More than test scores: A liberal contextualist picture of educational accountability

Educational Theory

Volumn 53, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 1-18

  Blacker, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 24944586271     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2003.00001.x     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Michigan and Pennsylvania have contracted with the financial information services company Standard and Poor's for evaluating their schools. See 〈http://www.ses.standardandpoors.com〉. Last accessed 1 March 2003.
2. For another kind of defense of pluralism in systems of accountability not inconsistent with my own, see Kenneth A. Strike, "Centralized Goal Formation, Citizenship, and Educational Pluralism: Accountability in Liberal Democratic Societies," Educational Policy 12 [ 1998): 203-215.
3. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice:A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York Basic Books, 1983).
4. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
5. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York Oxford University Press, 1990).
6. Amy Gutrnann, Democratic Education [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987);
7. Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (New York Oxford University Press, 1997);
8. and Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Macedo's analysis is slightly more contextualist because his "civic liberalism" signals an attention to a larger panoply of social institutions such as schools. Gutmann also directly attends to such institutions, including those outside schools.
9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929), 93.
10. To be precise, my view is closest to David Miller's extension of the Walzerian notion. See David Blacker, "Complex Equality and Democratic Education: The Challenge of Walzerian Spherical Pluralism," Educational Theory 49 11999): 181-206.
11. See also David Miller, "Complex Equality," in Pluralism, Justice ond Equolity, eds. David Miller and Michael Walzer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 197-225.
12. I explain and defend this assumption more fully in David Blacker, "The Institutional Autonomy of Education," Journal of Philosophy of Education 34 (2000):2 29-246.
13. Though I take inspiration from David Miller's Principles of Social justice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19991, these categories are my own. Miller's categories are "solidaristic community, instrumental association, and citizenship," 26ff.
14. More detail regarding this issue is provided in Blacker, "The Institutional Autonomy of Education."
15. Available at 〈http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html〉L.a st accessed 1 March 2003.
16. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L.A. Selby-Brigge (New York: Oxford University Press, 19851, 477-484.
17. See Franz de Waal, ChimpanzeePo1itics:Power and Sex Among Apes, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000);
18. and Franz de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist (New York: Basic Books, 2001 I.
19. This is an allusion to the famous title of John Rawls' essay, "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical, Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223-251.
20. Stuart Hampshire, "Justice Is Conflict: The Soul and the City," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 19981, 164.
21. Judith Shklar makes this point central in American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
22. See also Orlando Patterson, Freedom, Volume 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
23. Gutmann, Democratic Education, 4447.
24. Bruce Ackerman, We the People, Volume 2:Foundations [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). My view of the realm of right accords with what Ackerman calls the "constitutional regime, the matrix of institutional relationships and fundamental values that are usually taken as the constitutional baseline in normal political life," 59.
25. The latter goals are more explicitly embraced in democracies like the United Kingdom, which lack the relatively stricter Establishment Ciause-based jurisprudential requirements of the United States.
26. Again, analogous worries would apply if, say, religion or the Party were in control and were pushing exclusively for their own exclusive goods.
27. Educational institutions will have to make choices here. Are they hitched to some particular comprehensive conception (for example, are they to be "good Catholic schools")! Or are they to be public schools that have a wider locus of accountability - because they cannot be reduced to any particular set of demands from any one segment of society - and hence candidates for institutional autonomy? See Blacker, "The Institutional Autonomy of Education."
28. It may be that no comprehensive conception can be arrived at truly individualistically, though an "answer" to that question would probably presuppose some particular comprehensive conception.
29. Liberals may advocate on behalf of cultural coherence, too, but ultimately because it is good for the individuals or, as liberal contextualists would argue, because individuals are served by social heterogeneity as such. I do not think any liberal can hold that cultural coherence is good as such, because it will always depend on the culture and the extent to which it is compatible with human rights.
30. Logically, it is possible that the animating comprehensive conceptions have been replaced by others or are somehow no longer necessary (perhaps the weight of inertia keeps things going). The first possibility seems likely to be true here and there, but the second seems unlikely or, at best, a temporary phenomenon that may be experienced immediately prior to the collapse of a regime.
31. A countervailing force is where the patriarchal division of labor has dragooned its primary school teachers from a largely captive labor pool of females, as was the case for generations in the United States.
32. See Kevin McDonough, "Can the Liberal State Support Cultural Identity Schools?" American Journal of Education 106 (1998)4:6 3-480.
33. I thank Jeremy Waldron for the memorable phrase "liberal commissars."
34. There is no neat, mathematical model for this, however. Stalinism had its mythic aspects, for example, drawing self-consciously on images and motifs of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Nazism certainly had its own legal formalism. For the former, see Isaac Deutscher, "Marxism and Primitive Magic," in The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on Twentieth-Century World Politics, ed. Tariq Ali (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 106-1 17.
35. John Beck, Morality and Citizenship in Education (London: Cassell, 19981, 73-74. As Beck rightly emphasizes, this includes nonmoral motives that are often important for regime stability, such as "compliance" and "a certain taken-for-granted acceptance of the 'inevitability' of these unjust social arrangements." Beck continues, "Almost all theories of 'crisis' significantly underestimate the very considerable strength and durability of these non-nonnative bases of social integration."
36. DavidHume, Treatise on Human Nature, bk. 11, sect. V, in Hume: Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Henry D. Aiken (New York: Hafner Press, 19481, 25.
37. A terror state that uses its terror to uphold a liberal conception of rights seems a logical impossibility.
38. A now-iconic example of this would be whether a private restaurant may maintain racial segregation, as dramatized in the famous 1960 Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina.
39. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 19931, 133-172.
40. This would give one the tools crucial to critiquing substandard instruction as effectively denying educational resources to the children subjected to it. In this way, poor or mis-education (just like a lack of it) can become a violation of rights.
41. Or at least a number of citizens will do so. Liberal contextualism leaves plenty of room for apolitical individuals andeschews aproto-fanatical "participatory democracy" that would drag everyone into politics regardless of their comprehensive commitments (whichmight, for example, counsel them to avoidpolitical engagement).
42. I defend this view more extensively in David Blacker, "Civic Friendship and Democratic Education," in Education and Citizenship in Liberal Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, eds. Walter Feinberg and Kevin McDonough (New York Oxford University Press, 2003 [forthcoming]).
43. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harperperennial, 1998
44. In 1999, then-U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala emphasized the scope of the problem in testimony before the US. Congress, which included the following statement: "Youth suicide is an inseparable component of the problem of youth violence. Suicide is the third leading cause of death for young people, ages 15-24, in the united States. The rates havenearly tripledsince 1950 but over the past decade have declined by about 10 percent. In 1997, according to the YRBS [the Center for Disease Control's Youth Risk Behavior Survey], about 21 percent of students in grades 9 through 12 -more than one in five - reported that they seriously considered taking their own lives during the previous year. And almost 8 percent reported actually attempting suicide." The complete testimony is available at 〈http:// www.os.dhhs.gov/asl/testify/t990914a.html〉.a st accessed 1 March 2003.
45. Hume , Treatise on Human Nature, 2nd ed., 581-582.