Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

With Treme, Blues at the Equinox

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Is anyone out there watching the final season of Treme, David Simon’s underappreciated series about New Orleans and, by extension, us?

Since its debut in 2010, which followed perhaps too closely on the heels of Simon’s undisputed masterpiece, The Wire, most of the comments about Treme have focused on what it is not.

It’s not thrilling. It’s not suspenseful. It’s not exciting.

It’s true – Treme is not really any of those things. Then again, unlike just about every other drama on television, it’s also not about drugs, or counter-terrorism, or organized crime.

Two episodes into its fourth and final season on HBO, I’m struck by what this show is about – the silent, almost imperceptible shift away from something original, and raw, and dysfunctional, and towards something far more efficient, and generic, and mundane.

Treme is about modern society, in other words, and what it looks and feels like to be a human being at the equinox of reform-minded hope and change-inducing despair.

Consider the title of this season’s opening episode, “Yes We Can.” It’s 2008, and the central characters of the show – musicians and foodies most – are awash in the glow of Barack Obama’s historic presidential victory. But the glow lasts about five minutes before the reality of life in New Orleans intercedes to remind them (and us) of the work that remains to be done. A murderer escapes detection because the city’s crime cameras haven’t worked since Hurricane Katrina. A car gets eaten by one of the city’s gaping potholes. And someone arrested for a petty offense dies senselessly of an asthma attack in a holding cell. “I keep waiting for someone to come through and clean this place out,” says a frustrated detective.

There is, of course, a cleaning-out underway, but it’s the kind that comes with a cost. Developers and change agents of all kinds see in post-Katrina New Orleans a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remove the dirt and dysfunction of the past. Housing projects are closed to their former inhabitants. Charter schools apply fresh coats of paint to formerly rotting public school buildings. And corporate interests have plans for a gleaming new jazz center in an abandoned municipal hall.

Change is coming to the Crescent City. Who could argue with that?

A lot of people, actually. As one resident says at a contentious community meeting, “We all like getting sanctified, but we don’t like being gentrified!” But the genius of David Simon is that he doesn’t give us clear heroes and villains; instead, everyone inhabits their own moral shade of gray. As one of the developers asks earnestly, in the face of so much resistance, “Why is everybody so pissed off in this town all the time?”

Why indeed. And that’s why the tone of this show is so perfect. Unlike the crumbling levees of 2005, there are no undeniable alarm bells to signal the post-Katrina crisis at hand – which, at its core, is the diminution of New Orleans’ distinctive culture, particularly its twin anchors: music and food. Instead, the alarm of gentrification is a dog whistle; only some can hear it. Others see merely the beautiful convergence of profit and progress, leaving the rest of us to endure the disinfecting scrub of modernity, which spreads silently like Hannah Arendt’s definition of evil –with neither depth nor dimension, like a fungus, over the surface of all things.

In the face of such banal reforms, and amidst the death and the betrayal and the corruption and delay and disappointment, Treme reminds us of something that the rest of our popular entertainment seeks to skip over – that the circle of life is our lone constant, in all its persistence and pathology.

For better and for worse, our salvation rests with one another.

The writer Bruce Weigl makes a similar point in his similarly underappreciated Blues at the Equinox, a poem about its own form of strange bedfellows: two people moments after a motel hookup. “In the shadows the woman dresses quietly,” Weigl begins, “beyond the light the parking lot spears through thin drapes, her heart inclined towards the miraculous.”

What passes for love,
the miles and the years
and the rivers crossed no one could name,

what passes for love
is not always the fierce blessing
the mortal lovers give—and then grow pale—

but sometimes one heart robbing another
in a rented room, a great sadness
and a great happiness, at the same time, descending.

And so it goes.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Rethinking School Boundaries

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Now that DC is taking up the delicate question of whether its boundary lines for neighborhood schools needs revisiting — the first time they’ve done so since 1968 — it’s worth thinking through the issue with them.

This morning, I was part of a public radio conversation that featured DC Deputy Mayor Abigail Smith and local parent activist Evelyn Boyd Simmons. You can hear that 30 minute conversation here. But you might also want to read Mike Petrilli’s 2011 piece about controlled choice, or Rick Kahlenberg’s research into the feasibility of race-neutral admissions policies, or one school’s use of a zip code lottery to ensure an even representation from kids throughout the city it serves.

What other policies or programs are worth looking at?

Planet of the Technocrats

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There’s a great book out by Harvard’s Michael Sandel on the moral limits of markets (I wrote a long piece about it and its implications for school choice here). But Sandel’s book also contains a lot of interesting information about incentives, and the ways our use of them has both grown and revised the traditional economic thinking that began with Adam Smith’s original 1776 notion of an “invisible hand.”

As Sandel explains, we’ve substantially revised our definition of economics itself — from the 1958 textbook notion of “the world of prices, wages, interest rates, stocks and bonds, banks and credit, taxes and expenditure,” to the modern notion of “a group of people interacting with one another as they go about their lives.”

Because of that tectonic shift, incentives have become the primary weapon in modern social-science policymaking. As Freakonomics author Steven Levitt has written, incentives are now “the cornerstone of modern life.” And economics, he continues, “is, at root, the study of incentives.”

For all of us who care deeply about American public education – and who worry about its future – that shift in understanding should say EVERYTHING to us about what is happening in modern society in general, and modern school reform in particular. Indeed, from No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top, our increasing use of incentives to drive behavior change is the central factor reshaping American schools. Anya Kamenetz made this point in her review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, when she said:

I know there are hard-core right-wing Republican Tea Party/Grover Norquist/ALEC privatizers within the education-reform complex. I agree with Ravitch that the governor of my hometown state, Bobby Jindal, is probably one of them. I also agree that there are always plenty of people out to make a buck who need to be reined in.

But I think the big tent, the big umbrella, the unifying force here is a fascination with technology and innovation, not privatization per se. . . Technophilia explains why the ed-reform complex loves tests so much. It’s all that data, the number crunching that really gets them going.  That is why they love charter schools: to pilot new ways of doing things. That is why they love to give tax money to private business owners; they believe that innovation thrives among private entrepreneurs and not in the public sector. That is why they love software and computers in classrooms and online teaching and learning.

I think Kamenetz is onto something there. In fact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of the word “incentivize” has risen by more than 1,400% since 1990, and whereas Bill Clinton only used the word once in his eight years in office, Barack Obama used it twenty-nine different times in his first three years.

The logic behind this changing worldview was captured well by Obama’s former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, who actually said the following in public, apparently without embarrassment or shame:

We all have only so much altruism in us. Economists like me think of altruism as a valuable and rare good that needs conserving. Far better to conserve it by designing a system in which people’s wants will be satisfied by individuals being selfish, and saving that altruism for our families, our friends, and the many social problems in this world that markets cannot solve.

Did he really say that? Does he really believe that?

Yes, yes he does. So fellow advocates for a more humanistic sort of K-12 landscape, take note: when we describe Neoliberal school reformers as two-dimensional greedy privatizers, we obfuscate the real emotional center of their movement, and their primary motivations. As Anya Kamenetz put it, “Bill Gates was a ruthless CEO, but first he was a brilliant software engineer. Is it so hard to believe that in his third act, spending his personal wealth to try to tackle the world’s biggest problems, he’s influenced as much by the latter experience as by the former?”

 

 

Why We Need to Look Back — and Ahead

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There are two different articles in today’s New York Times that I would consider must reading for anyone interested in better understanding who we are, who we have been, and who we may become.

The first, “Obama and the Debt,” outlines Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz’s interpretations of the current crisis, and of its Constitutional underpinnings. Regardless of whether you love the Fourteenth Amendment (as I do), and regardless of whether you agree with Wilentz’s advice to President Obama (go hard or go home), I would offer this Op-Ed as very tangible evidence of why we need historians, and why there is great value in looking back to better understand that path that has led us to this particular moment.

The other article is in the Arts section, and it’s a review of David Cage’s new video game for the PlayStation 3, “Beyond Two Souls.” The game itself features star turns from two well-known Hollywood actors, Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. And the article struck me because it hints at the Brave New World we are entering, one in which a creator like Cage excitedly imagines the development of a “Scorcese algorithm” that would imitate the filmmaker’s iconic camera style and recreate it on demand, and one in which he describes his game as “an interface that will allow you to play life.”

I understand our infatuation with unadulterated self-direction, and I worry sometimes that it’s eroding our commitment to understand, on a broad, shared level, where we have been and what we have decided. And I share the disorientation so many of us feel when we hear of an algorithm that can codify the creative genius of Martin Scorcese in order to improve the narrative flow of a video game — and I can see why such a development could be very, very cool.

Both trends bear watching, and remembering, and questioning, by all of us.

 

Want to Get Smarter? Be More Childlike.

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Want to Get Smarter? Be More Childlike.

Interesting piece on NPR this morning in which Shankra Vedantam reviews some of the recent research in neuroscience. You can listen to it here, and you should because it highlights something simple and significant — that the best way to keep learning over one’s life is to keep hold of the boundless inquiry that characterizes early childhood.

“Using mathematical techniques that allow researchers to disentangle the effects of genetic and environmental influences on individuals,” Vedantam reports, researchers “noticed that kids who had higher IQs to begin with seemed to have an extended period in adolescence during which they retained the ability to learn at a rapid pace, just like much younger children.

“I found that twins that had a higher IQ were showing a more childlike pattern of influence during adolescence,” said one of the researchers, Penn State’s Angela Brant.

If that’s true, it would make sense to structure learning environments for children that are proactively designed to unleash each young person’s inherent sense of wonder and curiosity. And yet, here in DC and elsewhere across the country, we are doing the opposite. It’s true — too many young people are arriving in school with extreme deficits when it comes to literacy and numeracy. And it’s true — those things matter. But the best way to help all children thrive is not by making Kindergarten resemble a 10th grade honors class; it’s by making that 10th grade honors class more like Kindergarten.

That’s something educators have known for a long time. Now they have the research to boot.

DC’s Plan to Assess Early Childhood Programs: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?

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In case you missed it, the Public Charter School Board (PCSB) of DC has proposed a common framework for assessing the quality of all preschool and lower elementary programs. The original proposal sparked arguments for and against the plan; led to a petition campaign of protest; and anchored a lively hourlong discussion on public radio. Lots of people wrote the board to share their own ideas and feedback, and, earlier this week, the Board unanimously approved a revised policy.

What did the PCSB get right, and where is its plan still lacking? First, here’s what they proposed (with all changes highlighted in yellow):

 

 

To evaluate these changes, I reviewed the modifications against my three central design principles of a good assessment framework.

  1. Measure the Essential Skills: On the positive side, any school that opts to measure social-emotional growth will be held to roughly equal percentages of importance (14% v. 12% in preschool, and 25% v. 20% in lower elementary). Not what I would do, but I can live with it. On the negative side, SEL measures are still not required, and the past twelve years or so of education policy would suggest that, despite one’s wishes to the contrary, a school that is only required to do A is less likely to do B, C or D with the same degree of intensity. Will a majority of schools opt in to the SEL framework? Time will tell, but I’m skeptical. I do think, however, that the addition of a mission-specific goal provides another way for schools to elevate an essential skill, such as creativity. In sum, a mixed bag.
  2. Default to the Highest Common Denominator: As I wrote previously, “One of the biggest problems with the PCSB’s framework is that even though all schools would be held accountable to the same categories, not all schools would be using the same tools to assess their progress.” The danger of this was pointed out to me by the founder of a prominent charter school in DC, who cautioned that any school that chooses a less challenging assessment in, say, math will be more likely to score higher than a school that chooses a more challenging one. “This,” she says, “creates an incentive for schools to choose less challenging assessments which may provide less actionable/useful data for teachers to use in the classroom, which is what the real point of assessment is.” As far as I can tell, this design flaw is unaddressed by the revisions. That’s a big problem, and one the PCSB will need to get right in the coming year.
  3. Identify the other elements of a healthy school culture: This is where the original proposal was closest to the endgoal, and that’s still true here. Its metric for evaluating teachers has three separate components — emotional support, instructional support, and classroom organization — and its attention to attendance and re-enrollment make sense. Here, too, the addition of a mission-specific goal, depending on what schools choose, could apply to this category (measuring school climate, for example).

Overall, then, I think the PCSB heeded much of what it heard from the public, and its final proposal still needs some small but significant tweaks. What do YOU think?