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Arkansas Rep. Nate Bell is Heartless, Unpatriotic

Friday 19 April 2013 in Politics, Society | 1 comment

Christ. Do some people really agree with hateful vitriol like this?

There are about forty-eight things wrong with the representative’s tweet. Here are two that struck me fairly immediately.

First, no one I know was cowering. Boston is a tough city. As someone more eloquent than I has noted, Boston was founded “by people so badass that they needed to buckle their hats to keep them on their God damn heads.” A million people obeyed officials’ requests to stay put to make the search for a sadly misguided 19 year-old more effective and safer for those of us at home and safer for the brave folks who are performing the search. Bostonians are patient, dignified, and humane. We are not hysterical, blood-thirsty, or craven. We do not need individual arms to maintain order.

Second, no one I know thinks an AR-15 with high-capacity magazines would make the situation safer. Instead, I’m glad that my tax dollars go to support the heroes we call police officers, fire fighters, and first responders. And I’m thankful that these well-trained, lion-hearted men and women are willing to put their lives on the line so that I don’t have to. I am proud to be from Boston and I am proud of how our state, its officials, and our civic champions are handling the situation.

So, Nate Bell, as far as I can tell, the answer to your profane question is zero. Nobody was cowering. Nobody wanted an AR-15 with high-capacity magazines.

I support mandatory universal background checks, a ban on high-capacity magazines, and compassion. I am against senseless violence, acts of terror, and simpleminded legislators.

I feel this way, Representative, because guns don’t keep people safe. That’s why it takes so much courage to be a police officer, firefighter or first responder. Situations involving guns are dangerous. Guns are designed to cause injury. It seems like no one explained to you how guns work before.

I hope that you never feel like you need to cling to a gun for safety. The lonely individualism of your Tweet makes me sad. I hope you and your constituents do not feel alone or afraid without a gun. I am confident that my neighbors, community, and government are working hard to keep one another safe everyday—not just in times of crisis. I wish the same for you and your constituents.

Further, nonviolent community vigilance works. It resulted in a peaceful arrest tonight. Had a scared, armed individual taken justice into his own hands instead of calling the authorities for help, we would certainly have had one or more deaths on our hands. I am very pleased that entire Boston community worked together, acted dispassionately, and ended this string of tragedies without further casualty.

In case you don’t read my blog, Representative Bell, I have written you directly and and plan to call your office Monday so that you don’t need to wonder any more. For anyone who wishes to join me, here is his contact information:

Email nate.bell@arkansashouse.org
Phone 479-234-2092

Here’s hoping that this crisis ends quickly and peacefully.

Prophecy and Betrayal by Clark, Lytle, Geduldig & Cranford

Sunday 20 November 2011 in Politics, Society | No comments

Recently this morning, Chris Hayes reported on a memo to the American Bankers Association, a lobbying group which aims to influence law-makers to make laws that favor, well, the banks. Read a copy of it for yourself. (A scanned PDF courtesy Chris Hayes, a searchable plain-text version.) This thing sounds like something straight out of a conspiracy theory story, but the ABA confirm they’ve received it. So, sadly, I guess this is the real deal.

The memo summarizes in very plain language how big-time propaganda systems work. You pay us a lot of money to cook up dirt, spin our cause until it’s palatable for the majority, and then mobilize the masses against their own interests to support ours, stamping out grassroots campaigns and bullying politicians who might stand in the way as we go.

The point of this memo is clear: the Occupy Wall Street movement reminds people who were hurt by the financial crisis that the banks and their lobbying for massive deregulation are very responsible for the economy’s sorry state—a fact attested by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report; consequently the banks need to protect their political interests and get ready to for the upcoming elections.

There were a few things that stood out to me. First, the entire tone of the memo pitches a clear the-banks-and-our supporters-versus-everyone-else mentality. The memo explicitly names who the “and our supporters” are. According to this memo, bankers could, for some indefinite period of time, count on members of the Republican party to defend the interests of Wall Street companies. They’re worried that political pressure from groups like Occupy might change the tide. Here’s the full paragraph that reads all too transparently. (The emphasis is my own.)

It shouldn’t be surprising that the Democratic party or even President Obama’s re-election team would campaign against Wall Street in this cycle. However the bigger concern should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies—and might start running against them too.

As it’s stated, you might think that it’s common knowledge that the Republicans have been defending the banks. The danger is that they might stop. That is, unless you pay us to manipulate the American people. What’s worse, though, is how entirely remorseless these guys are. They even go out of their way to point out that many Americans who were hit hard by the recklessness of the banks are going to have a lean holiday season. Why is this bad? It might alter their vote.

This combination [of frustration on the political left and right] has the potential to be explosive later in the year when media reports cover the next round of bonuses and contrast it with stories of millions of Americans making do with less this holiday season.

Yikes. Which is more important, banker bonuses or the millions of Americans who are suffering because of a economic collapse created by large financial institutions aided by intense governmental deregulation? The authors say which side they’re on and they presume the reader feels the same way.

The second thing that’s really interesting to me in this memo is actually somewhat prophetic, and not just because they dated the memo by about a week in the future. The quotes I gave above already hinted at this point: right, left, it doesn’t matter, everyone is upset with the banks. And everyone is a lot of people. That’s Occupy’s mantra, right? We are the 99%. And in case you forgot, that’s a big number.

Well-known Wall Street companies stand at the nexus of where OWS protestors and the Tea Party overlap on angered populism. Both the radical left and the radical right are channeling broader frustration about the state of the economy and share a mutual anger over TARP and other perceived bailouts.

So this recent op-ed by Sarah Palin in the Wall Street Journal must have been terrifying. (I suggest you read it, it’s surprisingly sane even if it is essentially a plug for one of her staffer’s books.) Palin basically decries lobbying, or at least wants to make the process more transparent, and suggests specific solutions— make Congress subject to the Freedom of Information Act, for example. I can’t tell if she actually believes what she’s written, but many of her ideas have good potential.

By the end of the editorial, Palin starts to show her “maverick” roots and this time in a somewhat profound way. She reaches out to the Occupy movement to say, look, we’re not so different. Wall Street is bad. Their deep pockets can buy votes. Their predatory lobbyists are good at their jobs. They fight for big corporate interests that aren’t aligned with American people. Turn your attention on the politicians who receive these gifts. You have the power to act. I wish she had gone a little further and actually said, “Vote.” In Palin’s own words:

This call for real reform must transcend political parties. The grass-roots movements of the right and the left should embrace this. The tea party’s mission has always been opposition to waste and crony capitalism, and the Occupy protesters must realize that Washington politicians have been “Occupying Wall Street” long before anyone pitched a tent in Zuccotti Park.

And that’s exactly the sort of message this CLG&C memo warns against: political action from all sides for financial reform and regulation. It seems the Occupiers have caught on, too. They’re running commercials on ESPN and, wait for it, the O’Reilly Factor. I wonder whether these two groups will coalesce. Until then, watch the commercial here.

The third thing that jumped out at me is that the banks shouldn’t just be afraid of the ideas of Occupy, but of Occupy itself.

It may be easy to dismiss OWS as a ragtag group of protestors but they have demonstrated that they should be treated more like an organized competitor who is very nimble and capable of working the media, coordinating third party support and engaging office holders to do their bidding. To counter that, we have to do the same.

Clark, Lytle, Geduldig & Cranford promise to dig up dirt on Occupy leaders and undermine them, and therefore the movement they stand for, with a smear campaign. This might be trickier than they let on. The Occupy movement doesn’t, at least to me, appear to have a central leadership that outsiders like me can point to. Every time I see or read an interview I get a new face. It’s easier to discredit a handful of well-known, well-associated leaders. It’s next to impossible to pull records on an amorphous collection of anonymous demonstrators. Isn’t what that V movie was all about, after all? I hope the folks at Occupy resist the urge centralize their PR. Their relative anonymity is one of their strongest assets. That and the fact that the general tenets against corporate and political corruption are right.

So this memo suggests conventional print, radio and TV ads to combat negative bank press, as well as monitoring and leverage of social media sites. Sure. That’s usual, but they had one more idea that was a little shocking to me. It goes by the name of coalition planning. Since no one will trust the banks, these guys will hire and plant community leaders to plan and organize public support for the banks, but secretly. No one should know that they’ll be taking orders from the banks and doling them out to their unsuspecting supporters. It’s like making prisoners dig their own grave and smile about it! Here’s what ABA would get if they signed up with these guys:

Individual companies under threat by OWS and its adoption by Democrats likely will not be the best spokespeople for their own cause. A big challenge is to demonstrate that these companies still have political strength and that making them a political target will carry a severe political cost.

We will produce a report identifying traditional and non-traditional allies, intellectual support and politically important economic footprints that could ultimately form the basis of a broad coalition (rather than the narrow D.C. definition of a coalition) who can help carry our messages and organize supporters.

Notice how threatening their language is. These guys are not fooling around.

A strong placement [of paid advertisement that "combat OWS messages and provide cover for political figures who defend the industry"] early in a transition to adopt the OWS movement will send a powerful political signal about the risks of carrying that through.

We need to show politicians that if they stand for the American people and against corporate greed, we will stand for them during elections. Write to your senators and congresspeople to tell them what is important to you and why you will vote.

Business sense

Monday 14 November 2011 in Policy, Society | No comments

At the behest of a friend of mine, I’ve decided to pick up a copy of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report. Weighing in at 690 pages and 2.2 pounds, this bad boy is a behemoth of economic reporting. For those of you who prefer free, electronic copies of books, swing by FCIC website to get a full version in stunning PDF.

I’m only a few pages in, but already I’m impressed by those massively irresponsible rogue investment houses. For example,

[A]t the end of 2007, Bear Stearns had $11.8 billion in equity and $383.6 billion in liabilities and was borrowing as much as $70 billion in the overnight market. [pp. ix-xx]

Those are big numbers, and it’s hard for me to really wrap my ahead around whether $383.6 billion in liabilities is offset by the equity the company held. Being a lay person (who’s trying to learn more) in big financial matters, I’m not sure whether that sort of thing is common, sustainable, reasonable or downright foolish. So let’s do what scientists like to do with things they don’t understand: translate them into equivalent systems that they do understand. The borrowing habits of Bear Stearns were equivalent to

a small business with $50,000 in equity borrowing $1.6 million, with $296,750 of that due each and every day. [pp. xx]

Whoa. That doesn’t sound all prudent to me. How about to you?

So when Illinois congressperson Joe Walsh starts screaming at his constituents (here and follow-up here) at an Uno’s in a Chicago suburb that

it’s not the private marketplace that created this mess. What created this mess was your government, which has demanded for years that everybody be in a home…And we’ve made it easy as possible for people to be in homes

you’ve got to wonder whether he’s right. Or at least watch his rants on Youtube. But to Joe’s point, was it a misguided government conspiracy to make sure Americans have roofs over their heads that sent the economy spiraling out of control? According to the Financial Crisis Report, the answer is no.

True, for decades the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has listed affordable housing as one of its goals. Based on textual evidence and interviews, the behavior of government supported entities like the now infamous Freddie and Fannie were only marginally effected by the goals for affordable housing. In fact, a lot of the people buying up property already had homes! By the June of 2005, one out of ten home sales went to an investor, speculator, or individuals buying a second home [p. 5].

My friend’s grandparents have pointed to legislation that banned banks from black-listing whole communities from loans, a practice known as redlining, as a major cause for the collapse of the housing market. They’re talking about the Community Reinvestment Act which set expressly to combat redlining. Banks commonly denied individuals and businesses, primarily in substantially non-white neighborhoods, without regard to the creditworthiness of the applications because the entire neighborhood was deemed too risky. Chances are if you lived in a black community, the banks simply said no even if you could pay. The Community Reinvestment Act tried to make sure banks and savings and loans would lend, invest, and provide services to communities that deposited money in the banks—a sort of, you put in, we’ll put out sort of arrangement. So how much did these government policies contribute to the financial crisis?

Well, according to the report, not significantly.

Loans made by CRA-regulated lenders in the neighborhoods in which they were required to lend were half as likely to default as similar loans made in the same neighborhoods by independent mortgage originators not subject to the law. [p. xxvii]

In other words, the policies seemed to offer some protection, consistent with financial soundness! Anti-redline loans were better loans. Looks like level-headed, carefully crafted regulation can actually help stabilize markets.

I’m willing to believe Joe, but, Joe, help me out. Give me some facts I can check.

Keep the Internet Open: Update

Monday 14 November 2011 in Policy, Politics, Society, Technology | No comments

Last week, the Senate voted on SJ Res. 6, that piece of legislation that stated plainly: Congress disapproves of openness on the internet. That is, that companies should be able to block your traffic on the internet unless you paid for it. Fortunately, the resolution was rejected (by a slim margin of four votes). See the tally here.

Imagine how this sort of deregulation would work in the phone industry. Phone companies could monitor who were calling, listen in to what you were talking about, and then decide how much to charge you accordingly. Would you want the phone companies listening in to your phone conversations and then deciding how much to charge you based on what you said? “Oh, he’s calling his sister again—I bet he’d pay more to talk to his family.” “Her doctor is about to say something important, that phone call’ll cost extra.” Eek.

The FCC has been charged with the responsibility to make sure the internet remains open, transparent, and is free from blocking and unreasonable discrimination. According to the FCC, if it’s legal, you can do it and the internet providers should respect that. Since this policy seems like a good idea to me as it promotes technological innovation and rightful consumer protection, I was shocked that Scott Brown voted to dismantle openness on the internet. I’ve written to his office for an explanation for his vote. I’ll let you know the reasons if they respond.

I’m thankful to Kerry for supporting net neutrality. And I’m surprised and pleased to see that the White House had the backs of the American people, even if a near majority of the Senate didn’t. In an official statement, the President openly opposed SJ Res. 6 because he is in favor of job creation. And this resolution would have stifled technological innovation. Good work.

As an aside: in the end Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Kelly Ayotte did vote for big business. If anyone can tell me how this resolution would have helped families, consumers, the poor, and/or children in Massachusetts, Maine, or New Hampshire, I’d like to know!

Keep the Internet Open

Monday 7 November 2011 in Policy, Politics, Society, Technology | No comments

The internet is this country’s greatest, most used, and largest public library. Nearly a year ago, the FCC adopted FC 10-201 to keep the doors of the internet open to American citizens. In this regulation, the FCC cites evidence that broadband providers had been covertly blocking or degrading Internet traffic, and that cable companies have financial incentive and ability to shut things down even more.

Here’s a summary of values stated in the report:

PRESERVING THE FREE AND OPEN INTERNET

1. Today the Commission takes an important step to preserve the Internet as an open platform for innovation, investment, job creation, economic growth, competition, and free expression. To provide greater clarity and certainty regarding the continued freedom and openness of the Internet, we adopt three basic rules that are grounded in broadly accepted Internet norms, as well as our own prior decisions:

i. Transparency.
Fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network
management practices, performance characteristics, and terms and conditions of their
broadband services;
ii. No blocking.
Fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services; and
iii. No unreasonable discrimination.
Fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.

We believe these rules, applied with the complementary principle of reasonable network management, will empower and protect consumers and innovators while helping ensure that the Internet continues to flourish, with robust private investment and rapid innovation at both the core and the edge of the network. This is consistent with the National Broadband Plan goal of broadband access that is ubiquitous and fast, promoting the global competitiveness of the United States.

But NO! Senator Kay Hutichson (R-TX) introduced S.J. Resolution 6 to the Senate floor to strike down openness and transparency on the internet. The resolution states in plain English that Congress is against openness on the internet! If passed, this resolution will make the FCC unable to ensure the doors of the world’s greatest public library stay open to the public. This resolution is job-killing, innovation-stalling, and education-thwarting.

The resolution is so short, I’ll post its contents in their entirety for you to see for yourself:

Disapproving the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission with respect to regulating the Internet and broadband industry practices.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to the matter of preserving the open Internet and broadband industry practices (Report and Order FCC 10-201, adopted by the Commission on December 21, 2010), and such rule shall have no force or effect.

Today I called Scott Brown’s office in DC to tell him to vote NO on S.J. Res. 6. The number is (202) 224-4543. Do you use the internet? Do you plan to use it in the future? If so, then please call your senators to tell them to vote for American innovation and against S.J. Res. 6.

p.s. — If you live in Maine, ask Olympia Snowe (202) 224-5344 and Susan Collins (202) 224-2523 how this resolution will create jobs in Maine. If you live in New Hampshire, ask Kelly Ayotte (202) 224-3324 whether this resolution will help New Hampshire families make ends meet. They must believe it will. They co-sponsored the resolution, after all.

Scott Brown, why do you hate America?

Tuesday 25 October 2011 in Education, Politics, Society | 2 comments

Recently the Democrats introduced a bill to support teachers, police, and firefighters. It’s really short, so you should read it for yourself here. This law would help out the poorest people in the country. And do you know who they are? Children. Children are the largest demographic living in poverty in America today. They are not lazy. They are not riding welfare. They didn’t lose their jobs. They are children. And this law would help children.

And who would pay? According to this bill, only people earning over a million dollars a year. And the tax would only apply to the monies made over a million dollars. Joe Biden explains how easy the math is. If you’re only making $999,999 this year, don’t worry. You wouldn’t pay a cent to fund these teachers and first-responders. And if you do make more than a million dollars, you’d only see an increase of one half of one percent. That’s half a penny per dollar over a million. The average income of the people who would pay this surtax is 3 million dollars; they’d pay on average $500. That’s enough for 400,000 teachers, 18,000 police, and 7,000 firefighters. I only wish I could pay this tax!

But no one will. It got voted down, pretty unilaterally according to party lines in the Senate. The New York Times posted the tally here. All blue and independent voted yes; all red (and two blue!) voted no. Because I’m so baffled, I decided to write my senator to ask what he was thinking. I hope you will ask your senators why they think half a penny for every dollar over a million isn’t worth the stability and safety of our families and children. If you live in Massachusetts, please contact Scott Brown through his website or on the phone, (617) 565-3170.

Dear Senator Brown,

I am troubled by your recent vote against S.1723: Teachers and First Responders Back to Work Act of 2011. Please explain why you chose to cut jobs that serve obvious public good, promote American innovation and prosperity, and keep families and children safe. Teachers, police, and firefighters from the poorest communities will lose their jobs first because the poorest communities are those least able to support their salaries. Your vote is strictly un-American and it clearly acts against the best interests of Massachusetts’ citizens.

Please explain why you turned on American families and children, Senator Brown. Why did you deny poor American children access to adequate education; why did you deny working American families continued public safety? As one of your constituents, I believe you should make the reasons for your action clear.

Sincerely,
Joshua Reyes
A concerned citizen

Please, leave a comment if you contacted your senator!

Privilege (Part 1): Feminism takes women for granted.

Monday 9 May 2011 in Education, Society | No comments

As a resident tutor at Harvard, I get tagged to help students prepare for all sorts of things. Giving mock interviews is my favorite student service. Firstly, I honestly believe that students who master this form of conversation will be better prepared to navigate the system after graduation. And that’s important to me. Plus I love playing the part of a disinterested panel member who mercilessly questions a student about deeply meaningful issues. As a bonus, I usually learn something new about my student and the world in the process. Earlier this spring one student asked me to quiz her before an interview for the Women’s Leadership Award. (Sadly, she didn’t get it.) It was my job to ask difficult but thoughtful questions as a representative of the liberal left to a self-proclaimed traditionalist from way over on the right. And so I did.

I started off with what I thought was a low-ball question, “How has your leadership advanced, strengthened or otherwise benefited the causes of women on campus?” After a few long pauses, I reframed the question. “What is feminism and how is your leadership aligned with your definition?” Now I should admit that I have no formal training in women or gender studies, or, for that matter, in any other field that qualifies me to judge her response with any authority. I was just genuinely curious to know her answer and thought her interviewers might be interested, too. So I wanted her to have an answer ready at her fingertips for the real thing. But when she started to define feminism in terms of women, I thought her description might be too limiting.

As I see it, feminism is a misnomer. The field studies the general mechanisms of oppression and societal priority and, if done well, tries to figure out how to redirect and/or obliterate those forces. Without knowing anything about them, I’d say the same goes for African American studies, queer theory and the like. They might differ in the details, but the spirit is the same. That’s why WGS departments routinely host courses on masculinity, reality TV, urban sprawl, colors, and boats. The point is to figure out what society thinks is important, how those prioritizations are implemented in daily behavior, what the consequences of those choices are, and then to do something about it if necessary. Each of us makes lots of choices everyday—from what to eat, where to be seen, what to wear, and who to smile at—and all of those choices communicate information. Consequently, we should rename women, gender, and sexuality studies to something more general, less political, and more honest. How about ‘social dynamics‘ or ‘advertising’?

Because it deals with the fundamental question of how large groups of people value things in society, gender theory is widely applicable wherever large-scale disparate treatment exists. Since taking that course this winter at the Ed School, I’ve decided that urban education tries to tackle fairly identical problems. Our urban public schools are flooded with poor students of color, while their privileged white (putatively all-male) counterparts escape to a protected life in the suburban lands of milk and honey. How did this happen; how can we fix it; and what do those questions even mean?

The rhetoric in class focused largely around some vague thing called privilege. As far as I can tell, privilege in this context amounted was code for having money and the things that money can buy. And there’s compelling evidence that at least some differences in education are simply a matter of money. The international PISA test results are pretty damning when disaggregated by poverty rate. It goes without saying that the physical conditions of many urban schools are deplorable. What these kids endure is heartbreaking, criminal. But to write off the problem to a matter of resource allocation is lazy, a little self-righteous, and doesn’t help kids. What’s money good for if you can’t keep it? The staggering poverty of some former NFL players provides a good case in point. What we need is to think carefully about the systems that generate and maintain wealth for some but not others. As a clumsy first step, we need to unpack that elusory notion privilege.

At the end of the day, privilege is the ability to avoid hardship. Money can get you out of a lot of difficult situations. That’s why I think that people often regard privilege as a heritable good like money or real estate. But its power really derives from interpersonal interaction. No man is an island; it takes two to privilege. As I see it, privilege is different depending on who originates the interaction. In one case, privilege is granted—like when a car stops to let a pedestrian cross the road. In the other, privilege is exerted—as when a family moves from one neighborhood to another that suits them better. Of course the two types are intertwined. In the first example, the driver noticed the pedestrian and stopped, granting the right of way. The pedestrian had to recognize the situation and then exert her privilege to cross the street. Like I said before, it takes two to privilege. More complicated feedback can and certainly does exist in real life. In this post I’ll focus on granting and leave exerting privilege for another time.

In education, it’s useful to know the sources of privilege so that we can teach our students how to leverage what they’ve got. If a student has good teeth, her smile is going to gain her, largely through the accident of her birth, an upper hand over her peer with a crooked smile. People will trust her more. She’ll get more attention from teachers and bosses. As a result she’ll be rewarded for the success others, in part, have granted her. If she learns how to exert this privilege, she can cash these chips in for more success down the road. Once you prime the pump, success flows more easily. (Anyone who’s been job hunting knows well that a good resume begets a better resume.)

And so positive feedback will reinforce the small but noticeable advantages she started out with, like her winning smile. We might believe her success comes from dispositional traits, like hard work and politeness—and to be sure, those pieces need to be in place as well. That’s the American Dream, after all. But we need to step back and see the system for the trees. People respond to visible traits like speech, posture, height, hair style, skin color, gender expression, and dress. They read social cues and reply in turn. When lots of people all respond to these cues in a sustained and coherent way, they generate full institutions of systematic advantage and disadvantage. That’s what urban education is trying to understand and rectify. But it’s hard not to judge a book by its cover. If you know that, it’s easier to game the system. I’ve personally benefited immensely from misread social cues, which I’ve gone on to exploit.

On paper I fit the urban stereotype, minus the urban part. I’m Mexican, from a poor, single-parent family in a rural suburb of Boston. My friends and I drank in the woods to the light of homemade bonfires on the weekend. But I look white. My body type is slender; I have blue eyes, fair skin and brown hair. People, even Europeans, regularly assume that I’m British or Scottish. (I’m not, but thank you.) In college I learned to play squash, developed a taste for sherry, and started wearing bow ties to formal events. When I walk into a room, people grant me all the privilege a white man could want, even if my family were homeless for a time while I was away in college. What’s on the outside matters first, because that’s what people experience first. In my case, my exterior purchases me privilege because that’s what people are willing to pay to someone who looks and acts like me.

Changing what society thinks is worthy of reward is a long, hard seed to sow. And we need to continue on that front. It goes without saying that the same positive feedback that has helped me time and time again could easily have hurt if I looked different, talked differently, or dressed differently. Systematic disadvantage is real and consequential. But as educators, we can hasten the process of useful change if we teach our students the rules society plays by explicitly. We can give them generative tools to acquire and maintain privilege for their own ends. It doesn’t require expensive smart boards or computers or even books. That’s why I love giving mock interviews, write tutorials for paper writers, and askers for letters of recommendation. The best part about this approach is that the rules themselves can help to suggest actionable points of intervention. (Yes, I know I haven’t pointed any out yet. I’ve been setting up the system. The opportunities for change are coming, I promise.) But we’ve only read half the the story. Students need to be able to generate, identify, and exert privilege when the circumstances are right. And who better to teach them than educators?

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Thursday 28 April 2011 in Critical Thinking, Education, Society | No comments

This winter I ventured over to a part of campus that I hadn’t explored in the ten years I’ve been hanging around Harvard. In January, I took a two-week boot-camp style overview course on the ‘Foundations of Urban Education’ at HGSE. As many of you may know, I’ve always had a sweet tooth for teaching and learning. As an undergraduate I helped teach in the Mathematics for Teaching graduate program at the Extension School. After graduation I ended up at a publishing company where I wrote the chapter exams for middle school math books. (If you’re a sixth grader in California, I’m sorry.) At the same time I started in a spunky, free-thinking masters program in education at UMass Boston before getting whisked away to teach introductory computer science elsewhere in the university. Along the way, I hung around an urban charter school in Dorchester as part of my coursework. To be sure, education is really important to me.

So at first I wasn’t sure what to make of my HGSE course. These days I spend most of my time in the lab with delicate scientific instruments, goofy and less delicate scientists, and large, slippery, and quick-moving frogs. The pressures of real-time classroom conservation in a field that I’d been away from for so long with people who live and breathe this stuff everyday was, to be perfectly frank, intimidating. We had received our course pack and reading list in early December. Because time was at a premium, all of the lectures were prerecorded and posted ahead of time. And the teaching staff encouraged us to hit the books nearly a month before the first day of class. Yowsers. I had a lot of catching up to do.

But then the course started. I assumed course discussion would reflect the same sort of openness and thoughtfulness I had enjoyed at UMass. But if I learned anything in those classes, it was that I need to dispense with assumptions, suspend judgment, and, as we say sometimes in biology, let the data speak for itself. And, oh, did my classmates speak.

Never before had I encountered such persistent intellectual bullying. Not just at Harvard, but anywhere. It was shocking to me that some ideas could be heretical; certain topics entirely taboo. The main theme of the course was exactly what I expected: there are large groups of people (mostly blacks and Hispanics) who have been systematically disadvantaged throughout their history in this country. On the other side, another group (of wealthy, white men specifically) has manipulated mainstream social and political structures so that their children are systematically advantaged. To level the playing field we need a swift injection of money and multiculturalism. All of this seems completely reasonable if done reasonably. I want to give a voice and power back to the dispossessed; don’t you?

The sermon was predictable. Course material provided us with sound bites that we could wield quickly in a pinch. But the way I was supposed to think was fundamentally unchanged. In fact, it felt like that was by design. Opinions that weren’t recognizably aligned with the gospel truth were denied flatly. Those ideas that actively disagreed with mantra of the noble but disadvantaged youth—savage is no longer politically correct, but the sentiment is—were silenced. My classmates rode around on the white horse of moral supremacy to quash discussion and avoid making concrete suggestions for fear of criticism. Whenever someone took a definite stance, someone else inevitably asserted their fears that the dominant power structure was secretly creeping in to rob the poor of their humanity. Now don’t get me wrong, many times that was exactly the case.

The extent to which people who extolled the enlightened practice of listening burrowed their heads in the sand to hide from new ideas would have been laughable were these people not actual educators who interact with actual children. In group break-outs, my classmates railed against me (and other heretics) with passion but without evidence. During an exercise on curricular planning, for example, I suggested that mathematics isn’t itself hierarchical and that our classes need not be. Algebra doesn’t need to precede geometry. We just insist it does because of an accident of history that has been frozen into the curriculum. I didn’t mention my experience in math education. I wanted my ideas to stand for themselves. A classmate of mine insisted that math follows a linear order. Basics first. Advanced topics later. And that’s that.

Another time, I pointed to models of inequality that abolished race but were unable to dismantle financial segregation. Consequently I suggested that we should investigate how people acquire and maintain wealth and incorporate what we learn into our classrooms. This time another student, at a loss for words, told me that segregation was about race. It just is. Full stop. My TF consistently commented that my response papers could be stronger if concluded something that I believed contradicted my main arguments. Naturally, her arguments recapitulated the party line: in this case, that honors tracks are categorically bad. Like Lisa Loeb, I was only hearing negative, “No, no, no. Bad.”

My meeting during office hours with the professor was the most surprising example of this multiple-ways-of-knowing, except-in-this-class philosophy. Initially I had scheduled time with her to talk about careers in education, but by the time our appointment rolled around it was clear that our conversation would focus on my final paper and its subsequent rewrite. I should admit two things about my final exam. First off, I was confused about what a semi-reflective, semi-analytical paper ought to look like and my first guess was bad. My paper was disjointed and poorly written. Second, I put a lot of original thought into it. The version I submitted contained what I believe to be a thoughtful proposal for urban educators that integrated, if indirectly, most things we had read, discussed, or otherwise touched on in class. In lecture, our professor asked, “how can we best respect the diversity in our classrooms?” To come up with an answer, I defined respect and diversity, drew meaningful connections between them and proposed a framework for thinking about diversity which differed usefully from those found in our readings. But my response wasn’t “recognizable” to my TF or professor. And more, importantly, it seems, my paper didn’t explicitly retell the history of inequality in American schools. They needed a book report narration to prove that I had done the assigned readings. These were important, after all. At one point during our meeting I asked directly if I should just parrot back the readings one at a time for my redraft. At this point the professor responded that she would not usually want to sound so “anti-intellectual”, but that yes, that would indeed suffice.

The point of my favorite reading, one by Hirsch, argued that in order for a marginalized voice to be heard, it needs to speak the same language that those in power speak. The class had universally dismissed Hirsch, because they claimed (incorrectly) that he privileges rich, white viewpoints. In doing so, they proved his point: if you don’t sound intelligible, no one will treat you intelligently. So figure out how intelligent people sound and talk like them, but say what you think. The conversation I had with my professor, who specializes in civic education, marginalized voices, and social justice, did just the same. My point wasn’t recognizable, so it didn’t exist. (Like my TF, she also decided that my paper was about the necessary evils of tracking.) I’ll tell you how I rewrote my final paper in case you ever take a class at HGSE. There’s a recipe you can follow. It doesn’t require much thinking but guarantees success.

Race is Different than Money

Saturday 8 January 2011 in Education, Philosophy, Policy, Politics, Society | No comments

This winter I’m taking a course on urban education. Our first topic: segregation and desegregation in schools.

Firstly, what do we mean by segregation? As a working definition, I’ll offer that segregation is the spatial pattern of people across some attribute. So we could talk about segregation by race, by income, or by favorite ice cream flavor. Once we pick something to measure against, we find that every city is segregated according to this definition. What matters is in what way the segregation manifests and the consequences on the populace the pattern has. Segregation patterns can be uniform, with all groups distributed more or less evenly within a region, or clustered. Likewise, we could also calculate the extent to which subpopulations are isolated from each other—which also gives a rough estimation of how often members of one group is likely to run into someone outside of their group. I think when we talk about ‘segregated’ groups, we typically mean highly clustered populations that are isolated from the other groups in the city.

I don’t think that clustered, isolated groups are necessarily bad on their own. I love visiting the North End and Chinatown. Because they’re both T-accessible, it’s easy for me to get there. (Though, both neighborhoods have had rough pasts.) And Harvard Square is the nicest place I’ve ever lived. Score one for segregation!

Moral judgments aside, self-selection can have a big influence on patterns of segregation, at least it can in models. The positive feedback loops reinforce small, individual choice to generate large-scale patterning. Schelling’s model of segregation is a classic, good first example of what I mean. In this model individuals exhibit only a slight preference to have neighbors that are similar to them. The individuals in this model are not racist. (Or maybe they are. I don’t have a good functional definition of racism yet.) When individuals find themselves in a neighborhood that is too unlike themselves, they move somewhere else at random, possibly to a neighborhood more dissimilar from themselves than the last. Even with this mild, partially blind behavior, a totally segregated structure emerges.

In more relaxed models that completely ignore race, even more realistic patterns of segregation form. In this class of model, individuals simply choose to live in the nicest area they can afford. As if by magic, isolated poor and rich neighborhoods form. Depending on the details of the model, wealthy suburbs appear spontaneously. If we use socioeconomic status as a proxy for race, it’s the same old story. Except this time, we have a systems-level mechanism that generates isolated, poor communities that lack the power to advocate for equitable resources and very rich communities with disproportionately high share of public goods insulated by a buffer of middle class individuals. Race was not the cause; money was.

When was ask whether it’s morally justified for a white family to send their kid to a predominantly white school, I think it’s important to know what about the school is so attractive. Do all parents value differentiated cultural and social understanding across many kinds of experience? Are they likely to value it more than a pretty campus or reputation of success by its graduates? Sure, in some cases the choice may be motivated largely by racism. But I’d expect that in many cases, it’s mostly a matter of ensuring access to the most and best resources possible for their child. It just so happens that low-resource groups aggregate, even in the absence of race.

I believe that diversity (of background, experience, perspective, and the like) is important in schools because, as has been mentioned a few times by others, students learn how to navigate social situations outside of school from the people they meet in school. But when we talk about diversity, do we really mean racial diversity? As an example, imagine that an elite, wealthy, mostly white college in the Northeast has recently been chastised for admitting a student body that is not sufficient diverse. Consequently, the school begins recruiting wealthy black students from Africa, some of whom attended the same boarding schools as students already enrolled in the college. In time, the student body comes to be half white, half black with an even mix in all classes and housing situations. In what sense, if any, has the college increased diversity on campus? Do you think the college has produced the diversity they were previously lacking?

While I think that racial segregation is a problem, I don’t think race is necessarily the capital-C cause. In a world without racism, economic segregation will still exist. But I’m willing to bet that in a world with no financial disparity, a lot of the troubles we associate with racism would evaporate. And so, I think race will play a secondary part in the solution to segregation. In fact, I think that race may even obscure the issue of access to equitable education for all. (I’m not sure if that’s what we’re really trying to achieve, but I think it’s a good start.) Instead, I believe that the struggle of the American education system is one of power and status. As such, I think we should talk about resource allocation (including strategies that move students to resources as well as bringing more resources to students), causes and effects of socioeconomic segregation, and cultural and pedagogical practices that systematically discourage/motivate students to learn the skills required to become an informed and capable citizens.

Making Proper New Year’s Resolutions

Tuesday 1 January 2008 in Personal, Philosophy, Society | 3 comments

It that’s time again: the start of a new year. And while my cat hasn’t seemed to respond to the fleeting opportunity to mend one’s ways that the beginning of a new year brings, I have. In order to honor that age-old tradition of turning over a new leaf and calendar all at once, I’ve decided to make some new year’s resolutions of my own.

I applaud those people who pause long enough mentally to arrange their lives, reflect, and respond accordingly. I think it’s important to remove ourselves from the hustle and bustle of our own lives, make the familiar unfamiliar, and critically examine where we are and where we’re going. But in my experience, people have got the technique all wrong. Few people know how to come up with a proper resolution. And without a good resolution, how could you ever hope of using it to signpost your journey through the coming year? So I am here to impart my deep if not self-important insight to you, free of charge.

I remember my mother calling me one early January to wish me a happy new year and to share her resolution for the new year. “Josh, this year my resolution is to be happier,” she told me over the phone. Likewise, my dad resolved to make more money. And this year, for about twelve seconds, I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I managed my time more efficiently? Sure, these are all nice things to wish for, at least on the surface, but good resolutions they are not. (I hope my parents don’t mind my saying so here.) It’s hard to argue with anyone who wants the time and wealth it takes to be happy. (It takes wealth and time, doesn’t it?) So what makes these resolutions to bad? Well, two things.

A year is a long time, and it’s hard to keep track of long-term behavior when you experience it only in the moment. For this reason, avoid making resolutions that are fuzzy. Resolutions need to be stated in a way that gives you an easy way to know whether you achieved them. You need to build a measure into your goal, so you know whether you made it or not. In this way you have a mechanism to figure out how to adjust your actions if you’ve run off track. For example, instead of resolving to “be wealthier,” try to save 10% of your paycheck each week in account that you can’t touch until next year. It’s easy to check whether you’ve been saving over the course of a year. It’s a lot harder to evaluate your relative wealth from 365 days in the past.

Not only is it hard to know whether you’ve achieved a fuzzy goal, it’s hard to know how even to start. How in the world does someone go about “being happier” anyway? Resolutions should suggest a planned course of action. To kill two birds with one stone, I’m going to venture that a regular, regimented work-out routine would make me happier and force me to manage my time more efficiently. According to search trends on Google, it looks like a lot of people feel the same way. Look at how the number of searches on term “gym” spiked at the start of 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.

But we have to be careful to make sure that our resolution to go the gym has: (1) a well-defined goal, and (2) suggests a way to achieve that goal. So this year, I’ve resolved (2) to go to pool three days a week, so that I can (1) swim a mile without stopping. And, oh, to be more successful, too.

Happy new year, everyone.

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