AERA 2008

I was without internet during AERA last week—I just couldn’t justify spending $17 per day just so I could keep up with Craigslist postings. It’s time to catch up.

I just completed the SAAP-CIES-AERA three-conference swing: four days in East Lansing followed by two weeks in New York. It’s very good to be home. The first order of business was to check email—I had about 150 unread messages, only about 10 of which actually required a response. Score! The next task was the expense report, which took about six hours out of my day today. Now, finally, I can get to work.

Overall, I had a very good experience at AERA—I met with some of my favorite philosophers of education as well as many talented empirical researchers, saw some great sessions, and of course attended more than a few shockingly bad presentations. I also spent more on food in the last two weeks than I had during the previous two months.

I was able to spend a good amount of time roaming freely around the city, trying to figure out whether I could see myself taking a job in New York. Walking through the campus of Teachers College was a little like visiting the monuments in Washington D.C. I tried to imagine joining the faculty, working in the same offices as John Dewey, Lawrence Cremin, and the hundreds of other faculty and students who have helped shaped educational history. (On a related side note, I picked up a first edition of Cremin’s American Education: The Colonial Experience at The Strand).

I had some experiences walking through the city that helped refocus my attention. I find myself constantly struggling against the careerism that seems to dominate the academy. There is a push to research marketable (though shallow or ephemeral) questions. A great many of us pick our dissertation based on what we think the academic job market wants, and then hope that a decade or two down the road we might be able to finally research the questions that brought us to the field in the first place. My hope is that if I do a good enough job with my dissertations, I can convince hiring committees that my interests are worthwhile, even if they seem tangential to the current academic fetishes.

I may have already written this, but my criterion for a dissertation topic is this: one should pick a question to which, if a compelling and substantive answer were found, it could make a concrete difference in the experience of some individual or group. I believe that my two questions pass the test, but I welcome others’ opinions. These are working formulations, but here they are: First, what kind of evidence must be provided to warrant claims about social phenomena? Second, how might one observe the relationship between education and democracy?

CIES 2008

CIES 2008 surpassed my expectations. The Citizenship and Democratic Education SIG put together a very good string of sessions, and there were several good papers on the general program. I also met several interesting scholars, ranging from master’s students to senior faculty.

I was very happy with my own presentation. There were roughly 75 people in the audience. The session was also videotaped with the intention of it being put on I-Tunes. My delivery was not terrific, but I managed to make it through without too much embarrassment. The question and answer session was less strenuous than I had expected. Surprisingly, I had responses for every objection offered, even from the hyper-leftist quantiphobe in the audience.

The conference ended Friday, and I’ve spent the time since then getting some work done and getting to know New York. So far I’ve been able to see pieces of East Village, Greenwich, Morningside Heights, SoHo, Times Square, and Tribecca. I know I know—no one wants to hear about my touristy New York experience. But then again—did you really want to hear about my conference experience?

In memoriam

I'm writing this on day three of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy's Annual Conference. There have been several good sessions and rewarding conversations, but first I feel the need to write about the memorial sessions that were held for two people who had a great impact on my own career and who, unfortunately, passed away in the last year.

The first session was for Richard Rorty, who died in April 2007. Randall Auxier and Eduardo Mendieta gave wonderful papers about Rorty as a philosopher and person. Rorty may have been the most interesting and powerful philosopher in the United States during the later half of the 20th Century. His books have had a tremendous impact of the way I see the history of philosophy, patriotism, and the role of inquiry in achieving a better society.

My only personal contact with Rorty came during my junior year of college. I was writing a paper comparing Richard Rorty’s liberal ironist with William James’s poet. I was also contemplating whether or not to apply to graduate schools to study classical American philosophy. The professors in my department, though supportive, had virtually no interest in pragmatism or American philosophy, so I was left with little guidance.

On a lark, I looked up Rorty’s office phone number on Stanford’s website and game him a call. I didn’t expect an answer, so when I heard a deep and unhurried, “Hello,” I was in almost total shock. I, an undergraduate at an unknown college on the opposite coast, was speaking to perhaps the greatest living philosopher in the United States.

I introduced myself and told him that I was trying to write a paper about his work and wanted to know if he had recently written anything more on the subject since Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). He said a few words about the topic and referred me to one of his recent books. My mind was racing. I felt like an idiot for taking this man’s time to talk about an undergraduate paper, something that would not be published, would not contribute to the field. I wanted to get off the phone as soon as possible. I imagined he was terribly busy. But I stayed on the phone to ask his advice about graduate school, namely where I should apply to study American philosophy. Without the slightest hint of annoyance or hurry, he confessed that he had largely removed himself from the daily politics of philosophy departments and wasn’t sure who-was-where and who-is-going-where.

I visited the Bay area several times between that conversation and his death, and always wanted to visit him. I never did, still perhaps for fear that I had little to say to him, except that his work had been a great inspiration to me. I’ll always appreciate that a person of his stature took the time to talk with a student, not even his own student, and offer what help he could.

Sadly, Richard Rorty was not the only great American philosopher to pass away recently. Peter Hare died in January 2008. There was a memorial session in which his friends and colleagues, young and old professors alike, talked about their memories of him. He was the long-standing editor of the leading American philosophy journal, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Several people remember his encouragement of younger scholars and how he had worked with them to develop papers worthy of publication.

I was fortunate enough to sit next to Professor Hare at a Dinner at Bosco’s in Nashville, Tennessee. It was my second year of graduate school and something of a period of crisis. I had written a paper offering a qualified defense of Richard Rorty for a seminar I was taking with a professor who was (and is) deeply disdainful of him. I had felt that the paper was one of my better attempts. The professor disagreed—so much so that he refused to grade it. He wouldn’t even fail it. Instead, he told me to go back and read a couple of articles that he approved of (for no other reasons than that they were commensurate with his own position). The message was that unless I changed my position, he would not accept the paper.

I confided this story to Professor Hare over dinner. He listened to my position, asked questions, and confirmed my suspicion that my paper was judged unfairly. The validation felt extraordinary. A senior scholar, the editor of our flagship journal, took me seriously, even at the peril of disagreeing with my professor, himself a well-known and respected scholar. The encouragement he gave me that night meant more than he could have possibly known.

Education at Gunpoint

While many people are trying to find ways to keep guns out of schools, West Virginia is trying to get as many in as possible. The following article is in today’s New York Times:

“In West Virginia, state lawmakers gave final approval on Friday to a bill that allows hunting education classes in all schools where at least 20 students express interest. The goal is to reverse a 20 percent drop in hunting permits purchased over the last decade, which has caused a loss of more than $1.5 million in state revenue over that period. At least six other states are considering similar legislation.”

Apparently, the concern is that too many kids enjoy photographing animals, rather than killing them:

“Andrew Page...the director of hunting affairs for the Humane Society of the United States, he sees the drop in hunting as heartening, partly because it has come with a simultaneous rise in other types of outdoor activity. The number of birdwatchers, wildlife photographers and other wildlife watchers grew to 71 million in 2006, up from 62.8 million in 1996, according to surveys conducted by the Fish and Wildlife Service.”

Spring Break! A little work, a little play

I spent the morning revising a draft of the powerpoint I am co-presenting at CIES on the history of international education statistics. It was sunny and warm outside, so at noon I ditched work to take a long jog through Shelby Park and Shelby Bottoms. There were plenty other joggers and cyclists, but also roller bladers and a woman hoola-hooping around the 1.8 mile loop. I’ve never seen a person taking a stroll while hoola-hooping. This must be part of the ‘strengthening you core’ frenzy. Or maybe she is a dancer of some sort.

This evening I’m reading Hilary Putnam’s The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (2002). He argues that fact/value dualism depends on the analytic/synthetic distinction, which was (he argues) eviscerated by W.V.O. Quine in 1951, and before that by John Dewey. He then applies the anti-dualist arguments to economic theory (rational choice) and philosophy of science (his target seems to be logical positivism). My dissertation is set to have one chapter on facts and values in social science, so I’m hoping this proves to be a useful read.

How students learn to stop worrying and love the test

The New York Times has an article today about a program which pays students for acing their standardized tests. How much is a test score worth? Up to $50, which was quite a bit to me when I was in fourth grade. I'm not sure, but they do not seem to be using value-added scores, which means that they are focussing the incentive on achievement (which is only partially in the student's control) rather than effort (which is somewhat more under the student's control).

One might argue that paying students for test scores is the reductio ad absurdum of performance pay. I’m not ready to make the argument myself, but I can see how it might go.

Incentivize This: Day Two at NCPI

Here is my thumbnail sketch of what emerged as conventional wisdom regarding pay-for-performance in education:

There are two ways that performance pay can lead to improved student outcomes. First, it can induce teachers and administrators to work better so as to secure the incentive. Second, extra incentives can draw better teachers to the profession.

Success depends upon the ability to incentivize the right kinds of behavior. Part of the problem is technical. It’s difficult to measure and assess teaching and its effects. Most attempts to do so wind up polluting the act of teaching. However, like all pollution, this is tolerable to the extent that the benefits to students outweigh the costs. Another part of the problem is political. Teachers often resist attempts to differentiate pay by discipline, performance, or other factors.

If I’ve given a fair (if thin) representation of the conventional wisdom, the question is then: what should we make of it?

My classmates play lots of fantasy sports. If I were to have a fantasy school, I would see what I could do to attract not just people who know literature, history, government, philosophy, et cetera. I would want poets, historians, political scientists, and philosophers. I’d hope that I could create an environment in which teachers could actively engage pressing questions in their fields, and then communicate the urgency of these questions to their students.

And of course I would like them to be deeply invested in their students’ total success, not just their test scores in math and reading.