Lecture vs. Discussion and Its Consequences

I employ a number of different pedagogical methods in the classroom. It varies between courses and lessons. I get the impression, though, that I do a lot more traditional lecturing of the "sage on a stage" variety than my colleagues. I often do this because I worry that classroom discussion can encourage students to feel entitled to uninformed opinions. You don't get to have an opinion on moral/ethical issues like whether racism is bad or on matters of social fact like the poverty rate. Lecture encourages students to foster a critical respect for experts. This isn't to say that there is no place for discussion in my classroom, just that I am careful with how it is used.

Imagine that the world has been one big epidemiology classroom for the past two years. How much listening have students done to the experts? How many students have opted to debate those experts? What have been the consequences?

Rethinking Honors Education

My small, public liberal arts campus just transformed an honors program into an honors college, helped along with a very healthy donation from a wealthy emeritus professor. Over the years, I have taught a handful of honors sections of a frosh-level course. To be honest, they have been among the most rewarding teaching experiences of my career. They were what I imagined teaching at a liberal arts college would be. The students were enthusiastic. They wanted to be in the room. They interacted with me and with each other. They welcomed challenge--at least as much we humans can actually welcome that kind of thing. They were hardworking. Frankly, though, most of them were no more or less intelligent than their counterparts in non-honors sections, as far as I could tell. I don't have systematically-collected data to confirm this, but the honors students seemed to be disproportionately white, middle-class, and women.

I have found myself asking several questions about honors education (HE) over the years, though:

1. What is the purpose of HE?
2. Are honors students better off having HE?
3. What do HE programs mean for students from marginalized backgrounds, who are not typically in HE?

Here are some answers that I've worked through:

1. Disappointingly, I've yet to hear why we do HE articulated clearly. Inasmuch as there is explanation, it draws on much of the same mission, values, and buzzwords that are used on our campus to articulate what we do more broadly.
2. I suspect that the kind of student who would qualify for HE is the kind of student who is likely to be successful with or without HE.
3. My fear is that HE diverts resources from those who would benefit most to those who need it the least.

What the literature in the sociology of education shows is that education, at least as we currently do it, is not an equalizer; instead, it does social reproduction. Honors education seems like a quintessential example. Imagine how much more of an effect that million-dollar donation could have had for at-risk students (i.e. BIPOC, lower-class, first-generation, etc.). It's difficult for me to justify. While honors students are likely to succeed in college and beyond without much help from us, at-risk students benefit from any help that we can offer.

So You've Got an Opinion about the Local Schools?

My wife and I are frustrated with friends and neighbors who express ill-informed and socially-harmful opinions about our local public schools, several of whom have moved out of district, or threaten to, or enroll their kids in private schools. We have one child in kindergarten and another who will start preK in a couple years so the issue is suddenly more salient in our social circles. When confronted with the topic, I often find myself mute or inarticulate so I wanted to get a few somewhat disjointed ideas down and clarified.

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You think you're entitled to an opinion?
In a democratic society where your individual beliefs and behaviors have an effect on the rest of us, you are not entitled to uninformed or demonstrably-wrong opinions.

You've heard bad things about the schools from your friends?
Anecdotes and hearsay are necessarily biased. You need data.

You think schools are really important?
While I would agree in some ways, schools do a lot less than we give them credit for. Parents' education level, income, etc. are far more predictive of their children's successes/failures later in life than anything that goes on in school. If you're white and relatively-affluent, your kids are going to be just fine no matter where they go to school.

You've seen data that show that these schools are "bad?"
Just because it's data doesn't make it useful. If the report doesn't control for race and class, it's useless. Cross-sectional data (e.g. reading scores at one point in time) are misleading. Panel data that track progress over time—while accounting for race, class, etc.—are necessary. The bar should not be "Do kids in this school have good test scores?" or even "Do kids' test scores improve while they're in this school?" Instead, we should ask, "Does kids' learning improve while they're in this school even after we control for demographics like race and class?" We shouldn't be surprised when a school that is mostly white and affluent has "good" test scores, but are they as good as we would expect given that they are white and affluent? Are they showing improvement over time or are they just statically "good." Conversely, we shouldn't be surprised (even though we should be angered) when a school that is mostly black and poor has "bad" test scores, but are they as "bad" as we would expect given that they are black and poor? Are they showing improvement over time even if they are still "bad" in general?

You think your child deserves every "advantage?"
Education is a public good. In other words, we all benefit from an increase in the overall average quality/level of education. It's not (or at least shouldn't be) zero-sum.

You think this school is unsafe?
Too often (and often unwittingly), "unsafe" is code for "too black." It's racist (even if you're not a racist person). Bad things happen, and we all want kids to be safe. Often, we overlook or are shielded from the bad things that happen in "good" schools. At the same time, we focus on the bad things we hear about happening in "bad" schools (irrespective of their veracity) because they confirm our preconceptions. Regardless, poor and black students deserve to be as safe as affluent and white students.

You think "choice" is important?
Your economic advantage that allows you to move into the school district of your choice (or to opt into a private or charter school) means that you take your tax dollars, your charitable fundraising dollars, and your political capital with you, leaving behind those who are the most socioeconomically and politically marginalized. Choice is constrained for those who are poor.

Think your kid's different because they're special needs or gifted?
Going to a different district leaves poor kids who could benefit from such services behind. Your taxes could help pay for those programs, and your political capital could be wielded to expand and improve such services.

You don't think it's fair to "punish" your child to solve the problem?
Solving the problem only for your kid punishes the poor kids you leave behind.

You don't think it's your responsibility to fix a systemic problem?
Your kids benefit at the expense of others. Justice would demand that you are responsible. Granted, while staying put doesn't solve the problem, moving does exacerbate and exploit the problem. Political reform is needed (e.g. decoupling local education from local funding). It may not be your individual responsibility to fix the problem, but it is our collective duty.

Convenience, Kids, and Camaraderie

My three-year-old attends two different "preschools" this year, one Monday/Wednesday/Friday and another Tuesday/Thursday. (We'd prefer that she attend just one, but we missed our shot at the five-days-a-week class.) It's presented a natural experiment of sorts. The dropoff policy for the MWF school is that parents park their cars and walk their kids to and from the classrooms. The policy for the TR school is that parents queue their cars in the driveway and allow the teachers to come get the kids out of the cars. I have generally good interaction with the teachers and administrators at both schools. The stark difference ends up being in the relationships among the parents. The simple act of walking past the same faces six times a week, the eye contact, the head nods, the hellos, and at times, the conversations generate solidarity. Staring at strangers through my windshield and rearview mirror may generate curiosity but not much else. I know many of my daughter's classmates and their parents by name at the MWF school. At the TR holiday program today, I realized I was standing awkwardly among a group of nameless strangers. The convenience of the rolling dropoff isn't all that convenient after all.

Podcast Roll, 2017

A couple years ago, I posted a list of the podcasts I follow. Here's an update on that.

• 30 for 30
• cool mini versions of the ESPN documentary films
• FiveThirtyEight Elections
• good, data-driven insight into all things political
• Fresh Air
• Terry Gross is a national treasure!
• Hello Internet
• It's just two YouTube dudes, Brady and Grey, talking, but I love it.
• Hidden Brain
• This show does a good job of taking both sociology and psychology seriously. Best of all, it knows the difference and has featured a lot of sociology recently.
• Nancy
• all things queer that you were afraid to ask
• TED Radio Hour
• sometimes hit or miss, but generally thought-provoking
• Invisibilia
• I am so ambivalent about this show. They ask sociological questions but tend to give psychological answers. Even when they are sociological, it's very armchair. I should probably unsubscribe.
• On the Media
• so, so good; so, so necessary
• More Perfect
• Learn more about SCotUS.
• Reasonably Sound
• philosophy via audio
• Research on Religion
• I have a lot of issues with this podcast. There is some good stuff here, but more often than not, the guests are Christianists and/or not sufficiently academic. The host is disappointingly uncritical. I should probably unsubscribe.
• Song Exploder
• a window into the songwriter's process
• This American Life
• This is a generally engaging show, but this year, in particular, they have been right on top of the pressing issues, most notably race.
• Writer's Almanac
• I start every day with poetry. Garrison Keillor is a national treasure!
• WTF
• Marc is an interesting guy. Not all of his guests interest me, but he has some gets.

• The Annex
• I just stumbled on this new sociological podcast on Twitter recently. I have yet to listen to an episode, but it looks promising so I thought I'd include it here at the end.

Class Not Dismissed

Anyone who's spent much time in the classroom as an educator has inevitably seen the phenomenon of students packing up their materials prematurely. A couple weeks ago, I was showing a documentary in class, and like clockwork, someone started packing up with five minutes left in class. This, of course, prompted several others to start packing up. The sound of one person rustling with her belongings is largely ignorable, but several people messing with their stuff is distracting. It occurred to me that this is actually a good example of the social generally. One individual's behavior is inconsequential, but patterned collective behavior has ramifications. For example, if one person opts not to vote, it won't change the election; if many people don't vote, it has a measurable effect on the outcome. If one person drives an SUV, no problem; if many people drive SUV's, it accelerates global warming and increases the rate of fatalities.

Stop Moving and Start Fighting: Education Funding and Social Justice

This post started as a rant against my friends and colleagues who move to adjacent communities because the schools are "better." Let me set aside, for the purposes of this post, that their estimation of what is "better" is at best objectively wrong and at worst implicitly racist. I realized well into my writing that I was falling into the same trap that they were: mistaking an institutional issue as an individual trouble. The problem with primary and secondary education as we do it in the U.S., inasmuch as there is a problem, is that we fund it at the local level, that is, mostly with property taxes. Unsurprisingly, places that have higher property values (i.e. more rich people) have more resources for public education, while places that have lower property values (i.e. more poor people and, relatedly, more people of color) have fewer resources for public education. This is the root of all of the problems. Imagine if any other public good were maldistributed in such an obvious way. Live in a wealthy community? You get cleaner air and water, better policing, etc. (Oh, you say these things are actually distributed in this way? How 'bout that.) The solution to this problem is not necessarily to shame individuals who (have the ability to) choose to move their families to take advantage of these inequalities but, instead, to remove the incentives to this type of behavior by restructuring the way that we fund education. Specifically, all school districts should be funded in proportion to the number of students they enroll, not in proportion to the wealth of the people who live in their arbitrary borders.

I want to be clear in that I'm not absolving my friends and colleagues of their decisions to move to adjacent communities for supposed educational reasons. Ideally, they would remain in their originating communities and mobilize their social capital toward the ends of improving local education for not only their own kids but also the kids of parents who have less social and economic capital. 

An Apology for a Consumer Model of Higher Ed—Sorta

Increasingly, administrators in higher education have been entertaining the claim that students should be treated less as students traditionally have and more like “consumers.”* That generally has meant that institutions—including professors—are expected to be more responsive to the demands of students (and their parents). There is a seeming logic to this in that students (and/or their parents) are paying a lot of money in tuition and fees and should have a say in the “product,” that is the social and educational experiences, “sold” by colleges. In our neoliberal world, colleges exist in a very crowded “marketplace”; if one college, for whatever reason, isn’t responding to one “customer’s” “demands,” there are many, many other institutions ready to “supply” a “competing” “product” that can satisfy those “demands.”

Like many in higher education, I am leery of this new consumer model of education. This has caused many of us to resist its associated reforms quite vociferously. I would like to suggest, perhaps, that our opposition has been somewhat misdirected. The problem with the consumer model of higher ed is not so much that education is treated as a commodity that is exchanged for money with consumers; instead, the problem is whom we imagine the consumer to be. There are several beneficiaries of higher education. One is indeed an individual student. I would argue that the larger beneficiary is the public. In the US, states that have higher levels of average education tend to be more economically vibrant; those places benefit on a macro-level. In other words, both highly and less educated people benefit from the “product” that colleges and universities “sell.”

In the individual-as-consumer model, individuals are responsible for the cost of their education, logically, since they are the immediate beneficiaries of their education. Any state involvement in this exchange (e.g. state funding or federal student loan subsidization) is seen as meddling with the magic of the markets and, thus, should be limited or even eliminated. In light of this conceptualization, it seems obvious why states have been steadily decreasing their financial support of public universities (even if they retain their right to meddle politically in curriculum, governance, etc.). In the public-as-consumer model, the state bears the bulk of the responsibility for the cost of education, logically, because the public is the immediate beneficiary of education. If states are not highly involved in this exchange, individuals are expected to pay for a product from which others benefit; in other words, the student pays her tuition even though her peers who did not attend college get a benefit from her increased education. In light of this conceptualization, it is only just that the public, represented by the state, pay for public universities—arguably even to the point of making higher education freely available to qualifying individuals.

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h/t to Karen Sternheimer for her post that sparked this one.

* - I am (somewhat annoyingly) using scare-quotes throughout to highlight the business/economic/corporate-speak that has crept into the way we talk and think about this topic.

Death to PowerPoint (at Least for Most Uses)!

I regularly warn my students not to abuse PowerPoint and other presentation software and applications. (Don't get me started on Prezi!) I often assign these two readings. (UPDATE 8/25/16: a third reading.) Here are a few thoughts on the subject that I often share with them:

• Fancy animation, formatting, and backgrounds are distractions. The focus should be on your ideas. If things start flying around the screen, my first thought is to wonder why you don't believe the substance of your own presentation is engaging enough to hold my attention.
• The point of an oral presentation is for you to tell me (and sometimes to show me) things. If you ask me to read a bunch of text off of the screen, you might as well have just handed me a copy of your paper rather than stood up in front of me, wasting my time.
• Short of blocks of text, bullet points that outline your argument can be helpful--for you, the presenter. If you're an effective presenter, your audience should never need to see those notes. By all means, print them out and hold them in your hand, but don't project them for the rest of us.
• Never turn your back to your audience to read from the presentation. If you find yourself doing that as you practice, you're ill prepared.

Podcast Roll

One of my students just asked for some podcast recommendations so I thought I'd take the opportunity to plug the 24 podcasts to which I'm currently subscribed. I've marked my favorites with an asterisk(*).

Sociology:
Contexts Podcast
Give Methods a Chance
New Books in Sociology
Office Hours

Religion:
New Books in Religion
Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly
The Religious Studies Project
Research on Religion

News and Miscellanea:
The Diane Rehm Show
Fresh Air
Hello Internet*
Invisibilia
NPR TED Radio Hour
Radiolab*
Serial*
StarTalk Radio
This American Life*
What's the Point
Writer's Almanac*

Entertainment:
Car Talk
Hot Takedown
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!

Homebrewing:
BeerSmith
Brew Strong

Class-segregated School Systems and Realtors®

There is a cool new website that will let you zoom in to different school districts in the U.S. to see the percent of student poverty. One could imagine a society in which poverty is fairly evenly distributed in a given geographic area, but what's telling is that there are many, many instances of very poor districts abutting very affluent districts.

Here is where I currently live. Unless my family should decide to move, my child will attend school in the district at the center that is dark blue. Note the very white (in both senses) district immediately to the southwest.

Here is where I grew up. I attended school in the very white (in both senses) district near the center. Note the dark blue district immediately to the northeast. (It's no wonder I became a sociologist, right?)

Here is how that happens:


It doesn't take overt racism or classism to create such stark divides. We have simply structured our society in such a way that racist and classist outcomes happen irrespective of the intentions and beliefs of the individuals in those systems.

The Days of Whine and (No) Roses

It's that time of year, when poor students crawl out of their semester-long slumber to complain about grades. Here are a list of questions that I (should) ask of students before addressing any bellyaching they might impart:

1. Did you thoroughly read the syllabus at the beginning of the semester?
   (Indeed, have you read the syllabus at all?)
2. How would you characterize your attendance this semester?
3. How much of the assigned class reading did you actually complete?
4. What specific behaviors have you changed in order to improve your grade in class over the semester?
   (Indeed, have you changed behaviors at all or have you repeated the same steps expecting different results?)
5. Have you been reading the comments I've returned with your writing assignments?
6. Did you go to the campus writing center to get help with any issues noted on your papers?
7. How often did you come to my office hours to discuss your performance?
   (Indeed, have you ever come to my office hours?)
8. How often did you email or otherwise contact me about strategies to improve your performance prior to the end of the semester?

Sociology for the U.K.!

Just a quick thought today that I'll be elaborating on in tomorrow's post. I've been watching a show, The Inbetweeners (UK), on Netflix recently. (There was a short-lived American remake on MTV last year.) The show is crude, often homophobic, sophomoric, and borderline misogynistic, but even given all that, I must admit that I find the show hilarious and endearing. (Blasphemy, I know.) Anyway, all of that is beside the point. In the first two seasons, the high school students in the show mention studying sociology several times. Sociology. In high school. In one episode, one of the principle characters and his love-interest even engage in a critical discussion of Parson's writing on the nuclear family. Parsons. In high school. Why hasn't sociology had such a presence in high schools in the U.S.?

Guest Blogger: "On merit."

As a first here on Soc'ing Out Loud, please welcome guest blogger, Stephanie McClure. This is an edited version of an essay she posted originally as a Facebook note.
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...

My knowledge of the limits of standardized test scores and GPA as measures of merit comes from my reading of the research, which is quite consistent with my own experiences as an educator.  And that is, that they are noisy.  Very noisy. Do a little thought experiment with me, okay?  Think of all the classes you've had, in high school and college.  Now think of those classes where you got what you define as a "good grade."  In any of those "good grade" classes did you do the minimal amount possible, only reading when necessary, skipping class when you could, showing up just for exams, and memorizing to regurgitate, only to forget it all again as soon as the test/class was over?  Can you think of any?  I've got a few.  That college intro psych class, oy.  Pretty sure I showed up a sum total of 5 times the whole semester and I got an A. Okay, now think of all the classes you've had, in high school and college and make a list of those where you got what you define as a "bad grade."  In any of those "bad grade" classes, did you study a LOT, always go to class, learn a tremendous amount, and still remember to this day what you learned in there?  I've got a few of those too....  Now which of those two situations would you define as "behavior deserving of recognition and respect" (that would be the dictionary definition of merit)?  So, you know, a little noisy, right?

As to the question of standardized test scores.... I'll never forget the day I was talking about this in an intro class and a young woman raised her hand and explained, completely voluntarily, that at her elite, very expensive, private high school..., the SAT people came to their school and they took the test in sections, when they wanted, over a few days.  Now, I loved/continue to love this very bright, very thoughtful, very kind student. But I did think that day that I should perhaps offer to personally escort her safely back to her dorm room, as her classmates were absolutely staring DAGGERS at her after this little revelation.  Adorable. Standardized?  Really, though? Just as an example.

They do measure something, these measures of merit, but they are noisy.  Grain of salt, okay?  Not holy grail measures of innate worth and  value, so that if you score ten points higher you have ten points more worthiness for further education.  That's all I'm saying.  So why do we use them?  McDonaldization/bureaucratic rationality –efficient, predictable, calculable, and controlled.  It's inevitable, it's a part of human social organization, but it's not (or, better, therefore it's obviously not) perfect. I'd personally prefer to teach a room full of kids who score high on innate curiosity, something that doesn't necessarily correlate with high grades and test scores, but that's a whole other ball of wax.

And then, here's the thing.  [Abigail Fisher] didn't even measure up on your holy grail measures.  For real. And if you can't be bothered to know enough about the case to even know that, then you are an ideologue.  Someone who is so blindly committed to their own position that they cannot be swayed by new information, evidence, or something outside their own self-interest.  Which means I can't talk to you....

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Stephanie McClure is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Georgia College, where she teaches and researches in the Sociology of Education; Race, Class, and Gender; and College Student Persistence and Retention.

Is Homework a Capitalist Ploy?

Schools can be seen as training grounds for future workers. From this perspective, it's not so much that schools teach students a set of practical skills, like reading or maths, as that they instill an ethic, including things like the ability to effectively manage one's time, to self-discipline, and to use critical (within limits) thinking to solve problems. Skills can be taught with comparative ease, often on-the-job, but employers need workers with more deeply engrained personal predispositions or habits. Schools do some of that skill-teaching stuff but only so much as an exercise in that deeper ethic. For example, we all grow up reading Shakespeare in school, but we don't do so because knowing Macbeth will be of any real import in our careers; instead, reading Shakespeare turns out to be a decent-enough way for us to practice disciplining ourselves to critically engage a text over which we subsequently are evaluated individually. Nobody is asked to give a report on the Scottish play at work, but we are all required (and inevitably evaluated on how effectively we are able) to make sense of texts of our own accord.

This brings me to my critical question about one aspect of primary education. Inasmuch as schools are a way to instill a particular ethic in students, homework, then, is a way of preparing workers to accept that their work demands will intrude on their home lives. It may seem that I am channeling my rebellious adolescent self here ("We don't need no education!"), but this is a bit deeper than a down-with-the-man sentiment. The industrial revolution centralized the means of production, drawing workers away from family-owned/ran farms and workshops in rural areas to factories in urban centers. This created a work-life divide that hadn't really existed before. Work was no longer part of one's role in his family and was no longer done in or near his home. Work was alienated from the sphere of the domestic and familial. In the post-industrial world, however, centralization is increasingly less important. Evidenced by the growth in flex-time schedules and telecommuting, employers are realizing that workers can be equally (and potentially even more) productive outside of the office, freed from regular working hours. This, of course, requires a different ethic. Industrialization demanded that people accept work and home as separate spheres. Post-industrialization demands, instead, that people accept a re-intrusion of work into the home. It is impossible for a manager to ask a worker to finish machining a camshaft over the weekend knowing that the worker does not have access to the proper tools on Saturday and Sunday when the factory doors are locked. It is not only possible but desirable for a manager to ask a worker, invariably at the end of the day on Friday, to "Have this report on my desk by Monday morning." In order for the worker to accept this assignment, though, he has to accept it individually and see it as part of a cultural norm. Having been trained for 12 years in school to accept that some work must be done at home outside of regular hours, he becomes much more amenable to this exploitation.

So, does this mean that homework is bad? I'd say that it depends on one's perspective. To argue that it is bad is (ironically, I would say) to agree with an industrial model of production that bifurcates the world into work and home. If one finds the decentralized post-industrial model of production more agreeable, homework is at worst neutral. Homework can really only be seen as "good" by those who extract profit from workers by convincing them to be exploited.

Chicago, Schools, and Segregation: A Misunderstood Solution?

Chicago is closing a bunch of schools that they allege are being underutilized. It's an emotional issue to say the least. (This video seems to be going viral.) One reason that it is so emotional is that the schools that are targeted appear to disproportionately serve poor and non-white students. I understand people's concerns about endangering students by forcing them to travel further to get to school, often through violent areas, and ideally, the students should attend quality schools as close to their homes as possible. However, the argument that a school that has been made inefficient because it was abandoned by elites should be protected seems backward to me. Couldn't closing those schools be a way to integrate de facto segregated schools? What an interesting model for change, to close any school that has a disproportionately disadvantaged student body and force those students into adjacent school districts that are disproportionately advantaged. There would be nowhere to hide for those trying to "escape" "bad" schools (e.g. white flight); they should simply be forced to improve the schools they have. In other words, the root of the problem is not that the schools are being closed but that they have been put in such a precarious situation by privileged families following a short-sighted notion of self-interest.

Am I missing an important part of this story here either theoretically or practically? Admittedly, this a complicated social issue on which I am not an expert.

"Crowded Out"

In the thick of finals week with no time to do a real post today, but you all should read this from Inside Higher Ed. (I guess I need to rethink this old post a little.)

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h/t Josh Klugman

College, Graduation, and Timing

When people talk about graduation and retention rates, they're also inevitably concerned with timely graduation, and rightly so. We don't do our students any favors by allowing them to languish in limbo, hanging around our halls for five, six, or more years. The logical extension, then, has been to encourage early graduation. At my institution, there are several majors that are redesigning their programs to facilitate three-year degrees (which invariably include online coursework, something I've taken up here and will likely revisit in the future) and even some that allow students to finish both a bachelors and a masters in four years. All of this, I think, raises an important question: do the economic benefits of graduating college early outweigh the social benefits of a traditional four-year college experience? Here are the things we'd need to quantify (assuming eventual completion of the degree) to be able to make the calculation:

• What is the average overall cost, including lost wages, of a year of undergraduate education?
• What are the long-term social benefits of an average year of undergraduate education?
• What is the economic value of the average social tie made in college?
• e.g. What is the value of generating a social network capable of creating career opportunities?
• What is the economic value of an additional year of emotional, psychological, and social maturity?
• What is the economic value of an additional year of memories (both fond and ill) from a unique and unrepeatable period in one's lifecourse?

I hope that it's obvious that most of the concepts in the tail end of that list are not (easily) quantifiably operationalizable. In other words, you can't put a dollar amount on your experiences, memories, or friendships, all things that are truncated by early graduation. My point is that while the economic costs of higher education are important considerations, the social benefits of higher education are equally--if not more--important, and while we may not be able to force them into a mathematical equation, that does not mean that they shouldn't be part of students' decision-making process. (That was tough for a quantitative sociologist to write. ;) )

Making Public Education Compulsory AND Exclusive

In most of the U.S., education is compulsory until a student is between 16 and 18 years old. The default has become public education, though parents are alternatively allowed to enroll their children in private schools (both secular and religious) or to homeschool. After de jure segregation was struck down by the Supreme Court, many parents, both intentionally and unwittingly, have done de facto segregation by moving school districts or by exploiting the privilege of private schools. Contrary to the popular narrative about the failure of our public schools being attributable to poor teachers, the failure of public education can better be understood in terms of the flight of non-poor whites to more affluent school districts and to private schools. This has created a widening gap between students who attend failing schools and students whose parent(s) are financially and/or geographically mobile enough to attend effective schools. Private education reproduces and magnifies inequality.

The very people who could solve the problems in the public schools by contributing the most taxes to a school district and being able and knowledgeable enough to wield political clout in the local system are precisely those who are most likely to extricate themselves from those situations. They leave because they can. So, the problem is being able to keep both the political power and economic base in the public school system. An obvious solution to this is to require not just compulsory education but to compel exclusive public education. If parents are unable to pull their kids out of public schools, they will be motivated to improve the public schools.*

While the solution might be obvious, its implementation is problematic. For one, the centrality of voluntarism and individualism (read: individual liberty) in American culture guarantees strong resistance to the notion of forcing parents and students to do much of anything. (Indeed, it's surprising that public schools exist at all in this country!) In addition, though, it seems that the First Amendment would require religious exemptions for parents who prefer a religious education for their children, and savvy parents would exploit these exemptions as a way to get their kids out of public schools. I would argue that the state has a compelling interest here and that public education and religious education need not be mutually exclusive. There is nothing keeping parents from paying for their kids to attend religious school after they've spent the day at public school.

Just thinking out loud here.

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* - The problem of geographic mobility is a bit trickier. It's likely impossible--and indeed for labor force reasons probably undesirable--to keep people from moving from under-performing school districts to high-performing school districts; however, there is at least the possibility for planning policy and housing discrimination enforcement to constrain these problems, making them hypothetically more manageable indirectly than the private school problem.

Where Have All the Thinkers Gone, Long Time Passing?

I finished up the backlog of New Books in Sociology podcasts yesterday. Their first post was a cross-post from the New Books in History series, the topic being the Frankfurt School. The host and his guest spent some time near the end of the interview lamenting that fact that public intelectuals today are not of the same intellectual rigor as they were in the 1950s, 1960s, and early-1970s, that there wasn't the same kind of market for those kinds of ideas. In their opinions, people who pass for public intellectuals today, like Dan Brown, Dr. Phil, and Andrew Sullivan, were not of the same caliber as folks like C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse.

How to make sense of this? Here is my hypothesis. In the early- and mid-20th century, people were more tolerant of and even sought out public intellectuals because fewer in the public were products of higher education. The average level of education was lower which elevated the relative status of public intellectuals to expert. Ironically, increases in the rates of higher education have lowered the public's tolerance of such expert voices since people are more likely to see themselves as quasi-intellectual. Moreover, the nature of higher education has changed dramatically from the mid-20th century to the early-21st century: professionally-oriented education is in ascendancy as liberal arts education is in relative decline. People today are much more likely to seek out what they deem as practical advice (e.g. Dr. Phil) than more abstract and structural understanding (e.g. Mills).