[lbo-talk] What happens when you tie test scores to pay

[Wojtek S]

[WS:] The problem is that people like Duncan, maybe Rhee, and other
"reformers" are not themselves evil fascists.  They are are
well-meaning do gooders who want "help the kids" but instead put a
"human face" on on evil fascist game.  That happened with the
dismantling of the mental health system in the US in the 1960s.
Bleeding heart do gooders and reformers of various stripes did
enormous work publicizing real or exaggerated abuses of mental
patients, which in turn provided a cover for right wing manipulators
to defund and kill the mental health care system.

It is not what these bleeding hearts intended - most of them genuinely
wanted to help, they just did not know, or perhaps did not want to
know, that they were just played the role of useful idiots in the
right wing scheme of defunding and downsizing the public sector.

This is of course not unique - many intellectuals provided nilly willy
cover up for regimes - Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot to name the most
obvious - whose autocratic and murderous nature was plainly visible to
anyone with half a brain.  In that context, being a useful idiot in a
right wing defunding game in a quasi democratic environment is far
less surprising.  It is not that difficult to convince oneself that
various 'reform' efforts in the US can possibly produce socially
desirable outcomes (and some of them indeed do) - and it takes a total
cynic to see all these efforts as profiteering and defunding ploys.

Some will - no doubt - object to this by pointing to the "logic of the
capitalist system" and kindred functionalist mumbo jumbo - but that
obscures more than it explains.  While it is true that systemic forces
make certain courses of action more difficult and other easier, it
does not explain why specific individuals follow a particular course
of action.  There are many people who "go along with the program" and
then "blow a whistle" - often at considerable personal risks.  There
are also many people who can have comfortable lives pretty much
regardless of what path they choose, and yet they choose to "go with
the program."  Functionalist arguments about "systemic forces" do no
explain that - they sweep it under the rug, so to speak.

My understanding of this behavior goes along the lines set by the
Stanford Prison Study and Milgram Obedience Experiment - once you
enter the game, you internalize your role, pretty much regardless of
what your values and state of consciousness more generally were before
you entered the game.  From that pov, the bleeding heart do gooders
are similar to "prison guards" in the Stanford Prison Study or
subjects in Milgram's experiments - they play the reform game and
internalize their role in that game.

Wojtek

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 9:25 PM,  <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Well yeah.
>
> Joanna
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Wojtek S" <wsoko52 at gmail.com>
>
> [WS:]  Nail in the coffin?  She will likely end at a high paying
> sinecure at some neoliberal think tank.
>
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