stimulant

Taxing cigarettes is a pretty repugnant policy. The government acknowledges that cigarettes are addictive and unhealthy and then turns around and makes a profit off that? And forces that policy to do double duty as a punitive measure in the interest of public health?

The government taxes the sale of an addictive and unhealthy substance because it is addictive and unhealthy.

Cui bono? Whether or not it’s intentional malfeasance, taking advantage of an addicted [read: captive] group and alleging that punitive measures are benevolent is atrocious.

Who could say (or take) that seriously? Isn’t there some analogue to Godwin’s law for this¹ — i.e. false dichotomies, ever since, “with us or against us”?

We got the following comment on Bureaucracy may destroy the public school system.

Anonymous said… Homeschooling does not allow for all students’ needs. Lets get real. Only parents who can afford to stay home all day can afford to home school. Also, parents who are academically challenged cannot effectively homes school their own children. If a parent wishes to home school they make the choice on their own. To constantly criticize public schools will not help poor performing schools. It seems as though all home school educators do is surf the web in search of public school horror stories. If you have all day to sit at home and have your kids work on worksheets or drill and kill on the computer, take time to work with the public schools and make them better. You see public schools belong to the public and their successes or failures also belong to the public at large. If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. [emphasis mine]

via::“Why Homeschool”

1. “There is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress. This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin’s Law.” [↩]

From the introduction to Instead of Education:

It is clear now, as it was not at first, why Illich reacted with such horror to my saying that we should push the walls of the school building out further and further. That seemed at the time a good enough way to say that we should abolish the distinction between learning and the rest of life. Only later did I see the danger that he saw right away. Think again about the global schoolhouse, madhouse, prison. What are madhouses and prisons? They are institutions of compulsory treatment… . A global schoolhouse would be a world, which we seem to be moving toward, in which one group of people would have the right through our entire lives to subject the rest of us to various sorts of tests, and if we did not measure up, to require use to submit to various kinds of treatment, i.e. education, therapy, etc., until we did. A worse nightmare is hard to imagine.

They’re like statistics on steroids:

In a victory for Detroit automakers, the main backer in the U.S. House of tougher fuel economy standards said late today that he would not push for his 35 mile-per-gallon standard this week.

You know, in 1979, Volkswagen was making a car that got between 25 and 30 miles per gallon?

The Volkswagen Rabbit GTI, the North American version of the high-performance Golf GTI, debuted in Canada in 1979 and in the United States for 1983 model year. […] Claims for gas mileage of near-perfectly tuned Rabbit GTIs range between 25 and 30 miles per gallon.

Why has progress been so slow: we’re mandating what was possible three decades ago!

I was re-reading Alfie Kohn’s essay, What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated? earlier today, after recommending it to an acquaintance, and something clicked:

Is it even possible to agree on a single definition of what every high school student should know or be able to do in order to be considered well-educated? Is such a definition expected to remain invariant across cultures (with a single standard for the U.S. and Somalia, for example), or even across subcultures (South-Central Los Angeles and Scarsdale; a Louisiana fishing community, the upper East side of Manhattan, and Pennsylvania Dutch country)? […] Some criteria are more defensible than others. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge a striking absence of consensus about what the term ought to mean. Furthermore, any consensus that does develop is ineluctably rooted in time and place. It is misleading and even dangerous to justify our own pedagogical values by pretending they are grounded in some objective, transcendent Truth, as though the quality of being well-educated is a Platonic form waiting to be discovered. […] Who gets to decide what it means to be well-educated? Even assuming that you and I agree to include one criterion and exclude another, that doesn’t mean our definition should be imposed with the force of law – taking the form, for example, of requirements for a high school diploma. There are other considerations […]

When I first read this article, I confess I didn’t think very carefully about this question: I thought that raising the issue of who should be making decisions was an obvious problem (i.e. it is a very easy question to raise) to which I had no clean, elegant, answer¹.

I began considering the standardization movement as a political rather than pedagogical question and out popped the following claim: handling educational details and policies at the national level is undemocratic and imprudent.

The basic idea — and the one I’m most interested in discussing — is that scale is an essential element of democracy. Democracy isn’t simply giving problem-solving a public forum with the alleged opportunity for citizen input.² The scale at which you confront a systemic problem (e.g. education) should be closely coupled to the minimum scale that provides for independent solutions. What are those? I’ll get to that.

The basic assumption behind all this is that given a system, a problem, and a solution, there is a natural scale for implementing that solution. For instance, imagine bike theft were a big problem in cities nationwide. And assume that most stolen bikes stay within, say, fifty miles of their theft after being stolen. It wouldn’t make any sense to implement a national bike registry and anti-theft program, because the natural scale of the problem is a fifty-mile radius. On the other hand, drugs are trafficked across city, state, and country lines, and requires an infrastructure for sharing information across the systems at all those scales. Now, a national bike registry wouldn’t be so bad — that is, there isn’t a terrible overhead to its implementation (particularly when compared with a collection of city/state registreies). But with education, there are significant downsides to national standards from both an organizational and a pedagogical standpoint.

So to return to my first statement of this idea:

The scale at which you confront a systemic problem should be closely coupled to the minimum scale that provides for independent solutions.

What do I mean by “independent solutions?” Given a scale, you naturally partition a system. A nation into states into districts into cities into neighborhoods into blocks into houses. At each different scale, the granularity you define gives you a handful of subsystems (all the states, all the districts, … you get the idea). When you implement a solution at a particular scale, the question of whether it is independent asks whether this solution can be implemented without affecting other subsystems and their solutions.

Alternatively, you can think about the natural scale at which the problem occurs. For bike theft, a solution implemented in Albuquerque doesn’t affect an anti-theft program in Seattle. A spike in bike theft in Albuquerque doesn’t ripple out to Seattle. The problem doesn’t exist on a national scale³ and the solution shouldn’t be implemented on a national scale.

Theoretically, the federal scale is best-equipped to address problems that cannot be addressed within states (or at ever smaller scales). Unfortunately, the government frequently oversteps its bounds. And at other times, states are left to solve problems that really call for federal intervention.

Education isn’t one of these problems.

Education is a nationwide concern. But this doesn’t mean that solutions and reforms should happen on a national level any more than the fact that all states want garbage collection means that waste management should be a national issue.

I don’t think that anyone argues that tests are the best pedagogy. For the most part, they seem to be put forth as a tool for making pedagogy pragmatic: assessing what students “know”⁴ and comparing the systems that educate them. And there are plenty of people to highlight the detriment standardized testing does to education. I think that point is too obvious for me to belabor here.

But what I don’t think is obvious is how this notion of scale gives us tools to think about why the class of solutions that nationally standardized testing typifies are so egregiously ineffective (and undemocratic, to boot).

Democracy is (among other things) about compromise. Ideally, a compromise is as equitable as possible. For a compromise between two parties, this means that ideally, both parties leave equally [dis]satisfied.

When you move to larger and larger scales, it seems that compromises become less and less desirable because typically, you have a broader and broader distribution of ideal solutions.

To elaborate: with two parties, there are two potential solutions at the beginning of negotiations that one party would find perfectly satisfying. The process of negotiation and compromise involves mixing those together or finding alternate solutions that give-and-take appropriate ground.

As you increase the scale of your decision making, you add more and more “perfectly satisfying solutions” as you add more and more distinct parties. What this means, unfortunately, is that a single compromise satisfies fewer people less. Maybe a diagram will help.

Now, this isn’t a real diagram. You know how you can tell? Two points on the x-axis represent two solutions to a problem, and the closer those two points are, the more “similar” the solutions are. Whatever that means. Better yet? We’re assuming there are an infinite number of solutions.⁵

Anyway, geeky whining aside, the y-axis is a straightforward number: the number of people perfectly satisfied with a given solution. So this gives us a visual representation of satisfaction: the total area under the curve is the total satisfaction. This diagram depicts a perfectly neutral compromise: the solution is literally middle-of-the-road. But notice the difference between one, large group’s compromise (in blue, Figure 1) and the compromise of two, separate groups at smaller scales (in white, Figure 2).

Because the distribution of perfect solutions is narrower, a greater portion of those people involved leave more satisfied. Now imagine continuing this exercise at smaller and smaller scales, and take a look at Figure 3.

Why can’t we continue this indefinitely? Because problems have a natural scale.

All of this is theoretical wanking⁶. To reiterate: all of this is theoretical wanking. But I do think that there’s something important in choosing the right scale to solve a problem at. And I think that that is a discussion I haven’t heard when it comes to education.

To bring this back to education: people are constantly suggesting reforms. And there are a plethora of approaches, from progressive to reactionary. But why should we impose one solution on many, many systems when the problem doesn’t require it? NCLB allows for state standards, but setting standards is a much smaller problem than the big question it sweeps under the rug: is this the type of assessment we want, in the first place?

Now, what scale, if not national? I’m not sure. That opens up lots of questions, dealing with everything from what people want to resource allocation. And these questions are about how independent you can make your solutions. You don’t want a system that forces two groups of people with radically different visions (read: a wide distribution) to be forced to compromise. At the same time, you don’t want single schools to be able to get resources without input from other schools’ affected by budgeting decisions. Money given to a high school in DC doesn’t affect a preschool in Sacramento. Despite appearances, budgeting education nationwide is not a zero-sum game. More importantly, policymaking isn’t [a zero-sum game]. Essentially, this is a question of accurately gauging the size of a community, as defined by a common sphere of influence.

I don’t know how much of this is valuable and how much is empty theory, but I’m pretty convinced that the theme of matching scales of problems and solutions is a strong idea. Has anyone else heard arguments like this? Is this just dressing up an old idea?

1. outside of letting students decide [↩]
2. Or if it is, the definition is incomplete, and I would revise my statement to “handling educational details and policies at the national level is a bad idea.” [↩]
3. note that this is different than “happening” on a a national scale. Garbage collection is a nationwide problem, but that’s not the scale on which it makes sense. We can’t really afford to be vague about the word, “scale.” But I’m not going to try to define it, here. [↩]
4. Don’t get me started. [↩]
5. alternatively: the x-axis is a continuous space of solutions to a problem that have some metric [↩]
6. I even have the faux graphs to prove it [↩]

I have a big idea.

And it germinated from a few, basic questions:

1. Why are politics so impenetrable? The political system is shrouded in corruption, money, and law. It is not accessible.
2. What does it take to be a good, effective citizen? Why is this such a hard role to assume?
3. How does an unpopular war make any sense in a democracy?
4. How can I change this? What does it mean to teach/raise an effective citizenry, from a pedagogical standpoint?

For all my thought about social reform and education, I must confess that until recently, politics hadn’t been on my radar. Why not? Because I felt so isolated from it. I felt like trying to fix problems by going into politics was like trying to fix education by becoming a public school teacher. Of course, the problem is that there are alternative avenues for pursuing education reform. Outside of self-defeating initiatives like communes, I didn’t see any “outsider” approach for politics.

Nonetheless, it continued to bug me. And then, when I sat down to read Alex Russell’s blog I happened upon this post detailing his approach to voting:

Despite all of that, however, I vote every chance I get. Jennifer and I study for elections, usually reserving most of a weekend beforehand to pore over the hundred-plus pages of voter information booklets that get shipped to every California voter. We spend time researching, trying to pick the best person for the job, peering through the morass of private interest and political machinations and not always coming away feeling like we really understand all that’s at stake. I’ve never voted a straight party ticket in my life, mostly because I don’t think anyone really has all the answers. I expect my elected representatives to duke it out to a good compromise. I want the kind of slow, deliberative government that leaves everyone slightly bruised and no-one very happy.

and I fell in love with the idea of working toward making effective citizenry a viable goal. I realized that spending a weekend in preparation puts you ahead of 99% of voters, much less citizens. And that’s a straightforward, if not scalable solution (i.e. I doubt a national “Give up a weekend to vote in a rigged election” campaign would go over so well).

So I filed away that interest of mine, and mulled over the problem for the next few weeks. And one day, I realized that being a citizen is awfully hard. But for no good reason. Sure, there are tough decisions and moral quandaries and compromises to weight, but the hard part of being a good citizen for most people me is logistics. I don’t trust the media; there’s a proliferation of candidates; all the candidates tow pretty similar [party] lines; but I know they’re not all equally suited for the job. I don’t have the time or inclination to spend all the time sorting through truth and fiction on my own. And I doubt others do, either. I want a straightforward resource detailing facts, that’s it. Just facts. No commentary, nothing like that. Just facts, backed up by well-documented, well put-together primary sources. Speeches, voting records, financial records, biographies — I want a trusted source of information. I’ve never found a media outlet that cuts it.

With that, I realized I wanted to make a tool to make an active citizenry plausible. And then, the chips started falling in place with increasing frequency:

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I discovered scoopt, a site for citizen-photographers to sell their photos

Tim O’Reilly posted about a conversation with Karl Fogel that led to the suggestion that Congress needs version control tools:

They say you don’t want to see either laws or sausages being made, but I think they are wrong. Imagine how much more transparency and accountability our government would have if it were possible to see what changes were made by whom, who inserted extraneous riders into various bills, and generally to track the influence of various interests by the new visibility into their actual control over the knobs and levers of government!

Alex Russell hinted¹ at the increasing relevance (or at least, prominence) of these issues when he commented that at Foo Camp:

“I stumbled into a series of discussions about broadcast media, societal fragmentation (and unification) and the political and technical enablers for that fragmentation.”

Election season looms.

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And now, I’ve a big idea: Imagine a tool (and more broadly, a community) dedicated to ferreting out and making accessible political facts. Fact-checking would be based on a network of trust, augmented by scores affected by how often you provide misinformation or well-documented primary sources of information. But this would provide users with the ability to maintain a notebook of sorts, to which they can add issues, proposals, keywords, politicians, courts, cases, etc. All of these elements would have an online presence that would be continually updated and documented. Every fact would be required to have a documented primary source to which could be added a verification process.

Even better, the data that is usually hidden from citizens (voting records, earmarks, fiscal records, financial interests, legal records, pork, noteworthy comments or promises during campaigning or session: there are reams and reams of information from which most citizens are isolated. Putting a good interface on them is the first step towards opening all that up.

Imagine a non-partisan tool to which everyone flocks to get facts — not commentary — but facts that have been checked and re-checked and argued about and pared down until the language is as straightforward as possible and the item as accurate as possible. Finally, a useful conduit for the oppositional tension in government! And, the more important (read: higher-profile) an issue is, the more scrutiny it will receive and the stronger its documentation will become. And even more exciting is the possibility that legalese could become annotatable.

Let me expand on that. Recently, I met with a lawyer to talk about setting up a corporation and/or non-profit. At some point, they made the offhand comment, “That’s how we stay in business, we know a language most people don’t, and work hard to keep it that way.” I wanted to punch him in the face. But he was meeting with me for free. And I doubt that would have fixed anything. And I reminded myself that I’ve yet to find a profession or culture whose repugnant elements weren’t manifest in its practitioners. Teachers, government officials, lawyers — they aren’t malicious. It’s just a fucked up system.

Anyway, given that I have difficulty imagining the effective, retroactive streamlining of our legal system (c.f. the Paperwork Reduction Act), it seems like the key to making the legal system more equitable and relevant is to make it more accessible. Imagine if it were possible for documents in legalese — whether they be acts or bills or federal statutes or municipal regulations — to be annotated so that a user could click on a paragraph, and read a “human-readable” version explaining the content and relevance of the paragraph. This is a much bigger undertaking, and it’s not entirely clear how nicely it fits in with the other features and goals of the system, but there it is…

So I guess those are the broadest strokes: a user interface to the political world pasted onto a decentralized [social] network of trust that makes the legal system and documentation traversable and human readable. Groups could be formed, campaigns funded, information and platforms documented, criticized, and constantly fact-checked. Combine this with the personal value and functionality of a political notebook, and it sounds like we’ve started skirting around the beginnings of an exciting tool to streamline political involvement. Pair that with powerful, social pedagogy…!

What do you think of that, Alex Russell? Maybe it’ll free up a weekend?

1. in reality, I was — and probably am — reading all this context into it, so take this with a grain of salt [↩]

But she seems excited about changing higher education [for the better]:

“Is it fine that college tuition has outpaced inflation?” she asked in a National Press Club speech. “Is it fine that only half our students graduate on time? Is it fine that students often graduate so saddled with debt that they can’t buy a home or start a family? None of this seems fine to me.”

A funny criticism:

“The American Association of University Professors says the emerging vision of higher education is only a marketplace, focused on outcomes and skills. Developing a love of learning and civic virtues, the group says, ‘are marginalized to the point of irrelevance.’”

I certainly share their qualms: it does seem that Spelling is looking to commodify education further. But complaining that, “Developing a love of learning and civic virtues, the group says, ‘are marginalized to the point of irrelevance.’” rings hollow, given what college already is.

Mostly, it’s exciting that a receptive, pro-active official is looking to change the way higher education works.

You should check him out. He’s absolutely amazing. And it would seem that other people think so, too.

But not for teachers?

“The tentative deal reached this week between the principals union and the city is being hailed as progress, in part because it provides for merit pay of up to $50,000 a year for principals who excel. Those principals, however, will have to manage their teachers without any ability to pay them more or less based on their performance.”

While I’m pretty dubious of merit pay (any reform needing a metric usually means testing, rather than teaching), I am also surprised by this:

“It’s always been a mystery to us why the unions oppose merit pay. No one, after all, is talking about reducing the pay of bad teachers, though that would be an improvement on the current system. The discussion is just about paying good teachers more.”

If testing is currently a fact of life, anyway, why do unions oppose merit pay? There are a couple obvious reasons (e.g. school politics is already ridiculously petty and catty, in my experience), but admitting any of them seems a bit self-incriminating.

Update:This is one, anti-union explanation of what’s going on:

Under state policies that either explicitly authorize or tacitly sanction union monopolies, roughly two-thirds of K-12 public school teachers nationwide, including union members and non-members alike, are forced to accept an “exclusive” union agent as their sole spokesman in contract negotiations. Effectively, that means teacher union officials dictate what the compensation policy is.

And here are a few pro-union ideas to balance it out: ‘If there is extra money for merit pay, then why does that money not go to the kids?’ asked Frank Cherry, a sixth-grade teacher at Imperial Beach Elementary School and president of the Southwest Teachers Association. “When somebody’s in La Jolla getting merit pay and we have kids here who don’t have food, something’s wrong there. […] Terry Pesta, president of the San Diego Education Association, the union for San Diego city schools teachers, said: ‘There are so many factors that weigh into student achievement. This is looking at a simple solution of blaming the teachers.’”

Honestly, I’m suspicious [of teacher’s unions].