Ethics

There’s an interesting post at Harper’s , a set of 6 questions by Scott Horton and responses by Nathaniel Raymond “a war-crimes investigator who analyzed these furtive communications for the FBI and who now heads Harvard’s Signal Program on Human Security and Technology,” referring to James Risen’s new work Pay and Price.  Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter the Obama administration is trying to jail because he won’t give up his confidential sources for information he published on Bush-Obama middle east policy (there’s a long recent interview with him archived on Democracy Now).  The Harper’s post is not about Risen, however, but about one of the things he reports on:  The American Psychological Association’s collusion and participation in torture, and its lies about that participation.  I won’t try to summarize a brief and very clear, article, but some key points — “the APA secretly allowed the CIA to assist in revising its ethics policies on whether psychologists could participate in interrogation,” that the APA initiated some of this collusion, and then lied about it.  As Raymond point out, “the 2002 amended APA ethics code, which was passed by APA’s council within days of the Yoo–Bybee memo [the Bush administration’s effort to create a legal defense for torture] being signed off on by the Bush Administration, removed core concepts of international medical ethics from the code. The new code allowed the Nuremberg Defense and eroded the Nuremberg Code” and that Office of Legal Council (OLC)

memos hinged on the health-professional involvement in the torture. The OLC memos state that a good-faith defense against torture charges could be made if experts, in this case psychologists, claimed that the application of the torture tactics did not cause “severe, long lasting mental pain and suffering.”

Such conflations of legality and professional knowledge in the service of physical torment, and the subordination of both to the political desires of the state, may be most visible in the exception, but are probably common everyday institutional practice.   Schools, which in the US are dominated by the discourses of psychologists and educational psychologists affiliated with the APA, which supply a repertoire of pathologizing discourses that supply a scientific sheen to everyday oppressions.   More fundamentally, our standard, seemingly neutral vocabularies are built on premises about the normal distribution of “intelligence,” the individuation of “motivation,” the morality of tracking children, or treating decisions they make with young as one-shot “opportunities” which they have a single chance at using.   Is there an ethical problem embedded in the central conceit of intra-psychological processes?  The very idea that we can speak of individuals and psychological processes apart  for socio-cultural world?

Authority and Influence in Academia

There’s a recent AP story showing that ‘school spending by the affluent is widening the wealth gap,’ As others have pointed out, however, the real problem is not that inequality allows some parents to spend a lot more on their kids than others (that is a problem, but not the big one) – the big one is that school funding itself is very unequal. It’s an old story, Kozol wrote Savage Inqualities decades ago, and Berliner and Biddle have written about it  – there are many studies, and expert testimony and reports done for funding lawsuits such as Williams vs. California.

Things are probably just getting worse, and in our supposed ‘recovery’ the states are still spending less.  The result is a reinforcement of the advantages already enjoyed by children in wealthy families.

I mention these thing because the “Ohio Education Research Center,” housed in the John Glenn School at Ohio State, but with faculty from the Educational Studies department ( among others), recently hosted its annual conference, and for its keynote invited Eric Hanushek.

Ohio Education Research Center Fall Conference

The Ohio Education Research Center is holding its 3rd Annual Conference, “Using Data to Inform Policy, Practice, and Teacher Success,” on Wednesday (10/1) from 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Eric Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow, Stanford University will deliver the keynote address.

 

It’s an interesting choice for several reasons. Hanushek works at the Hoover Institute, a right-wing think tank, and has made a name for himself over the years for expert testimony in school funding cases, in which he invariably argues that funding makes no difference, that class size makes no difference, that teacher tenure and unions are a problem, and that firing bad teachers would be one solution.   There is, of course, a lot written showing the importance of funding, and as the judge in one case where Hanushek testified diplomatically pointed out only a foold would fine that money does not matter in education” (in Adler, 2010, 107). The economist Moshe Adler provides a nice characterization of Hunushek’s favored methods – meta-analysis — in the case of class. Adler is using the critique of the economist Alan Kreuger from Princeton.

 

Instead of counting studies, Hanushek counted estimates within studies. Hanushek reviewed 59 studies and extracted from them 277 estimates. The number of estimates in a study varied widely. Two studies included 24 estimates each, and both studies, by the same authors, were based on the same data. Other studies provided only one estimate. As Krueger explains, Hanushek’s method of counting estimates instead of studies is misleading. There is no reason to assign a greater weight to a study just because it has more estimates. . . . Krueger and Whitmore discovered that if studies were counted instead of estimates, the ratio between those that find class size does matter versus that find that it does not is actually four to one. (Adler, 2010, pp. 104-105).

 

The evidence on class size effects is complex: If you shrink classes and fill them with unqualified TFA teachers in schools without resources you’re not likely to be doing the kids any favors; but Hanushek’s methods as described above are problematic to say the least (though he does defend them) – and of course, he knew exactly what he was doing, and why.

 

More recently, Hanushek was one of only two witnesses called by the plaintiffs in the Vergara trail that ended teacher tenure in California. As described in the LA School Report:

Hanushek spent most of his time on the stand defending his belief that using value-added measures of teachers is critical for evaluating their effectiveness and supporting a recent Stanford report that showed LA Unified charter schools did a better job educating students than traditional district schools.

While plaintiffs attorney Marcellus McRae steered clear of asking about an even more recent Stanford report, a survey of all California charters that showed they performed about the same as regular public schools, a lawyer for the unions, Peder Thoreen, went right at it, only to be swatted back by objections because Hanushek said he had been out of the country when the report was released, and he was not entirely familiar with it.

That struck some of the lawyers as a bit disengenuous in that Hanushek’s wife, Macke Raymond, wrote both reports.

“It is a pretty outrageous statement given that it was written by his wife,” Jonathan Weisglass, a lawyer for the defense, said during an afternoon recess. “And it, in fact, says that for the entire state of California, that the performance of charter schools is equal to or worse than traditional public schools. It’s far less favorable to charter schools than the LA study. So it’s really kind of odd and surprising that he was only familiar with that one.”

Mainstream education writers regularly point out such flaws and conflicts of interest, but none of this damages Hanushek’s credibility (on value-added measures of teaching, see e.g., http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/26/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-1/). He and colleague Paul Peterson (who famously once described himself as a “Jedi attacker” for vouchers) are much in demand by the corporate right (see them team up together on Wall Street Journal video) — and they get invited to keynote things like the “Ohio Education Research Center”

 

But it’s important to realize that one reason none of this counts against them is that what Hanushek does with data is not unusual for economists. Diesing (1985) showed long ago that the neoliberal ‘Nobel Prize’ winner (and father of school vouchers) Milton Friedman played loose with data: Friedman’s practice was to present his theory as the only one plausible, and then constantly adjusts and interprets the evidence to fit that theory:

 

1. If raw or adjusted data are consistent with [the theory] he reports them as confirmation. . . .

2. If the fit with expectations is moderate; he exaggerates the fit . . .

3. If particular data points or groups of points differ from the predicted regression, he invents ad hoc explanations for the divergence . . .

4. If a whole set of data disagree with predictions, adjust them until they do agree . . .

5. If no plausible adjustment suggests itself, reject the data as unreliable . . .

6. If data adjustment or rejection are not feasible, express puzzlement (pp. 65-66).

 

Mirowski (2013) in Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste gives some context for this:

 

Orthodox economists tend to see nothing wrong with conflicts of interest, since they have generally subscribed to the precept that market arrangements are capable in principle of monitoring, restricting, and resolving any such conflicts in the course of normal operations.   . . .This has the curious implication that, whenever the economic orthodoxy has written about the “problem of corruption,” it parsed the problem as besetting only those individuals working in the public sector. Since everyone else employed in the private marketplace is known to be motivated by private gain, and the market turns that into public welfare, then by definition, there are no conflicts of interest in the private sector, only lax imposition of contractual protects. . . . Gary Becker [another neoliberal ‘Nobel Prize’ winner] boiled this down to a pity epigram in his Business Week column: “if we abolish the state, we abolish corruption” (p. 220)

 

In other words, the best way to avoid corruption is by selling your opinions to the highest bidder (that is, since no one really ‘bids,’ to those who pay best). This may be unfair to economists – some of whom really believe what they say – but that’s the implication:

In the neoliberal playbook, intellectuals are inherently shady characters precisely because they sell their pens-for-hire to private interests: that is their inescapable lot in life as participants in the marketplace of ideas. It is the market as superior information processor that ultimately sorts out what the masses should deem as truth, at least in the fullness of time. This constitutes the gist of the Robert Barro position [another neoliberal economist from the same team as Hanushek, Becker, and Friedman] that, as long as they keep paying us, we must be right. (Mirowski, 2013, p. 224).

 

We seem to be doing our part here at OSU – it’d be interesting to know how much Hanushek made for his keynote.

Child Poverty in Small Cities

We sometimes get fixated on the big cities — it’s easy, most of the decent media outlets remaining are centered in big cities, the major universities cluster around them, and that’s where a lot of the population is.  One consequence is that there’s much less research done in small cities, which both contributes to stereotypes — for example, stereotypes about the poor, about “the urban,” and so forth — and raises questions about how the things we see in the big cities play out in different political-economic-geographical ecologies.   Here’s a short bit that suggests the possibility of different dynamics of poverty.  It’s not that there’s no research on any of these places, of course,

http://blog.metrotrends.org/2013/02/high-rates-child-poverty-hidden-smaller-metro-areas/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MetrotrendsBlog+%28MetroTrends+Blog%29

School Funding in Hell

I mentioned this in class last night in passing:  A school that borrows $105 Million and has to pay back $1 Billion — over 40 years, it’s true; let the children deal with it, it’s for their benefit, right?  In hock in the cradle.

Inequality in a world context

There’s a new Oxfam report out showing that the annual income of the richest 100 people in the world could end World Poverty “four times over.”  This ignores a lot, of course, such as the money needed to create the infrastructures to distribute money, exploitation within families, the problem of economies that don’t generating enough goods or jobs, the ecological degradation that might result from governments taking the easiest way to jack up their commerce, etc.  Perhaps there’s really only enough to end world poverty once or twice over. 

Student Debt – Historical Background

Moe Tkacik had an excellent post a couple of weeks ago on “The Unconstitutional 40 Years War On College Students” (posted by her earlier on Reuters):  What she explains is how it came to be that student loans college are “non-dischargeable”: that is, you can’t get out from under them through bankruptcy — unless you can prove in court, as described in New York Times article yesterday that describes the brutal case of a recent graduate here in Ohio), that there’s a “certainty of hopelessness” to your situation.  The Times article references a 1987 appellate court decision that defined the standards:

the district court adopted a standard for “undue hardship” requiring a three-part showing: (1) that the debtor cannot maintain, based on current income and expenses, a “minimal” standard of living for herself and her dependents if forced to repay the loans; (2) that additional circumstances exist indicating that this state of affairs is likely to persist for a significant portion of the repayment period of the student loans; and (3) that the debtor has made good faith efforts to repay the loans

The case law on this is accessible on the web — the standard is used in 9 circuits as of 2011; one can apply for discharge, but it’s an “adversarial” proceeding and according to one analysis  the number of debtors who apply for relief is small — though the data (from 2007) seems problematic and the reasons for the small number is unclear.

Why do I keep on about student debt?  Well, it’s interesting (not the right word) to be on the outer edge of a Ponzi bubble (working in an institution increasingly dependent on student debt), and considering how higher education is being reconstructed as a bubble economy; but I’m also interested this new way of making and using futures:

In essence, the logic of the system is that the lenders own your future to the extent that your time and energy must be directed to repaying them:  And the only way to get out of this system is to prove that your future is worthless.

More on Student Debt

There was a 1/4 decent Bloomberg story yesterday on “Indentured Students” — better than some in providing a bit of history, as well as some context.  On the other hand, it places most of the blame on the rise of for-profit colleges and federal policy loosening access to loans — quoting the execrable William Bennett as an authority.  For-profits do deserve some blame (as do private lenders), but it’s also important to point to the ways tax cuts and state policy pushed public universities to rely more and more on income from tuition and fees — that is, on debt.  Given that many of the degrees being obtained are positional goods at best, I’d label this all a Ponzi scheme rigged to benefit the banks — but people have already been doing that for a while.  The article also suggests that we’d be better off sending more people to community colleges for 2-year or vocational degrees.  I think community colleges are great, but 1) job preparation isn’t or shouldn’t be the only reason for college, and 2) the Northern European systems referred to in the article operate within a different “variety” of capitalism (at least partially) — simply changing educational preparation wouldn’t do the trick.

Indices of Neoliberalism: Wages and Education1973-2009

From the Economic Policy Institute, a simple chart of pay, High School compared to College, men to women, from 1973 (the beginning date for the current economic long wave, and key shift in the world economic system that came with the breakdown of Bretton Woods system) to 2009.  The percentages in the right hand columns run 1979-2009.  Note the 1973-2009 differences as well.

And a Student Protest in California

And for a contrast to the Canadian Strike, from the May 6th New York Times:

NORTHRIDGE, Calif. — Angry about tuition increases and cuts in courses and enrollment, a dozen students at California State University have taken their protest beyond marches — their usual tactic — and declared a hunger strike.

On Thursday, the second day of the fast, supporters were preparing a kale, apple and celery juice concoction for the protesters at the Northridge campus. The students have pledged to

To read more ….

How Students in Quebec Organized Their Strike

The Real News Network has a very nice series of relatively short videos on Students and Teachers Defend Public Education

The most recent one features an interview with three organizers of the massive university student strike in Quebec: