Rick Hess might want to reconsider his choice of guest bloggers who take his place while he is out writing books. It will be hard for even the quotable Hess to compete with the posts from the last two weeks of his blogging sabbatical. First, Meira Levinson, Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Jacob Fay, and 36 contributors tackled the ethical quandaries inherent in teaching, as well of as those created by graduation tests, school closures, and other policies that inevitably produce winners and losers.
Levinson et. al concluded that it is fortunate that the non-educators who designed test-driven, market-driven reforms seriously wrestled with the morality of policies requiring that some children will always be damaged in order to help others.
Just kidding! Levinson asserted that reformers operate under a different "moral calculus" than classroom teachers and patrons, but she gave no indication that they understand why we are so appalled by their policies.
Levinson concluded that, "Good education is not just a data-driven, "best practices" oriented, technocratic enterprise. It is also a values-driven enterprise." She then called for a Presidential Commission on Educational Ethics. It would be "a body with 15-20 members including first-class researchers, policy makers, educators, ethicists, parents, students, and other members of civil society." While I admire Levinson et. al's exploration of ethical complexities, I'm dubious about the real-world potential of the commission. However, I would focus more on the tense used in her proposal. Educational non-profits and the federal government have been pushing reward and punish mandates for 1-1/2 decades and they're just now being asked to consider the morality of the policies they coerced states and districts into adopting?!?!
Then Megan Tompkins-Stange took the stage for a week and explored the "solutionism" ideology of technocratic education non-profits. Like Levinson, Tompkins-Stange gave little reason to challenge the sincerity of corporate reformers. But neither did she make it sound like those elites had nearly enough knowledge about actual schools, much less the desire to ask questions about education ethics or about "complex social challenges such as poverty or educational inequality." On the contrary, when faced with complicated and intertwined problems, elite reformers are more likely to echo the leader who said, "We wish there was an app for that."
Tompkins-Stange had been a Stanford undergraduate admissions officer and understood the similarities between the elite university and philanthropy worlds. Employees in both subcultures displayed a "'certain degree of sophistication' - coded language for an ability to navigate wealth and power." And, "both used doublespeak to appease, but not commit to, the people who sought a coveted and prestigious resource and the legitimacy it conferred." She was able to navigate the world of program officers who are "schooled in decorum. ... socialized to be pleasant, to listen well and respectfully, and not to disclose doubt, confusion, or dissatisfaction."
In terms of school reform, at least, the desire to rapidly scale up policies (as well as the hubris that allows non-educators to believe they can heedlessly impose the process) is what created the disaster known as corporate school reform. Tompkins-Stange placed that dynamic in a broader context. She explained that "since foundations can no longer rely on the scaling mechanism of the state, and instead are looking for wholesale ways to produce outsize impact outside of government bureaucracies and through technology." This shortcut is unlikely to promote "complicated solutions to child poverty" because they "cannot follow the same trajectory as scaling an immutable currency or technological innovation."
Consequently, she urged foundations "to twist their conceptual lens beyond the outcome-oriented approach, and instead also consider a multifaceted early childhood investment that involves systemic interventions at its core, despite the complexity of cultural, social and political factors inherent in this strategy."
Tompkins-Stange also drew valuable distinctions between the Gates and Broad foundations that predominantly align with what she terms "an outcome-oriented perspective, wherein grantees are held accountable for measurable, pre-defined results, with a high degree of involvement and control at the foundation level." She contrasted that approach with the Kellogg and Ford foundations and their "field-oriented perspective, wherein grantees retain more control of their initiatives." Her sources often described these "two perspectives as discrete and oppositional; one informant described a 'fault line' that has developed within education philanthropy in the last several years, while another asserted, 'There are basically two kinds of foundations.'" So, I guess that settles that; why would we expect Gates and Broad to learn from the much longer experience of established foundations?
It is the outcome-oriented perspective that has become the dreaded 800-pound gorilla despised by so many educators. Tompkins-Stange recalled Bill Gates's own words, "We're technocrats." She also heard from a number of sources who referred to Gates's approaches as "'searching for a silver bullet' or 'injecting a specific technical solution' through various initiatives - whether small schools, the Common Core, or teacher evaluation." One of her sources explained, "The education reform landscape is really heavily over determined by this managerial mindset ... And it's not recognized as an ideology in its own right that could compete or that could be challenged."
And, that brings us back from Tompkin-Stange's roots in Stanford to Meira Levinson and her Harvard project. If it is so difficult to persuade corporate reform edu-philanthropists to deal with complex social issues, how hard would it be to persuade them to listen to other sides when discussing complex ethical issues?