I found the YouTube video (link below) of the educational activist Diane
Ravitch speaking at Duke University. I originally started looking at activists
because of the Simmons book. She indicated that activist
organizations are a good place to begin looking at publics that surround an
issue because they form in reaction to feelings of exclusion. This reminded me
of the Cintron reading from the week before because he suggests that counterpublics
form based on a shared feeling of exclusion by the status quo.
The video is a little
lengthy, but I found that it related to our recent readings in the following areas:
The Fluidity of Publics
Diane Ravitch served in the administration of George H. W.
Bush and spent many years working with conservative think tanks on
education-related issues. She became a political turn-coat as the No Child Left
Behind legislation was taking shape (it was implemented in 2003). At this time,
with increasing emphasis being placed on testing and performance standards, Dr.
Ravitch began to question the very premise of her political and educational
philosophy and saw a problem with her assumption that the education system can
function as part of the free market
economy. Since this time, Dr. Ravitch has joined the liberal side of the
argument on education reform, armed with her new democratic rhetoric.
Did Dr. Ravitch change publics when she moved from the
conservative to the liberal side of the debate? Or is she still part of the
same public, since the issue of debate is still the same?
Dr. Ravitch’s experience makes me lean even more strongly
toward the idea of a multiplicity of public spheres. (This is another idea that
Cintron mentioned in his article). She is still active in the same debate
(sphere), but she is arguing something completely different. Even as I type my
preference for this idea, new questions arise. How do these public spheres
develop? How do publics know where their public spheres are? I hope that our
readings will shed some light on these questions over the remainder of the
semester.
Topos of Democracy/ Assumptions of Justice
In making her switch from the right to the left side of the
argument, Dr. Ravitch had to deeply examine where her ideas regarding education
reform came from. During her conservative years, she indicates that she was
operating under the assumption that schools should be able to thrive under the
same market conditions as corporations. According to this view, a just society
would reward the schools that thrive, and punish/ close the schools that
struggle or fail. From this assumption,
she could justify the following based on cost/benefit analysis:
-
Higher performance standards through testing
-
Merit pay for teachers whose students perform
well
-
School closures for underperformance
-
De-professionalization of teachers
-
Larger class sizes
It was not until she adopted a new idea of social justice,
one that valued equal access to education as a cornerstone, that she began to
view the list above as part of the problem, not the solution. Her new
perspective transformed her opinion of the purpose of education in society. In
the past, education was a means of ensuring global economic competition by
producing the best and the brightest. Now, Dr. Ravitch believes that education
should prepare students for the world by fostering creativity, innovation and
critical thinking. With this new lens, she can no longer justify the list
above. In fact, she argues that the reliance on testing is both misleading and
incapable of producing the desired results.
This video has left me wondering whether Candace Rai and Ralph
Cintron are pessimists or realists. They both claim that Democracy is a flawed
system that will inevitable meet its expiration date, or morph into something
completely unrecognizable. The fact that Dr. Ravitch went from one extreme to
the other demonstrates the power that surrounds the idea of social justice. She
did not compromise and develop a middle-of-the-road ideology.
Perhaps the recent increase in political polarization is in
part due to our reliance on the rhetoric of democracy to frame our arguments
and our resistance to changing sides. No doubt this is compounded by the social
stigma of being a turn-coat. Dr. Ravitch experienced mixed emotions in response
to her change of heart, from the congratulatory to scolding. If democracy is
built on discourse and rhetoric, shouldn’t we applaud changes of opinion? Aren’t
these changes a sign that discourse is working?
[Steve's comment]: I have taught a couple Ravitch essays, including the WSJ one you cite, in my comp classes for a long time (I do a unit on secondary education reform), and have always been impressed by her switch. To me, this represents not so much a change in ideals, but rather a loyalty to what might be seen as traditional science that is rarely seen, even in scientists. Here I'm thinking of the Gauchat article for this week, comparing political affiliation with trust in science (it's not an exact link, but bear with me). Basically, in a perfect world one would imaging science answering the questions of how we can do things, and politics (and other fields) addressing the question of what we should do. Politics offers goals, and science offers means of reaching those goals (and sometimes tells us some methods don't reach the goals at all).
ReplyDeleteTo me, though, it seems that politics in many areas has gone far beyond this, linking itself to particular experimental approaches and dismissing evidence to the contrary. The conservative education policies you list are an example of this, I think. In my mind, politics should merely offer the goal of improving education, and attempt to balance this priority with the many other priorities of society. When a political community decides that particular methods of improving education (or achieving any most any other priority, I would argue) are fundamental to their identity, then you get problems. The things on your list shouldn't be political at all. They are merely hypotheses about how we might improve education, and science would say let's test them and throw out the losers. So when a hypothesis that has been made central to people's political identity is called bunk by science, it's not terribly surprising they choose to reject science itself. But the real problem is not the rejection of science, but the problematic structure of the identity in the first place, I think.
So coming back to Ravitch, my take on her piece was that she was being a good scientist and accepting that the approaches she previously thought would be effective had failed to work. She tested her hypotheses, and when the tests came back negative she came up with new one rather than ignoring the tests. This is the ideal of science, of course, but I respect Ravitch so much because, as Kuhn points out, this virtually never happens, and indeed he argues that new paradigms really only take effect after old scientists die. Ravitch is really an example to follow, I think, and perhaps adheres to Habermas' original public sphere idea better than virtually anyone I know.