Towards a Definition of Social Justice in the Classroom.

Dedicated to the Memory of Dr. Vernon C. Polite.

This portion of my general theory of subject object interposition in hierarchical text and integration as a model of human thought and behavior is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Vernon C. Polite who recently passed due to a terminal illness. An extraordinary educator, scholar and gentleman, Dr. Polite's example as a tireless and dedicated educator is and always will be one of the broadest shoulders I will ever have the honor of standing upon to see further than other men and women who have come before me.


The National Association of Scholars, according the Wikipedia is a non-profit organization whose opposition to multiculturalism both in the classroom and in pedagogical best practices of teacher education assessment, put it and its members firmly in the camp of those national organizations arguing that academia, currently, is liberally biased (Wikipedia  April 18, 2010). I start this entry with this fact because on November 2, 2005, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, came under fire from this group on the grounds that the "Dispositions Requirement" was inherently unfair, primarily, to white students in the teacher  education program.

The connection of this debate to Dr. Polite's work here at Eastern Michigan is easily enough to understand.

First,  in a June 26, 2006 online article  A Spirited Disposition Debate, Inside Higher Education staff writer Elia Powers explains that Arthur Wise, then President of NCATE, seeking to outmaneuver his detractors in the NCA, whose opposition, in Wise's view, threatened NCATE's immediate future with the Federal Advisory Board on Education, officially distanced NCATE from any mention of the term "social justice."

...So Wise preempted his detractors. “I categorically deny the assertion that NCATE has a mandatory 'social justice' standard,” Wise testified. “We don’t endorse political and social ideologies. We endorse academic freedom, and we base our standards on knowledge, skills and professional disposition.”
And then, Wise threw the witnesses a bone, announcing that NCATE had decided to eliminate references to “social justice” from its current glossary because “the term is susceptible to a variety of definitions.”               Access April 18, 2010.

Then, in a November 17, 2007 blog entry, Brooklyn College professor of business Mitchel Langbert posted an entry entitled Vernon C. Polite's Provincialism where he argues that Dr. Polite's position on the issue of using the concept of social justice as an integral part of the Disposition Requirement amounts to in his words:

...a rigid, authoritarian definition of social justice...[that]... will lead not to justice, but to harassment of those who disagree with NCATE and with Dean Polite. It will lead to an authoritarian political correctness...

 Langbert's position is clear enough to understand and just like the links on his blog to those sites familiar with  and supportive of the workings of NAS, his argument is firmly in favor of a laissez-faire attitude towards the goal of improved social outcomes in education as far as minority students are concerned.

....The rigid definition of social justice as equality of outcomes is anything but just in terms of the thinking of Kant, Plato, Augustine, Aristotle and all other important philosophers....

All other important philosophers: this phrase is problematic as well as the main reason why Dr. Polite's work over the years, specifically regarding the issue of social justice in education is still so important.
This is why M.A.R.S. (Minority Awareness and Retention Scholars) programs are still vital to the mission of education in an increasingly diverse and complex democratic society.

The next part of this paper and tribute is directed to my fellow peer and colleague Chaz Douglass. (i hope somehow, he gets a chance to read this)

Mitchell Langbert's remarks, in spite of the fact that President Obama is in the White House, indicates that programs like M.A.R.S. may still be on shaky ground, at least as far as the NCTE is concerned. What I want to do here is present a point of view that I hope will be useful in demonstrating how important M.A.R.S is to education for all students regardless of their differences.

The remarks made by Langbert and the position of  the NAS claim there are "important" philosophers Dr. Polite's concept of social justice in education fails to recognize. Is that really the case?

When we talk about social justice I don't believe we're talking about just being fair. I believe we're talking about something a a lot more personal. Programs like M.A.R.S. are important because the language that is defined as acceptable is based on an interpretation of those "important" philosophers that doesn't say anything about real people with real problems in the everyday world.

Just because somebody sees a line of thought from Kant, Plato, St Augustine and Aristotle as the only standard that can be used to say someone is more or less competent than another, does not make it so.
For example, what about Socrates to Kant and Hegel to Bertrand Russel? In that line of reasoning people are important: all people, not in spite of their differences, but because of them. In this line of reasoning, the experience of the student as a person is just as important as all the standards of assessment and appropriateness  people like Mitch Langbert and the NAS argue should be the only thing we educators think about when we teach students of diverse backgrounds.

I argue that this could not be further from the truth.

What I am talking about is not just Differentiation, but a much more efficient model of  this contested classroom instruction. In the diagram we can clearly see how sensitivity to students' strengths is made a focal part of instruction by starting with Pre-assessment moving towards  general goals and objectives because of departmental benchmarks not in spite of them.

This is important because it involves student participation n their own education.

Student's self chosen benchmarks are much more their own choice which makes their success in meeting specific goals and objectives a much more certain thing: especially when it comes to meeting the requirements of standardized assessments.

The point of view Mitchell Langbert and the NAS subscribes to is unusable and unnecessary when it comes down to actually teaching ALL the kids across the curriculum. In fact, because more classrooms are becoming more diverse, not less, Differentiation as a best practice is essential to overall classroom success since all of our classroom are diverse and getting more diverse everyday.

 Furthermore,  when scholars such as Mitchell Langbert present their kind of logic as some kind of informed intellectual  history, I argue that they are not using intellectual objectivity or honesty: they are reading their version of the facts to make themselves look good and that is all, period. This kind of self serving intellectual dishonesty is what Dr. Vernon Polite devoted his career as a caring and professional educator to fighting. That is why M.A.R.S. is important not just for us, but for our children and the many generations of future teachers to follow.

How should we define social justice in education in a  way anyone can understand?
Equal access to common language, acknowledgment of  how everyone's experience contributes to what things mean and a serious curriculum based opportunity for all our students and their families to express their understanding of knowledge as a community based activity where everyone who wants to, has a voice and that voice is heard and not ignored. That's social justice and yes, it is fair and it is just and it is democratic and its worth believing in and fighting for.

 Dr Vernon C Polite meant a lot to me: he will be sorely missed, but what means most to me is the dream he spent his life championing. His dream is my dream: and I for one will never rest until that dream is finally and formally realized as a matter of American institutional reality.

Thank you and rest easy Dr. Vernon C Polite.

One Possible Plan for American Financial Reform: An Ann Arbor Cabbie's Perspective

There has been much said about the upcoming national debate over the pending legislation pertaining to financial reform. The following philosophical observation proposes one possible plan for financial reform: one route, at least in theory, this necessary reform might take as law makers continue to craft the essential ingredients of  American Economic regulation.

In Paul B. Carrol and Chunka Mui's Billion Dollar Lessons: What you can learn from the Most Inexusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years , the authors engage in a cultural archaeology of  the Wall Street world. Although the authors very adeptly explore what happens when corporations, big enough to make the claim they are too big to fail, I am going to speak my own thoughts, in a general way, based in part on my own experiences as a Cab Driver, and in part on the observations of the authors of this accessible and straightforward text. The theory I will arrive at, thus, will be due to the author's ideas on the one hand, and my interpretation of those ideas from the perspective of a cabbie and long time student of Philosophy and Speech Communication.

There is one thing I wish to say however: although the authors may vaguely imply what possible form economic regulation might take (indeed, the authors may not agree with ANY form of  external regulation whatsoever),  I wish to make the case that regulation of the financial industry take the form of an agreed upon series of methods and procedures underscoring real confidence in any possible strategy that should warrant respect on the part of planners, the consequential weight of such a decision across the possible outcomes of that strategy (xviii).

In other words,  economic regulation should be applied to those strategies, where the outcome will effect the Greatest common number of people regardless of whether those people are investors, shareholders, cab drivers or waiters: as many of us can well attest by now, DEFAULT eventually gets around to us all, one way or the other.

Carrol and Mui paint a vivid portrait of Green Tree Financial. In the 1990's this company made billions of dollars financing the sale of trailer homes on an unprecedented scale. Yet it did so, without considering those trailer homes would loose their value long before the borrower would or could realize any long term advantage (40). Indeed, Green Tree, in much the same way the sub prime mortgage lending fiasco developed, took those loans, repackaged them in a process called securitization: a bundling process that takes a lot of loans that will go bad, renames them in pools worth much more than their value, sells them as good bonds backed up by the short term interest collected on the original loans (40a). To make matters worse, Green Tree collected both the interest and the loan processing fees, made unfounded projections of future earnings and booked all of that as profit: profit based on their own models of defaults and prepayments rather than the actual behavior of the financial products they sold with reckless abandon (41).

In order to put this into perspective, let's say I take out a loan to buy three cabs in the spring and use as collateral the cab I already own plus a projection of possible earnings based on the value of each fare at $7 per fare per 31 trips per one 12 hour shift times 7 days per week. $10,633.00 per cab sounds pretty good. But let's also say that the possible earnings projections don't necessarily match up with the actual performance of positive cash flow projection? But that's o.k. because, instead of relying on actual cost structure, I hedged my bet by bundling each cab on paper into a bond security, folding in the interest on each cab into the overall lease for each driver, then sold those securities without paying down the loans on each cab, to area investors such as churches, synagogues, area businesses and assorted other private parties.

I would in turn charge each diver  12 or 13% and pay the bond holders 7 or 9% and of course, pocket the difference as pure profit. And then turn around and get a similar loan for three more cabs and repeat the process making even more profit. But like in the Green Tree example, this gain-on-sale type of aggressive accounting does not take into account the inherent accuracy of the value of the securities' projected worth.

Just as a number of factors could arise with each cab driver that would negatively alter the base figures, Green Tree ran into the problem of relying on inaccurate forecasts of interests rates in direct, joint and inverse relation to a host of  fluctuations first in performance of the financial product and then in the subsequent decreasing value of those products in the long term.

Tyler Mc Graw of USA Today explains:.
Taxi medallions — required licenses fastened to the hoods of all New York City yellow cabs — have rocketed in value at a time when many investments have plummeted...
With the slogan, "In niches there are riches," the company [Medallion Financial] has lent more than $3 billion to the taxi industry in the past decade and recorded no loan losses because it can repossess the medallion if the client doesn't pay. But Murstein says the medallion loans, on which the company currently charges about 6.25% interest a year, give ambitious drivers a legitimate opportunity for ownership. 

Bottom line: if you were to take all the cab companies here in Ann Arbor and compare them to the ANY index the State of Michigan may rely on: NASDAQ etc... you will find that although heavily regulated, generally speaking, the industry outperforms the largest overestimated security (McGraw 2009; Carrol and Mui p 42-50).

In other words, when we talk of regulating the financial industry,  the cab driving model is a pretty safe bet. The industry works not in spite of the regulations, but because of them.

So what am I saying here?  Financial Reform along the lines of:
                                  1) Transparency in Securitization: gain on sale profits must match most recent
                                       performance volume indexes.
                                  2)  Credit Financing Accuracy: credit must be proportional to most recent opportnity
                                        and threat management scenarios.
                                  3)   Leverage must be documented in relation to most recent Justification and Earnings
                                         Projection Statement based on substantiated earnings projection, cash flow
                                          projection, debt schedule and operational cost matrix.
                                  4)    Close scrutiny of  Non regulated Special Purpose Entities in                                            multiple holdings, static revenue homogeneous forecasts and excessive                                                          inventories.

These are the same rules cab drivers have to play by, 24/7 365 days and by and large, the regulations tend to work in our favor: industry-wise. Why can't the same or a similar formula work for the financial industry as a whole?

A Standardized Growth Expectations Index that effectively monitors all reported product volume in respect to overall and specific confidence in appreciable asset net worth is not that far fetched an hardly amounts to excessive Government intrusion. The alternative, of course as we have seen invites investor overconfidence and gross distortion in speculative acquisition and merger. This is pretty much what we have painfully experienced with AIG, Bear Sterns and a host of other companies, who have recently posted record profits derived mainly from the same set of operational procedures that facilitated the last federal bailout.

Comprehensive financial is necessary and it is necessary NOW. The only question that remains, at least in my understanding is who are going to listen to: an out of touch broker who has forgotten how to work WITH the rules or a cab driver, who makes their living by dealing with the rules every hour of every day, year in and year out: rain, sleet, snow or shine.

That's how I roll, how about you?

A Few thoughts from
Tom
Ann Arbor MI.