Recently in My Education Category

What ultimately has made the criticism of the Chicago strike so odd and irritating is that the critics are so dismissive and arrogant about the chief sticking points in the negotiations, which aren't really about money. There's a seeming inability to understand why poorly designed evaluation systems, particularly those that are tied to test results, threaten the very best and most inspiring teachers as much as anyone. What they threaten is not the loss of job security, but the professional discretion and skill of good teachers. You can't be in favor of clumsy or cookie-cutter evaluations and still claim to be primarily concerned about the quality of teaching in public schools.

What might be happening here is less the rage of privileged elites against anyone they deem to be beneath them, and more the rage of upper middle-class professionals who have found their own lives increasingly hemmed in by forms of deprofessionalizing oversight and dumb operant-conditioning gimmickry sold to organizations by snake-oil consultancies.

The trick in the next decade is going to be: can we get the river to flow the other direction? Rather than give in to every person who insists that whatever outrages and inefficiencies of 21st Century Taylorism have been inflicted on them must be inflicted on everyone else, we should be trying to claw back generative, productive forms of dignity and autonomy to the working lives of every person.

Do Liberals and Elites Hate Teachers? | Easily Distracted

I took a super-interesting Information History class with Dan Schiller my last semester at GSLIS, and one of the main themes of the course was how IT allows capital and management to deprofessionalize and regiment work. This starts at least from the invention of the modern clock, and goes up through the early management techniques of the industrial revolution, to office technology like the typewriter and the adding machine which replaced a whole middling professional class of clerks with pooled labor. Then you get the full monty with Taylorism and all the dehumanizing results that followed from that, which was thankfully somewhat offset by the rise of organized labor by midcentury.

So, then modern computer IT comes along, which of course was initially clearly centralized and controlling (think mainframes and men in gray flannel suits.) But, since I didn't know my history or recognize my privilege I'd always thought of the emergence of the networked personal computer as different somehow, liberatory instead of controlling. And, of course, it can be, for those with the power to control it rather than be controlled. 

What we're seeing now is the rapid shrinking of the proportion of people and professions who have that power. It's happening to teachers, lawyers, writers (think of the methods of HuffPo and Nick Denton and the rise of pageviews as the measure of cultural worth if you don't think that cultural work can be regimented and automated) and lots of other previously autonomous professional occupations.

That call center worker whose every second and every move is monitored and timed and dictated? Well, that may be your future too, unless we fight tooth and nail for power over our working conditions. That's what teachers in Chicago are doing now. It's time for professional classes to realize that they have a lot more in common with those below them on the economic ladder than with the people running things. We're in a place now where solidarity isn't just sentiment, it's survival.

jackflaps:

I'm just not in the room where they do that. So in ten years, I'd like to be in the room where they do that. Ideally I could make that happen without having to get a Ph.D. in information science or a master's in urban planning, because those things are expensive and I'm already $25,000 in the red from Carleton, but I think if it was brutally necessary I'd find a way to deal with that. Jobs like this don't exist, though, and also I live in a forest where nobody cares about urban planning.

This is way after the fact (Tumblr outage plus end-of-semester craziness interfered) but I just wanted to say that one semester into library school, I already feel like I'm in the same boat, and I'll be interested to see what kind of path you take.

I'm interested in broadband / community technology / community development policy, and I'm getting tons of hands-on experience in the Community Informatics track here at GSLIS, but I'm not seeing many practitioner-level jobs where you can make even close to an acceptable or stable living, and I sort of need health insurance to stay alive and stuff. I'd prefer to build a reputation through practice and work my way up to the policy level that way, but I'm not seeing much of a path there. Even with policy, I'm not seeing the kind of career track that justifies going way in debt and getting a Ph.D when I'm not particularly interested in the tenured faculty rat race or in doing hyper-focused and rigorous research (that's likely of dubious practical value to anyone) in areas where I could learn a lot more and be a better policy maker through practice.

It looks like the best path is probably entrepreneurial, whether starting an organization or a business or what have you, but I'm not really interested in or skilled at that either. I kind of need someone else with business, marketing, management, and begging skills to do that for me, but I don't see anyone lining up to do that. I'm really not sure how to get from here to there, though hopefully the next year or so of school will give me a more of a sense. Right now the fallback plan is to work at a public or community college library, and try to do cool community outreach and tech/info literacy stuff in that context, but I'm afraid that could always be doomed to be a sidelight in most such settings, especially with the resource constraints we'll be under and the stage of my career I'll be in.