"I’m Not a Politician" ?! We're all politicians, sometimes ... often.

Faith is believing what you know ain't true. -- Puddinhead Wilson

Everyone’s a politician to some extent. If you need no one’s help to get what you want, then all your problems are technical. This doesn’t mean they are easy or honest. As soon as you need to involve someone else, then you must be political, that is, take into consideration what they want to do that might conflict with your goals. And you’ve got to talk to them so as not to scare them off. You must give up forthrightness for effectiveness. This is politics. And it doesn’t mean that what you are trying to get done is either technically difficult or underhanded.

Situation A: Who gets up in front of a crowd of people at a political rally and says. “I’m am not a politician”? Who believes it? Many political aspirants, it seems, like to say such things. And no one really believes it. And yet lthe audience goes along with what the speaker proposes. The speaker’s lie is politically productive.

Situation B: Suppose that same person had gotten up in front of the same crowd and said, “I’m a politician.” Most in that crowd would think, “Yeah, we know that already,” and boo him or her for saying it out loud. And few would go along with what the speaker would have to say. So it would be stupid to start off a speech saying, “I’m a politician” for this audience. The speaker’s forthrightness is politically unproductive.

Situation C: There is a third possibility. The speaker does not say anything about being a politician. He or she just gets up and says, “I want you to help me get elected so I can do something for you.” Doesn't this seem more honest and direct? Isn’t it better to ask for help without requiring people to first swallow a lie in order to do so? Would it be less productive?

It depends. Are these people who expect some kind of stroking, who demand some kind of emotional bribe to compensate their paying attention? Even more, do these people need to be lied to, placated, flattered, cajoled, made to "feel good" with what they know is less than true? Are they consciously aware that they are involved in a falsehood, a hypocrisy, before they are willing to be productive? It is for the sake of group solidarity, or just a tradition of good manners? A faith that overwhelms all veracity?

What kind of moral upbringing brings people to prefer hypocrisy? What kind of situation evokes this preference?

To examine these issues further, see Productivity, Politics and Hypocrisy in American Public Education


Cordially
--- EGR

A Good Education: substance or symbol?

... people can engage in trade-off reasoning. They do in all the time -- every time they stroll down the aisle of a supermarket or cast a vote ...We expect competent, self-supporting citizens of free market societies to know that they can't always get what they want and to make appropriate adjustments. -- Philip E. Tetlock (1999) "Coping with trade-offs: Psychological constraints and political implications."

Public schools face conflicts that both private and parochial schools, so long as they have sufficient budgets, can avoid. These conflicts are based in religious and other value differences.

Religion is always a controversial item in the public school context. Although religious indoctrination is officially not permissible in a public school, what constitutes religious indoctrination is often vague. Consequently, school practices are not uniform from one district to another.

Public schools give lip-service to pluralisms of various kinds, preaching equality of treatment across ethnic, religious, racial, sexual, gender and, even age boundaries. This often bumps up against local, and even broader, traditions. (See Trading-Off "Sacred" Values: 
Why Public Schools Should Not Try to "Educate")

In spite of these problems, public schools are expected to provide each child in them a good education. What this consists of is often highly controversial. So it is, in our pluralistic society, that perceived employability and status become the common yardsticks of judgment.

What counts, in public education, as a school benefit, or cost, is a matter for debate. This debate is dampened to a great extent by informal agreements to understand every school undertaking as being “preparation for the world of work.” Even the honorifics of academic achievement are lead back to some notion of “developing intellect in order to enhance economic productivity.”

Not that it has been working! Grade inflation, wide-scale academic dishonesty, graduate unemployment and an “over-qualified” workforce are four indicators that something is amiss.

To find further references for exploring these issues, see Dissecting School Benefits: a typology of conflicting goals

Cordially
--- EGR

Systems Don’t Do the Work: rear echelon vs front line

edited 072719

'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismay'd?

Not tho' the soldiers knew

Someone had blunder'd
Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.
-- Tennyson

Generals don’t shoot enemy soldiers. Stock market traders don’t chop onions. School Board members don’t teach children. Logistics is not delivery.

History demonstrates that it is far from unusual for rear echelon people to foul up the front line action. The best any rear echelon person can do is to provide the wherewithal to those who are on the front lines.

On the other had, the best generals can be stymied by the mutiny or cowardice of their soldiers. The best businesses can fall to the stock market manipulations of traders.

What really fouls up a system is when rear echelon and front lines personnel serve competing interests. If superintendents pursue longevity and sinecure, whereas teachers pursue comradely relationships with their students and sinecure, then given the demands most school systems face today, trouble, if encountered, will be swept under the rug, rather than intelligently handled.

To examine these and related issues further, see ON THE VIABILITY OF A CURRICULUM LEADERSHIP ROLE 
Avoiding Confusion of Role and Function


Cordially
--- EGR

Does Public Education Support American Democracy?

updated 8/20/20

…there is a need to redefine democracy, making it consistent with what people are able and willing to do and to know in the complex modern world. Jefferson’s model of “government by consent of the governed” is much more realistic in such a world than is the classical definition of “government by the people.” -- E. E. Schattschneider (1969) The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America>

Dewey’s primary public message was that public schools, in order to prepare their students for life in a democratic society, should replicate that democracy within themselves: the schools, making allowances for student intellectual development, should be democratically run. Throughout his lifetime John Dewey was lionized, honored and seldom listened to by “practical people.” His opponents said aloud what his followers guided their practice with: he has got to be kidding!

In Philadelphia recently, a public school teacher was removed from duty for having provided carfare to high school students so they could participate in a protest over the closing of their school and the transfer of their teachers. The same administrators who were unable to predict a $400,000,000 budget shortfall for the coming year, who awarded contracts in a questionably unofficial manner to persons they favored, apparently ascertained in a very short time that the teacher’s behavior threatened the health and welfare of the students she gave bus tokens to.

Most of the people I went through twelve years of public school with were intelligent enough to dodge being dragooned into service as a student council representative. After all, as Class Representatives, we would be intimidated by our teacher sponsor to “discuss” at length what everyone knew were unimportant things, e.g. what rooms could be used for holiday parties, what color the balloons would be, etc. Certificates at graduation were no recompense for hours of boredom.

What public school students’ experiences with such “democracy” seems to inculcate is, on the one hand, something obvious: there is no “real democracy” in public school.

But what is bizarre is that a second thing manages to be planted in their brains: “real democracy” means “everyone should participate and make important social decisions in order to exercise their rights as citizens.” John Dewey put it that the more people we can interact with, the more democratic our society becomes. This seems to be the classical model that Schattschneider in the epigraph above mentions.

The total population of the United States in July 2009 was 307,006,550 (in 2020, ~330,000,000). When we take into consideration this number along with time, energy, money and opportunity needed for interaction with even a small fraction of Americans, how are we supposed to make such a democracy work? How many people will you be able to discuss any given issue with?

Perhaps Jefferson’s idea is more appropriate. And then we wouldn’t need to feel, in school or out, so hypocritical about making necessary decisions for others; or to feel so irresponsible for allowing others to make the decisions for us. And we would come to understand that, but for their compulsory nature, public schools fit right in with American democracy.

To examine these issues further, see Democracy vs. Efficiency in Public Schooling


Cordially
--- EGR

The Academic Carnival: A ticket to the good life?

Fifteen years ago I asked a college graduate working for a moderately-sized company how she found the corporate life. She remarked that while it was engaging, the surprising thing was that 90% of the work was done by 20% of the people. She couldn’t figure out what the rest contributed.

There used to be a bank in Pennsylvania that appointed the sons of its wealthiest depositors as “directors” of sorts for one particular branch office. These “directors” were paid not insubstantial salaries despite their almost continual absence from work. Residents in nearby communities knew better than to go to that branch and expect service. The depositors whose often fully-grown “kids” were “working” and “titled” were happy the bank could provide their scions with a “respectable” occupation.

John Kenneth Galbraith once remarked that the most philanthropic of institutions in American society was the corporation: for a select group of “employees” few other institutions rewarded low productivity so handsomely.

In the colleges and universities that nowadays claim to prepare students for life in our greater society, certain traditions and practices have existed among a select few students almost since that fateful day in 1636 when Harvard College was founded: slacking off, plagiarism, cutting class, cheating, intimidating faculty, vandalism and social promotion.

As higher education continues, year by year, to cost more, the plebeians have caught on. They have come to the conclusion that the purpose of college is to get a certificate of entitlement to the “good life.” And you can avoid a lot of drudgery – e.g. reading, writing, thinking – if you know how to game the system. (See The University as Rumpelstiltskin.)

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, report that in their broad study of American colleges a large proportion of students showed no improvement in reading, writing and critical thinking skills for their first two years, and very little afterward.

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) is a comprehensive survey for freshmen and seniors in which they report the number of books read, papers written, hours spent preparing for class, as well as provide indicators of student collaboration, student-faculty interaction, and the overall campus environment. Although many top-ranked universities participated in this study, those institutions have blocked the general public from access to its results. Are they worried about invasions of privacy?

But the source of many of these problems may well reside with those who criticize them most severely: the public, corporate leaders and their legislative representatives.

To examine this and related issues further, see Fiscal Policy Effects on Grade Inflation


Cordially
--- EGR

Dreams, Luck and Too Many Cooks: American Higher Education

edited 3/28/19

Vivat academia
Vivant professores
Vivat membrum quodlibet
Vivat membra quaelibet
Semper sint in flore.

Long live the academy!
Long live the teachers!
Long live each male student!
Long live each female student!
May they always flourish!

-- Gaudeamus Igitur (vers. C. W. Kindeleben 1781)

Is Facebook a tool, or a distraction? Millions of people would disagree with me on this, because I would vote, “It is a distraction - generally a waste of time.” My productivity is cut into by every minute I spend examining my Wall.

But what is productivity? Which activities are worthwhile? Which are a waste of time and money? If you check to see how people vote with their time and money, you can only come to one conclusion: there is no universal agreement on this issue. What productivity is depends on the kind of life you aim at having. Excepting those who are pathologically envious, people tend to dismiss as “wrong,” or more accommodatingly, “not right for them,” the competing alternatives others have chosen.

What about organizations? Which is more productive? One that focuses only on making PCV sewer pipes, or a typical college or university? There is no easy, if any, answer to this question. The university, unlike the PCV pipe producer is multifunction. There is no one basis of evaluation for it.

Much more important, since the PCV factory is focused on one narrow outcome, it is easier for its management to prioritize activities and respond to market pressures than it would be at a college or university. Colleges and universities, due to accidents of history, contain within themselves a pluralism of competing goals and missions. Power is seldom held by one faction, not even by the trustees.

In colleges or universities near desperation in seeking applicants, market fluctuations provoke not only much face-saving ceremony, but a variety of myths and behavior that strive to maintain internal harmony. Just listen to faculty members chortle, chuckle or giggle at a president’s or trustee’s very lame jokes as they consume a tuition’s worth of food and drink at an annual welcome-to-new-staff party.

Just trying, no doubt, to help out American higher education, ACTA has jumped on the bandwagon of worrying about undergraduates who take longer than four years to complete their degree. But, why should anyone want to rush through college if they can afford to take a longer, more leisurely time to do it? And if they can’t afford it, why isn’t that the issue?

To examine these and other strongly related issues further, see Productivity, Politics and Hypocrisy in American Public Education: 
school organization as instrument and expression



Cordially
--- EGR

Productive Schools? Who Will Judge?

What is mathematics? Professional mathematicians disagree. For schools, school boards decide the question.

What is history? Professional historians disagree. For schools, school boards decide the question.

What is political science? Professional political scientists disagree. For schools, school boards decide the question.

What is language? Professional linguists disagree. For schools, school boards decide the question.

Questions that the most practiced and learned professionals have difficulty agreeing on are usually decided in the United States of America by the least practiced and least knowledgeable of people.

This is crucially important in understanding a major development in American schooling: institutionalization.

Efficient productivity requires agreement on clearly defined goals and an organization’s activities must be prioritized to serve these goals.

Institutionalization occurs when concern in an organization shifts from efficiency to formality. From another point of view, institutionalization is the sacrifice of productive activities to political pressures.

To examine these issues further, see Controlling the School: Institutionalization


Cordially
--- EGR

Staff Development: Bibbidee, bobbidee, boo!

A Soviet-era Russian joke: The workers’ paradise -- we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

A related hypothesis: any occupation where it is not clear what is being produced, or how what is produced is to be evaluated, will have someone whose job it is to provide “staff development.”

If you release me from my job responsibilities to sit and jawbone about peripheralities and, especially, to “open up” and “confess” how I “feel” about them; then, I might well join in and pretend that you, too, are earning your keep.

To examine these issues further, see How Not to Develop Staff

Cordially,
-- EGR