Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology

School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism

Christo Sims

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400885299
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. Ethnographer Christo Sims documented the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. Disruptive Fixation is his account of how this "school for digital kids, " heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged.Sims shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes—often dramatically so. He traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. Sims offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle. Disruptive Fixation offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.

1

INTRODUCTION

We are familiar with social reformers who promise cutting-edge remedies for entrenched social problems. We are accustomed, for example, to arguments that herald recent breakthroughs in information and communication technologies for their potential to reinvent outmoded educational systems, to develop areas of the world with high rates of poverty, or to knit together the planet in a harmonious way. Perhaps we have heard about how Massively Open Online Courses will radically democratize access to education and hence opportunities, how low-cost computers and cell phones will launch impoverished nations and persons into the digital age, or how the Internet will bring together people across divisions of nation, class, and tribe. Further in the past, some may recall confident claims about how film, radio, television, and then computers would make for a radically more efficient and engaging educational system, how electronic media would bring forth a harmonious global village, or how the printing press would create a whole new democratic world. If we are familiar with claims of this sort, then we should also be aware that philanthropic interventions premised on these arguments have repeatedly fallen short of reformers’ lofty aspirations, often dramatically so.¹ If we are aware of this history, then we should not be surprised when a new cutting-edge philanthropic intervention is unable to fulfill the good intentions of those who designed and proselytized it. What is puzzling is how so many of us hope, and even demand, that the next time will be different.

I was on hand when one of these next times was unveiled in the borough of Manhattan, New York City, in the late summer of 2009. After several years of research and design, an expert team of media technology designers, academic specialists, and educational reformers opened the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology—henceforth the Downtown School—with a single sixth grade class.² The school was a centerpiece in an ambitious new philanthropic initiative that aspired to reinvent educational systems for the twenty-first century. According to the project’s designers and philanthropic backers, both the world and children had changed in dramatic ways, but educational institutions had not kept up. We were living in a radically new, interconnected, technologically saturated, and unequal era, the school’s designers and backers argued, and inherited educational institutions had become woefully out of date. The Downtown School would help overcome this disconnect by opening the school to the world and meeting students where they presumably lived their lives. It would be a “school for digital kids,” as the school’s tagline read, and the entire pedagogy would be organized like a game. Instead of the rote and boring activities that were common at conventional schools, students at the Downtown School would spend their days actively and creatively working through complex challenges in designed game worlds. Rather than passively consuming media, technology, and knowledge, students at the Downtown School would learn to be creative makers, remixers, and hackers of technology and culture. Instead of taking on the identity of obedient pupils, students at the Downtown School would role-play the identities of scientists, designers, inventors, programmers, entrepreneurs, and other tech-savvy creative professionals. What is more, the school would offer its services to students from any background. Thus the new school would equitably and engagingly prepare young people for the increasingly interconnected and competitive world and job market of the twenty-first century.

This vision of a school designed for the realities of the twenty-first century garnered enviable support and interest for a new public school. Between 2005 and 2015, one of the most prestigious philanthropic foundations in the United States gave millions of dollars to the nonprofit organization that designed and launched the Downtown School, and it spent more than $200 million on related research projects and interventions focused on digital media and learning. Other powerful philanthropic foundations also generously supported the school and its designers’ associated projects. The Chancellor of New York City public schools granted the Downtown School special status as an “innovation zone” school, allowing it to bypass some of the bureaucratic hurdles that encumbered experimentation in more conventional public schools, and the Department of Education gave the school premium space in the heart of one of Manhattan’s most ­renowned cultural districts. Transnational media and technology companies, local universities, and nonprofit organizations donated equipment, space, and services. The Downtown School had more laptops than students, the latest hardware and software for making and hacking media technologies, and one of only two “semi-immersive embodied learning environments” in the world. In addition to teachers, administrators, and staff, the school hosted an in-house team of media-technology designers and curriculum specialists. In short, the school was as well supported as just about any experimental new public school could hope.

Before it opened, many other people were already taking a special interest in the school, and over the next several years the school’s fame and influence would spread widely. In the spring and summer before its first year, scores of intrigued parents attended information sessions, many applied, and more than a few were distraught when their child was not admitted. During the school’s first few years, local, national, and international news organizations produced and ran hopeful stories about the new school, and the New York Times Magazine even featured the Downtown School as the cover story for its yearly education issue. New corporate partners, including one of the largest video game developers in the world, joined the founders’ efforts to design game-based learning environments. One of the largest and most powerful philanthropic foundations in the world hired one of the school’s founders to locate and fund similar experiments in digital media and learning. Educational reformers from South Korea to Los Angeles visited the school as they worked to launch similar projects back home. Philanthropists, technology designers, policymakers, academics, educational practitioners, and social entrepreneurs hosted the school’s designers, educators, and even select students to make presentations about their innovative experiment in locations as varied as Aspen, Austin, and Doha. Members of the United States Congress and officials from the White House invited the school’s designers to forums and workshops on the future of education. In all these cases, the Downtown School was celebrated as one of the most innovative and promising attempts to redesign schooling in the first decades of the new millennium, one that swept away antiquated educational conventions and replaced them with an innovative and improvisational culture that was more akin to a Silicon Valley startup than a traditional public school.

Long before I stopped fieldwork in 2012, the Downtown School had become much like the schools that it had been designed to replace, and it was helping to remake many of the problems that it had been designed to remedy. The school’s founders and backers had imagined a playful game-based pedagogy in which students, rather than teachers, took the lead, and yet daily life at the school quickly turned into a lot of tightly scripted behavior and familiar relations of power. They had hoped to connect students and the school to the world, and yet in countless areas reformers, educators, and especially involved parents worked to close it off. They aspired to uproot inherited social hierarchies and yet ended up with a system that entrenched more deeply many of those same inequities.

And yet throughout my time in the field, many smart and well-intentioned people continued to portray the Downtown School, as well as the larger initiative of which it was a part, as a cutting-edge and morally just model of social reform that was worthy of emulation. What is more, they often did so with passion, sincerity, and conviction. If history is a guide, these swells of idealism will eventually recede. But history also suggests that other seemingly cutting-edge philanthropic initiatives will take the Downtown School’s place, and swells of hopeful optimism will once again come rushing forth. How is it that this idealism, while temporarily tarnished by recurring shortcomings and failures, does not take long to renew? Why does techno-philanthropism seem immune to the lessons of history?³ How, in other words, do we reconcile recurring “failure” with persistence? These are the central questions that this book explores.

This is a book about how genuine frustrations with the status quo and understandable yearnings for social change are converted, again and again, into seemingly cutting-edge philanthropic interventions that not only fall far short of reformers’ aspirations, but that often also help sustain and extend the status quo, as well as its problems. It is a book that addresses how concerns about the putrescence of inherited institutions as well as longings for a promised polity come to be fixated on apparently unprecedented versions of familiar mechanisms for making social change, despite decades upon decades of disappointing results. By examining these processes ethnographically, the book investigates how optimism and idealism for new rounds of techno-philanthropism spring forth and mostly survive encounters that should seemingly deflate them. The book also examines what this perennial rejuvenation of optimism and idealism manages to accomplish, even as enthusiasm for a particular disruptive project or movement eventually recedes.

This book explores these themes by taking a close look at one recent attempt to radically redesign, or “disrupt,” education. Educational reform projects are especially common places where philanthropic yearnings repeatedly come together with hopeful idealizations about the transformative powers of recent technological breakthroughs (Cuban 1986; Buckingham 2007), but they are far from the only places where these yearnings and idealizations recurrently conjoin. Some of the most illuminating literature that I read while working on this project focused not just on the perennial character of seemingly cutting-edge educational reforms (Tyack and Cuban 1995; Varenne and McDermott 1998; Lashaw 2008; Labaree 2008; Mehta 2013; Ames 2015), but also on international development programs and humanitarian interventions (Ferguson 1994; Escobar 1995; Li 2007; Fassin 2010), as well as on techno-scientific schemes for social improvement more generally (Latour 1988; Akrich 1992; Bowker and Star 1999; Brown and Duguid 2000; Suchman 2006, 2011; Morozov 2013). Indeed, the problems and processes that this book investigates appear to arise whenever social reformers knit together yearnings for what they see as beneficent social change with seemingly unprecedented techno-political solutions (Scott 1998; Rose 1999; Mitchell 2002).

While the themes that this book explores have broad pertinence, education is also remarkable for the extent to which it is repeatedly targeted for disruption, especially in the United States. This ambiguous distinction is partly because idealizations about education, like the market, are tightly interwoven with the state’s and the polity’s sense of themselves in the United States. As American educational historians have demonstrated (Tyack and Cuban 1995; Labaree 2008), when social reformers in the United States have yearned for a more idealized polity, they have repeatedly attempted to fix education, and particularly public schools, as a—if not the—means for transforming their longings into reality. This recurring tendency has not only made the school instrumental, but it has also made it difficult to question the institution too profoundly without also questioning the state and the polity. As such, public debates about education reform tend to focus narrowly on how to fix educational structures rather than on asking whether these are the right structures to be fixing in order to bring about hoped-for social outcomes.

This book takes a different approach. The book does not systematically diagnose the shortcomings and successes of this particular attempt to disrupt education, nor does it prescribe better ways to do education reform or technology design. Rather, the book examines a concrete attempt to disrupt education in order to offer an intimate perspective on how more widespread and enduring yearnings come to be interwoven with especially optimistic ideas and feelings about the transformative potential of recent technological breakthroughs.⁴ The book also takes a close look at how this braiding recurs and produces concrete effects in the world despite its routine failure to accomplish wished for outcomes.

While the case of the Downtown School is distinctive, it can take us to the heart of some of the most hotly debated questions about technological innovation, social change, and, hence, the social and political ordering of modern life. Wherever new technologies are advanced as a novel means for disrupting the status quo, public discussions tend to be deeply divided between those who are generally, if not enthusiastically, optimistic about these enterprises, and those who are predominantly, if not profoundly, cynical. These seemingly irreconcilable divisions are partly a consequence of the audiences to which each side addresses themselves. Optimists tend to address reformers, technology designers, policymakers, engineers, business people, and activists, and, as such, their discourses tend to be managerial, technocratic, and focused on potentialities. Cynics, by contrast, tend to write for other social and cultural theorists, and, accordingly, their discourses tend to be demystifying and sometimes alarmist. These divisions are also rooted in opposed assumptions about how each side understands the “real” function of the domain that reformers aim to disrupt, as well as quasi-deterministic assumptions about the role that new technologies and techniques will play in these processes. Optimists often take it as a given that liberal institutions are fundamentally beneficent but broken (and, hence, in need of fixing) or lacking (and, hence, in need of enhancement). By contrast, more cynical accounts tend to treat these institutions as instruments that accomplish the (often unstated) interests of entrenched structures of power.

A quick glance at stalemated debates around education reform helps ­illustrate this dynamic. Optimists of education reform tend to fall into a long and dominant liberal tradition that understands public education as one of the main mechanisms for creating an enlightened, egalitarian, and united polity. According to this liberal perspective, hierarchical social divisions are commensurate with democratic values so long as these inequalities have been accomplished meritocratically. When confronted with systemic inequities in education and society—which conventional sociology of education consistently identifies—a key question for liberal reformers is how to redesign education so as to create equal opportunities for all.⁵ And, as we will see, one repeatedly seductive means for trying to fix education so as to fix society is to try to leverage the seemingly unprecedented possibilities of recent innovations in media technology (Cuban 1986; Buckingham 2000, 2007).

Against these dominant perspectives, cynics of educational reform tend to see public education not as a means for realizing an idealized polity, but rather as a mechanism for producing, maintaining, and extending a hierarchical and governable social order. As social reproduction theorists have argued since the 1970s, schools do not so much dismantle inherited structures of power as help reproduce and extend them (Althusser 1971; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Collins 2009).⁶ From this perspective, public education is understood as an apparatus of the capitalist state or, more recently, as part of a governmental dispositif that mechanistically produces and differentiates subjects so as to guide them onto the uneven circuits of a capitalist and technocratic social and political order. Similarly, cynics tend to argue that new educational interventions reconfigure and extend these techniques and technologies of control even further, beyond the school and throughout one’s lifetime (Deleuze 1992; Rose 1999).

While optimists and cynics typically hold opposing assumptions about the inherent function of educational institutions, they ironically tend to share similar assumptions about the special role that new technologies play in these processes. Both optimists and cynics tend to assign to new techno-scientific breakthroughs a predominant, if not determining, role in their accounts, they just cast these new technologies as heroes and villains, respectively. Optimists tend to see techno-scientific innovations as finally allowing education to make good on its democratic promises, whereas cynics tend to see the deployment of new technologies as reinforcing the reach and power of technocratic modes of control.

Both of these perspectives are important, but both are also unsatisfying theoretically and politically. Both optimists and cynics tend to be hamstrung by functionalist assumptions about the real purpose of educational institutions—or the capitalist state, or development, or techno-science—as well as deterministic assumptions about the role that new technologies and techniques play in these processes. As Paul Willis (1977) astutely pointed out about educational debates in the 1970s and as James Ferguson (1994) echoed in his reading of the development literature in the 1980s, optimists tend to naively accept the official definition of these enterprises and hence overlook the ways in which philanthropically sanctioned interventions are always sites of power relations and politics.⁷ By treating development or educational reform as technocratic exercises, optimists depoliticize these endeavors as well as the problems they are designed to solve.

Yet more cynical accounts are often also problematic because they tend to treat designed interventions as mechanistic black boxes. In the case of educational debates, the problem is not that cynics are wrong for trying to debunk the diagnoses, prescriptions, and ideologies of liberal reformers; nor are they wrong for pointing out that educational interventions routinely help produce and legitimate unjust political and social orders. The problem is that cynics tend to rely on ideal types to explain these phenomena, and, as such, they tend to treat the outcomes as a forgone conclusion. From such a perspective, the incredibly heterogeneous ensemble of actors that have to be assembled in order for a philanthropic intervention to come to life are unsatisfactorily portrayed as either conspiring in an elite agenda or blinded by dominant ideologies and rationalities. Empirically, such claims are not satisfactory since ethnographic inquiry has long shown that there is no smooth congruence between the interests and strategies of elite groups and the complicated medley of events that actually transpire in and through the situated practices of a reform endeavor.⁸ Additionally, cynics tend to imply that those who are targeted by philanthropic intervention are “cultural dopes,” to borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall (1981), interpellated by capitalist ideologies or, more recently, seduced by neoliberal modes of governmentality (...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Cycles of Disruptive Fixation
• Chapter 3. Spatial Fixations
• Chapter 4. Pedagogic Fixations
• Chapter 5. Amenable and Fixable Subjects
• Chapter 6. Community Fixations
• Chapter 7. Conclusion: The Resilience of Techno-­Idealism
• Appendix. Ethnographic Fixations
• Notes
• References
• Index