I'm interested in the mechanics of how someone's work becomes "hot," one of the texts "worth" mentioning in grants/scholarly work etc. to prove your chops. And is it possible to defy that trend or fad and still succeed?
Also, I appreciated the autumnal background (pumpkin). You'll be a YouTuber yet, deBoer!
I'd imagine it's as hard to pin that down as it is to pin down how any media or cultural artifact / idea becomes a fad, but I'm interested in the same questions.
The academic angle is certainly a valid one - there's often self-reinforcing paradigmatic momentum in most disciplines.
But it's also "hot" because of the alignment between anti-racism and corporate interests. Capital is sanctifying components of it, and that's what shakes the stick in the US.
As a few other comments have pointed out, it's often a matter of incentives. Doing the same thing that's always been done (even if it's generally working well) isn't going to get you an award or a better job higher up the ladder in education world. Putting your own personal stamp on the curriculum or policies as an administrator on a department, a school, or a district is something that can help propel you to the next level in your career, even if the metrics (if you're even allowed to use those) don't support it; statistics can be massaged in various ways to fit the narrative and there's always the "it's a good idea but bad people just didn't implement it right" excuse.
So what does an entrepreneurial administrator (because you almost certainly can't move up the salary scale very much if you stay as a mere teacher) do? Find the most recent "trend" in education that seems new, cool, and different. This is where the education schools and think tanks come in, sometimes with foundations dangling $$ as well. Then, force your underlings to implement that fad.
This will often go poorly; teachers who've stuck around for more than a few years are burned out from the endless parade of "new ideas" and have seen this show before. Doesn't matter if the new stuff is not a good fit for the school or district, doesn't matter if it's poorly implemented, doesn't matter if you don't really have buy-in from the community or not--this is *your* new curriculum/behavioral plan/whatever and you're going to make sure it gets done or else. This is where you get to use threats, cajoling, playing favorites, etc. to make sure that people at least nod along with you and use whatever buzzword you wanted rolled out.
The end result is usually a mix of confusion, ineffectiveness, a few "demonstration" schools or classes that get hyped up in the media. But by the time the other admins/politicians wise up, the aspiring admin is usually long gone or in a higher-up position (see for instance the meteoric rise of Cindy Marten in San Diego, now a deputy at the Dept. of Education).
Over time, you get a hodgepodge of various policies/curricula cobbled together from previous leaders that sometimes get the dubious label of "best practices," but in actuality are often contradictory, poorly designed, badly measured, and not adequately funded. Sometimes this is benign, but other times this cobbled-together set of fads gets immortalized in a "reformed" teacher evaluation rubric that tasks teachers with performing 80+ distinct tasks (each of which is "supported" by some study or other, regardless of the context or replicability or scaling issues) during each observed lesson or turned into a 100+ page Word document for a curriculum that is impossible to actually get through in an actual class.
I’ve found that simply citing the CRT Wikipedia works to disabuse someone of the view that CRT is only legal studies: “In addition to law, critical race theory is taught and applied in the fields of education, political science, women's studies, ethnic studies, communication, sociology, and American studies.”
Can confirm. I got my MS.Ed at a big name school last year and was formally trained in the dark arts of CRT. More than anything else, the foundational CRT papers are just boring as shit to read. I skimmed them so I could go back to lesson planning and doing my actual job of getting ready to teach.
Everything you say here is true, important, and well-articulated. So, thank you. I would just add one broader aspect of what seems to make CRT so particularly "hot" right now:
Because it is both far-reaching in its claims and purposely muddy on the details, CRT has the ability to immediately draw criticism from its opponents, without providing a clear, digestible line of attack. In theory, your opponents are left looking like reactionary simpletons and you're left to frolic in the glow of inscrutable mystique.
This is (at least part of) the power that figures like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol drew from in the Pop Art movement. It's not that their work intrinsically spoke to art-lovers' desires for boundary-pushing . But it did have the power to provoke immediate resistance from the old guard about what is and isn't art. By the time the old guard realized that this was actually a difficult distinction to make, it was too late. The authority-provoking flame was already burning too bright to be extinguished.
Well done. Academic careers are grant-driven. If the grants are available professors will come to the topics and when they come the results will be written, presented and cited. And someone clever will present this as a public intellectual and get paid a lot of $$$ to go around to campuses and make presentations.
My wife (kindergarten teacher) came home with a saying popular at her school the other day:
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym. And those who can't teach gym run the DEI workshops.
Joking aside, you explained how this works with grant applications. Something pretty similar seems to be happening in the Teacher-to-Principal pipeline. You need to have the hot stuff on your resume. This means you run anti-racism and DEI new teacher training seminars at your school. It means you take time off to go to training seminars yourself. Check those boxes or your resume gets put in the trash.
We're left with a system where those who are most inclined to like this stuff end up in administration themselves. And the cycle continues.
The same thing happens in college. Both tenure-track faculty and administrators have incentives to add DEI-related committee work to their resumes. When I worked at a college, the DEI committee was so big they often had to bring in additional chairs because so many people wanted to be members.
"You need to have the hot stuff on your resume. This means you run anti-racism and DEI new teacher training seminars at your school. It means you take time off to go to training seminars yourself."
Ah, so it's similar to the corporate world where people have "lean six sigma" and other useless trainings.
This seems to me an instance within a larger type of bureaucratic issue: there are those who go through the motions of obtaining the certifications and the trappings of success and improvement that are recognized within their bureaucracy as means to advance. These sorts of efforts produce uneven results, because the reasons for getting those certifications are typically advancement-driven; however, in the course of gaining such certifications, a person *can* learn valuable techniques and ideas (most of those certifications were created for a reason). But the value of those buzzword ideas is dependent on a whole lot of things, not least of which is the extent to which they are being applied because they fit the problem, and the extent to which they are being applied even if they don't really fit because the practitioner wants to be seen to apply them.
Anyone who has been in corporate jobs has seen the person who wants to apply scrum or lean / six sigma or net promoter score or whatever new thing is generating buzz more than they actually want to solve a problem.
Luckily, and perhaps confoundingly, it's not something everyone does. Some practitioners and professionals still just want to solve problems, find the truth, etc. Sometimes the buzzword techniques are really good for doing that. Sometimes they are not. If you can't define the problem properly, though, it doesn't matter which method you use: your success depends on luck.
The point about how interdisciplinarity in academia is rhetorically praised but in practice punished is a good one. That contradiction has always confused me until I realized it was by design; that is, that contradiction is the result of conflicting personal agendas/incentives.
Having been an academic at public universities for most of my career and being a bleeding-heart liberal, I am nonetheless appalled by what academia has become. I read this ( https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/other-than-merit-the-prevalence-of-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-statements-in-university-hiring/ ) today. Granted, the American Enterprise Institute is not my go-to source as a rule, but don't kill the messenger. My reaction was "My God! I can't believe that, were I to apply for an academic position today, I might have to bow to the thought police to even be considered for a position." Read it and weep:
"In 2018, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Heather Mac Donald drew attention, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, to the decision at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) to require statements from all faculty applicants documenting their contributions to DEI, which would be weighted with the rest of their application portfolio. Since Mac Donald’s warning, the University of California (UC) system has likely become the leading university system embracing mandatory DEI statements from faculty applicants.
As of 2019, eight out of 10 UC campuses required these statements. A joint task force recommended that DEI requirements be standardized across the UC system. At the University of California, Berkeley, administrators published a sample “Rubric for Assessing Candidate Contributions to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” which provides guidance for search committees evaluating applicants. Under this rubric, applicants are evaluated on a 1–5 scale for knowledge of DEI, track record of DEI, and plans for advancing DEI. And UCLA’s decision noted that diversity statements were becoming more common nationally and that growth would continue. "
Tangential at best, but thinking of all this imo loony DEI stuff reminded me of a Kurt Vonnegut short story [http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html] I taught long ago and far away, which begins as follows:
---------
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains. ....
George and Hazel were watching television. .... On the television screen were ballerinas. .... They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.
deBoer has written about this a few times. Equality doesn't really make sense as a political goal. Marxists preferred focusing on freedom and ending exploitation.
I'm calming down from the party-change thing, but I do believe that only the center gets things done, and I only care about things that get done, not posturing.
Watching a talking head on MSNBC claim that black woman Winsome Sears, newly elected Lt Gov of Virginia, is AHKTUALLY a White Supremicist was pretty unsettling, as is the fact there has been zero pushback from any elected Democrats to this. Michael Moore was a hero of mine after Fahrenheit 911, but he is now recommending doubling-down on the losing progressive candidates, who can't even win a ranked-choice election in New York City, or be on the ballot and defeat a write-in centrist Democrat in Buffalo.
Yes, this. Also links directly to the general concept/vocabulary diffusion among the broader PMC or whatever you want to call it - as a member of that class in my 30s, we learned all these concepts in HS/college and it’s now essentially etiquette to incorporate them to some degree in formal/professional settings like published writing and job interviews. There’s a conformism aspect that spreads very quickly (which I recognize even as I agree with most of the concepts!)
That makes it both less organic and less profound than its advocates claim, but also less philosophical or sinister than its critics fear. And mostly shows how the particular issue being debated right now is about language more than anything else.
First, CRTers are weird about who counts as a CRTer. Apparently, you have to have some set of assumptions and beliefs to count as a CRTer, but from what I can tell, they're not rigorously definable or even laid out as principles. So the moves to designate someone as a real CRTer and someone who is not are often opaque.
I would imagine that this happened just so that CRTers could say they have a particular paradigm, but its weird combination of persnickety gate-keeping and definitional amorphousness then led to its useful second feature, which is the technically correct but substantively irrelevant fact that you can say Chris Rufo is wrong about what CRT is. Yes, Rufo is wrong about what CRT is. It turns out that convergent interest theory is a big, dumb part of CRT. And that dummy instead labels as "CRT" ideas like "America fundamentally white supremacist", and "if you're not actively antiracist, then you're racist", and "disparate impact is racist." But those ideas are quite worrisome and far from obviously true to a huge number of people in America!
It reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Lisa is sentenced to Monster Island, but she's told not to worry, because "it's just a name." Sure, it has monsters on it, but it's really a peninsula! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAS3DsmLfKY
Real missed opportunity not naming the YouTube channel Freddie DeBloegger tbh
I'm interested in the mechanics of how someone's work becomes "hot," one of the texts "worth" mentioning in grants/scholarly work etc. to prove your chops. And is it possible to defy that trend or fad and still succeed?
Also, I appreciated the autumnal background (pumpkin). You'll be a YouTuber yet, deBoer!
I'd imagine it's as hard to pin that down as it is to pin down how any media or cultural artifact / idea becomes a fad, but I'm interested in the same questions.
The pumpkin caught my eye as well. Nice touch.
The academic angle is certainly a valid one - there's often self-reinforcing paradigmatic momentum in most disciplines.
But it's also "hot" because of the alignment between anti-racism and corporate interests. Capital is sanctifying components of it, and that's what shakes the stick in the US.
here for the pro-pumpkin comments.
Am I correct to infer that public school curricula are treated like a petri dish for academic and think tank research?
No, that implies that they have some doubt about their ideas. It's more, here, we've figured out what's best, now go do it.
As a few other comments have pointed out, it's often a matter of incentives. Doing the same thing that's always been done (even if it's generally working well) isn't going to get you an award or a better job higher up the ladder in education world. Putting your own personal stamp on the curriculum or policies as an administrator on a department, a school, or a district is something that can help propel you to the next level in your career, even if the metrics (if you're even allowed to use those) don't support it; statistics can be massaged in various ways to fit the narrative and there's always the "it's a good idea but bad people just didn't implement it right" excuse.
So what does an entrepreneurial administrator (because you almost certainly can't move up the salary scale very much if you stay as a mere teacher) do? Find the most recent "trend" in education that seems new, cool, and different. This is where the education schools and think tanks come in, sometimes with foundations dangling $$ as well. Then, force your underlings to implement that fad.
This will often go poorly; teachers who've stuck around for more than a few years are burned out from the endless parade of "new ideas" and have seen this show before. Doesn't matter if the new stuff is not a good fit for the school or district, doesn't matter if it's poorly implemented, doesn't matter if you don't really have buy-in from the community or not--this is *your* new curriculum/behavioral plan/whatever and you're going to make sure it gets done or else. This is where you get to use threats, cajoling, playing favorites, etc. to make sure that people at least nod along with you and use whatever buzzword you wanted rolled out.
The end result is usually a mix of confusion, ineffectiveness, a few "demonstration" schools or classes that get hyped up in the media. But by the time the other admins/politicians wise up, the aspiring admin is usually long gone or in a higher-up position (see for instance the meteoric rise of Cindy Marten in San Diego, now a deputy at the Dept. of Education).
Over time, you get a hodgepodge of various policies/curricula cobbled together from previous leaders that sometimes get the dubious label of "best practices," but in actuality are often contradictory, poorly designed, badly measured, and not adequately funded. Sometimes this is benign, but other times this cobbled-together set of fads gets immortalized in a "reformed" teacher evaluation rubric that tasks teachers with performing 80+ distinct tasks (each of which is "supported" by some study or other, regardless of the context or replicability or scaling issues) during each observed lesson or turned into a 100+ page Word document for a curriculum that is impossible to actually get through in an actual class.
I’ve found that simply citing the CRT Wikipedia works to disabuse someone of the view that CRT is only legal studies: “In addition to law, critical race theory is taught and applied in the fields of education, political science, women's studies, ethnic studies, communication, sociology, and American studies.”
Can confirm. I got my MS.Ed at a big name school last year and was formally trained in the dark arts of CRT. More than anything else, the foundational CRT papers are just boring as shit to read. I skimmed them so I could go back to lesson planning and doing my actual job of getting ready to teach.
Everything you say here is true, important, and well-articulated. So, thank you. I would just add one broader aspect of what seems to make CRT so particularly "hot" right now:
Because it is both far-reaching in its claims and purposely muddy on the details, CRT has the ability to immediately draw criticism from its opponents, without providing a clear, digestible line of attack. In theory, your opponents are left looking like reactionary simpletons and you're left to frolic in the glow of inscrutable mystique.
This is (at least part of) the power that figures like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol drew from in the Pop Art movement. It's not that their work intrinsically spoke to art-lovers' desires for boundary-pushing . But it did have the power to provoke immediate resistance from the old guard about what is and isn't art. By the time the old guard realized that this was actually a difficult distinction to make, it was too late. The authority-provoking flame was already burning too bright to be extinguished.
Well done. Academic careers are grant-driven. If the grants are available professors will come to the topics and when they come the results will be written, presented and cited. And someone clever will present this as a public intellectual and get paid a lot of $$$ to go around to campuses and make presentations.
My wife (kindergarten teacher) came home with a saying popular at her school the other day:
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym. And those who can't teach gym run the DEI workshops.
Joking aside, you explained how this works with grant applications. Something pretty similar seems to be happening in the Teacher-to-Principal pipeline. You need to have the hot stuff on your resume. This means you run anti-racism and DEI new teacher training seminars at your school. It means you take time off to go to training seminars yourself. Check those boxes or your resume gets put in the trash.
We're left with a system where those who are most inclined to like this stuff end up in administration themselves. And the cycle continues.
The same thing happens in college. Both tenure-track faculty and administrators have incentives to add DEI-related committee work to their resumes. When I worked at a college, the DEI committee was so big they often had to bring in additional chairs because so many people wanted to be members.
"You need to have the hot stuff on your resume. This means you run anti-racism and DEI new teacher training seminars at your school. It means you take time off to go to training seminars yourself."
Ah, so it's similar to the corporate world where people have "lean six sigma" and other useless trainings.
This seems to me an instance within a larger type of bureaucratic issue: there are those who go through the motions of obtaining the certifications and the trappings of success and improvement that are recognized within their bureaucracy as means to advance. These sorts of efforts produce uneven results, because the reasons for getting those certifications are typically advancement-driven; however, in the course of gaining such certifications, a person *can* learn valuable techniques and ideas (most of those certifications were created for a reason). But the value of those buzzword ideas is dependent on a whole lot of things, not least of which is the extent to which they are being applied because they fit the problem, and the extent to which they are being applied even if they don't really fit because the practitioner wants to be seen to apply them.
Anyone who has been in corporate jobs has seen the person who wants to apply scrum or lean / six sigma or net promoter score or whatever new thing is generating buzz more than they actually want to solve a problem.
Luckily, and perhaps confoundingly, it's not something everyone does. Some practitioners and professionals still just want to solve problems, find the truth, etc. Sometimes the buzzword techniques are really good for doing that. Sometimes they are not. If you can't define the problem properly, though, it doesn't matter which method you use: your success depends on luck.
"Machine learning" is the new six sigma.
I love me some random forests but come on ML isn't the solution to everything
Machine learning, AI, and blockchain.
The point about how interdisciplinarity in academia is rhetorically praised but in practice punished is a good one. That contradiction has always confused me until I realized it was by design; that is, that contradiction is the result of conflicting personal agendas/incentives.
Having been an academic at public universities for most of my career and being a bleeding-heart liberal, I am nonetheless appalled by what academia has become. I read this ( https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/other-than-merit-the-prevalence-of-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-statements-in-university-hiring/ ) today. Granted, the American Enterprise Institute is not my go-to source as a rule, but don't kill the messenger. My reaction was "My God! I can't believe that, were I to apply for an academic position today, I might have to bow to the thought police to even be considered for a position." Read it and weep:
"In 2018, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Heather Mac Donald drew attention, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, to the decision at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) to require statements from all faculty applicants documenting their contributions to DEI, which would be weighted with the rest of their application portfolio. Since Mac Donald’s warning, the University of California (UC) system has likely become the leading university system embracing mandatory DEI statements from faculty applicants.
As of 2019, eight out of 10 UC campuses required these statements. A joint task force recommended that DEI requirements be standardized across the UC system. At the University of California, Berkeley, administrators published a sample “Rubric for Assessing Candidate Contributions to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” which provides guidance for search committees evaluating applicants. Under this rubric, applicants are evaluated on a 1–5 scale for knowledge of DEI, track record of DEI, and plans for advancing DEI. And UCLA’s decision noted that diversity statements were becoming more common nationally and that growth would continue. "
Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark provides a synopsis here: https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/whos-afraid-of-free-speech [scroll down to the heading "The Diversity Loyalty Oaths"]
As someone with an economics degree, I'm so happy that we're not longer the laughing stock of the academy.
But the econominsts have to submit those statements to UC too if they want a job there.
Economist can always run to the private sector if they don't want to deal with this crap though
Where in the private sector would you go that doesn't have a thriving DEI component? Or are you talking *just* about the loyalty oaths?
My favorite moment, 3:55: "Academia is a weird world with a lot of turfs and stuff -- that T-U-R-F".
"that's"
Tangential at best, but thinking of all this imo loony DEI stuff reminded me of a Kurt Vonnegut short story [http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html] I taught long ago and far away, which begins as follows:
---------
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains. ....
George and Hazel were watching television. .... On the television screen were ballerinas. .... They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.
--------
That's equity of outcomes, folks!
deBoer has written about this a few times. Equality doesn't really make sense as a political goal. Marxists preferred focusing on freedom and ending exploitation.
Except that marxists can't actually define "exploitation" in any way that could be codified into law. Marxism is vaporware.
I'm calming down from the party-change thing, but I do believe that only the center gets things done, and I only care about things that get done, not posturing.
Watching a talking head on MSNBC claim that black woman Winsome Sears, newly elected Lt Gov of Virginia, is AHKTUALLY a White Supremicist was pretty unsettling, as is the fact there has been zero pushback from any elected Democrats to this. Michael Moore was a hero of mine after Fahrenheit 911, but he is now recommending doubling-down on the losing progressive candidates, who can't even win a ranked-choice election in New York City, or be on the ballot and defeat a write-in centrist Democrat in Buffalo.
I remember that story! It should be required reading for all the neoracists.
Yes, this. Also links directly to the general concept/vocabulary diffusion among the broader PMC or whatever you want to call it - as a member of that class in my 30s, we learned all these concepts in HS/college and it’s now essentially etiquette to incorporate them to some degree in formal/professional settings like published writing and job interviews. There’s a conformism aspect that spreads very quickly (which I recognize even as I agree with most of the concepts!)
That makes it both less organic and less profound than its advocates claim, but also less philosophical or sinister than its critics fear. And mostly shows how the particular issue being debated right now is about language more than anything else.
The "this isn't CRT" stuff is so annoying.
First, CRTers are weird about who counts as a CRTer. Apparently, you have to have some set of assumptions and beliefs to count as a CRTer, but from what I can tell, they're not rigorously definable or even laid out as principles. So the moves to designate someone as a real CRTer and someone who is not are often opaque.
I would imagine that this happened just so that CRTers could say they have a particular paradigm, but its weird combination of persnickety gate-keeping and definitional amorphousness then led to its useful second feature, which is the technically correct but substantively irrelevant fact that you can say Chris Rufo is wrong about what CRT is. Yes, Rufo is wrong about what CRT is. It turns out that convergent interest theory is a big, dumb part of CRT. And that dummy instead labels as "CRT" ideas like "America fundamentally white supremacist", and "if you're not actively antiracist, then you're racist", and "disparate impact is racist." But those ideas are quite worrisome and far from obviously true to a huge number of people in America!
It reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Lisa is sentenced to Monster Island, but she's told not to worry, because "it's just a name." Sure, it has monsters on it, but it's really a peninsula! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAS3DsmLfKY