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