New Hampshire’s Republican-dominated Legislature overrode Democratic Gov. John Lynch’s veto Wednesday to enact a law letting parents request an alternative curriculum for any subject they object to, legislation that critics say could limit children’s access to a comprehensive and quality education.

H.B. 542 initially passed by the state House and Senate last year, and was promptly vetoed by Lynch in July. In a statement explaining the decision, the governor wrote that the law — which allows parents to pull their children out of “objectionable” courses if they can finance the cost of instilling an alternative curriculum allowing the child to meet state requirements for education in that particular subject – does not clearly define what material can be considered objectionable, potentially giving individual parents the right to veto any lesson plan developed by a teacher.

The question of the cost of the bill is important, but let’s set that aside for now. The thing that interests me most about this is whether there are good moral reasons to object to such a policy.

Ideally, every student everywhere would receive a well-rounded, content-rich education facilitated by expert teachers. Of course and obviously, there are eight zillion political, moral, practical, epistemic, etc reasons why this is not the case. We instead inhabit a very imperfect world in which many actors with diverse values and beliefs act in generally well-intentioned but often ineffective and conflicting ways to create and sustain education as we know it.

So I think we can and should take a non-ideal perspective on matters of policy such as this (forgive me for not attempting to define the non-ideal here. Hopefully the concept is somewhat intuitive). In this, I take my cue from Harry Brighouse and his thoughtful, unconventional discussions in On Education, the work which has most colored my thinking, well, on education in the past year or so.

Instructive here is Brighouse’s position on religion in schools. Basically, he thinks that people in the U.S. have kind of fetishized the separation of church and state, by insisting that state funding not go to religiously-affiliated schools, because this results in a polarized set of educational alternatives: thoroughly secular public schools, and virtually unregulated religious private schools. Religious moderates (who far outnumber extremists) find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place when deciding what to do for schools, and with some frequency end up choosing the arguably worse option of private, unregulated religious schools. From a big picture perspective, it would be better for children’s autonomy if some state funding were allowed to flow to religious schools in exchange for their cooperation on matters of basic education quality. This would draw many religious moderates back into the fold of public education, to the benefit of their children and society.

I want to take a similar position on the new NH law about the parental right to opt their children out of objectionable lessons. Context matters — we must compare the new law to the alternative state of affairs that would actually obtain in the absence of the law, not to some imaginary ideal. While we, the secular or those who otherwise disagree with would-be opt-outers, may dislike that some children will miss out on what we hold to be essential lessons, those children are ultimately likely to benefit from being kept in public schools even if they don’t benefit from each individual lesson on offer there. Public schools will still generally provide a more intellectually and socially diverse environment for learners than private schools or homeschooling (which relevantly, in NH, appears to be virtually unregulated).

So, to objectors to this policy, I would put the following serious and not rhetorical question: Would you really prefer that students migrate away from public schools and into the isolation of private and home schools rather than sit out a lesson on sex or evolution? Given hard thought, the answer to this on critics’ own terms based on their own values, may well be “no.”

You might think that improving the situation of the handicapped is an area in which non-utilitarian social welfare theory agrees with utilitarianism: if the handicapped are not so happy, and we know how to make them happier, and can do so efficiently, then we should. (Using a non-technical conception of utilitarianism here; feel free to question it).

But then Eric Barker comes along and shares, on his excellent Barking up the wrong tree blog, that an academic study’s “Results seemed to demonstrate essential equivalence in life satisfaction for handicapped, retarded, and normal persons.” Notice that the study’s subjects are members of the actual world, where accommodations for the handicapped exist, but not as extensively as social model theorists and other disability advocates request.

Assume that there is some truth to these findings (which I believe are consistent with a number of prior studies). Do they give us a reason to accept the capabilities approach, according to which the handicapped may still lack important capabilities and/or suffer from a false consciousness, etc. that makes their lives still less than good enough? Or should these findings about the life satisfaction of the handicapped assuage our former guilt for not having done enough to improve their lives?

In particular, I am trying to think about these findings in terms of their implications for expenditures on special education, which are large but difficult to measure and highly controversial (here’s a relevant recent post from Education Next). If the goal or purpose of education is rightly happiness, as Nel Noddings and others have suggested, then are extreme special education measures warranted if the handicapped turn out relatively happy without them? Or is this a repugnant conclusion that suggests that the proper goal of education is something other than happiness?

The teaching of traditionally revered texts may be justified in at least two ways:

1. The books/ideas comprising the canon of western higher education are, in fact, better than those which are excluded. We continue to teach them because a good education exposes the young to “the best which has been thought and said” (Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy).
2. The books/ideas comprising the canon should continue to be taught simply because, historically, they have influenced society so much. Like it or not, students need to be made familiar with these texts in order to more fully engage with other pieces of culture, and broader segments of society. As such, this bank of common social knowledge opens up opportunities and ways of life that would not otherwise have been available or salient to students who don’t receive a thorough cultural education outside of formal schooling.

I’m going to name these the de jure and de facto (respectively)  justifications of great books, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Menand associates the de jure justification with Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, and the de facto justification with E.D. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know (making me much more sympathetic to the latter author, who I had previously — and apparently erroneously — taken for a snobby elitist).

N.B. that the de jure justification of great books seems prima facie to commit its proponent to some sort of objectivist view about value (and at least rules out thorough forms of subjectivism about value, including even aesthetic value). The de facto view is agnostic in this respect, and is compatible with both objective and subjective theories of value regarding the cultural artifacts at issue. For this reason, the de facto justification of great books curricula can probably attract more supporters than the stronger, narrower de jure justification.

So the really interesting question becomes: In practice, is it really possible to teach great books the de facto way, presenting them to students not as possessing any magical intrinsic goodness, but simply as constituting useful gateway to cultured life? If so, then a major objection to de facto-justified great books curricula — that they are implicitly racist, sexist, classist, etc. — can be at least partially dispelled. However, if in practice students do not or cannot fully grasp that great books are merely a kind of sociocultural currency, or if great books tend to edge out non-traditional texts from the curricula, then even the de facto justification may be in trouble.

“Education is like a series of micro-traumas. You do an assignment, hand it in, get evaluated, feel badly about yourself.”

So, so true. Must it be this way? Sigh.

Technology won’t merely change the way that educational services are delivered and consumed. Technology will also significantly change the face of the education profession.

Here’s how and why: Historically until about the present, public school teachers have existed as a more or less homogeneous group, with similar job functions and experiences. Teachers’ unions have had an interest in preserving the impression of teachers as a united group in order to more effectively pursue their collective political goals. But, with the advent and ongoing rise of educational technologies, teaching is becoming an ever more differentiated profession. Online classes, and even whole online schools, require (or at least can operate more efficiently from) the services of teachers and other education staff with diverse skills, time commitments, and salaries. Positions might include course preparers, live call-in support, graders, supplemental tutors, and so on. Some of these staff members might be career professionals, others temporary workers and/or stay-at-home moms looking for supplemental work, and everything in between.

Preserving this united face of teaching has been costly for students and/or taxpayers. Importantly, take the existence of a single salary schedule in many school districts. According to these schedules, teacher pay is determined by a teacher’s level of education and years of experience (these are the union-sanctioned criteria for salary). Teacher pay is NOT usually determined by the teacher’s field of expertise — this would cause division among teachers, as qualified science and math teachers would in many places earn more than others (higher salaries being needed to draw them away from lucrative private industry jobs). This results in shortages of qualified math and science teachers, while many education dollars are wasted in encouraging teachers to pursue graduate degrees that do not seem related to improved student outcomes.

Diverse education sector employees mean diverse interests. It will become increasingly more difficult for unions to garner support for pensions, last-in-first-out policies, non-value-added assessment methods, and their other standard political fare when these issues affect teachers and other education personnel differentially. This could result in a dramatic evolution of the unions, if not an outright demise, in a bottom-up fashion, without the need for controversial top-down union busting (*cough* Wisconsin *cough*).

Neither technological nor political change is inevitable; these systems are not deterministic. But educational technologies are interestingly poised to make a difference in the structure of the education industry as we know it (hopefully for the better) and teaching will change commensurately. Thanks to Moe and Chubb for so clearly articulating this insight.

The concept of authority is pretty closely tied up with that of expertise. To teach people to “question authority” is to wield too wide of a brush because it readily melts down into questioning legitimate expertise as well. The resulting anti-authoritarian spirit can easily partially fuel precisely the anti-intellectualism and anti-scientificism that we wish to fight in critical thinking (and all) classes. This is why I find it at least a little strange that some of the most scientific-minded people I know would be caught dead saying things like this.

It’s not that I don’t understand what the “question authority”-ers are getting at. “Question authority” after all doesn’t necessarily mean “reject authority.” They just want students, and people, to be able to see burdens for justification, demand reasons, evaluate them, consider whether it is reasonable to comply with the (un)justified demands of others or the government, and so on. These are valuable skills, no doubt.

But developing this suite of critical thinking abilities is *so* much more complicated than “question authority” even begins to capture. Indeed, a robust disposition to “question authority” may on balance be detrimental to the welfare of many individuals. Not all but plenty of authorities are worth respecting, because they are correct and/or because to do so is of prudential value. Advocates of generally questioning authority seem to take for granted that they already possess the intellectual and/or cultural capital required to know when it is appropriate ultimately to reject authority, and when it isn’t. Recognizing legitimate authority or expertise is a skill that takes development over time, and it becomes integrated into our other faculties of judgment, so it may go unnoticed and underappreciated. But lots of people have not developed this skill, and to emphasize the “question authority” bit without also deliberately tackling the “respect authority” bit is lopsided, misleading, and maladaptive. Those of us who have been enculturated to respect authority may need to compensate with a “question authority”-type mindset. But those of us who have been enculturated to distrust even legitimate experts may need to be deliberately taught how to identify them, and not to further “question authority” indiscriminately.

Want to become an authority-questioning maverick? Sure, go ahead. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when you end up killing yourself, your kid or someone else’s, or when you land yourself on the school-to-prison pipeline. What “think critically” lacks in sloganly sexiness, it makes up for in non-misleadingness.

When value-added models were first conceived, even their most ardent supporters cautioned about their use [Sanders 1995, abstract]. They were a new tool that allowed us to make sense of mountains of data, using mathematics in the same way it was used to understand the growth of crops or the effects of a drug. But that tool was based on a statistical model, and inferences about individual teachers might not be valid, either because of faulty assumptions or because of normal (and expected) variation.

Such cautions were qualified, however, and one can see the roots of the modern embrace of VAMs in two juxtaposed quotes from William Sanders, the father of the value-added movement, which appeared in an article in Teacher Magazine in the year 2000. The article’s author reiterates the familiar cautions about VAMs, yet in the next paragraph seems to forget them:

Sanders has always said that scores for individual teachers should not be released publicly. “That would be totally inappropriate,” he says. “This is about trying to improve our schools, not embarrassing teachers. If their scores were made available, it would create chaos because most parents would be trying to get their kids into the same classroom.”

Still, Sanders says, it’s critical that ineffective teachers be identified. “The evidence is overwhelming,” he says, “that if any child catches two very weak teachers in a row, unless there is a major intervention, that kid never recovers from it. And that’s something that as a society we can’t ignore” [Hill 2000].

(As you may be aware, a similar argument is sometimes made about charter schools, which were apparently intended to reform, and not replace, ordinary public schools).

So here’s the thing. I really don’t know what to make of value-added models, which have received alot of attention in the mainstream media ever since this hoopla in Los Angeles. I lack familiarity with statistics, and have read deeply conflicting accounts of their accuracy and meaningfulness in making education policy decisions both with regards to schools and individual teachers.

HOWEVER. Ask J. Robert Oppenheimer — just because you develop something doesn’t mean that you retain authority over its usage for all time, nor would that be desirable. What matters is how that technology can be used, and how it should be used, for independent moral, political, and practical reasons. Sanders, “the father of the value-added movement,” in the quote above makes substantive claims about how teachers ought to be treated, and about the ill effects of using VAMs in a particular way. But those are entirely separable from the statistical technique itself, and do not follow from it.

If value-added models, or charter schools, can in fact be used to improve education and, all other things considered, make sense to adopt, then to hell with their inventors’ intent. That is all.

The value of education is not purely as an investment. Education also provides some degree of consumption value.

This observation kind of throws a wrench in human capital theory, because it will be difficult to decide whether certain forms of education spending were worth it in the absence of information about the value that that education had to students in virtue of merely consuming it, apart from any job they subsequently got or whatever. The consumption value of education is subjective, and will vary widely from person to person. But the fact that education’s consumption value is difficult, or impossible, to observe and measure does not give us good reason to ignore it.

The consumption value of education came to my mind frequently as I recently read “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” Throughout the book, the authors stress that college students today emphasize the social value of college to an extreme degree, some of them going so far as to say that the relationships that they form and experience in college are significantly more important than anything they may learn in the classroom. Unfortunately, gaining extensive social experience in college is, to some extent, at odds with performing well academically: for instance the authors show that, while participating in a fraternity or sorority may improve academic performance somewhat, studying in groups is less effective than studying alone. And, because our time is finite, hours spent socializing are mostly hours spent not studying, reading, or writing, activities which occupy less of college students’ time today than in the recent past, apparently to their detriment.

Now, socializing at college may itself have some investment value, particularly at elite colleges (i.e., “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”). But college students engage in many social activities simply because they are enjoyable. As such, social opportunities and experiences constitute much of the consumption value of going to college, and students self-report that this is a very important aspect of college life to them. Yet, practically daily now there is a story in every major news outlet, describing the shock, frustration, anger, and sadness of college graduates upon realizing that they are unable to trade their college credentiala for a high-paying job, or even any job (here’s an example from the NYT).

My assessment of the situation: Stuff doesn’t acquire investment value just because you want it to. Students and parents realize, on some level, that the value of college consists to a large extent in consumption. This is why they speak frequently of the college “experience” and make college decisions taking things like sports, dorms, and dining hall food into account. But then, when it’s time for the degree to hit the fan and for interested parties to see what kind of investment value that expensive education really had, they are unable to bite the bullet and admit that college is greatly about consumption.

Notice that another aspect of the consumption value of education consists in students’ simply enjoying attending classes (your author is the queer sort of creature who often enjoys it immensely) and partaking in other academic experiences available only through institutionalized education. This should be kept in mind when we think about students’ decisions to attend graduate school and pursue careers in academia, despite the dismal job prospects. Many of the requisite educational expenditures should be understood as (maybe) overpaying for educational experiences, rather than as failed investments.

Annoying: when people conflate the difference between random and merely unpredictable processes.

It received a fair bit of attention. This is my attempt to explain the context. Please bear in mind that I am neither a statistician nor a scientist of any kind. These are just my reflections on a portion of education policy class last night that I found confusing. If you have anything more interesting and/or more accurate to say about randomness and/or predictability, then please chime in.

We were discussing different models of the policymaking process. Traditional/rational models posit that the process proceeds from deliberation about the problem, to identification and evaluation of all possible solutions, to implementation and evaluation, all in an organized, reason– and/or evidence-governed way.

On the contrary, an alternative model, the “garbage can model,” expresses and depends on the idea that policy choices are not made in such an organized, rational way. Rather, there are various “streams” contributing to the outcome: problems themselves and how they are defined, politics, and policies. The confluence of all these factors results in a kind of “organizational anarchy,” in which multiple streams collide to influence policy outcomes, often in ways that are unintended by policy actors. It’s apparently called the “garbage can” model in order to emphasize how the various policy factors are all just sort of mixed together in a container, like garbage, and that the way they collide and converge is disorderly.  There’s a concise description of the model here, if you’re interested.

In discussing the garbage can model, my prof switched between saying that the outcome was “random” and “unpredictable,” as if the two are interchangeable in this context. In fairness to him, other authors writing about the garbage can model around the internet seem to have a tendency to do the same thing. However, I think this can’t be quite right. Like I said, I’m no expert on the meanings or applications of the concept of randomness. But, to me, as a student in a policy class, what “random” conveys is that all of the possible policy outcomes are equally as likely to clump together in the garbage can and ultimately get selected. That’s just got to be false; some policies are surely more likely to be selected than others. For instance, ceteris paribus, a policy benefiting business leaders with lobbyists may be more likely to be selected than a policy benefiting a small and non-vocal group of grassroots activists. The policy outcomes may seem random, because we can’t tell why a certain blend of factors resulted in them, but that doesn’t make the process actually random. Saying that the garbage can process is “unpredictable” is fine, though. The factors that contribute to the process are many, varied, difficult to observe, and difficult to measure. Also, note that this process could be both random and unpredictable, in which case it would be unpredictable in virtue of being random. But I don’t think that’s the case here.

The reason this matters is because if the garbage can model of education policy is true and accurately described as “random,” then the appropriate response is to become thoroughly pessimistic about the possibility for anyone or any group to influence policy outcomes. After all, that would mean that, as soon as the policy factors mix up in the garbage can, they become equally likely to be selected. So why even bother? But unpredictability is weaker — it suggests that we don’t know everything about the policy process and should be realistic about our prospects for influencing it, our ability to avoid unintended consequences, etc., without dismissing the possibility altogether.

Updating to add: None of this is to say that the garbage can model is worthless. It helpfully reminds us that policy work is very, very messy. It just isn’t random.