{"id":3289,"date":"2011-03-16T11:30:28","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T15:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=3289"},"modified":"2013-09-12T09:38:14","modified_gmt":"2013-09-12T13:38:14","slug":"go-for-the-jugular-not-politicization-as-a-process-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=3289","title":{"rendered":"Go for the jugular, not “politicization” as a process attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been going back and forth a bit on Twitter with David Cohen<\/a> and Rachel Levy<\/a> about the term “politicization” when applied to education policy, with Cohen and Levy arguing that the high-stakes accountability policies they dislike represent politicization.<\/p>\n

As an historian, I’m skeptical of the term “politicization” in policy discourse for two reasons: first, we’ve had more than a century of debate in education where that term has been used as a trump card (or the use as a trump has been attempted) against arguments or practices that the speaker\/writer has opposed. Thus, the arguments in favor of small, unelected school boards in the early 20th century were based on the argument that the change would remove politics from education. (See Tyack’s One Best System<\/em> for the classic account.) This is one of the great American irregular verbs: I stand up for principle, you’re influenced by special interests, and he’s politicizing.<\/p>\n

More fundamentally, perhaps, education is now accepted as part of citizenship, perhaps the first accepted component of social citizenship in the United States that developed in the 19th century. You know what goes along with citizenship? Politics! Having tax-supported public schools was a political act, as was desegregation. Even if you don’t agree with the 1960s-wave feminist adage that the person is political, certainly schooling is political, and avoiding that legacy is unrealistic.<\/p>\n

I think it is also ineffective. You can badger and poke with process-oriented arguments, but the reason why Cohen and Levy dislike certain policies is because they dislike them. Period. That doesn’t mean that the rhetoric being tossed around today by advocates of higher-stakes testing is any paragon (especially “status quo” when high-stakes testing is the status quo). And\u00a0I understand that Cohen and Levy find ideological attacks on public schools as inappropriate as I do. But for several reasons it’s better to go straight for the jugular: my opponents are wrong because they’re wrong, not because they’re political.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been going back and forth a bit on Twitter with David Cohen and Rachel Levy about the term “politicization” when applied to education policy, with Cohen and Levy arguing that the high-stakes accountability policies they dislike represent politicization. As an historian, I’m skeptical of the term “politicization” in policy discourse for two reasons: first, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-R3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3289"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6681,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3289\/revisions\/6681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}