Trope Diagram

The review last week in class was very helpful in that it led me to diagram the operative slots of my Prezi in relation to Kovitz's project. 

Kovitz 

Tenor: utopian social planning 

Vehicle: pig farming 

Trope: evokes the horror concentration camps 

Contaminates the Tenor: The conceit-link between utopian social planning and pig farming renders the former grotesque, especially in the instances where the material signifiers of pig farming (eg., barbed wire) correspond with the stuff of concentration camps.

My Case 

Tenor: standardized testing based curriculum 

Vehicle: the Jacquard Loom (first machine reader) 

Trope: evoke a sense of Derrida's theories of writing and his critique of metaphysical hierarchies 

Contaminates the Tenor: The metalepsis of the tenor and vehicle should emphasizes the ontological import of technics (ie., machinic reading) on the conception of knowledge in contemporary K-12 education policy. 

In pataphysical terms, I'd like my Prezi to--if nothing else--"exhaust the imaginary potential" of standardized testing as a practice for learning via machinic reading. The trope then should at least open a space for considering modes of learning/writing with machinic reading other than the literate metaphysics of standardized testing.

Playing with Utility

In his examination of the four types of games, Caillois indicates the importance of acknowledging non-productive and non-useful forces at work in any event.  Of the four attitudes/games, we saw that game theory based its theory of human behavior exclusively on the competitive, win-at-all-cost drive assumed in games of agon.  In the objections to game theory, we can see that part of its failure to recommend sound strategy in every situation lies in the fact that not all situations/games are based in agon.  Driven by alea, mimicry, or illinx, players will willingly resign themselves to fate, non-rationality, and vertigo.

Relevance to my project: Education reform based in the measure of standardized testing sees the problem-solution entirely in terms of agon.  They point to a lack of motivation -- they say a competitive, performance-based salary will push teachers to "win" the extra money by going the extra mile for their students.  Standardized tests act as the figure of the official/referee and --true to the spirit of agon -- it is regarded with the utmost authority and respect.  The test is also the stadium where students are judged against each other, ranked based on their individual, indisputable (lack of) achievement.

Thinking with Prezi: Reformulating the Big Picture

(continuing from the previous post)

Standardized testing, then, establishes a restricted economy of writing, which--in keeping with literate metaphysics--neglects the "accidental" iterability of (arche-)writing and the excess of the signifier. As a utilitarian response the problem/disaster of contemporary American public education, standardized testing adopts the efficiency of machine readers as perceived from the calculating standpoint of instrumental reason. This of course contrasts with genres of electrate writing, which embrace machinic technologies precisely as means to write with the excess of the signifier rather than downplay it.

And so, though I've been saying this whole time that my accident/disaster was the proliferation of standardized testing, I now think it's more accurate and productive to see it as my contrast. That is, standardized testing constitutes the restricted economy's way of dealing with the underlying disaster, which is the somewhat recent failings of the American public education system (as documented in films like Waiting for Superman).

In addition to being utilitarian, standardized testing could also be seen as a profoundly literate response to the emergence of digital/binary technologies, rooted in the same fatal drives evident in the invention of the jacquard loom. As such, and this is perhaps the starting point for a future project, standardized testing as a writing system marks an important point of contrast from electrate writing practices, which in turn speaks to the value of electracy as a theoretical/pedagogical project that is distinguished from the conventional calls for so-called digital literacy, media literacy, information literacy, etc.

Thinking with Prezi: Receiving the Trope

Some thoughts accruing alongside my work/play in the Prezi (but not explicitly referencing what I'm doing in Prezi):

The Jacquard loom initiated machine reading processes into technics at the beginning of the 19th century. The loom was designed to "read" specific patterns programmed into punched cards by textile designs. The loom would produce textile designs based on its interpretation of the presence/absence (binary code) sequence of each punched card.

Humans have a desire to know. Since Plato's academy, schools (along with libraries and museums) have been the institution that societies entrust with the responsibility to generate, disseminate, and archive knowledge. Schools appeal to the desire to know--to learn--via literate metaphysics.

“According to Derrida then, metaphysics involves installing hierarchies and orders of subordination in the various dualisms that it encounters (M 195). Moreover, metaphysical thought prioritises presence and purity at the expense of the contingent and the complicated, which are considered to be merely aberrations that are not important for philosophical analysis. Basically then, metaphysical thought always privileges one side of an opposition, and ignores or marginalises the alternative term of that opposition.” (IEP)

Machines can read/register binary code (presence/absence markers) much faster than human readers. If students write in binary code, then their writing can be read at the most quick and accurate manner possible. When binary writing meets machine reading, learning becomes hyperlearning (the hyperlearning of hyperknowledge?).

When machines read binary writing, the only measure is that of presence/absence. Standardized testing practices map over this measure with their own (i.e., the axis of true-false) and erect a set of referents made to stand in as signifieds for the binary writing. To write in the space of "A" is to mean/signify a pre-established answer, the true-false value of which has already been predetermined by the test-maker-as-foundation/referent. Machine reading processes – at least in the case of standardized testing – reinforce the writing of literate metaphysics.

“Derrida’s more generalised notion of writing, arche-writing, refers to the way in which the written is possible only on account of this ‘originary’ deferral of meaning that ensures that meaning can never be definitively present…He suggests that “writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true” (OG 43), and this process of infinite referral, of never arriving at meaning itself, is the notion of ‘writing’ that he wants to emphasise…The widespread conviction that the sign literally represents something, which even if not actually present, could be potentially present, is rendered impossible by arche-writing, which insists that signs always refer to yet more signs ad infinitum, and that there is no ultimate referent or foundation.” (IEP)

Visual Quotation and Collage-Montage

Planning a Fatal Strategy

We know that the second half of the project will be devoted to making a consultant's report targeted at public policy formation surrounding our disaster.  Furthermore, we know that this report will break from the conventional literate/scientific mode of consulting (e.g., a narrative forecast of possible scenarios) and will instead focus on obscene and fatal graphic details arranged by an aesthetic and pataphysical logic of conduction.  The exhibition of accident -- the fascinating seduction of its appearance -- will be of greater concern to us than any ambition to explain its empirical cause and to pitch a positivistic solution.

So, what have part one of the project prepared me to do for part two?  Looking back over my posts so far, I'm confident that three groups of post will come in handy during part two.

1. Technics.  I've gathered an inventory of technical devices and processes that have been historically crucial to the rise of standardized testing, noting these machines are basically the same one used in voting for the legislators who have come to promote bills like FL SB 6. A key question for part two: what does this popular application of copy/scan technics show us about the conditions of though in the dromosphere? (i.e., how does it explain us?)

2. Values.  Thinking rhetorically about the information I gathered from the Foundation for Florida's Future (the "think tank" behind SB 6), and using One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a relay for the fundamental values at work in my policy debates, has alerted me to some of the drives and desires currently guiding the more pronounced stances on the issue.  As I've commented in these posts, values such as civic duty, pay-for-performance, and omni-accountability -- though not "bad" values -- seemed to have become warped to the point of ate (blindness/foolishness) in this case.

3. Graphic Detail.  I've been seduced by a graphic detail -- the clip-art style images of kids that typically adorn FCAT worksheets -- which clearly resonates with the politics/values of standardized testing as an educational application of copy/scan technics.  This detail also suggestive of appearance and disappearance, or the appearance of a disappearance: the disappearance not only of a person a standardized ideal of "the student," but also (and more subtly) the disappearance a certain way of experiencing the world and engaging with knowledge (the disappearance of the methods of the humanities?).  I'll be continuing this line of thinking/designing in part two, attempting to make the disaster of this disappearance appear more and more seductively.

Taking each of these areas into part two, the major task I'm prepared to pursue (which I've drawn from class lectures) is to design the appearance of my disaster such as to evoke (conduce?) an epiphany about emergent electrate thought structures.  To put more specifically, my aim in part two will be to articulate (or at least make visible and seductive) the metaphysical stakes of the appearance of the disappearance occurring at the intersection of copy/scan technics and bureaucratic education policies/practices.

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.

Polling and Testing

In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard has a lot of critical things to say about "polls and other forms of directive solicitation."  These passages, of course, resonate with the directive solicitation practices at the core of SB 6: voting ballots and, especially, standardized testing (eg, FCAT).

Certainly, the answer is induced by the question.  But the one who asks the question has no more autonomy: he can only ask questions which have a chance of getting a circular reply--he is caught in exactly the same vicious circle. (67)

However you perfect them, polls will never represent anything, because the rule of their game is representation. (116)

The obscenity proper to polls comes not from their betrayal of the secret of an opinion...but from statistical exhibitionism, from this continual voyeurism of the group spying on itself. At every moment it must know what it wants, what it thinks, it must see itself in numbers...Overinformed, it becomes obese with itself. (118)

...no one can live in the anticipated image of what he is, nor in the exorbitant mirror of his statistical truth. (120)

At all events the greatness of statistics is not in their objectivity but in their involuntary humor. (121)

Statistical Exhibitionism

It is tempting and humorous/ironic to think of a test as a poll.  It even seems accurate in the case of standardized, multiple-choice questions dealing with contingencies of practical reason, as is generally the case with reading comprehension/interpretation sections.  For Baudrillard, the kind of knowledge yield by the poll is only ever a degraded form of opinion.  Can the same be said of standardized tests like the FCAT--that they test (and teach) not knowledge but a degraded form of opinion?  As such, an FCAT-based education could be framed (via obsenario) as an series of exercises in learning how to think with degraded opinions.

Copy/Scan Technics

@ The Printing Press

@ The Copy Machine

Since the invention of the printing press, the reproduction of printed documents has been getting easier and easier.  But nothing has done more to democratize the means of reproduction than the electronic copy mechanisms of the 20th century.  Institutions such as schools could suddenly perform much of their copying and scanning needs in-house.

The Official Machine of Degraded Opinion

It's hard to imagine the magnitude of the shift from scribes to the printing press, in terms of how much that shift accelerated the reproduction of writing.  With the Scantron, a prototypical machine reader (which are currently exploding onto the scene of everyday reading), we can see the early signs of an acceleration similar to the printing press.
This acceleration initiated by the Scantron-as-machine reader does for processes of reading what the printing press did for processes of reproduction.

With the printing press (and more so with the electronic copier), I can run a piece of paper through a machine and get an instant reproduction of the writing I "programed" into it.  With the Scantron (and other reading machines), I can run a piece of paper through a machine in order to get an instant, programmed reading of the document.

What forms of reading can be programmed?  If a test is to be graded by a Scantron, then the Scantron must be able to read it--and that reading must be programmable.  Machine readers, like all computers, are masters at one thing and one thing only: counting (or calculating).  Thus, all programmed reading is really just a (sophisticated) form of counting.

What forms of writing lend themselves to programmable reading?  Obviously, at the current stage of AI, a machine reader can not "read" a novel or poem (or even a memo) anymore than the printing press or electronic copier can "write" one.

In order for its reading to programmable, applications of the Scantron (eg, standardized testing) must remove the accident from writing: it, like game theory, recasts practical reason as pure reason.

Before the Scantron, There was the Jacquard Loom

The Jacquard loom*, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, was one of the first machines to use punched cards -- making the loom an often cited processor/influence in many narratives of the history of computer hardware and computer programming.  Demonstrated in the above video, the loom allowed textile designers to "program" a sequence of mechanical movements via the punched card; the designed punched card could then be feed into the Jacquard loom to be read and executed.

Punched Cards

The loom operated on the basis of the same binary (yes/no, on/off) logic that remains fundamental to computers today, and with enough binary input the loom was capable of outputting a surprisingly complex range of patterns.  If the textile designer wanted to change the output pattern, all they needed to do was feed the loom a new punched card (i.e., punched card as software and loom as hardware).

What is striking to me about the Jacquard loom as compared with the standardized testing machines of the 20th century is the differences of their outputs.

The Jacquard loom read punched cards that were designed -- with a specific visual/material output pattern in mind --  in order to produce a textile such as a rug:

And standardized testing machines (and voting machines), by the same basic technical processes, read bubble sheets that are designed -- presumably without any pattern in mind -- in order to produce data visualizations such as bar graphs:

(*Thanks to Walton for giving me this lead.)

Waiting for Superman and SB 6

Davis Guggenheim's recent documentary Waiting for Superman provides an excellent "statement of the problem" concerning the present state of public education in America.  The film will no doubt serve as a constant referent in education policy debates for years to come, and it will probably be invoked to justify various (even competing) agendas--just like 1912 newspaper accounts of the scene of the Titanic's sinking were used to justify Anglo-Saxon heroism but also to support allocations of elitism).  This is because the movie names and appeals so strongly to a common desire to improve public education, and yet, it also points out positive and negative aspects of various agents/entities involved.  In other words, teachers are the movie's heros but they are also its greatest villains (eg., teacher unions, apathetic teachers, etc.); American kids are portrayed as ambitious if not bright, but they're also shown to be cocky and/or stupid at times.  Politically, the film could be used as "evidence" in any number of cases, depending on which part of the movie was being referenced.

Waiting for Superman changed my mind about one issue relevant to SB 6.  While I am a vehement supporter of tenure in higher education on the basis of academic freedom, the film it very clear that tenure for K-12 teachers is very different from university tenure.  Unlike college professors, K-12 teachers are typically granted tenure very quickly without having to show a high level of accomplishment and promise.  Moreover, tenure in K-12 doesn't seem to have much to do with academic freedom: there are no research requirements and the curriculum is generally predetermined and invariable.  One of the most shocking scene's of the film comes when the D.C. superintendent proposes a plan that would do away with K-12 tenure but enable "highly effective" teachers to earn a solid six-figure income.  The teachers of D.C., however, stage a protest by refusing to even cast a vote of the proposal.  The proposal disappears.  This moment of the movie acted as a "punctum," propelling me to my memories of the status quo, mediocre, "CYA!" demeanor that overshadowed my experience of teaching in a Florida public high school.  That demeanor--which pervaded the school and rubbed off on the students--was bar none the worst aspect of the experience, therefore I think a move toward a merit-based form of teacher pay is necessary.  And since K-12 tenure isn't really predicated on merit or academic freedom, its elimination is an entirely different matter than tenure in higher education.  In fact, if the elimination of K-12 tenure creates the conditions for a true meritocracy, then K-12 without tenure would be more like the highly competitive, accomplishment-oriented system of tenure in higher education.  

Of course, the big question still remains: how do you measure quality when it comes to teaching?  With a merit-based pay scale, the answer to this question has even greater stakes and consequences.  With an major incentive to be measured as "highly effective," those who are highly motivated to become the best in the profession must use the established measurement criteria as their guide to the top.  If the measure is FCAT scores, the best teachers (who would likely be the best teachers in any given evaluation system) will generally strive, above all else, to maximize their students' test scores.  And yet, the measure (once it becomes a meritocracy) will not only guide the best teachers--it will also guide the teaching profession, such that the very idea and activity of teaching will rapidly transform.  (Indeed, we can already see if we compare the best private school teacher with the best public school teachers: their teaching philosophies/styles are extremely different and will continue to be as public schools become more and more engrossed by standardized testing as their primary measure.)    

A formal/aesthetic observation: the film is premised on the animation of education statistics.  We see this in two ways:

(1) the arch of its narrative follows five real kids who hope to be accepted (via lottery) to better public schools--and the screen is constantly flooded with national statistics of very processes being lived through by these five kids (so we see the plain statistics, but we see them at precise moments when we are very emotionally invested in the kids' chances of accessing that better education--in this way, the statistics become animated through our interested in these kids by virtue the narrative);

(2) the personal narrative arch is occasionally interrupted by computer-animated sequences that display (inter)national statistics dealing with reading/math levels, teacher unions, and the cost of schools vs. the cost of prisons.

Obviously statistics and data are at the core of FCAT and the policy debates that surround it.  In this sense, Waiting for Superman's animation aesthetic provides a useful formal/tale relay for my project. 

Technics and the "Indirect Production of Science"

Connecting last week's lecture on technics with Virilio's writing on the accident, I'm finding myself more curious about the presence of technology in my disaster, which I hadn't really grappled with directly when making my video on Senate Bill 6 last spring.  A frequent translator of Bernard Stiegler's work, Stephen Barker comments on the vital role of technics in the shaping of (human) experience:

What is being “profoundly transformed,” according to Stiegler, is nothing less that the nature of the human itself, by which Stiegler does not mean some traditional notion of “human nature”: since for Stiegler technics and technology are temporally prior to “the human” (and obviously, therefore, to any “humanism”) our need to attempt to “understand the process of technical evolution” is a vitally important ontological (and existential) imperative.

And so, here's a question we could be asking: What is the ontological or existential significance of the technics at work in my accident/disaster? Or, more specifically, how does the disaster reveal the "indirect production" (those qualities concealed/obscured by narratives of progress and utility) of the technics involved?

In the case of my disaster (the rampant proliferation of mandatory standardized testing as stipulated by FL's SB 6), my next blog post will look at the technologies that underlay if not engender that thought of such educational policies/practices.  Indeed, if we accept Stiegler's notion that technics precede human subjectivity, then technologies like photocopiers and scanners become reframed as immensely significant from an ontological perspective, rather than (boring) machines that sit passively in the sense of a "standing reserve."  A survey of the history of standardized testing, for example, reveals that the very concept of a standardized, multiple-choice test was, at least in the West, unheard of (and unthought) until soon after the Industrial Revolution; furthermore, the concept and cultural place of standardized testing wasn't really developed until the 1930's--the same decade in which the first automatic scanner was invented: the IBM 805.

The IBM 805

Of course, after noting this relation between the evolution of copy/scan technology and standardized testing, we have to qualify the terms of relationship.  For instance, my video (ABCDE, see in blog below) critiques the FCAT education environment as an "evaluation machine gone crazy," and I use image repetition and audio looping to suggest the experience of teaching a standard, drill-based, top-down mandated curriculum.  Throughout the video, though, I am relying upon the exact same copy/scan technologies that underlie standardized testing; my engages these technologies to create an aesthetic and visceral affect, while standardized testing uses them to establish and enforce a disembodied/universal jungle-gym of utilitarian rationality.  So we cannot claim that the technologies of copy/scan (the bedrock of computational media) inherently foster the kind of dull repetition symbolized by standardized testing and other forms of bureaucratic paperwork.

If, as Virilio (a la Ulmer) suggests, we treat contemporary standardized testing--and its surrounding policy debates--as a sign of the coming metaphysics, then we need to approach this particular practice of copy/scan technics as an entry point.  Rather than interpret, critique, and condemn the situation (and then just complain about it as it persists), a heuretic encounter with standardized testing aims to learn something from it--something about how our society tends to conceive of and relate to copy/scan technics.  If we can learn something here about copy/paste technics, then perhaps we'll be in a better position to articulate an alternative strategy for governing or occupying copy/scan technics--a strategy that contrasts from the utilitarian rationality evident in the FCAT, but a strategy that nonetheless answers to the same historical, technological, and political conditions.

The Post-Industrial Accident

In an interview called "Surfing the Accident," Paul Virilio explains his theory that a new kind of accident has emerged--an accident that is contemporaneous with exponential speed and global scope of current technical innovation.

Just like there has been a change in the nature of the accident somewhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth century - from the natural accident towards the industrial accident - we now witness a fresh transmutation of the accident: from the industrial accident to its post-industrial successor. This transmutation is accompanied by a very substantial increase in scale. The industrial accident is still the kind of event that "takes place." The post-industrial accident, on the other hand, goes beyond a certain place, you may say that it does no longer "take place," but becomes an environment. The disaster that befell the Titanic involved only its passengers; the Millennium Bug will involve everybody on this Earth.

What bothers me most about the apparent logic of SB 6 is the belief that problems with the public education system can be treated (and solved) in the manner of an industrial accident/disaster.  That is, while the bill targets and seeks to reform instances where failure 'takes place' (in the most empirical, data-driven sense), supporters of the bill (and even many who oppose it) do not realize that the logic of the bill 'becomes an environment.'  This industrial treatment of the accident (ie, failing students/schools) is precisely what engenders disaster on a post-industrial scale.  Evaluation mechanisms have an enormous influence over day-to-day curriculum decisions, each subject/discipline requires its own form of thinking, and the learning strategies of K-12 accompany students as they enter college or the workforce.

By suiting educational practices to the evaluation mechanism (ie., standardized, multiple-choice tests), we impose restrictions over how much of the thinking unique to a subject/discipline can actually be exercised in the classroom.  How can the generative/creative thinking so crucial to the resolutely qualitative/subjective subjects (eg, art, music, English, humanities, etc) be mobilized or even approximated by the multiple-choice format?  FCAT questions dealing with literary passages, for example, generally remain anchored in sheer comprehension/regurgitation and occasionally ask students to choose among several interpretations and select the "correct" one, as if that interpretation was an inherent/eternal property of the work itself, independent of a reader's reading of the work.   

ABCDE: A Found Footage Experimental Documentary

In April of 2010, Florida legislators passed a bill (SB 6 in the senate and HB 7189 in the house) designed to improve public education K-12. Among other things, the bill proposed that schools pay teachers according to, in large part, how well their students scored on standardized tests such as the FCAT. Fortunately, Governor Charlie Christ vetoed the bill. While this video is not exactly a work of activism, its chief aim is to dramatize (via experimental video techniques such as looping and repetition) the uncanny experience of schools in which standardized testing has become an "evaluation machine" gone crazy.

More specifically, having had some time to reflect on the video, I see the video playing upon several routine aspects of the year I spent teaching English at a Florida public high school: passing out worksheet upon worksheet of FCAT practice materials, making copies upon copies of those materials, enduring the gossip and complaints of fellow teachers during faculty meetings, watching generic teacher training videos at mandatory workshops (after which we teachers, in place of any real discussion, had to complete the same type of worksheets we had to give our students), and, most of all, pacing around the room proctoring students as they stared blankly at FCAT questions and bubble sheets on a weekly basis.

Ballots and Bubble Sheets

Our state political discourse, like most K-12 educational practices, revolves around the validation of existing answers, solutions, and courses of action from a proscribed set of possibilities. "This or that" proceeds "what if." Voting and standardized testing are matters of multiple choice.