Tag: murray

58/365 Investigating Ch. 7 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.

Murray sets his sights on education in Ch. 7 and gives it a treatment no different than the previous three chapters.

Murray’s main point about education in the mid-to-late 60s is that minority populations, namely African Americans, were making progress at closing the gap with their white peers and that social welfare policies and moves to bring equity to the system messed that up.

At the outcomes end of the argument, he points to the findings of A Nation at Risk to show somewhere between the incremental gains in test scores in the 50s and the dire story told by Risk, we started charting the wrong course as a country. While I’d agree with his course contestation, Murray and I diverge when he points to federal programs aimed at equity as causing the widening of educational gaps.

In fact, Murray appears to ignore the unrest and riots of the late 60s in African American neighborhoods when groups of citizens saw violent riots as the means left to them following legislation and judicial decree’s failure to bring the equity of opportunity the country had promised. As I was reading, I found myself wanting to put my arm around Murray and say, “Don’t you think riots (understandable or not) finding their epicenters in the middle of African American communities might have done something to scar communities and detract from whatever education was happening in classrooms?” This is to say nothing of political scandal and a series of military actions that called a disproportionate  number of unfortunate sons from the African American community? While I don’t know enough and there might not be the kind of data we need to know whether the policies Murray cites had a negative causal relationship with minority academic achievement between 1964 and the release of A Nation at Risk, I don’t believe the numbers are there to support the kind of sweeping claims he’s making.

One final piece about this chapter. Of Risk, Murray writes:

Only scattered, limited criticisms of the report were voiced, despite the harsh language that the commission used. Few were prepared to defend the state of American education.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (Kindle Locations 1243-1244). Kindle Edition.

While I have many possible arguments as to why this was true, the one that sticks in my mind the most was Murray’s own from Ch. 3. Perhaps defending American education was out of fashion. With the ascendance of President Reagan and the shifting of American politics to a more conservative favor, was this yet another conversation we failed to have as country because the conservative elite, led by Secretary Bell had picked up another trend of demonizing public education and deficit modeling that’s remained the model ever since.

Just maybe.

 

57/365 Investigating Ch. 3 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.

In Ch. 3, Murray walks readers through the shift in thinking from the intelligentsia of the mid-to-late 60s. Before digging in to the one sentence that made it incredibly difficult for me to continue reading this chapter, let me outline some of the common cause I was able to muster from these pages.

Murray outlines what he describes as a certain way of thinking becoming unfashionable during the time period. Pre-1964 thinking was that those unhappy with their jobs should take matters into their own hands to change their position and, recognizing the difficulties inherent in that premise, the system was doing all it could to help them. Murray’s argument here was 1964 exposed the faulty nature of the second premise and thereby the impossibility of the first.

Where we find common ground is in his conversation of how the shift took place and the lack of conversation or dialogue – the lack of a difficult conversation – about what should be done and what was right.

There was no great debate in the interim, no moment at which the nation could observe itself changing its national policy. The change happened unannounced.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 45). Kindle Edition.

Somewhere in the last few years, the sentiment above shifted to reflect the lack of conversation or debate in how we set the fashionable education reforms that are currently en vogue.

Where Murray lost me, was with the following sentence:

Before 1964, blacks were unique. They constituted the only group suffering discrimination so pervasive and so persistent that laws for that group were broadly accepted as necessary.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 43). Kindle Edition.

I don’t know what to say about that belief or to that belief, so I’m going to let it sit in my brain for a while.

57/365 Investigating Ch. 2 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.

It’s difficult to believe the idea of systemic and structural oppression, racism and classism would be difficult to see for someone who is looking as closely at history and how society functions as Murray is. Yet, in Ch. 2, “This System is to Blame,” that’s the impression I was left with.

While Murray appeared to be holding back or at least surreptitiously making his case against federal programs that might help assuage the ill-effects of societal neglect of the impoverished and minority ethnicities, he’s out in the open from the start of this chapter, stating:

For one thing-and the importance of this must not be forgotten during the ensuing discussion-an accident of history brought a master legislator to the presidency at a moment when the other forces were converging. The antipoverty bills, Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, public housing programs, manpower training, expansions of entitlements, all followed pellmell. It was a legislative blitzkrieg, not the implementation of a master plan.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 24). Kindle Edition.

While I understand the allure of a master plan Murray argues was lacking, it strikes me as possible the “pellmell” approach to instituting these policies was driven by the urge to institute changes that could start to rectify centuries of oppression brought on by a civil movement that brought voice to the oppressed and made that voice next to impossible to ignore.

Strangely, Murray chooses to believe in the idea that people sort of just noticed poverty in the mid-sixties and chose to do something about it because they thought the economy was too big to fail. It reads as though the nation had some extra walking around money and decided to try their hands at social reform.

While Murray never outright states a disbelief in “structural poverty,” it’s jumping out from between the lines as is his frustration that the country turned to the idea that perhaps poor people weren’t staying poor just because they were lazy but that other interests might be vested in them remaining so.

Murray concludes the chapter with a brief discussion of the federal reports and offices that bloomed as the government attempted to attack systemic poverty. He is almost incredulous at the idea that these reports and studies found small success in their first years and that we didn’t quite know how to solve a problem that had been so long in the making.

The trouble I found here was the same trouble I found in my study of the after effects of Brown v. Board a few weeks ago. The movement to re-design social systems away from institutional poverty had momentum in the 1960s. As Murray pointed out, those idealists attacking the problems felt this was something they could not imagine failing at. Rarely do such resources, good will, and brainpower find one another in history. Looking at the problem with the benefit of contemporary perspective, these were problems that would take more time to solve, systems that would take longer to reboot than many were likely to believe.

No one says, “I want to change the world – incrementally.” But that was and remains the lot of those working against injustice. The small gains Murray outlines at the end of the chapter were not the big win researchers and policymakers were hoping for, but they should not be discounted as wins given the long line of losses in the years prior.

56/365 Investigating Ch. 1 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.

Murray opens Losing Ground by first describing America’s general blindness to poverty leading up to to the 1960s, referencing few mentions of impoverished Americans in periodicals and research of the day. It was a problem (45 million or 30 percent of America’s population) but not one garnering much attention. I can’t help reading thinking perhaps Murray’s looking to Life magazine as the barometer of knowledge and awareness of poverty as perhaps coming short. Surely, those 45 million were aware of their poverty. Perhaps they too were surprised that one of the nation’s most widely circulated magazines wasn’t mentioning the failure of America’s post-war boom to help everyone attain prosperity. Then again, given our more contemporary willful blindness to poverty, maybe no one was surprised.

The meat of Murray’s first chapter, though, has to do with President Kennedy’s departure from tradition in suggesting the federal government put institutions in place that transferred welfare from “a hand” to “a hand up” and President Johnson’s subsequent expansion of this principal.

Murray closes the first chapter with this:

Johnson lost no time in implementing the Kennedy rhetoric. The initial antipoverty bill was written, debated, passed, and signed-in August 1964 -within Johnson’s first nine months in office. The bill was a faithful attempt to follow the “hand, not a handout” script. It provided for job training, part-time jobs for teenagers and college students, community antipoverty projects, loans to low-income farmers and businessmen, and the establishment of VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps. There was not a handout in the lot. Johnson was careful to point this out at the signing ceremony, incorporating into his remarks the cheerful prediction that “the days of the dole in this country are numbered.”14

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (Kindle Locations 406-409). Kindle Edition.

My note in the margin here is more about what Murray’s not saying than the argument he’s explicitly making. Textually, he’s reporting what happened. In the subtext, he feels to be coughing under his breath saying, “And that’s when it all started to go to hell.”

It was difficult to align this subtext with my personal experience working alongside the modern-day equivalents of these programs and seeing the good they’ve done in communities and the capacity they have built in their participants.

More on Ch. 2 soon.