You seem to be asking”what do your really think of me?”

My guess is that many readers would consider me one of “the usual suspects” when it comes to Andrew Rotherham; I have sent readers to my many critiques repeatedly. I’m sure that some will discount my opinions because I’m a lawyer, pro-market and have no classroom experience (well, I was a TA in college).

That’s ok, people should make up their minds about my fact-based arguments knowing everything they can about me. I’ve been very clear about my history and have repeatedly told readers to Google “Marc Dean Millot” for more. I can’t very well be upset with that fact while arguing that readers should be fully informed of the various interests and relationships around RTTT and I3.

I don’t know if “the usual suspects” marginalizes the subjects or not. In Casablanca, the phrase is used by Captain Renault to suggests they have nothing to do with the merits of the case, but are the kind of people who occupy the relevant demimonde. I’d say you occupy the small world of blog criticism around Russo and Rotherham, wouldn’t you? Like me, you are a usual suspect.

I believe the merits of the case against Russo and Rotherham is what is important here. However, I am not naive – the “priors” of people who join in on my side matter to where the disinterested observers comes out. In the end, I’m not part of any club that will have me, and I’m less interested in preaching to some choir than in persuading this middle.

In this respect, because you can be counted on to come out against the two, your opinion has to be discounted. I have to say so, unless I would like to be painted as part of your club, and see my arguments characterized as such. I think I’m better off persuading this middle if If I adopt a strategy of distancing myself from your take, an approach which has the added rhetorical advantage of being true.

There’s nothing personal here. Nor do I disrespect your position. I think I understand something of why so many educators are upset with market-based reforms – teachers have been disrespected by their employers for so long, are now seeing this new new thing shoved down their throats by those same employers, and the capacity (however defined) of so many private for and nonprofit providers is far short of their reach. Nor do I fail to welcome your support. But my main objective here is not making you feel happy or comfortable.

I have been trying for a decade to make an objective, fact-based case about what I’ve called the social keiretsu. I know the edu-blogosphere has become an outlet for those deprived access to traditional media and decision channels. Unfortunately, too much of this potentially powerful medium has been taken up by discourse somewhere between “snark” and ad hominen attacks.

I’m sorry to say that you have contributed to making the media more like bad talk radio than NPR. I can’t say I’ve every read any post from you that took the time to make a solid argument against Rotherham or Russo.

It is somewhat hypocritical to focus on my use of “the usual suspects” and imply that I might intend to marginalize you, when you are one of the few edu-bloggers with the social history and teaching experience to make a substantive contribution to the debate, but have wasted the opportunity to educate your audience with mere sniping.

To be specific, you’ve marginalized yourself. You may have the satisfaction of the wiseacre in the back of the classroom, cracking jokes about the teacher. Your audience may get a certain relief from their oppression. But like the wiseacre, you wont take the time to make a positive contribution for change. Indeed, you have help your oppressor by turning a potentially useful means of political leverage into a joke. In the meanwhile, you’ve helped Rotherham and Russo to become the middle of the roads preferred channel.

If you don’t want to have the sense that others might think you are marginal, you might think about what you can write that won’t leave you on the margins.

This is not intended to be mean. I think you could do more for your audience if you got out of the intellectual gutter.

My students prefer “creative construction time” over any of this “first grade practice.”

No big surprise there.

A little bit of Postman, here, for example:

But as we all know, in every virtue there lurks a contrapuntal vice. I believe Tocqueville had this in mind in the passage I quoted. He meant to praise our ambition and vitality but at the same time to condemn our naïveté and rashness. (p. 106)

He meant, in particular, to say that a culture that exalts the new for its own sake, that encourages the radical inclination to exploit what is new, and is therefore indifferent to the destruction of the old, that such a culture runs a serious risk of becoming trivial and dangerous, especially dangerous to itself. (p. 106)

This is exactly what is happening in the United States in the latter part of the twentieth century. In today’s America, the idea of newness not only is linked to the idea of improvement but is the definition of improvement. If anyone should raise the question, What improves the human spirit? or even the more mundane question, What improves the quality of life?, Americans are apt to offer a simple formulation: That which is new is better, that which is newest is best. (p. 106)

The cure for such a stupid philosophy is conservatism. My version, not President Reagan’s. A true conservative, like myself, knows that technology always fosters radical social change. A true conservative also knows that it is useless to pretend that technology will not have its way with a culture. But a conservative recognizes a difference between rape and seduction. The rapist cares nothing for his victim. The seducer must accommodate himself to the will and temperament of the object of his desires. Indeed, he does not want a victim so much as an accomplice. What I am saying is that technology can rape a culture or be forced to seduce it. (pp. 106-107)

The aim of a genuine conservative in a technological age is to control the fury of technology, to make it behave itself, to insist that it accommodate itself to the will and temperament of a people. It is his best hope that through his efforts a modicum of charm may accompany the union of technology and culture. (p. 107)

Standardized testing is a technology in which too much faith in invested by people who are not present to see its destructive consequences.