Exciting Updates from the Interactivity Foundation!

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Keiva Hummel

We wanted to share a couple of updates from NCDD member org The Interactivity Foundation, including some resources that may be helpful for those working on dialogue and deliberation efforts on campuses. First off, IF recently gave their website a fresh look and if you haven’t seen it yet, we encourage you to head on over there to check it out! Secondly, they posted about a day-long workshop organized by The Deliberative Pedagogy Institute last Fall, which featured several heavy hitters from the NCDD Coalition. In the post, IF kindly shared their Student Facilitation Workbook for free and a reminder about a new D&D text called, Creating Space for Democracy: A Primer on Dialogue and Deliberation in Higher Education, that has an incredible line-up of contributors.

You can read the article below and find the original version on IF’s site here.

Why do we need deliberative pedagogy?

Why do we need deliberative pedagogy? The short answer is that we can’t solve complex social problems if we can’t get together and talk about them. It seems simple, right? But in our current era of political polarization and retreat into comfortable, familiar social bubbles—where do we get together to have genuine interactions with people who have different opinions, views, and values? And have we lost (if ever collectively had) the skills to productively talk with one another once we are at the table together?

The Deliberative Pedagogy Institute: Creating Space for Democracy, hosted by Providence College and co-sponsored by Campus Compact for Southern New England, offered a full-day workshop on November 15th for faculty, staff, students, and administrators designed to deepen their understanding of current campus-based democratic practices that foster dialogue, inclusion, and civic action at colleges and universities.

Through plenary sessions, workshops, and networking, participants were able to:

Learn about various approaches to dialogue and deliberation;
Develop an understanding of “what works” to empower students to talk across differences, build leadership, and practice civic agency; and
Build a network and relationships with practitioners.

Presenters at the Deliberative Pedagogy Institute represented some of the leading voices of the deliberative democracy movement, including representatives from Everyday Democracy, Essential Partners, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, New Hampshire Listens, the National Issues Forums Institute, the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, and the Interactivity Foundation.

IF fellow, Shannon Wheatley Hartman, facilitated a workshop on “How to Design a Course That Empower Students to Be Facilitators of Exploratory Discussion.” Using IF pedagogy, modules, and a Facilitation Workbook, participants explored how best to incorporate student facilitation into the classroom and “level up” skills and capacity to then organize campus-wide and community-based exploratory discussions. To learn more about IF educational approaches and materials, please contact Shannon Wheatley Hartman at esw@interactivityfoundation.org

Also available for purchase on Amazon is the Creating Space for Democracy: A Primer on Dialogue and Deliberation in Higher Education.

You can read this article on IF’s site at www.interactivityfoundation.org/why-do-we-need-deliberative-pedagogy/.

“The Pragmatist’s Call to Democratic Activism in Higher Education” is now out

Posted on February 12, 2020 by etweber@gmail.com

Published in Essays in Philosophy 21, Issue 1/2 (2020): 29-45.

I’m excited to announce that my latest paper has been published in the journal, Essays in Philosophy, volume 21, issue 1/2, in 2020. If you want to read the paper, you can click on the image below or click here.

My abstract for the paper reads as follows:

This essay defends the Pragmatist’s call to activism in higher education, understanding it as a necessary development of good democratic inquiry. Some criticisms of activism have merit, but I distinguish crass or uncritical activism from judicious activism. I then argue that judicious activism in higher education and in philosophy is not only defensible, but both called for implicitly in the task of democratic education as well as an aspect of what John Dewey has articulated as the supreme intellectual obligation, namely to ensure that inquiry is put to use for the benefit of life.

I’m very grateful to Dr. Ramona Ilea for her excellent work as editor of the journal.

The post “The Pragmatist’s Call to Democratic Activism in Higher Education” is now out first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.

discussing school choice

Posted on February 11, 2020 by Peter

In my public policy course, we are discussing school choice as an opportunity for exploring theoretical issues (What is a market versus a state? What is a public good versus a private good?); empirical questions (What happens when you implement various systems of choice? How should we measure the outcomes?), and normative principles (What counts as an acceptable outcome, or an ideal outcome?) Most policy questions involve a combination of mandates and choice, or choices structured and constrained by laws. School choice is therefore exemplary of broader issues.

Some quick notes from the readings so far:

1. Chubb, John E., and Terry M. Moe. America’s public schools: Choice is a panacea. The Brookings Review 8.3 (1990): 4-12.

This is a classic (1990) manifesto for the modern school choice movement. It presents a radical proposal, and is therefore not based on data or experience from the past. The main argument is theoretical, applying a certain strand of public choice theory. The authors argue that if you favor any particular approach to education, there is little point in advocating it to government-run schools, which work in the interests of government officials. The only reform that can succeed is to make schools accountable to parents, who will then demand the education they want–squeezing out bad practices and supporting a diverse array of schools that meet their diverse preferences. Note, however, that in their proposal, the government remains the funder of education, which is therefore as much a public good as Medicare is, or schooling in a country like the Netherlands that uses vouchers. Bernie Sanders’ college proposal is like theirs for k-12 schooling.

2. Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Michael C. Johanek, Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice is Really About

Johanek contributes a chapter on the history of how American kids have chosen, or been placed in, particular schools since colonial days. Ben-Porath presents and analyzes the main conflicting principles of justice that arise when we consider who should attend which schools, and who should decide. It’s a complex and wide-ranging book, but if I had to derive one summary statement, this would be it: We do not face a decision about whether or not to implement “school choice.” Which school you attend is inevitably a function of choice under constraints. The appropriate question is: Who should choose among which options for whom, and how?

3. Robert Pondiscio, How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice (2019)

Pondiscio embeds himself in a school within the controversial charter network called Success Academy. He has written a nuanced and beautifully reported account that eludes easy categorization. But again, if I had to summarize it, I’d say something like this: Success Academy actually works extraordinarily well for the goals that its parents and teachers sincerely value–best defined not as high test scores but as winning a competition that they consider worthy. The school works because the parents and teachers share these goals, and both sacrifice to make it succeed. Although the parents are diverse individuals, a common profile is a culturally conservative working-class family of color that values discipline and is especially concerned about the variety of racism that manifests as low expectations. These families often thrive at Success Academy and have a right to the choice that it offers. But the model wouldn’t scale very far, because it depends on the specific value commitments and capacities of its parents and teachers.

4. Abdulkadiroglu, A., Angrist, J., Dynarski, S., Kane, T., & Pathak, P. (2011). Accountability and flexibility in public schools: Evidence from Boston’s charters and pilots. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 126(2), 699-748.

This is a quantitative study that claims to measure causation, whereas Pondicio’s book is a qualitative study that offers a perspective on what it’s like to be inside one school. (We need both methods.) According to this paper, being randomly selected to attend and then actually attending a Boston charter school is associated with higher test scores regardless of other factors. However, random admission to a Boston “pilot” school is not associated with higher scores. Both charters and pilots are choice schools that use lotteries to admit students. The main difference is that the pilot schools come under the standard union contract, while the charters do not. The charter schools have smaller classes and longer hours, probably because they pay their non-unionized teachers less/hour. A reader could conclude that unions are the problem–or that spending more money on unionized teachers would allow regular schools to equal charters. It is also worth considering whether the measured outcomes (test scores) are what we should value.

5. Meira Levinson, “Is Pandering Ethical? Power, Privilege, and School Assignment”

Levinson describes the relatively new Boston Public School (BPS) assignment plan. Every child is assigned a basket of schools that includes all the local ones plus an equal mix of good, medium, and bad schools (as measured by scores) from across the city. Parents rank their preferences, and competing choices are randomly settled by an algorithm.

Putting distant schools in every student’s basket improves equity, because poor neighborhoods have worse-scoring schools. If every child had an equal chance of attending any BPS school across town, that would maximize equity, but it would sacrifice convenience and neighborhood schools. It would also alienate a set of middle class parents who believe in equity and diversity, do not argue that they deserve better schools, but would leave BPS if their kids were assigned to “bad” schools. If they stay in BPS, they improve it.

What to do about these families? Levinson says it’s not a matter of compromising, because they don’t claim a right that needs to be balanced against other parents’ claims. It’s not a question of coercing them, because they can leave. She thinks “pandering” is the best description, and it may be ethically obligatory to pander given unjust social contexts.

how many foundings has the US had?

Posted on February 7, 2020 by Peter

Here are six answers to the question in my heading. Arguments can be made in favor of each.

The founding took place from 1776-1789, from the Declaration to the Constitution. Although the architects of the new republic sought to recycle some existing materials, they drew a new blueprint for the base on which our system stands. It was designed to be alterable–and it has been altered–but the foundation is still recognizable.
The foundation was poured in 1492 and 1619. Once Europeans began seizing land from indigenous people and importing enslaved Africans to work that land for them, the basic arrangement was set. The 1788 Constitution essentially preserved that structure. Some better things have been built on top of it, but the original floor is still down there, not far below the surface and determining what can be constructed above.
The social contract has been renegotiated at several key points: 1776 (Declaration), 1781 (Articles of Confederation), 1788-9 (Constitution), 1864-5 (post-Civil War amendments), 1938-45 (the Supreme Court reverses itself and allows the welfare state), 1954 (Brown v Board), and arguably again since the 1980s. These shifts are fairly fundamental and not well described by treating the 1788-9 contract as still foundational. The 21st-century political system is incompatible with the Framers’ plan, but that is because we have chosen to lay new foundations.
The United States was founded in 1788-9. In the 1900s, we ignored some of its basic principles, such as the list of enumerated powers, without explicitly and legitimately renegotiating them. The foundation is still in place, but we have built unsound structures on top of or beyond it. The Constitution is “in exile” (a phrase apparently more used by critics of this view than proponents of it).
The actual political-economic system in which we live is fundamentally based on publicly traded corporations, industrial production, organized labor, regulatory agencies, credentialed professions, public and private bureaucracies, mass media, mass schooling, securities markets, electronic networks, science (as a set of powerful institutions), databases of people and objects, and a permanent war machine. These elements are not envisioned in the US Constitution, which influences them somewhat but hardly determines them. The same basic structure is evident, for example, in Canada. The modern foundation has been poured one layer at a time, but if you had to pick a symbolic date for this option, it might be 1908, when the first Model T rolled off the assembly line.
There is no foundation. A society is not well understood as a base and superstructure or as a single game with basic rules. It’s a complex, emergent system best understood as whole series of overlapping and interacting institutions, each with rules of its own that affect the other institutions’ rules. All is flux.

I realize that most people don’t explicitly discuss this question, yet I think that today’s opposing ideological camps would each answer it differently. It could even serve as an ideological Rorschach Test.

youth in the Iowa caucuses

Posted on February 6, 2020 by Peter

Posted just now by CIRCLE:

Young people had an extraordinary impact on the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, representing a higher share of the overall vote than in previous caucuses and propelling Sen. Bernie Sanders to one of the top spots, according to a youth turnout analysis released by researchers from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE)—the preeminent, non-partisan research center on youth engagement at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life.
Young people (ages 17-29) turned out at an estimated rate of 8% and made up a 24% share of all caucusgoers, the highest youth share since CIRCLE has been tracking Iowa entrance polls.

Young people strongly backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (48%), followed by former Mayor Pete Buttigieg (19%) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (12%).

Come Work in Prison Education at Georgetown University

Posted on February 6, 2020 by Joshua Miller

We’re hiring two new staff for the education team at PJI, which I will supervise.

(We’re also hiring a Department Administrator!)

I’m incredibly proud of the work that we do at the Prisons and Justice Initiative–but this has been an especially powerful year. After the Pivot graduation this June, we all thought we had settled into a rhythm, until a confluence of events suggested that we’d be able to expand the Scholars program in the corrections system in the state of Maryland, with a bachelor’s degree. Now the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has agreed to help fund that expansion.

Prison Scholars Program Receives $1 Million Mellon Foundation Grant

Georgetown has been committed to teaching in prisons in one way or another for almost forty years. The support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow us to redouble that commitment, with a bachelor’s degree and an expanded footprint in Maryland. We love to showcase the genius of students who are incarcerated—both their greatness and their goodness—because it points to the more fundamental fact that they are our neighbors and fellow citizens.

Because of mass incarceration, there are millions of people incarcerated in the US who would not be incarcerated in most of the rest of the world: generations of should-have-been undergraduates in prisons and jails who have been waiting for their chance to be that first year student in a philosophy class or to write that senior thesis on trade policy. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Georgetown is going to educate the next generation of formerly-incarcerated leaders who will help to reverse the policies that trapped them.

I’ve always argued that punishment requires mutual responsibility, and that one form of that mutual responsibility is a willingness to both teach and learn. We need to respond to harm with something other than more harm. Georgetown gets this, in part because of the Christian commitment to “visit the prisoner” and the Jesuit ideal of cura personalis, “care for the whole person.” That pedagogical ideal ends up meaning more than just “a sound mind in a sound body.” It means a commitment to serious attention to others, even students and even those we tend to ignore. Ignatius—himself formerly incarcerated—put it this way: “be slow to speak and patient in listening to all.” It’s the model for what we’re trying to do with prison education.

If those sound like your values, please apply!

Midlife

Posted on February 5, 2020 by Peter

The young speak to say something, to make a name.
The old repeat to hold themselves the same. 
Midlife is for any age, a state of mind.
It’s saying what you think you’d better say,
Like it or not, because the words, not you,
Might budge some dense thing in someone’s way
(Although by speaking you are using time,
That dwindling light, that sinking sun).
Your words are not true, not original,
Not worth repeating, especially by you;
They have their purpose, they take their turn.
Midlife is the breadwinner, the driver,
The gentle nudge and the picture-taker. 
Tender to those who speak to speak, and those 
Who sing one more time what they fear to lose.

inequality in India and the UK, 1930 and today

Posted on February 3, 2020 by Peter

(Baton Rouge, LA) In 1930, Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy of India–one of innumerable such letters. His thesis: British rule in India was a “curse.” Among his complaints: the Viceroy was paid five thousand times as much as the average Indian, whereas the British Prime Minister was paid only 90 times as much as the average Briton. Gandhi didn’t quite spell it out, but I think he implied that a government that depends on the consent of the governed will not overpay its leaders, but an empire may.

Today, India has a Prime Minister of its own. His official governmental salary is about US $26,400 per year, which is about 414 times the median income of his countrymen ($616/year).* That ratio is less than a tenth of the ratio in 1930. As Gandhi would have predicted, democratic India pays its leader much less than imperial Britain did, at least in comparison to ordinary incomes.

PM Modi declares assets of about US $350,000, but I have no idea whether such disclosures are credible. Of course, his office comes with many perks–not only the usual ones (official residences, travel, etc.), but also things like free tolls on all national highways.

Gandhi didn’t calculate the ratio between the UK Prime Minister’s salary and the average Indian salary in his time, but based on his numbers, I think it was 640-t0-one. Today, the UK Prime Minister is paid just under US $200,000 per year. That is about five times the mean individual salary in the UK, 100 times the mean income in India, and 7.5 times the salary of his Indian counterpart. The first two ratios represent a considerable improvement in equity compared to 1930. Still, the PM’s salary (by itself) would put him in the top 1% in Britain. Boris Johnson is reported to hold assets of about $2 million. And he has a nice free house in Downing Street.

If someone today were paid 5,000 times as much as a median Indian, as the Viceroy was in 1930, that would translate to about US $3 million in annual income. That would be much higher than any government salary but far lower than the highest salaries in India’s private sector. Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar earned US $65 million last year. That is 105,000 times the median income. Mukesh Ambani, who leads Reliance Industries, has an estimated net worth of $58.4 billion.

What do these changes suggest? First, democratic and independent nations do put downward pressure on the salaries of their leaders. In fact, US $200,000 is a modest salary for the leader of the whole British Government, if one compares it to CEOs’ salaries in the private sector. However, democracies still tolerate large gaps between the pay of their political leaders and average people–perhaps wisely, to attract talent to the government. And they offer sometimes surprising perks that are not only valuable in market terms but also symbolically distance leaders from citizens. (Every Indian toll booth announces that the top officers of the national government can drive through for free.)

Meanwhile, independent democratic nations are currently tolerating enormous gaps between the average income and the highest salaries in their private sectors.

*The mean income in India is $2,016. I find that number less meaningful, but Gandhi may have been using the mean in 1930.

The High School Civic Literacy Exam in Florida

Posted on January 31, 2020 by stevemasy

Today, the state of Florida Department of Education released guidance on the High School Civic Literacy Exam to be piloted this year across the state. Some key details of this exam and the pilot administration:

It will be piloted in Spring of 2020 and is open to students in grades 9-12.
This year, it will not be tied to school accountability or student graduation.
IT IS THE SAME EXAM THAT WAS DEVELOPED FOR THE COLLEGE LEVEL. The good news here is that the State Board of Education is developing a rule that requires higher education institutions to accept passing scores achieved in high school as meeting the college requirement. This rule will be retroactive to include students that take it during this pilot year.
100 questions, multiple choice, 60% to pass
The state encourages students enrolled in US Government and Economics courses (AP, Honors, and Regular) to take the assessment, but it is not tied to any course and is open to students 9-12.
The department will provide districts with the 100-question exam and an answer key via ShareFile.
Districts will administer the test in a process similar to other local assessments and may choose to deliver the test to students on paper, electronically, or a mix of methods.
The test duration is 100 minutes. Districts may choose to administer the test in two sessions; however, all students should be tested on the same number of items at the same time to help mitigate test security concerns.
The test may be scheduled at any time before the end of the school year and does not need to coincide with other statewide testing this spring.
Additional details will be communicated to district assessment coordinators in the near future.

Questions about the exam should be directed to Mike DiPierro at FDOE. They will be releasing a resource page soon, but you may also visit the various university pages for a collection of resources as well (such as UF or UCF, for example). The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship will be adding a module to Civics360 to help address this assessment for the 2020-2021 school year.

where to focus your political energies

Posted on January 31, 2020 by Peter

Everyone should read Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change by my friend and colleague Eitan Hersh. It is a gentle and disarming critique of how many of us spend our time and energy as citizens. It comes with valuable suggestions for how to improve our impact. Read the whole thing, but for a teaser, see Eitan’s recent New York Times op-ed, “Listen Up, Liberals: You Aren’t Doing Politics Right” (subtitled “Politics is about getting power to enact an agenda. And the only way to do that is face-to-face organizing.”)

My response is to audit my own political activity to select work that meets these criteria: 1) The issues and problems are important. 2) I might be able to shift some people’s opinions or behavior by expressing my views to individuals who trust–or could trust–me. And 3) These people have–or could have–influence over decisions, e.g., by voting in an actually contested upcoming election, by changing their own organizations, by building new organizations, or in other ways.

Using those criteria, here are some possible foci for my own attention, ranked from most valuable (#1) to least worthy (#7). Your list will be different, because everyone has a unique set of assets and opportunities.

Advocate for changes in the state and local policies and the available materials for civic education in US schools. This is not the world’s most important issue. (It isn’t the earth’s climate.) But I have been paid to work on it for decades and have some comparative advantages in terms of credibility, information, access, and networks. Then again, I must be careful not to be satisfied with working on this issue, for which I am paid and assessed. I should also be engaged on other issues in my own time.
Advocate for affordable housing in Cambridge, MA, where I live. Dense and affordable housing in a city with excellent public schools would be good for the climate and for racial and economic justice. Housing is a salient and contested issue in our city. Most neighbors believe in affordable housing abstractly, but the proposed policies are deeply contested. I hold views on the matter, and if I invested my time, I might be able to make persuasive arguments to undecided voters within my own networks of trust, and expand those networks.
Form relationships and exchange ideas with people in one or more other countries, especially countries that do not get a huge amount of attention in the US and about which I might have some direct knowledge. Even though the geographical scale is large, people can increase the odds of peace and understanding through informal diplomacy and by educating their own fellow citizens back home.
Advocate for policies within Tufts, where I work. I do this every week while sitting in committee meetings or sending emails. Sometimes, the issues are significant. I have an increment of influence here. But I also face both practical and ethical limitations as a middle-manager. There are issues on which it is appropriate and important for me to advocate, and others that really aren’t in my domain. Drawing that line can be an ethical challenge for anyone who works within a Weberian organization.
Advocate specific policies to presidential primary candidates and legislators. I am not going to accomplish anything by taking a stand on the major policy issues of the day, such as single-payer healthcare or Iran. But there are specific issues on which I might have some special expertise and credibility and an ability to be mildly influential. For example, I believe that a Green New Deal (of any scale) must incorporate citizen participation in order to be effective. This is something I could advocate.
Take and express a view on the Democratic presidential primary candidates. Millions of others are also doing that, and almost every point that could be made has been made. Still, my social network includes a wide distribution of Democratic primary voters, from strong Democratic Socialists to committed centrists, and I suppose I might shift someone’s view by making a good point. (The reason I haven’t done this yet is that I am deeply torn and don’t know where I stand. Maybe I should just figure that out for myself and quietly cast my secret ballot on March 3.)
Take and express a position on the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. The decision-makers are the members of the US Senate. My senators (Warren and Markey) are 100% likely to convict. Approximately 1 bazillion words have already been said or written about this topic. Among those words are many annoying ones that I could criticize all day. But everyone I know has already made up their minds. I have no special expertise, influence, or leverage. This is one of those bright, shiny objects that lures my attention and distracts me from actually improving the world.

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