Tenured failure and self-indulgent pedagogy
If one judges matters by intentions (such as by presuming that effects flow from intentions), one lives in a very congenial world. You are always right, because your intentions are always good. Those who disagree with you must, therefore, have “wrong” intentions and so always be wrong.
If one judges by intentions, then no amount of failure is too much failure, since the intentions were good. Government action, for example, generally has some grand (and good) public policy intention proclaimed to justify it. So, if intentions are what counts, any apparent success is more than enough success, no amount of failure is too much failure. It is only if consequences are taken to matter that things get awkward. But, even there, working out consequences can be a difficult and complex thing. It is so much easier to judge by intentions and put down any failure to just needing more resources (so no amount of failure is too much failure).
Conversely, private commercial action is “for profit” and therefore has “bad” intentions. So, if one is judging by intentions, no amount of success is enough success and any failure is more than enough failure. Even better, government interventions manifest in market outcomes, so poor market outcomes can be blamed on the people with “bad” intentions (those in it for profit) and not those with good intentions (the regulators). Particularly as disentangling the effects of government regulations and other interventions can be difficult and complex. It is so much easier to judge by intentions and put down any failure to regulators just needing more power and resources (so, again, no amount of failure is too much failure: as, for example, in US federal housing policy).
Government-provided schooling is not the most effective way of achieving either imparting skills and knowledge or equality of opportunity. Moreover, by having the regulator also be the main provider, it sets up a profound and inherent conflict of interest. It is like having the Collingwood Club Board run the AFL. What would be a stupid way to run a football code is not a good way to organise the education of our children.
But public schooling has good intentions-lots and lots of them, with more being added regularly. So any failure is clearly due to “lack of resources”. Or perhaps not, as this piece on the extreme difficulty in getting rid of dysfunctional teachers from the California School system indicates.
Tenure creates a property right, a property right in a job. With teachers having tenure, overturning that property right becomes difficult:
Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and draining for principals and administrators that many say they don't make the effort except in the most egregious cases.
It is very difficult to get dismissals past the review boards. But the review boards are public sector entities. Their members are, in effect defending (indeed effectively defining) a property right their own members benefit from having as strong as possible. On straight property rights analysis, the results described by the LA Times are hardly surprising.
But public provision is always about creating public sector property rights (i.e. particular people controlling particular resources) that then get defenders. Property rights that, in this case, clearly has become the central issue. It is clear that providing good teaching to students is very much not the issue that counts:
Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare. In 80% of the dismissals that were upheld, classroom performance was not even a factor.
Nor is tracking the performance of the beneficiaries of this property right:
Evidence suggests that L.A. Unified does a poor job of tracking teacher performance overall, making it tough to prove anyone is a bad apple.
Putting something in the public sector can be a great way of reducing accountability for resource use. Being coercively funded means it is insulated from consequences and accountability. The pooling of revenue and of expenditure obscures who is paying for what, and who is getting what.
The public is forced to rely on agents, with all the principal-agent problems involved in that. Which are worse if the agents are hard to sack. Particularly as being agents for a removed amorphous mass means congenial deals can be made. When it comes to the review and rule-enforcing process, the teachers and their unions are players in the game, the students and their parents are not.
What the LA Times article sets out is a system where any commitment to make things work (in terms of educating students) often gets sabotaged in procedures designed to protect public sector property rights-either in the form of tenure as such, or by exalting process over outcome. Either way, the effect is to reduce genuine accountability behind the façade of it.
Advocates of public provision have to believe in the formal intentions of the system to justify the property rights created. Including believing in the moral or other cognitive incompetence of alternatives-such as the inadequacy of private schooling, commercial provision or other forms of people making their own choices.
Yet intentions may or may not be realised: what we actually do is what people have to deal with. Consequences are always real, intentions may never be more than things in the mind.
Judging by intentions (either directly or by presuming the intentions have the desired effect) does have, as I noted above, the congenial consequences of never being wrong. Academics are particularly prone to “the politics of good intentions” since their existence is all about what’s in the mind and so judging by intentions elevates them and what they do.
A property rights analysis is also fruitful for analysing academe. Humanities and social science academics have been redefining their own jobs to remove constraints. To put it another way, selection processes in intellectual fashions have been removing constraints for the people whose judgements are the selection processes. By portraying the past as a dreadful legacy of misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc one reduces the need to be properly versed in past learning. By dismissing truth as relative, or otherwise a misconstrued ideal, intentions as a mark of intellectual and moral capacity are elevated. By elevating critique of the society around them as the moral imperative, any notion of academe as a form of genuine service is undermined. Instead, we get the tenured academic as the purveyor of heroic, critical good intentions.
The highly influential (i.e. fashionable) teacher-training text, Paulo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is all about such heroic good intentions:
Freire isn’t interested in the Western tradition’s leading education thinkers-not Rousseau, not Piaget, not John Dewey, not Horace Mann, not Maria Montessori. He cites a rather different set of figures: Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, as well as the radical intellectuals Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Georg Lukács. And no wonder, since Freire’s main idea is that the central contradiction of every society is between the “oppressors” and the “oppressed” and that revolution should resolve their conflict. The “oppressed” are, moreover, destined to develop a “pedagogy” that leads them to their own liberation.
Even specific identification of “oppressors” and “oppressed” is dispensed with:
Seldom does Freire ground his description of the clash between oppressors and oppressed in any particular society or historical period, so it’s hard for the reader to judge whether what he is saying makes any sense. We don’t know if the oppressors he condemns are North American bankers, Latin American land barons, or, for that matter, run-of-the-mill, authoritarian education bureaucrats. His language is so metaphysical and vague that he might just as well be describing a board game with two contesting sides, the oppressors and the oppressed.
For free-floating “oppressors” and “oppressed” means an endless moveable feast of “goodies versus baddies” with no limits to vistas on which education academics (and their students) can project their heroic good intentions.
The past has to be discredited, along with any notion of service or teaching as a technique for imparting knowledge or skills to students:
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire had listed ten key characteristics of the “banking” method of education that purported to show how it opposed disadvantaged students’ interests. For instance, “the teacher talks and the students listen-meekly”; “the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply”; “the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined”; and “the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it.” Freire’s strictures reinforced another cherished myth of American progressive ed-that traditional teacher-directed lessons left students passive and disengaged, leading to higher drop-out rates for minorities and the poor. That description was more than a caricature; it was a complete fabrication. Over the last two decades, E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge schools have proved over and over again not only that content-rich teaching raises the academic achievement of poor children on standardized tests but that those students remain curious, intellectually stimulated, and engaged-though the education schools continue to ignore these documented successes.
This intentions-trump-techniques approach is congenial since a genuinely service-focused outlook requires far too much humility and hard work. In particular, such “critical pedagogy” releases adherents from any serious concern with what the society needs to function or any serious commitment to making things work. Those who display such concern or commitment become just “props for oppression”.
Tenure is just the flip side of such ideological self-indulgence.
The real reason to have government-provided schooling is to control the socialisation of students so as to control socialisation of belief (pdf). Which is why highly ideological regimes ban private schooling, the most common competitors to state schooling are religious schools and those in Western societies who most want to control public discourse (who support “hate speech” laws, attack the motives of dissenters, want to assert control over the terminology of public discourse, etc) typically also want to financially starve or ban private schooling.
But these are another form of justified-by-intentions with, as is ultimately inevitable, congenial consequences smuggled in. If management of schools was entirely separated from regulation of schools, that would be a major step forward. Switzerland has a version of that, since the legislature regulates schools but funding and control is in the hands of the local communes (essentially, the local parents). So the Swiss have highly paid teachers who are easy to sack. But none of the ardent advocates of public schooling elsewhere are going to advocate anything like that for their own jurisdictions, since that would very much undermine the sort of central control they are actually after. In particular, it would not entail the public sector property rights they want to create and defend.
If one judges by intentions, then no amount of failure is too much failure, since the intentions were good. Government action, for example, generally has some grand (and good) public policy intention proclaimed to justify it. So, if intentions are what counts, any apparent success is more than enough success, no amount of failure is too much failure. It is only if consequences are taken to matter that things get awkward. But, even there, working out consequences can be a difficult and complex thing. It is so much easier to judge by intentions and put down any failure to just needing more resources (so no amount of failure is too much failure).
Conversely, private commercial action is “for profit” and therefore has “bad” intentions. So, if one is judging by intentions, no amount of success is enough success and any failure is more than enough failure. Even better, government interventions manifest in market outcomes, so poor market outcomes can be blamed on the people with “bad” intentions (those in it for profit) and not those with good intentions (the regulators). Particularly as disentangling the effects of government regulations and other interventions can be difficult and complex. It is so much easier to judge by intentions and put down any failure to regulators just needing more power and resources (so, again, no amount of failure is too much failure: as, for example, in US federal housing policy).
Government-provided schooling is not the most effective way of achieving either imparting skills and knowledge or equality of opportunity. Moreover, by having the regulator also be the main provider, it sets up a profound and inherent conflict of interest. It is like having the Collingwood Club Board run the AFL. What would be a stupid way to run a football code is not a good way to organise the education of our children.
But public schooling has good intentions-lots and lots of them, with more being added regularly. So any failure is clearly due to “lack of resources”. Or perhaps not, as this piece on the extreme difficulty in getting rid of dysfunctional teachers from the California School system indicates.
Tenure creates a property right, a property right in a job. With teachers having tenure, overturning that property right becomes difficult:
Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and draining for principals and administrators that many say they don't make the effort except in the most egregious cases.
It is very difficult to get dismissals past the review boards. But the review boards are public sector entities. Their members are, in effect defending (indeed effectively defining) a property right their own members benefit from having as strong as possible. On straight property rights analysis, the results described by the LA Times are hardly surprising.
But public provision is always about creating public sector property rights (i.e. particular people controlling particular resources) that then get defenders. Property rights that, in this case, clearly has become the central issue. It is clear that providing good teaching to students is very much not the issue that counts:
Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare. In 80% of the dismissals that were upheld, classroom performance was not even a factor.
Nor is tracking the performance of the beneficiaries of this property right:
Evidence suggests that L.A. Unified does a poor job of tracking teacher performance overall, making it tough to prove anyone is a bad apple.
Putting something in the public sector can be a great way of reducing accountability for resource use. Being coercively funded means it is insulated from consequences and accountability. The pooling of revenue and of expenditure obscures who is paying for what, and who is getting what.
The public is forced to rely on agents, with all the principal-agent problems involved in that. Which are worse if the agents are hard to sack. Particularly as being agents for a removed amorphous mass means congenial deals can be made. When it comes to the review and rule-enforcing process, the teachers and their unions are players in the game, the students and their parents are not.
What the LA Times article sets out is a system where any commitment to make things work (in terms of educating students) often gets sabotaged in procedures designed to protect public sector property rights-either in the form of tenure as such, or by exalting process over outcome. Either way, the effect is to reduce genuine accountability behind the façade of it.
Advocates of public provision have to believe in the formal intentions of the system to justify the property rights created. Including believing in the moral or other cognitive incompetence of alternatives-such as the inadequacy of private schooling, commercial provision or other forms of people making their own choices.
Yet intentions may or may not be realised: what we actually do is what people have to deal with. Consequences are always real, intentions may never be more than things in the mind.
Judging by intentions (either directly or by presuming the intentions have the desired effect) does have, as I noted above, the congenial consequences of never being wrong. Academics are particularly prone to “the politics of good intentions” since their existence is all about what’s in the mind and so judging by intentions elevates them and what they do.
A property rights analysis is also fruitful for analysing academe. Humanities and social science academics have been redefining their own jobs to remove constraints. To put it another way, selection processes in intellectual fashions have been removing constraints for the people whose judgements are the selection processes. By portraying the past as a dreadful legacy of misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc one reduces the need to be properly versed in past learning. By dismissing truth as relative, or otherwise a misconstrued ideal, intentions as a mark of intellectual and moral capacity are elevated. By elevating critique of the society around them as the moral imperative, any notion of academe as a form of genuine service is undermined. Instead, we get the tenured academic as the purveyor of heroic, critical good intentions.
The highly influential (i.e. fashionable) teacher-training text, Paulo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is all about such heroic good intentions:
Freire isn’t interested in the Western tradition’s leading education thinkers-not Rousseau, not Piaget, not John Dewey, not Horace Mann, not Maria Montessori. He cites a rather different set of figures: Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, as well as the radical intellectuals Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Georg Lukács. And no wonder, since Freire’s main idea is that the central contradiction of every society is between the “oppressors” and the “oppressed” and that revolution should resolve their conflict. The “oppressed” are, moreover, destined to develop a “pedagogy” that leads them to their own liberation.
Even specific identification of “oppressors” and “oppressed” is dispensed with:
Seldom does Freire ground his description of the clash between oppressors and oppressed in any particular society or historical period, so it’s hard for the reader to judge whether what he is saying makes any sense. We don’t know if the oppressors he condemns are North American bankers, Latin American land barons, or, for that matter, run-of-the-mill, authoritarian education bureaucrats. His language is so metaphysical and vague that he might just as well be describing a board game with two contesting sides, the oppressors and the oppressed.
For free-floating “oppressors” and “oppressed” means an endless moveable feast of “goodies versus baddies” with no limits to vistas on which education academics (and their students) can project their heroic good intentions.
The past has to be discredited, along with any notion of service or teaching as a technique for imparting knowledge or skills to students:
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire had listed ten key characteristics of the “banking” method of education that purported to show how it opposed disadvantaged students’ interests. For instance, “the teacher talks and the students listen-meekly”; “the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply”; “the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined”; and “the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it.” Freire’s strictures reinforced another cherished myth of American progressive ed-that traditional teacher-directed lessons left students passive and disengaged, leading to higher drop-out rates for minorities and the poor. That description was more than a caricature; it was a complete fabrication. Over the last two decades, E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge schools have proved over and over again not only that content-rich teaching raises the academic achievement of poor children on standardized tests but that those students remain curious, intellectually stimulated, and engaged-though the education schools continue to ignore these documented successes.
This intentions-trump-techniques approach is congenial since a genuinely service-focused outlook requires far too much humility and hard work. In particular, such “critical pedagogy” releases adherents from any serious concern with what the society needs to function or any serious commitment to making things work. Those who display such concern or commitment become just “props for oppression”.
Tenure is just the flip side of such ideological self-indulgence.
The real reason to have government-provided schooling is to control the socialisation of students so as to control socialisation of belief (pdf). Which is why highly ideological regimes ban private schooling, the most common competitors to state schooling are religious schools and those in Western societies who most want to control public discourse (who support “hate speech” laws, attack the motives of dissenters, want to assert control over the terminology of public discourse, etc) typically also want to financially starve or ban private schooling.
But these are another form of justified-by-intentions with, as is ultimately inevitable, congenial consequences smuggled in. If management of schools was entirely separated from regulation of schools, that would be a major step forward. Switzerland has a version of that, since the legislature regulates schools but funding and control is in the hands of the local communes (essentially, the local parents). So the Swiss have highly paid teachers who are easy to sack. But none of the ardent advocates of public schooling elsewhere are going to advocate anything like that for their own jurisdictions, since that would very much undermine the sort of central control they are actually after. In particular, it would not entail the public sector property rights they want to create and defend.