what’s the matter with kansas?: how conservatives won the heart of america

In 2004, it was easy to moan about how strong the neo-conservative movement in the United States was. The war against gay marriage, abortion, and other social/cultural issues was raging and the neo-cons seemed to be winning—witness the fact that George W. Bush was reelected that year on a platform that consisted of almost nothing except the failures of his first term and the idea that he was somehow of the common people.

This is exactly what journalist and writer Thomas Frank does in What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004), using his home state of Kansas as the poster child of confused, misguided voting in the U.S., voting by the poor and working class against their economic self-interest. His main questions: why, in Kansas (and, by extension, all over the country), would farmers, blue-collar workers, and poor people, in general—historically faithful Democratic voters—vote Republican, supporting the corporate takeover of their family farms, the Wal-Martizing of their local businesses, and the reduction of taxes for the wealthiest? Why would the people that need the most help getting by support reducing the amount of health care, education, and other public services?

The answer, unsurprising to those that have read George Lakoff, is values. Thomas makes the case that the neo-conservatives have used wedge issues social issues like abortion, gun control, and evolution/creationism—racial and xenophobic fear is notably absent from his list, but I would certainly add them—to polarize the traditionally Democratic base. The ironic thing about these reasons for voting Republican, as Thomas points out, is that little is ever actually accomplished on those issues. The neo-cons run on a platform of social outrage and moral uprightness, but spend their time in office busting unions, cutting taxes, deregulating industries, and gutting our public school system.

Thomas is a thorough researcher, but most of the book is an anecdotal rant, a head-shaking “can you believe this really happened?” What’s missing is the kind of organizing scheme that Lakoff provides, a lack that left me feeling little wiser after reading the book. Nevertheless, Thomas makes some important points. Primary among them: “Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Shawnee and Wichita with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.” The lack of clearly articulated progressive vision, combined with liberal politicians’ concessions to Wall Street and the rich, have impoverished the left and the country has paid the price with 8 years of neo-cons in the White House.

A year after Obama’s election, it feels like we’ve started to recover from those dark days. However, the economic policy debates are still largely framed like they have been since the 1980s. Progress on social issues, incremental as it is, is great, but does little, if anything, to change the economic conditions, distribute wealth and prosperity to all people, and improve health care and education. Only by reframing the issues so that most people see real change as beneficial to them and in line with their values can we move forward to create more justice and equity in our society.

race matters

Almost a year after Barrack Obama was elected president the debate about what his being the nation’s first biracial president means rages on. Simplifying and generalizing the arguments (always a precarious thing to do): some say it signifies a step beyond race to some place where we do not have to worry about it, where race has nothing to do with how we see and judge people; others admit the importance of Obama’s election, but also speak of the continued racism that people of color face and to statistics about the disproportionate number of people of color living in poverty, failing in our schools, suffering from toxins in their neighborhoods, sitting in prison, and generally dealing with the very real effects of institutional and systemic racism in our society.

In recent weeks the debate was inflamed by the arrest, in his own home, of noted scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who publicly asserted that he had been the victim of racial profiling. The arresting officer denied the idea and refused to apologize, saying he had no reason to do so. The president weighed in; the papers and talk shows are having a field day. Predictably and revealingly, in a poll, about 3/4 of African-Americans said they thought race was a factor in the arrest; 2/3 of whites said it wasn’t; it is the privilege of the over-class to ignore the world in which the under-class lives.

There is hardly a better moment to read Cornell West’s 1993 classic Race Matters. In essays entitled “Nihilism in Black America,” “Beyond Affirmative Action: Equality and Identity,” “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject,” and more, West incisively and profoundly analyzes racism in the U.S. His carefully constructed prose elucidates complex ideas and stimulates further thought. He speaks truth to power in a way that is both provocative and obvious, frequently making me wonder why I hadn’t seen his point before that moment.

Among many, the idea that stands out for me at the moment is that African-Americans are intrinsically part of our national culture. They’ve been on the continent almost as long as white people. Our society has evolved with the contributions of both black and white people. To the extent that there is a “white” culture and a “black” culture (categories that clearly include a great deal of variety and individuality within them), they have evolved together, contributing to one another in both many, many ways. African-Americans are as “American” as the rest of us.

It is obvious to me that, as the title to this book suggests, race still matters in the U.S. and around the world. The sooner that white people in the U.S. accept and publicly acknowledge this reality, the sooner we will be able to take true steps to equality.

race and recession report

The Applied Research Center has put out a report entitled “Race and Recession: How Inequity Rigged the Economy and how to Change the Rules,” telling the story of the way our current recession disproportionately impacts people of color. The report uncovers root causes of long-term racial inequities that fed into the economic crisis and proposes structural solutions to change a system that threatens future generations.

See a video about the report and down load it at: http://www.arc.org/content/view/726/136/.

the art of critical pedagogy

Let us begin by rethinking the position that urban schools are failing. . . . When one set of schools [in high-income communities] is given the resources necessary to succeed and another group of schools [in low-income communities] is not, we have predetermined the winners and losers. . . . Urban [low-income community] schools are not broken; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do.

This in the second paragraph of Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell’s brilliant book, The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. It’s brilliant because it is based in the experience of actually teaching our country’s youth, on working day in and day out with high school students in Los Angeles and Oakland. Most of the book is Duncan-Andrade and Morrell detailing several educational projects on which they’ve worked, describing their experiences as they try to put their belief in critical pedagogy into practice, and explaining what they learned.

As grounded in experience and practice as they are, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell know the theory, too. In chapter two, they give the best overall summary of the work and writing of the major names in critical pedagogy—Freire, Shor, Darder, McLaren, Giroux, hooks—I’ve seen. In addition, they discuss the efforts of a few “lived examples of critical pedagogy to emphasize that critical pedagogy is more than just a teaching strategy—it is a personal, financial, political, emotional, and spiritual commitment to prioritizing the needs and liberation of people who are suffering under various forms of oppression”: Carter G. Woodson, Lolita Lebrón, Franz Fanon,Reies López Tijerina, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Subcommandante Marcos. (If this list and the words used to describe these people intimidate you, you’re a normal human being. The authors make it less intimidating as they describe how they put those words into practice in the work they have done and continue to do.)

Before they do that, they lay out their understanding of the urban public school context in which students try to learn and in which teachers try to teach. They argue that “urban school failure is tolerated because deep down our nation subscribes to the belief that someone has to fail in school,” belief supported by racist and classist ideology. Currently, the line is that “educational failure is the result of cultural deficiencies on the part of the student, the family, and the community—de facto, educational attainment is attributed to cultural superiority or assimilation into culturally superior ways.” Regardless of the reasons, the result serves the dominant culture in our country, because “some people must fill the least desirable places in society, and it is important that they feel they deserve to be in those positions or, at the very least, that there is a formal mechanism to justify their place there.” The attack on students’ esteem and confidence is self-perpetuating and circular: if you’re made to feel stupid, you do worse on tests because of your lack of belief in yourself.

But, according to Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, the equation of performance in school and intelligence is false. For, if

school achievement were an accurate measure of intellect, achievement patterns would more closely mirror the random distribution of intellect that genetic scientists report in human populations. Instead, the results of schools are quite predictable. . . . With remarkable consistency, schools serving low-income, non-white children disproportionately produce the citizens who will spend most of their adult lives in the least desirable and least mobile socioeconomic positions (prison, low-ranking military positions, and service labor).

The few urban students who do well are “asked (sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly) to exchange the culture of their home and community for the higher culture of the school in exchange for access to college.” Therefore,

urban education reform movements must begin to develop partnerships with communities that provide young people the opportunity to be successful while maintaining their identities as urban youth. This additive model of education focuses on the design of urban school culture, curriculum, and pedagogy that identifies the cultures and communities of urban students as assets rather than as things to be replaced.

This “approach provides pedagogy and curricula that lend immediate relevance to school in the lives of urban youth. It also works to break the cycle of disinvestment of human capital in urban communities by crating graduates who recognize their potential agency to improve urban centers, rather than seeing them as places to escape.” Duncan-Andrade and Morrell see critical pedagogy as a win-win for students, teachers, and society as a whole, because “rather than presenting the community as a place to rise above, schools must equip themselves to draw from the knowledge that students bring with them to school—knowledge that is often not in their textbooks but is acquired from the streets, family cultural traditions, youth culture, and the media.”

They are critical of the results we’ve seen so far from multicultural education because it has “failed to deal with the conditions of modern urban life.” They argue persuasively “for pedagogical practices situated in critical analyses of the role of urban schools in social inequality.” We should “shift the rhetoric of failure from young people and caring teachers onto an inequitable system designed to concretize failure in poor communities.”

Finally, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell “believe that urban students should go to college at rates equal to their more affluent counterparts” and that a

schooling environment that foregrounds the relationship between education and the most pressing conditions in the community, an education with relevance, is most likely to produce notable increases in college eligibility. . . . [T]he desired outcome in critical pedagogies in urban education is multiple and . . . it must impact academic achievement, identity development, and civic engagement. . . . To often, we believe, critical pedagogies focus on the rhetoric of social critique to the exclusion of the development of sophisticated literacy and numeracy skills.

These academic skills frequently come “at great personal and social costs that include alienation from family, language, community, and progressive social values.” Therefore, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s work focuses maintaining a sense of community and culture for students, while still promoting rigorous academic skills, by setting those skills in the community and cultural context. Literally, they ask the students what problems or questions are important to them and then develop the curriculum around those issues.

All this made connections for me with the writing of bell hooks, especially in Where We Stand: Class Matters in which she talks about her experience of going to college and being alienated from her home culture by the college culture and the resulting disorientation of being caught between two the two. (For more, see my entry on hooks’ book.) The connection is expected, since Duncan-Andrade and Morrell begin their work with hooks and other related writers as the foundation upon which they build. Indeed, they are trying to do the work that such writers recommend.

As I mentioned above, after contextualizing their work, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell spend the bulk of the book describing their work with students in urban schools. In the final chapter, “Toward a Grounded Theory of Praxis,” they try to draw conclusions from their experiences, point to areas that need more research and exploration, and make suggestions about teacher education. Importantly, they also talk about love. In a section called “Pedagogy, Love, and Revolution” they write about “revolutionary love” and its potential to change both students’ lives and the larger world. From my perspective, real love—that includes celebrating successes and correcting errors and facilitating the development of the person each student wants to be—for your students is the foundation of good teaching. It doesn’t mean that you like every student the same or that every student likes you. It means that you love them and treat them with the respect and compassion you treat all your loved ones. It means that you treat your students the same way you treat your own children. This is a beautiful, dangerous, and somewhat radical stance—and that is right where I want to be.

up where we belong

Gail Thompson interviewed 121 out of 136 (89%) teachers at a large urban high school asking them about their school, their colleagues, their students, the parents of their students, the quality of their own work, and their ability to be effective teachers. She asked the teachers to respond to prompts like:

• “I consider my current school site to be one of the best public schools in this district”
• “I believe that most of the teachers at this school are outstanding educators”
• “The majority of my students come from decent homes”
• “I care about my students’ academic and personal welfare both inside and outside of school.”

I’m happy to say that a large majority of them responded in ways that we would like; that is, most of the teachers agreed that they worked in one of the best schools in the district, that their colleagues were outstanding teachers, that their students live in decent homes, and that they care about their students. Further, most of the teachers believe they are making a difference for their students, that they are using innovative and pedagogically sound instructional practices, and that their students would rate highly as a teacher. Based on these answers and despite all the problems that we know exist in public schools, we can at least feel that teachers in those schools have the right attitudes and that they believe in themselves, their schools, and their students.

A deeper look at all the questions (52 in all) she asked reveals a more complicated picture.

• When asked if they would want their “own children to attend this school” only 29% agreed.
  80% of the teachers agreed that some of their “colleagues do not have high expectations of their students.”
• 64% “believe that parents or guardians are largely to blame for students’ low achievement.”
  Nearly 40% of the teachers didn’t “believe that all students deserve a college preparatory curriculum.”
• And, when asked if students are largely to blame when they “fail to pass a test or fail an assignment,” 57% of the teachers agreed.

Thompson also surveyed the students in the same school. She asked them to respond to statements like:

• “Most of my teachers are good teachers.”
• “Most of my teachers are willing to give me extra help during class if I need it.”
• “I wish I had better teachers.”
• “Most of my teachers are fair about discipline.”
• “I believe most of my teachers care about me.”

As we would hope, most students answered that their teachers are good, fair, caring and willing to help, yet there were marked differences between the way Blacks, Latinos, and Whites (the groups that made up 90% of the student population) responded. Significantly less percentage of the Black and Latino students (56% and 57%, respectively), for instance, thought most of their teachers cared about them than White students (70%).

Even more important, student responses were different from teacher responses in ways that, I believe, should make teachers sit up and pay attention. For example, 97% of the teachers said they care about their students, but as we just saw, less than 70% of the students felt their teachers cared about them. 91% of teachers said they “make the curriculum relevant” to their students’ lives, but only just over half of the students agreed with similar prompts about their courses.

While differences between student and teacher perceptions is a big part of the story of Up Where We Belong, the book Thompson wrote based partially on her surveys, the real punch comes from the voices of the students from focus groups she conducted with them to follow up the surveys. The students tell us what happens when their teachers make them feel stupid or discipline them unfairly or just don’t seem to care. They also describe what a powerful force for good a caring, skilled teacher is when he or she believes in his or her students. Those stories, combined with Thompson’s own experiences as one of “America’s stepchildren”—a term, she uses “to refer to African Americans, Latinos, Southeast Asians, Native Americans, and sometimes even low-income whites, because members of these groups are often marginalized and treated as second-class citizens in schools and the wider society”—make the book immanently readable, emotionally effective, and compellingly motivational.  The result is a persuasive argument for the educational reform “lessons” Thompson learned through her work:

• Lies, subterfuge, and denial are “weapons of mass destruction” that impede school reform and harm many students, especially America’s stepchildren.
• Some people in high places don’t really want achievement gaps to be closed.
• Too many influential people still don’t believe that Americas’ stepchildren are capable of academic excellence.
• Oppressive school settings, inadequate teacher preparation programs, and a lack of support will continue to drive new teachers out of the profession.
• As long as their voices, needs, and concerns continue to be ignored, teachers and students will find creative ways to derail school reform efforts.
• At best, school reforms that are based on high-stakes testing will produce “tuna” that looks like Star-Kist but is not the real thing.
• Because of resistance and racial prejudice, it is difficult for African American and Latino school administrators to improve the status quo in K-12 schools.

Books about education reform come in all shades of ideology; Thompson’s is useful and different because it is based, and sets the standard for successful reform, on what the students themselves say. Too often, student voices are not part of this discussion. Thompson listens to students and helps us all hear what they say. Let us hope that the Obama administration is listening, too.

fugitive days

In 1972, the year I entered 1st grade, the U.S. was still fully engaged in the Vietnam war. The movement to end the war was going strong, as well, and our society was searching for stability in the wake of the necessary upheaval created by the struggle for civil rights. The hippie counter-culture was in full bloom.

All this barely existed for me then, at six years old. No adults in my life talked about civil rights or the war or hippies in front of me that I remember. Certainly, none of my teachers talked about these things or discussed them in class. Everything about these events was shrouded and unspeakable, yet phrases and images punctured the veil: body count, free love, acid, red menace, Ho Chi Minh, Woodstock, Black Panthers, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, a young girl running naked down a Vietnamese highway—all these were part of the mythology, the background, however dark and incomprehensible.

The lack of information added to the mystery for me, made me curious. I wanted to know what was going on and, since it was clear that the adults in my life didn’t want to talk about it, I simply recorded the emotions and feelings and images and words that I could see and feel around me. That is to say, I remained mostly ignorant of history, of a time in our nation’s and our world’s history that I see now shapes much of our current world, especially the generation between my parents and me, people who are currently 55 to 65.

I’ve been meeting and talking to people from those days. They lived and struggled, believing in the portentousness of their era and the potential for changing the world. They felt that revolution was upon them, that the world might be fundamentally different next year or next month or next week or maybe tomorrow.

During the last several years I’ve begun doing social justice work within the educational system. I consider this work a continuation of the movement and ideas from the 1960s and 1970s and I’ve been trying to learn from their triumphs and failures how best to make my work effective. (Further, I think we as a nation and a world need to learn from those times—considering our nation’s involvement in Afghanistan an Iraq, I’m afraid we aren’t.) I’ve been trying to learn about middle and upper class white people (people like myself) and how they tried to work in alliance (or not) with working class folks, poor people, and people of color. They saw the fight against the war as tied up with the civil rights movement and also with rejection of the dominant culture. With hindsight some of their work and perspective was self-serving and did not overturn the system as they hoped. They were, as we all are, trapped in the systems in which we live; destroying those systems is, while a good goal at times, perhaps not always realistic or even entirely positive.

It was in this context that I began to read Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers memoir about coming to the anti-war movement and the progression toward building and planting bombs in buildings, claiming credit for them, and publishing manifestos proclaiming the injustice of the war, calling attention to the genocide propagated in Vietnam, and demanding its end. I was looking for insight, for understanding of how and why someone comes to decide that blowing things up seems like the right choice. I wanted to know how he felt about it now. Did he feel that their actions helped achieve their goals?

I found some of what I hoped for, though not enough to be satisfied. Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations. It may be too much to ask Ayers for profound wisdom and help with my own strategic decisions; the events may still be too close, too personal, too raw. Whatever the case, a lot of the book feels unfocused, rambling, jumbled, even confused. To its credit the book feels very real, real enough to be uncomfortable for me, who clings tightly to my rationality and the idea that I always have options. I want to stay connected to the worlds I know.

For me that is the real lesson. Ayers paints a world in which blowing things up became the only option, a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances. He and his cadre of friends and allies disappeared down the rabbit hole, putting themselves in a world where there were no other alternatives if they were to remain true to their principles. That is a very difficult place to be.

I never read a memoir without feeling the sense of self-indulgence and solipsism. This one in no exception and, in particular, it is a little like a trip through temporary insanity; only when Ayers begins to emerge from it, toward the end of the book, do I start to feel comfortable. He pulls back at the last and I get a little of the perspective for which I hoped. Along the way, I also got a lot of stories about living in those times, about fighting the police, about arguments on campuses and in basement rooms, about the sexism and racism and classism that still challenge our movements and society. It is not a great book, but I’m glad to have read it. May we all learn a little from it.

bridging the class divide—and other lessons for grassroots organizing

Linda Stout has a vision of a United States in which the air and water and land is clean, in which neighbors of all cultures and ages have real community with each other, in which everyone has a job they want to do and the unpleasant jobs are shared, in which every child is cared for and fed, in which every person has good health care and access to good education, in which every person, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, or any other “difference” is respected and fully part of society. In this vision the media provide information from all viewpoints and everyone participates in a democracy with real opportunities for all to share leadership. It is a great vision.

Perhaps you have a vision like Stout’s. If so, you are not alone—and Stout might ask you: “What are you doing to make your vision a reality?” If you answer that you have no power, that you’re uneducated, poor, don’t know what to do and too busy to do it if you did, she might tell you her story. Stout grew up in North Carolina in a working poor home—a 10’ x 40’ trailer with no running water. Her mother was permanently disabled in a car accident at age 30, but got nothing in compensation because they were unable to hire a lawyer to help them with the legal process. Stout did well in school, at first, but after being belittled by her fourth grade teacher her grades suffered and she was tracked away from college throughout her middle and high school experience. Nevertheless, she did find her way to college, but discovered her “working-class English was not acceptable” there. Even though she knew she did good work, she internalized the idea that her way of using language was inferior and she lost much of her confidence to speak publicly or write. Despite all this, Stout helped found one of the coolest, most effective social justice advocacy groups in the nation (the Piedmont Peace Project—PPP), now speaks powerfully to large audiences, and has written a book, along with numerous press releases and other work.

Bridging the Class Divide is part personal journey, part grass roots organizing handbook, part appeal for national and global social justice, part treatise on what a real movement for real, permanent change looks like. Stout’s deceptively simply prose structure displays a depth of experience and commitment that rivals anyone anywhere. That depth gives the book its power and accuracy, consistently hitting every target at which she takes aim. And, as she discusses PPP’s model for social change and organizing, Stout always illustrates her ideas with concrete examples from the work.

Stout identifies barriers between classes and how to overcome them. She delineates seven principles for organizing:

• Focus on social change.
• Work across race and class lines.
• Include indigenous organizers and leaders.
• Encourage diversity with ongoing outreach and training.
• Focus on connections between local and national issues.
• Develop and maintain personal empowerment while working for organizational power.
• Be flexible and ready to create new models to adapt to needs and leadership styles of participants.

She redefines leadership as a “survival issue for people of color, women, and low-income communities.” By Stout’s definition, leadership can be learned and shared by every person and “the reward of leadership lies in giving what you’ve learned to others.” She assumes that every person wants to be a leader and gives them opportunities to grow, while still providing support.

Stout discusses how to use the media effectively, how to budget and plan, and how to take care of an organization’s staff. She talks about the need to be prepared for backlash; serious opposition is proof that you’re beginning to succeed in your work—from slashed tires to bad press to family pressure against community leaders, you need to be ready to respond calmly and appropriately.

The book concludes with a call for a unity group, across organizational lines, working for change at every level. Only by bringing us all together with the common vision of a better world for all humanity can we bring the necessary masses together to make the world we all want. “Working together will be the hardest challenge we will face. Much harder than facing the opposition or working alone. But it is the only way we will win. It is the only way to create revolutionary change.”

Tim Wise on racism and flooding

Tim Wise’s commentary (in LiP Magazine) on Rush Limbaugh, flooding in the Midwest, and comparisons to Katrina’s aftermath in New Orleans is (as usual) sharp, insightful, and well-researched. Despite what some say, racism is alive and well in our society: “Only when white folks stand up . . . only when we see challenging white racism as our burden, our responsibility, and as a fundamental part of what we need to do . . . will things likely change.”

the mismeasure of man [sic]

Stephen J. Gould is one of the finest writers on science I have read. He writes clearly and thoroughly about both the technical details of science and its larger philosophical issues. When his analysis of the history of attempts to measure human intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man, was published (1981), it was an almost instant classic. In it he exposes the bias inherent in the studies of intelligence and ranking, focusing primarily on the logical and statistical flaws, though he also spends time on the cultural and political contexts in which such errors flourished and on the bias—cultural and linguistic—in the tests themselves. Almost without exception, he writes with a humility about science and its possibilities, while still affirming the need to try, that I find refreshing and helpful in a world that is too often filled with disciplinary arrogance.

Technically, this book is about biological determinism. Although there are many versions of biological determinism, the idea is essentially that one’s genes and the biology with which you are born determine your potential. Another way to think about this is that biological determinism is primarily about limits for a person’s growth: according to this argument, a baby’s physical being creates a maximum for how smart he/she can ever be, how talented she/he can ever be, and to what socio-economic class he/she can ever rise. I hear the ghosts of biological determinism when students say things like “I’ve reached my math limit” or “I’ve gone as far as I can in math.” Indeed, there is a fairly common belief that people either have math ability or they don’t and there’s no changing it no matter what you do, but I have seen no research to back up that idea. And this kind of idea is not limited to math ability; it’s often applied to all kinds of mental and other abilities.

Gould “seeks to demonstrate both the scientific weaknesses and political contexts of determinist arguments.” He places deterministic thought within the Platonic tradition in which it belongs, but his message is not that determinists were evil or even always wrong, but that science is a “social phenomenon, a gutsy human” act of creativity, filled with “hunch, vision, and intuition.” For Gould and for me, science is an imaginative process of understanding and explaining the world, a process in which we try to, and sometimes succeed, in come closer to the truth, but that—because we are human and because this creative process is cultural bound and culturally influenced—does not always bring us closer to the truth. Gould criticizes “the myth that science is itself an objective enterprise, done properly only when scientists can shuck the constraints of their culture and view the world as it really is.”

One of the large themes in the book is the error of reification: the conversion of an idea into a concrete object. A good example of this in our every day life is the idea of love. Most of us have ideas about what love is and how it operates in the world, but I don’t think anyone would suggest that love is a concrete object that can be measured or assessed. Rather, it is an idea we use to describe certain feelings and events and commitments. The biological determinists Gould describes try to reify intelligence by turning it into a unitary object that can be measured through tests of what we have learned to call IQ. That intelligence is more complex and interesting than that seems obvious and good to me, but the attempts to measure human intelligence are numerous and continue today.

More than that, once we have a number attached to intelligence, we can rank people and groups of people, and that is precisely what was done. Cranial capacity, IQ scores, and other supposed measures of intelligence were used to rank people—and with unsurprising results, considering who was doing most of the measuring: middle-class, white men came out on top and other gender, racial, and class groups fared less well.

If you read the book, you’ll find the details of many of the historical attempts to measure and rank intelligence, starting in the 19th century and up to the 1970s, along with a broad view of the scientific and political contexts of those attempts. It is a fascinating and cautionary tale—and one with a positive message, at least in my mind: humans and our endeavors, including science, are complex and full of potential; that we cannot accurately measure that potential means that our limit is not known.

In Professor’s Model, Diversity = Productivity

Claudia Dreifus published a provocative article and interview with Scott E. Page in the NYTimes in January. His book is The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies (Princeton University Press). In the interview, Page explains that, together with Lu Hong—an economist at Chicago’s Loyola University—he

constructed a formal model that showed mathematically that diversity can trump ability, and also when it does. . . . What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.
The other thing we did was to show in mathematical terms how when making predictions, a group’s errors depend in equal parts on the ability of its members to predict and their diversity. This second theorem can be expressed as an equation: collective accuracy = average accuracy + diversity.

I am leery of the predictive power of mathematical models in the world. Furthermore, I haven’t read this book and can’t speak to its readability or to the quality of the research in it. I do think the ideas expressed in the article are worth talking about. It’s a good addition to the national conversation on these issues.