There is a chicken and egg controversy over at HunBlog about IQ, socioeconomic status, and achievement. Brad Hoge kicked it off with a riff about my post on the likelihood of significant climate change in Hades, and the response he got in his comments confirmed my observation that it won’t happen anytime soon.

Brad made an interesting ecological argument for local rather than broad and sweeping interventions as we work toward making classrooms better places for kids to learn. I wanted to comment when I first read it, but I got sidetracked by the beginning of school. I checked the comments on the first of the two posts yesterday and found a lively exchange going on there about race and class in educational processes.

Brad’s analysis of the limitations of social science research reminded me of an article by James Paul Gee in which he discussed patterns in language and literacy research. Gee argued that

the patterns most important to human thinking and action follow a sort of “Goldilocks principle”: they are not too general and not too specific; they are midlevel generalizations between these two extremes.

He called these midlevel generalizations “situated meanings,” which sounded a little bit like Brad’s thesis that overgeneralizing leads us to erroneous conclusions.

Brad’s post was engaged by KDeRosa, who began the infinite regression down the search for lost causes, talking about whether “external factors” cause student failure and claiming that “improving the curriculum and/or school has raised achievement….while attempts at changing the external factors have largely, if not wholey, failed.” He goes on and on breaking down the causes and correlations between low socioeconomic status and low academic achievement.

I wanted to say something, but I hardly knew where to begin.

Now I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter.

Whenever I present the question to my students about which came first, the chicken or the egg, they tackle the problem with relish. They take sides and argue passionately for chickens or eggs. For pure entertainment value, asking this chicken and egg riddle to a group of kids is like dropping a cat into a yard full of huskies. Everyone goes home either mad or hungry, because there’s no satisfaction in an answer.

To get back to a first cause ignores the fact that in the here and now, chickens cause eggs and eggs cause chickens, and if we are going to do anything about one of them, we have to consider the other.

The reason to ask about chickens and eggs is presumably to intervene somehow on behalf of a chicken or an egg. Consequently we now hear a lot of people talking about schools as a monolithic concept, which is what pluralizing a regular noun allows you to do. They argue that by fixing schools they will improve our society, or by fixing society, we can improve our schools.

I challenge the notion that there is anything like a “school system” to be fixed. A system is organized and integrated, and schools are not, and never have been. What we have is a culture of schooling, not a system, and culture is not readily directed or intervened upon.

I denounce as racist, any advocacy for educational reform that discounts the relevance of equity in educational processes. My position is not practical. It is a moral stance. We don’t need to be concerned with causes whatsoever. They are a distraction from the real work of healing and nurturing that teachers are called to.

Education is not merely a path to material success. It is also a journey of self-discovery and communion. Social equity is also not simply a path to material well-being, but represents a birthright for every human according to our highest principles. The success criteria for education is neither test-passing, nor material gain. Success has more to do with satisfying deeply personal values which are not definable across diverse contexts. There can be no true education without justice, because the worth of each individual is the central teaching in a democracy, and the absence of that condition exposes all other teaching as hypocrisy and deceit.