. "Excellence" has become some strange signifier, along with "world class standards" and other signifiers designed to create some sense of American exceptionalism (a Lake Wobegon where "all the children are above average") while at the same time acquiescing to American egalitarianism. This is most evident in the "all children can learn" mantra...100 years ago Pavlov taught us that dogs can learn, so what are we really saying there? That everyone--no matter what else is going on in their lives--can learn this stuff...it's just that easy? Who's advocating for that position? If everyone can learn "at world class levels" or whatever, then what are special ed classes all about? Do we seriously believe that all babies can master any curriculum we throw at them by the same stage in life? Anyone who knows anything about children knows how crazy that is. Yet we act as if this is sound education policy.

It's like "reading at grade level": grade level (used to) mean(s) that in a typical classroom, 50% of students of a given grade would be reading above that level, and 50% would be below that level...so how can "all students read at grade level"? And why will no one point out that this is just asinine education policy?

Unless statisticians are willing to give up their beloved bell curve (which they've gone so far to call a "normal distribution") and rethink the entire concept of a range of abilities, unless we're prepared to really believe—against all logic and evidence to the contrary—the "we're #1" jingoistic rhetoric that every one of our kids is smarter than than the smartest kids in every other nation (thereby leaving them to fill out the other standard deviations of the bell curve), we need to describe "excellence" as what it really is: a minimum level of competency.

Topic: the rhetoric of equity and excellence OR us vs. them in Chicago

when I was thinking about what it was about NAR that most interested me, it was thinking
about how it eclipsed the language of equity that was out there that helped make things like Head Start possible. (Granted, that was wrapped in a larger civil rights discourse, but that's part of my point--how did the Global Economic Competitiveness frame so effectively shift the discourse from equity to "excellence"? If I had to sum up my interest in rhetoric in ed policy in general, it would be that key shift I'm interested in--that move from the key term being "equity" to "excellence".)

With Chicago, the 1988 reform was much more in the context of an equity frame; while test scores were there, etc. (i.e., we can point to neo-liberal discourse), the policy was largely centered around "democratic localism" rather than "efficiency" or "competitiveness" ideals. The 1995 reform was definitely about "efficiency" (either cloaked as "scaling up the successes of democratic localism" or "reining in out-of-control, rogue LSC's" or what have you). So as I
think about this, I'm interested in NAR as an example of the ability to shift the discourse, not necessarily in NAR itself (though I think it's one of the best examples of the rhetorical work of reframing a debate), maybe looking at MSM coverage of the time between the 1988 and the 1995 reforms to see how those reforms got framed to make 1995 happen might be a good place to look. I have no idea if that's any more marketable, since if anything, it's even more provincial, and it's historical. [Though I haven't studied it extensively, Villaregosa's (sp?) attempt to take over LAUSD might be a more contemporary version (though LA is a one-paper town). ]

What both reforms have in common, I guess, is the trope of anti-corruption. The premise in 1988 (much like the breakup of the Soviet Union) was that, "hey give us a shot; we can't screw it up worse than the central office has"; in 1995 it was, "those LSC's are all over the place; we need some way to get some way to make sure they're not squandering what we've given them". In both examples, "accountability" was the driving trope; the first said, "turn it over to those most directly affected and let them worry about policing it", and the second said "it's too complicated to let everyone police themselves; if everything's efficient it's easier to monitor--and businesses can be trusted, because if they try any funny business,
they're out of the market (which expresses a profound cynicism about the ability to get politicians 'out of the market', and a profound naivete about the workings of business--both the idea that it's easier to monitor, or that it won't be have more incentive to be corrupt, but nonetheless)".

So the key distinction in 1988 was an "us" rhetoric--let us work with our own money for our own kids in our own schools, while 1995 took on an "us" vs. "them" rhetoric of "what are 'they' doing with 'our' money?" (While an extensive look at the rhetoric will probably complicate such notions, I think they pass the smell test.) So my larger issue about rhetoric and the equity/excellence shift is to look at that move--how did the language of the elites (as expressed in the MSM) show them as part of the "us" in 1988, but as the "us" working against an unclean rabble in 1995.

[Another example: When Kozol publishes "Savage Inequalities", the answer isn't to regionalize education funding to address those issues, despite the use of New Trier and CPS as examples. While the book got big notice, even in the mainstream press, it didn't get policy traction (certainly not in the way he did when he first published "The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home" or "Death at an Early Age", even though so little had changed in the way of the examples in his books).]

How's that for a revision of thinking? Does it address the "relevance to what we're worried about today"? I see the framing issue (thanks to Frank Luntz and Karl Rove and George Lakoff over the past six years) having become pretty common in media reporting, so that part seems relevant, though I still don't see people talking about it in terms of education policy, only electoral politics. So that's how I see myself as relevant. I'm looking for a good example that will clearly show how different framings lead to different policies.

Meta: Learning or Teaching

"My “assignment” for this week was to come up with something short—less than one page—talking about what I want to learn…it threw me…first, it threw me because I’m thinking about how long the dissertation has to be, and how fuzzy my ideas have been for years, the concept of getting it down under a page seems so counterproductive. On the one hand, I know that it’s often harder to write a one page paper than it is to write a ten page paper—because to get your thoughts clean enough to fit in a page requires some serious thinking. (And that’s part of my problem; I think it’s going to take a lot more than one page to really get my ideas clean, so that’s a tough order.)

The other thing that threw me with that “assignment” was the phrase “what you want to learn”…I keep thinking about it in terms of what I want to teach my reader, or what I want to “prove”, that the idea that the proposal (and the dissertation) as a learning experience seemed counter-intuitive as well. Learning seems so freeing—the ability to explore and follow issues where they lead—I’m thinking about the dissertation as knowing where I’m going and just gathering the information to get me there (convincingly—this is a dissertation about rhetoric, after all). I’m not thinking about using the dissertation to learn something new—that’s what the work leading up to the dissertation is for (and granted, that’s where I am, so it’s not that big a deal, I suppose), and granted, there are little moments of learning all the time, but to think of the project as something with learning at its core threw me.

Topic: A Nation at Risk

A Nation at Risk was a rhetorically powerful document; several aspects of that power are understudied:

• its dominant metaphor is of military threat, but it calls forth the threat to argue for economic competitiveness
• and there's painfully thin, or painfully bad, evidence either supporting its claims or showing the causal links between its claims and its warrants
• note that just as it comes out--1983--America starts the personal computer revolution--led by young graduates and dropouts (i.e., the products of this failing school system)--that leads to the longest economic expansion in history...and still the school system gets no credit for that.
• its recommendations weren't particularly revolutionary and were already in place in many places, so its rhetoric and its actual policy prescriptions were pretty divorced
• it convinced many people to get on board with it, despite not necessarily agreeing with its premise, methodologies, or conclusions--in the hope that bringing such attention to education would yield good results (i.e., how did so many people get conned?)
• it gained mainstream media attention in a way few government reports have
• that media attention was overwhelmingly positive, while the professional response was overwhelmingly negative--yet that professional response got almost no media attention
• it really helped to move the debate about the appropriate sphere of education to one where education's role was to maintain America's global economic competitiveness, a place it hasn't shifted from for 25 years
  

Topic: CFP(&P) Call for papers (and publisher)

As I've played with this, I've envisioned a book (probably aimed at a general audience, not as a dissertation--though if I could get it through a committee, I'd be willing to be convinced otherwise) that looks at the trope of threat in the history of education--how its marshaled for a particular policy's cause, how the threat is constructed and assessed to be worthy of policy intervention, how policies are proposed to counter the threat, and how those policies play out in the lives of those afraid of the threat and thought to be the cause of the threat. A sample of chapters I can think of right off the top of my head: the "Old Deluder Satan" law requiring education in the Massachusetts colony; the (Catholic) immigrant crisis that motivated Horace Mann's public school push; the immigrant threat posed by bilingual education (and maybe the Ebonics debate of the 1980's); Sputnik and the threat of the Soviets in the 1960's; NAR and global economic competitiveness in the 1980's; the "urban school crisis"--a conflation of fears about failing schools, race, and gangs; the DARE program and "The War on Drugs"; [obviously it's not hard to come up with examples...I think I'd be best at editing a volume with this theme and eliciting folks to write about it--I've always been better at helping others with their writing than pushing myself to getting to the writing myself...as the fact that I'm hardly closer to having a dissertation under way than I was last year at this time makes pretty clear.]

Other: Title

I've liked the title "situation critical" since I thought of it (probably in 1997 or 1998) because it plays nicely on two meanings of critical--important and analysis. And because, for my entire life (at least) education has been described as being in a state of "crisis". And because I'm running out of time to complete my dissertation. (And I've had a fondness for the Situationists). I was unaware prior to the quick google search I just did that National Geographic has a series by the same name, or that "Dre Dog" (whoever that is, no offense to all the Dre Dog fans that may be out there) has an album of that name, etc. I apologize to everyone that stumbled here looking for anything related to those such things.

Topic: current state of thinking (summary)

While this is still not a "research question" (or "phenomenon of inquiry" if you, like me, are less fond of the "lab report" structure inherent in most dissertation thinking and want a less scientistic euphemism, though I still can't embrace the term; but that's a Meta: post for another time), my thinking about "what I want to learn" is sitting in this formulation in my word processor currently: How do we construct a more powerful public narrative for the idea of engaged citizenship as the purpose for public schooling?

This is really coming out of opposition toward the dominant public narrative about the purpose of public schooling, that schools exist to train workers for the new economy so that America can maintain its dominance. I call this the Global Economic Competitiveness frame (GEC), and see it coming largely out of A Nation at Risk for a variety of rhetorical and historical reasons. (About which many posts will definitely follow.)

I’m deeply influenced in this line of thinking by David Labaree’s Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals in American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 39-81. [and by virtue of going to a “hippie school” for undergrad]. So I’m interested—on a larger political, ethical level—in creating the conditions where politicians don’t mention “developing good citizens” as the poor stepchild in their list of reasons why we need to do something about education, but rather place it at the center of their list of reasons (and, of course, alter their policy prescriptions accordingly). On a research level, I’m interested from the standpoint of how did GEC so effectively eclipse (for example) the competing equity frame that gave us Head Start and other programs looking to use education as a tool to ameliorate social ills.

Among my many concerns about GEC are:

• Rhetorically, that it normalizes a business paradigm where competition becomes an essential part of education (and by extension, American supremacy in that competition—in education and elsewhere—is taken for granted—as an “is” and an “ought”), where measurement is paramount, and money is the ultimate measure
• Practically, that it reduces learning to job training—if it’s just that, why should the public have to pay instead of the employers it’s designed to benefit?
• On a policy level, that there’s no evidence that what we do in education has any relevance to what happens in the economy—the generation that created the personal computer and internet revolution is the same one that was graduating from (or even dropping out of) the educational system that was supposedly so bad that “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” And even as those revolutions gave us the longest sustained period of economic advancement in history, we didn’t hear anyone credit the education system.
• And more, but that’s a start…
  

So I want to call for us to get smarter about how we think and talk about the purposes of public education so that we can be more successful at improving education. One way I see of doing that is overthrowing the GEC and replacing it with something better. But that’s a tall order, so I’m interested in how that happens; I think by being smart about how it happens in the media will help shape how it happens in politics as well. (Tangent post will be created about media vs. politics strategies if needed.)

Other: The Order of Things

As a first post, I'll start (with a Foucault pun) by giving some order to my postings. I'm beginning with the premise that such an activity will prevent me from having to create multiple blogs. Each post title will start with a subject heading: "Topic" will be for those posts that deal with the subject matter of the dissertation itself (see next post); "Meta" will be for those posts that deal with the act of writing a dissertation; "Tangent" will be for those posts that deal with interests that are not directly related to the dissertation work itself; "Other" will, obviously, cover those things not otherwise relevant to the subjects already listed. I'll put the subject headings in the labels as well, but the title should expedite things, should you be searching. I'll modulate the fonts (Topic in Georgia, since it's a good font for large blocks of text, which presumably those will be; Meta in Verdana, since it's one of my favorite sans serif fonts; Tangent in Times, since Times is small, and tangents are supposed to be smaller than the dominant topic, but because those also can run long, serifs can help with long posts; and Other in Courier to look appropriately administrative--this post aside) to make it easier as well.

In any event, please post comments about whatever interests you to help me get smarter about all of this thinking (since this is my mind in first draft mode) and figure out where I'm rushing ahead because I've been thinking about this for years and not playing it out clearly enough, or not paying attention to important caveats.