Conclude Unit IV (4/28)

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Conclude Unit IV (4/28)

• Conclude Education Learning Gap
• Markets and Public Provision Vouchers
• Begin Einstein Socialism

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What is the effect of raising the floor on the
mean and the ceiling?

• In the United States, the procedures of Asian
  education would be viewed as holding back the
  quick students for the slow ones.
• But it is an empirical question what would be the
  effect of a less tracked and sorted system.
• And the evidence is that it increases the score
  of the best students by raising the floor.
• There are many times when health care, etc.
  depends upon the floor.

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Why Does Raising the Floor Raise the Ceiling?

• Both in Japan (Sendai) and Taiwan (Taipei) there
  is increased clustering, more increase both in
  the mean scores, and in to top scores than in the
  US
• Sendai top scores increased 32 (from 24 to 56)
• Taipei top scores increased 26 (from 27-53)
• US top scores increased 24 (from 22-46)
• One explanation is that top schools and students
  decide what is good enough by what is better
  than the bottom schools.
• The rationale of school and student
  differentiation is competition but it probably
  decreases competition,
• and many suburban schools and parents are
  probably just as happy to decrease competition.

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Culture

• The sharper increase in Asian schools is usually
  explained by the greater time spend on academics,
  which is explained by a culture oriented to
  education.
• Culture always reinforces social structures and
  vice versa.
• In Japan, the parents of a student who goes to
  school 6 days a week, 45 weeks a year, doing
  well, will insist on math tutoring. Why?
• That student needs the calculus to do well on the
  exam to get into university to get into the big
  firms. The US student does not.

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Can Teachers expect all students to succeed?

• Yes.
• But it would require structural change.
• Neither pep-talks nor competition nor uniform
  standards would do it.
• The social structure that gives all students a
  level playing field is not in place.

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21st century Issues

• The main political and social issues of the 20th
  century have involved the appropriate mixture in
  economy, health, education, housing and other
  social areas.
• The end of the 20th century 1989-2000, saw a
  large increase in unfettered capitalist
  arrangements.
• The balance between social and private provision
  is one of the key issues of the 21st c.

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Vouchers

• Allow Rita to take her funding with her to a
  private (often a religious) school
• Vouchers marketize public education
• while countering a part of the difference in
  ability to pay between 90210 and East LA
• Legal and constitutional issues
• Public support of religious education
• The erosion of the common school effect
• Dismantling of the public school system or
  ghettoizing it.

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Some arguments

• PRO
• It is cheap
• It promotes competition
• It gives poor students middle class advantages
• It promotes free choice

• CON
• It increases segregation
• It takes resources away from the neediest schools
• It would increase inequality and despair.
• It produces traps.

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Competition and Freedom

• Is there greater freedom of choice in the US?
  For whom?
• Do vouchers increase freedom of choice? For whom?
• It is possible for someone outside of East LA to
  say, it is Ritas own fault but it is more like
  a trap.
• And if she leaves, what happens to those left
  behind?
• Vouchers would not give most students the ability
  to be competitive with 90210 parents,
• and any choice it gives them is at the expense of
  that of the other students in their school, since
  the presence of other motivated students is key
  to the goodness or badness of a school.

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Markets and Choices

• The notion that markets promote competition and
  freedom is central to many other market-like
  proposals in education, health, etc.
• But some institutional schemes purchase the
  increased choices of some are at the cost of
  decreased choices for others.
• The idea of a social dilemma shows why such
  schemes sometimes frustrate the choices of the
  great bulk of people.

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Thinking in systems terms

• Arguably the main motivation of vouchers is the
  view, There are only a few, good, motivated
  students in those schools lets save them.
• But what creates the motivation or lack of
  motivation in a school?
• A systems view Part of it is a social structure
  of contacts and opportunities.
• The success and/or failure of all schools must be
  analyzed as an interdependent system.

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Einstein Why Socialism?

• What was Einsteins main concern?
• He had lived through the rise of fascism in
  Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Hungary, Finland,
  Bulgaria, Argentina, etc.
• World War II and hundreds of millions of deaths,
• and he was the father of atomic weapons, giving
  humans the ability to wipe out the human race.
• He believed we can no longer afford Monopoly and
  Risk.

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Do we live in a predatory society?

• By any view of predatory, many things look
  predatory about society today
• 187, Al Quaeda, Code of the Streets.
• Billionaires / tens of millions below poverty
• Ch. 11-13 suggest that in terms of class, race
  and gender, there is often a game of Monopoly in
  which the rich make rules that insure that the
  rich get richer.
• Ch. 14 and 17 suggest that this may have
  devastating effects on family, education, etc.,
• and ch. 16 suggests that the political economy
  is often a game of risk Nationalism and war

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Is it a stage?

• However, some people would argue that that is
  human nature,
• and that people are always like that.
• Einstein disagrees he argues that such things
  represent a pathological accentuation of greed
  and individualism in modern society, produced by
  capitalism.
• How would you decide whether such conditions
  demonstrate social pathology?
• How evaluate Einsteins arguments?

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Socialism

• I am convinced that there is only one way to
  eliminate these grave evils namely through the
  establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied
  by an educational system oriented toward social
  goals. In such an economy, the means of
  production are owned by the society and utilized
  in a planned fashion. The work is distributed
  among those able to work, and the society
  guarantees a livelihood to every man woman and
  child.

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What can social science tell us?

• He begins by saying that he is not a social
  scientist, and so he asks whether he has anything
  to contribute to social debates.
• He respects social science, and he certainly does
  not speak as a great man, but
• He suggests that technical social science runs
  into two main limitations in speaking about the
  future

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1. Society and humans change

• The future may be different from the past.
• Aristotles Politics said that you could not have
  civilization or democracy except on the basis of
  slavery,
• Which had been true up until then.
• Einstein says that we have not yet emerged from
  the predatory stage of society,
• And so our theories have difficulty conceiving
  what a non-predatory society could look like.

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2nd limitation of science values

• The question what kind of society and what kind
  of world we want to live in is partly a question
  of values.
• Science cannot dictate values.
• Einstein believes that there is a deeply
  pathological set of values rooted in present
  social structure Look out for number one. Me
  first my family first my ethnic or racial group
  first my country first.

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Mans double nature

• As a solitary being, one protects oneself, those
  closest, and satisfies personal desires.
• As a social being, one shares the pleasures and
  sorrows of ones fellow human beings and strives
  to improve their conditions of life.
• What classical social theory does this resemble?
• How does and how can the balance between these
  vary?

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Capitalist values

• The values of a social being are discouraged by
  structures of competitive individualism,
• and by having ones childrens food, health and
  education depend on ability to pay.
• Monopoly promotes greed.
• Capitalism promotes being out for number one and
  being focused on the bottom line.
• We could afford it but we cannot any longer.

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The balance of egoism and altruism

• There is a biological component of both of these
  they are unavoidable.
• However, the personality that finally emerges is
  largely formed by the environment in which a man
  happens to find himself during his development,
  by the structure of the society in which he grows
  up, by the traditions of that society and by its
  appraisal of particular types of behavior.
• That is, this social/cultural constitution is
  subject to change.

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His first example

• Einstein was discussing with a colleague the need
  for a world organization with real power.
• He argued that if different nations pursue their
  own self-interest in the atomic age this will
  ultimately destroy the human race.
• The reply was So what? Why are you so opposed
  to the disappearance of the human race?
• Which is a symptom of a more pervasive attitude
  of not caring about the other guy.

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The crisis of our time

• For Einstein, humans can find meaning in life,
  short and perilous as it is, only in their
  relations and mutual aid with others.
• But at the present time, most people perceive
  their ties to others and to world-society not as
  an organic, supportive connection, but as an
  imposition on their rights.
• Einstein argues that capitalism is the source of
  this exaggeratedly individualist attitude.

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Capitalism

• The entire productive apparatus is privately
  owned (by a tiny fraction of the population).
• Those with no means of production are
  increasingly disciplined by the reserve army of
  the unemployed, (including immigrant and foreign
  workers).
• Owners of the means of production increasingly
  dominate the political process.
• The educational system inculcates competitive
  attitudes and acquisitive success.

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Capitalism as Monopoly

Political influence
property



Income

Social and academic prestige

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Comparisons with other theories

1. Murray believes that individualist capitalism is
   intrinsically democratic, socially efficient and
   morally good.
2. Feagin believes that individualist capitalism
   often generates socially and ecologically
   unsustainable (suicidal) structures, particularly
   racist and sexist.
3. Pettigrew believes that unregulated individual
   choice often creates social dilemmas.

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Capitalism and The Dispossessed

• Leguin, comparing a free-enterprise and a
  socialist-anarchist state suggests that
  unfettered capitalism creates a mall-society
• Capitalism generates materialism
• Lack of knowledge or concern for labor
• Huge inequalities
• And therefore need for police powers.

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Varieties of socialism

• All public provision of health, education and
  welfare is socialistic in some sense.
• All industrial societies have a mixed economy.
• Einstein argues that such a society should be
  democratic, and must be guarded against becoming
  bureaucratic.

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The Sociological Imagination, again

• Society does shape individuals the consequences
  of various kinds of social arrangements may be
  complex and figuring out what they are may
  involve disagreement.
• Individuals create society individual,
  organizational and social policy creates society.
• Is it the kind of society and the kind of world
  we want to live in?

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21st century Issues

• The main political and social issues of the 20th
  century involved the appropriate mixture in
  economy, health, education, housing and other
  social areas.
• The end of the 20th century 1989-2000, saw a
  large increase in unfettered capitalist
  arrangements.
• The balance between social and private provision
  is one of the key issues of the 21st c.