Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

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24 D.F. Labaree as subjective, context-bound, and ungeneralizable. They can neither be externally validated nor internally replicated. So why take them seriously? In addition to the danger of reification that comes from the use of statistics for educational policy, there is the danger of giving primacy to technical knowledge and in the process discounting the value and validity of local practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is universalistic, abstracted from particular contexts, and applicable anywhere. It allows us to generalize the real world by abstracting from the gritty complexities of this world according to rationalized categories and quantifiable characteristics that are independent of setting. Its language is mathematics. As a result, technical knowledge is the natural way for the modern state to understand its domain. In local settings, however, knowledge often takes a less rationalized and more informal character. Understandings arise from the interaction among people, their work, and the contexts within which they live. These understandings incorporate experience from the past, social arrangements that have developed from this experience, and a concern about applying these understandings to recurring problems and serious threats. This kind of knowledge, says Scott, focuses on matters that are too complex to be learned from a book, like when to plant and harvest crops. It arises when both uncertainty and complexity are high and when the urgency to do something is great even though all the evidence is not yet in. It involves not rules but rules of thumb, which means it depends on judgment to decide which rule of thumb applies in a particular case. It relies on redundancy, so there are multiple measures of where things stand, multiple ways to pursue a single end, and multiple mechanisms for ensuring the most critical outcomes, so that life will not depend on a single fallible approach. It is a reliable form of knowledge for the residents of the local ecology because the residents have a stake in the knowledge (it is not ‘academic’), it captures the particular experience of the local context over time, and it is the shared knowledge of the community rather than the knowledge of particular experts. Scott’s depiction of local practical knowledge arises in particular from anthropology and the knowledge of peasants tilling the soil in the ecology of a village, but it applies equally well to the work of teaching and learning in the ecology of the classroom. The knowledge required to survive and thrive in that setting is enormously complex, uncertainty is high, rules of thumb (instead of technical laws) dominate, context is everything, and redundancy of measures and actions is essential in order to know what is going on and to avoid doing harm. The craft of teaching in the modern classroom in this sense is similar to the craft of farming in a premodern village. And one key commonality is the incompatibility between the local practical knowledge in this setting and the technical knowledge of the nation state. When the state intervenes in either setting with a plan for social reform, based on a reified quantified vision of how things work, little good can result. When the state takes the quantified depiction of schooling that educational researchers provide and uses it to devise a plan for school reform, the best we can hope for is that the reform effort will fail. As the history of school reform makes clear, this is indeed most often the outcome. One reform after another has bounced
2 The Lure of Statistics for Educational Researchers 25 off the classroom door without having much effect in shaping what goes on inside, simply because the understanding of schooling that is embodied in the reform is so inaccurate that the reform effort cannot survive in the classroom ecology. At worst, however, the reform actually succeeds in imposing change on the process of teaching and learning in classrooms. Scott provides a series of horror stories about the results of such an imposition in noneducational contexts, from the devastating impact of the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union to the parallel effect of imposing monoculture on German forests. The problem in all these cases is that the effort to impose an abstract technical ideal ends up destroying a complex distinctive ecology that depends on local practical knowledge. The current efforts by states across the globe to impose abstract technical standards on the educational village bear the signs of another ecological disaster. References Becher, T. (1989). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of the disciplines. London: Open University Press. Crosby, A. W. (1997). The measure of reality: Quantification and western society, 1250–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gould, S. J. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: Norton. Headrick, D. R. (2000). When information came of age: Technologies of knowledge in the age of reason and revolution, 1700–1850. New York: Oxford University Press. Kaplan, A. (1964). The conduct of inquiry: Methodology for behavioral science. San Francisco: Chandler. Labaree, D. F. (1983). The people’s college: A sociological analysis of Philadelphia’s Central High School, 1838–1939. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania). Labaree, D. F. (1988a). The making of an American high school: The credentials market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Labaree, D. F. (1998b). Educational researchers: Living with a lesser form of knowledge. Educational Researcher, 27(8, November), 4–12. Labaree, D. F. (2004). The trouble with ed schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lemann, N. (2000). The big test: The secret history of the American meritocracy. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Mercator Projection Map. (2009). Retrieved October 2009, from http://www.cultural detective.com/worldmaps.html Oxford English dictionary. (2002). London: Oxford University Press. Porter, T. M. (1986). The rise of statistical thinking, 1820–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Porter, T. M. (1995). Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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