7

CONCLUSION: THE RESILIENCE OF TECHNO-IDEALISM

In late June 2012 I attended the Downtown School’s first eighth-grade graduation ceremony. I was about to move across the country for a new job and the ceremony offered a last chance to say goodbye in person to the school’s designers, educators, parents, and students. Graduation ceremonies tend to be festive occasions, and this one was especially cheerful. The ceremony was the first graduation for the first school of its kind. The graduating students were, and always would be, that school’s very first class. Various people who had committed themselves to the project since its early days were now seeing the fruits of their efforts. After a tumultuous start, the school had mostly stabilized. Instead of a mass exodus of privileged families, the school now enjoyed the ambiguous blessing of being a hot option among families in District Two, especially among creative professional parents with middle-school-aged boys. An impressive portion of the graduating class had been accepted by New York City’s selective public high schools, and some students who could have been accepted into these schools nevertheless ­preferred to remain at the Downtown School for high school.

Nearly everyone at the graduation ceremony seemed pleased and proud. We clapped and cheered loudly when students crossed the stage to receive their degrees or to pick up an award, and we cheered equally loudly when school leaders recounted the school’s accomplishments. During one such moment, a school official announced the results from that year’s standardized state exams. Loud applause once again filled the auditorium when the official announced that this year’s scores were up from last year’s and that the Downtown School was now competitive with well-regarded peer institutions. Like others, I applauded these accomplishments, and I felt genuinely happy for everyone who had worked so hard on the philanthropic project. It felt good to celebrate each other, and hence the project, as a successful, beneficent, and cutting-edge experiment, and it felt equally off-putting—petty, churlish, and even misanthropic—to focus on the ­project’s shortcomings. Sure the school had some problems, but it was not as if the people who had made the project what it was were especially greedy, selfish, or unscrupulous. Parents were just trying to offer their ­children the best educational opportunities that they could, and designers and educators were spending much of their lives in professions that paid comparatively modestly, did not confer especially high social status, and were frequently subjected to public attacks even though they were trying to help others. Surrounded as I was by all these positive feelings and good intentions, how could I focus on the negative?

And yet I also remembered how the school’s philanthropic backers and designers had imagined and justified their new school in large part by problematizing what they called the testing regime. Similarly, I recalled how many of the privileged parents who now cheered for the school’s ­improved test scores had been drawn to the Downtown School because it seemed to deflect that regime’s normative prescriptions and competitively divisive pressures. I recalled how these designers and parents had championed the school’s focus on games, technology, and design because it supposedly facilitated students’ creativity and improvisation, modes of activity that the testing regime seemed to foreclose. Once again I felt I was participating in a seeming paradox: as designers, educators, and parents worked to make daily life at the school more and more conventionally scripted, many of these same people continued to celebrate the school as if it were radically new and disruptive. I also began to think about who was not at this graduation ceremony: students such as Corey and Niki, both of whom had once been near the top of their class academically and socially but who had left the school after privileged parents, and then educators, fixed them as threatening delinquents. And I thought of Corey and Niki’s group of friends, many of whom had also been driven from the school during its first several years. Similarly, I wondered who had been kept out, whether through concerted efforts by involved parents, structural impediments such as school district borders, or the more quotidian workings of unexamined biases. When I considered these more prescriptive and divisive aspects of the school, I could not shake the sense that we were celebrating our own contributions to remaking the status quo as if those contributions were disruptive and philanthropic. I have been unable to shake that feeling since, and, if anything, I have come to feel that those of us who contribute to these processes extend far beyond the people who design and implement cutting-edge philanthropic interventions.

We have tried this before, repeatedly. The demand to fix education in order to fix society is as old as public schooling. The claim that the new media technologies of an era represent unprecedented opportunities to do so is equally as old. Despite well over a century of educational crises, countless reforms, endless experiments with the new media of the moment—radio, film, television, computers, the Internet, games, mobile phones, tablets, MOOCs, and virtual reality—public education has never come close to its idealization as society’s great equalizer and unifier, and new technologies have never managed to fill the gaps.

But maybe next time will be different?

The case examined in this book suggests that the next time will not be so different. It is hard to imagine a philanthropic endeavor better equipped to fulfill recent calls to disrupt education than the Downtown School. The school had smart, skilled, and dedicated designers, reformers, and teachers. They had an abundance of resources, including some of the most cutting-edge educational technologies in the world. They had a pedagogic approach designed by some of the world’s most respected learning theorists and technology designers. And yet, despite these resources and an abundance of good intentions, the designers and backers of the Downtown School mostly overlooked, rather than overcame, their intervention’s contributions to remaking the status quo. The reformers had promised unprecedented creativity, improvisation, and fun, and yet daily life at the school turned into a lot of rote and scripted behavior (chapter 4). They believed they were opening the school to the world, but in several highly problematic areas educators and, in particular, privileged parents worked to seal it off (chapters 3 and 6). They hoped to appeal to students’ inherent interests and overcome social division but ended up with a system that removed many of the most uncomfortable underprivileged (chapters 5 and 6). They quickly became much like the organizations that they aimed to replace, and they helped remake many of the very social divisions that they hoped to mend. Given that techno-philanthropism routinely falls far short of reformers’ stated ideals, how can it be that cycles of disruptive fixation predictably recur?

Beneficiaries of Failure

For James Ferguson (1994), who drew heavily on Foucault’s (1977) analysis of prisons in his study of development interventions, the key to understanding the endurance of seemingly ineffective development projects was to focus not on their apparent failures but rather on what these endeavors did manage to accomplish, for whom, and how. By changing the problematic in this way, Ferguson was able to see that while international development projects routinely failed to eradicate poverty, their professed philanthropic aim, they were quite effective at expanding bureaucratic state power. If we similarly ask what perennial cycles of disruptive fixation do achieve, then the enormous amount of money, energy, and affect that are continuously invested into seemingly cutting-edge philanthropic interventions no longer appears as just bad policy or incompetence. When we look at what routine failure accomplishes and for whom, the story becomes more complicated, more interesting, and also more political.

As the vignette at the beginning of this chapter begins to illustrate, a disruptive philanthropic intervention that does not live up to its professed ideals still produces many beneficiaries. In large part because of their involvement in this project, one of the Downtown School’s designers landed a prestigious job at one of the largest and most influential philanthropic foundations in the world. Another of the school’s designers received millions of dollars in additional funding from foundations and corporate partners, this time to leverage the seemingly unprecedented possibilities of “big data” in game-based learning. Within the broader philanthropic initiative that helped fund the Downtown School, one of the scholars who received the most grant money was hired by one of the world’s largest media-technology corporations, only to be later hired as a partner at one of the world’s most prestigious design consultancies. Similarly, the program officer for one of the foundations that supported the Downtown School was awarded tens of millions of dollars by that same foundation in order to launch an NGO focused on tech-ed innovations. One of the school’s original curriculum designers was tapped to run the middle school, one of the school’s founding teachers was headed to graduate school for a PhD, and I got a tenure-track job, in no small part because of the research I conducted at the Downtown School.

These are but a few of the beneficiaries of a “failed” cycle of disruptive fixation, that is, people and groups that benefitted in different ways from a cutting-edge philanthropic intervention that did not come close to realizing its ideals.¹ Taken together, the recurring failures of techno-philanthropism ironically help maintain, and even expand, the industries, research programs, media professionals, and investment opportunities of parties that specialize in diagnosing societal ailments and prescribing seemingly innovative new fixes. For example, cycles of failed educational disruptions have produced and sustained a not-so-small army of experts—in academia, think tanks, consulting firms, NGOs, government agencies, and corporations—whose jobs consist, in part if not in full, in diagnosing what is wrong with education, as well as with prescribing and carrying out seemingly innovative solutions. Similarly, many technology and media companies, as well as many technological experts, have long relied on perpetual rounds of ineffective education reform as a stream of revenue and funding (Buckingham 2007). The lack of success of various cutting-edge philanthropic interventions and movements does not cause these figured worlds to implode; on the contrary, it helps produce conditions for those worlds’ ongoing survival and even expansion. One project or movement’s inability to finally fix education or development is another project or movement’s opportunity. Indeed, it is precisely because a project or movement fails to realize more widely held yearnings and ideals that entrepreneurial reformers can call for new and more ambitious rounds of disruptive philanthropy. Perpetual failures also allow various experts to continuously problematize what went wrong with a given intervention as they help imagine and design alternatives (chapter 2). In this way, figured worlds like education reform and development can perpetuate and expand themselves with a seemingly moral, technocratic, and innovative edge, but they often do so without asking more fundamental questions about whether the means deployed—here education and technology design—can realize the broader social transformations that designers and reformers continually promise.

Those of us who work in higher education are also beneficiaries of the perpetual failure of educational reforms, albeit in ways that are often left unexamined. Not only do US research universities continuously receive large grants by promising to help finally fix education, often in high-tech ways, but they also often entice students and families to pay and borrow hefty sums by promising to deliver the opportunities that K–12 schooling has been unable to deliver. And yet, like high schools before them, colleges and universities are now also finding themselves unable to make good on these promises. Indeed, a likely reason that there is currently a growing fixation with fixing higher education in the United States (Arum and Roksa 2011; Shear 2014) is because many recent college graduates and their families feel that higher educational institutions did not deliver the breadth of promised opportunities (Long 2015; Selingo 2015).

Professional fixers, NGOs, and companies are not the only beneficiaries of perennial cycles of disruptive fixation. As we saw, and despite their understandable frustrations with the competitive educational systems in which they were entangled, many families, especially families who worked in the so-called creative industries but also some families from less-privileged backgrounds, used the Downtown School to gain advantages in those competitive systems. In doing so, these parents also comparatively disadvantaged other families who were also trying to navigate New York City’s educational systems but from less advantageous positions. At the most general level, anyone who has gained comparative advantages in educational systems has also benefited from, and thus helped to produce, the seeming failures of those systems. As Varenne and McDermott (1998) astutely observed, the idealization of institutionalized education as a meritocratic race—that is, as a system that should fairly sort people from different backgrounds into the hierarchies of the adult world—ensures the production of educational winners as well as educational losers (Labaree 2010). Once framed in this way, questions of social justice are reduced to questions about whether the playing field is level, and yet, as Bourdieu (1973) and countless other critics of institutionalized education have long argued, privileged families are better equipped to both win these political contests as well as to shape the terrain of struggle (Lareau 2003). Families in relative positions of privilege are by no means guaranteed to reproduce their social standing in their offspring, but they are comparatively well positioned to use educational institutions as a means to both fight for and legitimate their children’s ascendancy in inherited and emergent hierarchies.

Failure is also productive in that cycles of disruptive fixation always leave their mark. Cumulatively, cycles of failed intervention not only perpetuate the worlds and industries of reformers, they also extend the reach of those who can profess expertise in these domains as well the modes of governing that those experts, perhaps inadvertently, help install. As ­Ferguson (1994) pointed out in his study of the development industry, even though development projects routinely fail to combat poverty, their idealized aim, they nevertheless help expand the reach of the bureaucratic state. A similar point could be made about the perennial failure of cutting-edge educational reforms. In a dual process that we could call educationalization (Labaree 2008) and informationalization, more and more aspects of not just young people’s everyday lives, but also the everyday lives of many adults, increasingly fall under the jurisdiction, authority, and practices of those who profess some form of educational or informational expertise. As cutting-edge educational interventions routinely fail to deliver various wished-for outcomes and as more and more demands for social change get delegated to educational and technological experts, a common response is to develop and prescribe, as well as to seek out, more and more seemingly cutting-edge educational remedies. Such an expansion is evident not only in the swelling duration and reach of the school (Patall, Cooper, and Allen 2010), but also in the uneven flourishing of extracurricular, enrichment, and self-help activities (Qvortrup 1994; Halpern 2003; Lareau 2003; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014), in the burgeoning and class-differentiated market for educational media technologies (Seiter 1993, 2008; Ito 2009), and in the attempts by learning theorists, educational reformers, and media technologists to theorize, design, and connect diverse sites of everyday life into a cohesive educational-informational net (Ito et al. 2013).

Experiencing and Sustaining Idealism

Drawing attention to the question of who benefits from the recurring failure of techno-philanthropism can easily lead to the conclusion that cycles of disruptive fixation persist because these diverse beneficiaries somehow conspire to produce mutually beneficial outcomes. According to this more cynical view, diverse beneficiaries of failure know that they are promoting unrealizable solutions, but they collude in propagating outsized hopes because doing so serves their interlocking self-interests. While the figured worlds of education reform and philanthropically oriented technology ­design undoubtedly include hucksters and cynics, what is more striking is how many participants in these worlds act, with all appearances of sincerity, as if their efforts are cutting edge, disruptive, and philanthropic, even as they often help produce regressive consequences.

One of the reasons that they appear able to do so is because failed cycles of disruptive fixation nevertheless help repair and sustain social and political ideals that extend far beyond the figured worlds of professional fixers. Techno-philanthropism exerts the moral and normative forces that it does in large part because it gives concrete instantiation to widely held moral imperatives: to eradicate poverty, to fulfill democratic ideals about equality of opportunity, to forge a united and harmonious polity, and so forth. As such, it is incredibly difficult to challenge techno-philanthropism as an enterprise without also seeming to reject the values and yearnings that legitimize its existence. It is much more tempting to identify problems with specific interventions and movements while keeping faith in the larger enterprises, and hence in the yearnings and values that such enterprises officially represent, intact.

This is a false choice.

Someone can aspire to combat poverty or bridge social divisions without concluding that disruptive educational reforms or development interventions are the best means for bringing about such transformations. But the braiding together of these enterprises with the moral values and longings that sanctify them makes pointed critiques of the former quite difficult, even though they have important political consequences (Ferguson 1994; Easterly 2001, 2006; Fassin 2010). As Ferguson (1994) observed in his study of the development industry, the braiding together of widely held moral ideals with narrowly held technocratic expertise has the effect of depoliticizing political, economic, and social struggles. As we have seen, experts’ processes of problematization and rendering technical (Rose 1999; Li 2007) tend to cast issues such as poverty, inequality, and social division in technocratic, and thus seemingly apolitical, terms. It was this tendency to transform more widely held political and moral yearnings into technocratic enterprises that led James Ferguson to famously characterize the world of international development as an “anti-politics machine.”

It can be tempting to interpret contemporary techno-philanthropism as another antipolitics machine, as some critical scholars have recently done (Aschoff 2015; McGoey 2015). After all, the wealthy philanthropists who do so much to instigate and support new rounds of disruptive fixation are among the people who have benefitted the most from existing political and economic arrangements. By channeling more widespread concerns with the status quo as well as hopes for substantive change into seemingly apolitical, charitable, and disruptive remedies, techno-philanthropists can evade political outrage while leaving the structural arrangements that benefit them more or less intact. Yet, and unlike Ferguson’s account, I think it would be a mistake to characterize contemporary techno-philanthropism as simply another antipolitics machine. For one, debates about both education reform and the social implications of new technologies are often highly public and politicized, much to the chagrin of many of the people who specialize in these professions. In polities that see themselves as liberal-democratic, public debates and struggles over both education reform and the utopian or dystopian role of new technologies in contemporary life provide a sanctioned, personally meaningful, but also mostly structurally unthreatening way for people to affirm their moral ideals and values, including idealizations about democratic citizenship. As the preceding chapters have shown, media industries and entrepreneurial reformers often play a key role in these processes by regularly producing utopian and dystopian accounts about both education and new technologies. As such, the worlds of educators and educational reformers often, and unfairly, catch much of the public and political outrage when broader social ideals remain unmet (Tyack and Cuban 1995). Similarly, understandable concerns with current conditions, as well as anxieties and hopes about the future, are routinely projected onto the latest technological innovations in heated public debates (Buckingham 2000). Given all this public attention and concern, the tremendous money, time, effort, and affect that is recurrently directed into cycles of disruptive fixation do not so much appear as an antipolitics machine as a politicized buffer zone that helps absorb and fix volatile energies while leaving the sources of those volatilities intact.

While wealthy elites, and privileged groups more generally, undoubtedly benefit from these misplaced forms of hope and concern, and while entrepreneurial reformers and professional media outlets play an outsized role in shaping the terrain of these debates and struggles, it is far too simplistic to suggest that wealthy elites, or any other unified subject, control the strings. In keeping with Ferguson’s arguments about the world of development, we cannot look at what failed rounds of disruptive fixation accomplish and then teleologically infer that the resulting effects—the absorption of politically volatile energies, for example—was the plan of some unified actor and thus that all the other actors that enrolled in a cutting-edge philanthropic intervention were somehow conspirators of the state, of capital, or of billionaire technology entrepreneurs, and so forth.

Yet Ferguson’s machine imagery is also limited in that, while it rightly decenters accounts that figure reformers and designers as conspirators or cynics, it instead casts them as “cultural dopes” (Hall 1981). Those who do the work of intervening, from the perspective of Ferguson’s neo-Foucualdian problematic, appear as cogs in the machine, helping to advance and entrench structures of power, but doing so behind their backs. A puzzle that remains insufficiently addressed by neo-Foucauldian problematics—as well as other problematics that separate the analysis of political-economy from the analysis of situated practices—is how reformers and designers who meet moral calls to improve the world for others manage to produce and maintain their idealism despite having some knowledge of recurring failures, witnessing the ineffectiveness of their own efforts firsthand, and often helping to remake the very ailments that they aim to mend (Li 1999, 2007; Lashaw 2008, 2010). I find it too facile to say that these instrument effects simply happen behind reformers’ and designers’ backs, just as it is too facile to suggest that such effects are their real, but concealed, intentions.

To build on the insights of Ferguson (1994), Tyack and Cuban (1995), Li (2007), and the many other important works that have examined the cyclical character of philanthropic interventions that routinely fall far short of their idealizations, this book has developed the concept of disruptive fixation. The phrase is meant to draw attention to the interplay between two notions of the term fixation: fixation as tunnel vision—akin to James Scott’s (1998) “seeing like a state,” as well as Michel Callon’s (1998) Goffman-inspired notion of technocratic “framing”—and fixation as attempts to stabilize, or fix, seemingly volatile and unwieldy forces. Taken together, disruptive fixation refers to the cyclical process by which enthusiasm for techno-philanthropism faithfully renews itself even as actual interventions predictably fail to fulfill their professed aims.

Using the case of the Downtown School as an example, a propositional sketch of this cyclical process is as follows: the inability of previous reformers to finally fix a more structural problem—like poverty or systemic inequality—helps sustain conditions for entrepreneurial reformers, as well as powerful elites more generally, to call for, and sometimes support, new rounds of disruptive fixation. In doing so, these elites often profess that we are in a radically new era as they herald the unprecedented opportunities of recent breakthroughs in technology. Doing so helps convince many people, including themselves, that this time is different (chapter 2). Because these powerful elites do not tend to have deep expertise in the domains they aim to transform, nor the time to try to do so, they recruit and enroll experts. These experts tend to be sympathetic to the philanthropic outcomes that the elites are calling for, but they are also dependent on the support of more powerful outsiders in order to follow up on their insights. This relation of dependency does not determine what experts will design and attempt to implement, but the relationship places significant limits on what experts will imagine and explore.

As these experts respond to entrepreneurial reformers’ calls for disruption they problematize what is wrong with the world as they render the world intelligible with, and amenable to, the instruments that they have in hand or are developing (Li 2007). As we saw, it was through these intertwined processes of problematization and rendering technical that fixations—of space (chapter 3), pedagogy (chapter 4), the project’s intended beneficiaries (chapter 5), and community participation (chapter 6)—occurred among reformers and designers at the Downtown School. While these fixations helped reformers imagine that they were designing a plausible and novel means for accomplishing hoped for outcomes, they also excluded and distorted much of what they would encounter once they set their projects down in the world. In the words of Michel Callon (1998), their fixations, or in his terminology, their “frames,” were “overflown” by the complexities, interrelations, and historical contingencies of the worlds they aimed to transform. Because of this overflowing, a cutting-edge intervention often turns to chaos for reformers once it is launched as factors and forces that were excluded and distorted by their fixations quickly perforate a project and destabilize reformers’ carefully crafted plans.

In theory, these moments of overflowing and instability are opportunities when experts might reexamine the limitations of their fixations—they could, for example, attempt to trace the sources of the destabilizing forces in order to better understand the worlds into which they are intervening—and some experts do begin to reexamine the limits of their fixations in these more expansive ways. But the dominant tendency is to engage in a much more pragmatic form of fixation: reformers attempt to quickly stabilize their project by reaching for whatever resources are readily available. In keeping with DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) well-received notion of “mimetic isomorphism,” many of the stabilizing resources that are ready-to-hand ironically come from canonical versions of the organizations that reformers aim to disrupt, particularly from the professional communities of which some of the reformers are a part. Yet—and in a curious return to Weber (1978), whom DiMaggio and Powell claimed to have taken us beyond—other stabilizing resources come from outside the worlds of experts and bureaucrats, and particularly from powerful factions of the local community—in this case privileged parents—who offer to help stabilize the project in exchange for enhanced power in the project’s governance. While these local elites often espouse commitments to philanthropic outcomes that resonate with reformers’ yearnings, they can also exert isomorphic, and even revanchist, pressures on a project, whereas experts to some extent remain forces for change.

At the current historical moment, the pressures that these local elites can exert are likely, and ironically, being amplified by recent attempts to make institutions, particularly state institutions, more responsive to the people they claim to serve, as epitomized in this book by the choice reforms of New York City’s public schools. While these reforms appear to have transferred some power away from bureaucrats and toward citizens, they have also empowered their intended beneficiaries in highly uneven ways. At the Downtown School, factions of local elites were simultaneously unsettled and empowered by the choice reforms, and in these conditions they used their power to grab onto and attempt to control the intervention’s unique resources. Instead of pushing for openness and heterogeneity, they pushed for the sealing of borders and the tightening of discipline. In this way, a morally sanctified call for disruption was converted into a mechanism that not only locked social processes into prescriptive and regressive forms but that also entrenched more deeply many of the very social ailments that reformers and their backers had hoped to uproot.

One curiosity about a cycle of disruptive fixation is that many of the people who take part in it manage to repair and maintain their idealism, at least for a while. They generally do not become especially cynical or apathetic. At the Downtown School, most designers and reformers continued to act as if they were participating in a cutting-edge philanthropic undertaking even as they made the project more and more conventional and increasingly disciplined and purged some of the people they most wanted to help. Many remained passionately committed to the school, and some even proselytized it as an exciting new model of change to other reformers, policymakers, and the media. From an anthropological perspective, the resilience of this idealism—the maintenance of the collectively lived as if imaginings that help animate and sanctify a disruptive philanthropic intervention—takes a lot of work. Setbacks, compromises, and contradictions have to be overlooked, rationalized, or forgotten; the creep of disillusionment has to beaten back; hope and optimism have to be repeatedly and collectively rejuvenated.

One way that designers and reformers manage to keep their idealism intact is by framing setbacks as something positive and even empowering. Instead of interpreting setbacks and compromises as indication that their intervention does not have the power to realize its philanthropic promises, reformers often frame unanticipated challenges as opportunities for growth, adjustment, and improvement. In the case of the Downtown School, reformers who had come to the project from the world of technology design not only expected setbacks, but they often also celebrated them. “Fail forward” was, and is, a sort of mantra among the entrepreneurial tech designers involved in the project, as were the ideas of “grit” and resilience among many of the experienced educational reformers, so much so that they treated these dispositions as something to be cultivated in their students. In both cases, maintaining optimism and idealism involved ongoing processes of interpreting indications of failure positively as opportunities for improvement. In doing so, the broader structural, and particularly political-economic, conditions that thwarted the realization of their ideals remained largely unexamined.²

Entrepreneurial reformers, technology designers, reform experts, some of the people charged to execute philanthropic interventions, and factions of local elites are also able to mostly maintain their idealisms because many of the stabilizing resources that reformers deploy are canonical and hence unremarkable, especially to experienced reformers and practitioners. For example, experienced educational reformers and educators at the Downtown School tended to classify many of their quasi-Tayloristic practices not as pedagogy but rather as classroom management, the latter of which was seen as a separate precondition for their innovative pedagogy. Novices to these worlds, including myself, learned to make similar distinctions as we became more-experienced reformers and educators (chapter 4). Additionally, a spatialized division of labor often separated the people who called for, supported, and designed the Downtown School from the people who were tasked with executing it on a daily basis. Similarly, local elites, in this case privileged parents, were often spatially removed from the day-to-day workings of the project. As such, canonical practices of discipline and control could remain largely out of sight and out of mind for many of the people who idealized the project, while these same practices became part of the taken-for-granted background of executors’ everyday routines.

Designers, reformers, and educators were also able to reconcile tensions in their partnerships with powerful locals in part because such partnerships were legitimated by more general assumptions about the inherently democratic character of community involvement, local participation, or, in the case of schooling, parental involvement. According to the designers’ problematizations, these local elites were part of the population that the philanthropic intervention had been designed to benefit. As such, these local elites’ involvements in the intervention were sanctioned by discourses that valorized citizen, consumer, community, or local participation in an intervention’s design and governance. While reformers and educators were often torn about forging these partnerships, they nevertheless tended to accept them, in part because they did not feel that their project could survive and retain its status as an innovative model of reform without this local political support, and they were probably right (chapter 6).

Finally, more widespread rhetorics about individualism and marketlike consumer choice helped designers, reformers, and local elites disassociate themselves from some the intervention’s more divisive effects. These rhetorics allowed responsibility for division to be attributed to the seemingly apolitical preferences of consumers, which in this case were parents choosing schools. For example, most people, including many of the parents of students who left the Downtown School, did not so much challenge the school for helping to remake problematic social divisions as suggest that departing students had not been a “good fit” for the school (chapter 6). When placed in the logic of consumer choice, cultural fit and misfit all too easily depoliticize the ways in which philanthropic interventions can contribute to social division.

Taken-for-grantedness, a spatialized division of labor, and rhetoric about participation and choice can help explain how many of the people who commit themselves to a cutting-edge philanthropic intervention manage to maintain their idealism even as they help remake and even extend many of the processes and relations that they aim to disrupt. But the exposition thus far does not account for how this idealism is repaired and rejuvenated in the face of numerous, and often dramatic, setbacks and compromises. The maintenance of idealism depends not only on practices of overlooking and rationalizing, such as those discussed earlier, but also on the production, documentation, circulation, and ritualistic celebration of practices that appear to fulfill the intervention’s innovative and philanthropic idealizations, practices that I have been referring to as sanctioned counterpractices.

At the Downtown School many of these sanctioned counterpractices were stylistic transformations of familiar cultural forms and scripts. For example, reformers instructed teachers to tell students that a paper-and-pencil math test was actually an application to a code-breaking academy. Similarly, they instructed teachers to grade students according to the familiar rubric of five ranked categories, with plusses and minuses for each, but labeled with terms like master and apprentice rather than A, B, C, D, F (chapter 4). Other sanctioned counterpractices, such as the project-based Level Up period at the end of each trimester, were more substantively unconventional as well as less scripted by adults. But these practices were relatively fleeting and carefully contained in circumscribed periods and spaces. In general, sanctioned counterpractices played a relatively minor role in the day-to-day routines of the project, especially when compared to the canonically scripted practices described previously, and their role in daily life diminished as the intervention aged.

Yet sanctioned counterpractices played an especially important role in repairing many people’s idealism for the project and hence in keeping the project going. Sanctioned counterpractices were the starring content when designers and reformers ritualistically told stories about the project to themselves and to various supporters and potential allies, including privileged parents, most of whom had little exposure to the project’s day-to-day routines. Sanctioned counterpractices were front and center in the school’s various showcases, festivals, ceremonies, publicity materials, and conference talks, and they were featured extensively during tours for prospective families, journalists, government officials, academics, designers, and officers from funding agencies. Similarly, when journalists and professional researchers produced accounts about the school, these ­accounts overwhelmingly focused on and tended to optimistically celebrate the school’s sanctioned counterpractices. In many of these accounts, the school’s distinctive media technologies were highlighted, as was the agency and creativity of the students. By contrast, the canonically scripted practices discussed previously, as well as the much more mundane and managerial uses of media technologies, were either erased or marginalized in both professionally produced media about the project and in the project’s ritualized self-representations. These collective celebrations of sanctioned counterpractices helped recruit and sustain the outside support upon which the intervention depended, and with the help of these allies the project’s designers and reformers managed to convince many others that their intervention could and should be emulated. But also, and equally importantly to the survival of the project, the ritualized celebration of sanctioned counterpractices helped many designers, reformers, educators, involved parents, and their supporters experience and repair the collective sense that they were committing themselves, often quite passionately, to an innovative moral enterprise.

The swell of enthusiasm for this particular round of disruptive fixation will eventually recede, and indeed such an ebbing may have already begun. But history also suggests that similar swells of techno-idealism, these invigorated by the seemingly unprecedented philanthropic possibilities of even-newer breakthroughs in media and information technologies, will soon come rushing forth. The cycle is not unlike that of waves repeatedly crashing into a rocky coastline.³ Each new wave is different, each rushes forth with an impressive confidence and force, and yet each comes to a dramatic halt once it meets the expansive and uneven terrain of the shore. Upon hitting land, the smooth and powerful swell refracts and jumps in countless directions. Eventually the water settles and then recedes, sometimes clashing with smaller currents and eddies that are still rushing forth. For a moment the tumult ceases and the water-soaked shore is calm. But soon another swell, slightly different from the last, returns, only to be rebuffed in a similarly dramatic fashion. Each new swell eventually exhausts its energy and recedes, but these seemingly futile cycles of advance and withdrawal are not without their consequences. Each powerful swell deposits, rearranges, and sometimes sweeps away looser sediments, and over time the cycle cuts deep grooves in even the hardest of rocks.

If there is a constant to this seemingly perpetual cycle, it is the tendency to wish hoped-for outcomes onto recent technological breakthroughs in a way that encourages many people to not only forget that we have tried this before, repeatedly, but also to overlook, simplify, and marginalize whatever cannot be manipulated and controlled with those new means. After ten years and more than $200 million in investments, in 2015 one of the large philanthropic foundations that funded the Downtown School announced that it would no longer prioritize digital media and learning as one of its strategic areas of funding. While not admitting defeat, the president of the foundation declared that it now was time for private companies, government agencies, and other NGOs to support the movement that the foundation had done so much to instigate. With this ending, the president also announced a new beginning, and it is with this new beginning that this book will end. In an essay titled “Time for Change,” the president of the foundation optimistically put forward the foundation’s ambitious new strategy. They now planned to implement a “solution-driven” philanthropic strategy that would “be bolder and aim higher.” They would fund fewer interventions, but the ones that they did fund would be “larger in scale, time-limited in nature, or designed to reach specific objectives.” The need for change was urgent, the president of the foundation stressed, and refusing change was “not an option.” The essay began:

Today, people and places around the world, as well as the earth itself, face formidable, complex, and connected problems. At the same time, technological advances and increased connection hold unprecedented promise for the well-being of humanity and society, while creating new and vexing problems.

The president’s opening words can be read as a preamble, as well as an epilogue, for disruptive fixation.