Detail Trope

Technics and the human intersect at the (ob)scene of the disaster, to paraphrase from Ulmer's review lecture.  The proliferation of (policies mandating) standardized testing is a critical site through which we are engineering our own becoming.

The heuretic method, coupled with the CATTt readings for this particular project, suggests that we locate a precise visual detail from the (mediated) material of our disaster, and that we treat this detail as a mise-en-abyme for an epiphany (or at least a punctum feeling) we have about the disaster.

In my case, the clip-art images of children that conventionally appear on FCAT practice tests and worksheets struck my as a promising visual detail.  

The aesthetic of these images (low-res, black & white) seems to reflect something about the political/bureaucratic institutions that commissioned them: from a technical standpoint, these clip-art images are the most efficient design for circulating unchanged from the national or state Department of Education to the copiers and scanners of each and every school in the region.  As such, the images are designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of technical capabilities--they are settled upon a design which can be read by and agreed with (exactly reproduced) by even the most rudimentary copy machine.  Moreover, on a more enigmatic level, the clip-art aesthetic elicits, from me, an eerie sense of correspondence between the design of the image, the structure of the test, the experience of taking/teaching the test, and it's ramification for education (and consequently thought).

Flattening. Stratifying. Efficiency. Black and White.        

The Values of the Foundation for Florida's Future (2)

 The Foundation for Florida's Future really likes grade things.  I don't know if this tendency is an expression of their fundamental values as policy makers so much as it is an attempt to transpose their political agenda into what seems like a more objective/neutral system of espousing value judgments.

The Foundation prides itself on establishing objective measures for data-driven accountability to promote statistically-evident increases in student learning.

To this end, in consultation with the Foundation, Florida has adopted an education policy that calculates grades for each and every public school in the state based on student proficiency levels (measure by the FCAT).  The state then uses these grades as the basis for dolling out funding.  "A" schools get the most money, "B" schools a little less, and so on.  Here's the Foundation's reasoning: "Funding that recognizes and rewards progress will result in rising student achievement and more efficient and productive school systems."  Not only do "failing schools" receive less funding--the teachers at these schools are required to attend weekend workshops learning how to teach the FCAT and must devote a minimum amount of their class time FCAT practice questions.  In this way, the grade-policy appropriates the qualitative tradition of school grading systems as a euphemistic means to proscribe quantitative (money and time) rewards and punishments, whereby (administrative) data becomes more knowledgeable than (disciplinary) knowledge.  

But schools aren't the only thing the Foundation likes to grade.  There's another thing, which I just discovered on the Foundation for Florida's Future website.  And it's is almost too funny to believe.  The Foundation gives a grade to each of Florida's state legislators based on their performance related to educational policy.  So, as I click on the link to these "grades," I'm wondering just how great the disparity is going to be between Democrats and Republicans.  And sure enough, the grades for Democrat senators: 1 "C"; 2 "D"; 10 "F"...really, 10 F's out of 13.  And, of course, the Foundation scored all but a handful of Republican senators as "A" and even "A+"...this so-called report card is worth seeing for yourself.

The Values of the Foundation for Florida's Future (1)

The above ad, put on by Jeb Bush's Foundation for Florida's Future, urges citizens of Florida to support Senate Bill 6.  The Foundation for Florida's Future has been the major hub for the state's education reform efforts for several years, and they are currently working with legislators to finish up a revision of SB 6 that will be voted on later this year.

Continuing my back and forth between One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and SB 6, I'll spend this post looking directly at the fundamental values apparent in the Foundation for Florida's Future promo materials and website, all the while keeping in mind the insights generated from my posts on the movie.

Returning to the ad above, here's a breakdown of its three main verbal appeals (and the subtext of their rhetorical function as an enthymeme):

1) "Florida's neediest students...the poor, the disabled, those in broken homes with broken spirits... deserve an education that gives them hope for a better life."
Doxa: charity, good will, the American Dream
Omitted Premise: The current education system neglects Florida's neediest students.
Omitted Premise 2: Neglecting the needy is bad but nothing's worst than neglecting needy children.

2) "We can finally pay more to teachers who care about every child's learning"
Doxa: pay for performance (capitalism), equal opportunity (democracy)
Omitted Premise: Emphasis on "finally" -- SB 6 is progressive if not obvious, while other teacher pay systems are backwards and not reflective of the current economic system.
Omitted Premise 2: Emphasis on "care" -- Teachers who don't teach their students how to do well on the FCAT do not care about student learning.

3) "Please, don't abandon these children."
Doxa: intergenerational/civic duty
Omitted Premise: These children desperately need/want SB 6 to pass.
Omitted Conclusion: If you don't support SB 6, then you are turning your back on the(ir) future.

Target+Contrast+Theory

Here's a question that stuck with me from last class: What is it about our accident/disaster that is seducing (some of) us? Framing the question in this (Baudriallard) way adds something, I think, to the instruction from our Contrast, which is "to use popular narratives as probes to locate the fundamental values (the common scenarios) motivating decision-making in individual and collective situations." That is to say, locating these fundamental values is a matter of tracing the characters' and the policymakers' fascination; their (fanatical) adherence to certain values probably has more to do with seduction and symbolic exchange (general/gift economy) than with rationality and utility (restricted economy), even when they justify their decisions with logical appeals to the common good. 

This is a glaring point of correspondence between my Contrast movie (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) and my Target disaster (standardized testing & the policies that promote/enforce them). In my movie, for instance, Nurse Ratched uses a logical appeal to the common good to justify the most crucial policy decision of the film (the decision to keep McMurphy in the ward beyond his mandatory 90 day sentence). In spite of the psychologists' willingness to give McMurphy the benefit of the doubt (yes, he's a bit wild, but he's not clinically insane), Nurse Ratched urges them to retain McMurphy in the name of the institution's professional responsibility to society. She believes that "giving up" on McMurphy would be to "pass our problem onto somebody else." 

The scene (and obscenity) of this decision in the film corresponds rather clearly with current policy debates surrounding public education in Florida. Failing schools (teachers and students) are cast into the role of McMurphy, while the FL legislators sit at the table with Nurse Ratched and the psychologist (all bathing each other in their collective sense of personal responsibility). Of course, personal responsibility is not a bad thing/value in inself; it becomes problematic, however, when one's (ecstatic) sense of personal responsibility drives her/him to take responsibility away from others. At this point, what is called personal/professional/civic responsibility becomes a game of subject/object relations: 

*by appealing to my professional responsibility to the "common good," as a state legislator, I am indirectly extending the reach/power of my subjectivity at the dispense of those teachers and students who, as the statistics show, have failed their responsibility to the common good 

*the fact/proof of their failure affords me the power as legislator to impose a plan (my plan) upon them in the name of civic duty 

*my power as legislator (i.e., my capacity to impose my will upon others, rendering them into passive objects of my subjectivity--as FCAT literally does) is directly proportionate to my ability to exhibit the statistical failings of the teachers and students (FCAT data sheets have always excelled at this)

*my fascination with my professional responsibility to the common good is at once the image of my own power seducing me 

(I can give the people of the Florida education system a lobotomy--like Nurse Ratched eventually does to McMurphy--all the while believing that it's the correct course of action.) 

Hence, the fascination with values of "professional/civic responsibility" and "doing what's (morally and/or statistically) 'right' for the 'common good'" can, as McMurphy puts it, "rig the game" of policy formation.