Preface
1 I thank Jean Lave for drawing my attention to the prevalence, and politics, of this presumed binary distinction.
Chapter 1: Introduction
1 On the potential for massively open online courses to disrupt education, see Daphne Koller’s 2012 TED talk, “What We’re Learning from Online Education.” http://goo.gl/7nNkWw. On the promise of helping impoverished people from around the world by providing them with laptops, see Nicholas Negroponte’s 2006 TED talk, “One Laptop per Child.” http://goo.gl/oz6KoS. On the promise of cell phones for economic development, see Jensen (2007). On the emancipatory potential of Internet-enabled peer-production, see Benkler (2006). On the history of optimistic claims about education being ascribed to film, radio, television, and computers, see Cuban (1986, 2001) and Buckingham (2007, 50–74). On the potential for electronic media to bring about a global village, see McLuhan (1962). On the idea that the printing press can bring forth a whole new democratic world, see Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (2000). For a critical assessment of “One Laptop Per Child,” see Warschauer and Ames (2010) and Ames (2015). For a critical review of the promises that have been made about the democratizing potential of Internet-enabled peer production, see Kreiss, Finn, and Turner (2010). For a general critique of claims about the democratic potential of new technologies, see Marx (1964), Nye (1994), Mosco (2004) and Morozov (2013).
2 Throughout, and in keeping with ethnographic conventions, I use pseudonyms for all people and organizations that were directly involved in the project. That said, I am aware that the uniqueness of the project makes it impossible to preserve the anonymity of the field site. I discuss this dilemma and my attempts to address it in the appendix.
3 I use the term philanthropism rather than humanitarianism as the latter has come to be associated with international interventions, whereas the moral sensibility to which I wish to draw attention cuts across domestic and international reform programs. In using the terms philanthropic and philanthropism I am referring to a moral sensibility that aspires to promote the well being of others, which includes but is not limited to the work of wealthy philanthropists and philanthropic foundations. The moral sensibility is more generally held and valued.
4 On the endurance of this longing and its tendency to be remade in myths about new technologies, see Mosco (2004, 15–16).
5 Varenne and McDermott (1998) offer a helpful analysis of how the popular metaphor that figures schooling as a race on a level playing field guarantees the production of winners and losers. Also see Labaree (2010).
6 Bourdieu and Passeron’s work is unique among these social reproduction theorists in that it introduces the importance of a semiautonomous cultural realm in processes of social reproduction, but like the other reproduction theorists, Bourdieu and Passeron’s model treats schools as “black boxes” that reproduce social hierarchies more or less mechanically.
7 It is not surprising that Willis and Ferguson reach similar conclusions about education and development, respectively, as Ferguson cites Willis as one of the main inspirations for his important study.
8 See, in particular, Latour’s (1988) critique of treating change as the successful implementation of strategy.
9 Mosco, who uses the notion of myth, rather than lived fiction, reaches similar conclusions: “Myths are not true or false, but living or dead” (2004, 3).
10 I thank Chandra Mukerji (2012, personal correspondence) for drawing my attention to how figured world theory also provides helpful tools for a material theory of politics, as well as Fernando Domínguez Rubio for helping me clarify the distinction between materiality as means and materiality as mediums.
11 Li’s inspiration for the phrase rendering technical comes from Rose (1999) and Mitchell (2002).
12 Becker’s notion has much in common with Li’s (2007) notion of trustees. While Becker and Li’s notions share much in common, Becker’s seems more apt for describing the roles of elites in techno-philanthropism when there is a political crisis of authority. Trustees, as well as Li’s notion of the will to improve, strike me as more apt for describing the role of elites when established authorities and institutions are fairly stable and secure. The position of the trustee is legitimated in terms of stewardship as well as incremental improvement, whereas moral entrepreneurs’ demands are often urgent, fervent, and morally sanctioned. Li also includes bureaucrats and specialists as trustees, whereas I want to make a distinction between those who have the power to call for and support technophilanthropism and those who are tasked to design and execute it.
13 James Ferguson’s account of the launch of a particular development project in the Thaba-Tseka district of Lesotho succinctly and evocatively describes this dynamic: “When the project set itself down in Thaba-Tseka it quickly found itself in the position not of a craftsman approaching his raw materials, but more like that of a bread crumb thrown into an ants’ nest” (1994, 225).
14 Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of symbolic capital has influenced my analysis of this dynamic.
Chapter 2: Cycles of Disruptive Fixation
1 Three of these students were born overseas (Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Cambodia) and then adopted by parents in the United States.
2 It is worth noting that while most of these families qualified as privileged compared to the overall population of the United States, let alone the world, in the context of the extreme economic inequality of New York City, there were many local families even more privileged than these families, in some cases, substantially so. In the context of this book I use the terms privileged and less privileged not as general sociological categories, but rather as relational categories that index the rather large differences in class conditions among the families who attended the Downtown School. In statistical terms, the distribution was bimodal.
3 As quoted in Buckingham (2007, vi). The original quote comes from Papert (1984, 38).
4 Quoted from Duguid (2015, 349).
5 See Corak (2006), Jäntti et al. (2006), Piketty and Saez (2003, 2006), Isaacs et al. (2008), Economic Mobility Project (2011), Hall (2011), Chetty et al. (2014).
6 Florida (2002) builds on ideas about knowledge work, the knowledge economy, and the new economy, all of which extend debates and concerns around the “post-industrial economy,” announced by Bell (1973) and related works, such as Porat (1977). One of Florida’s main contributions to this tradition was to emphasize the cultural dimensions of knowledge workers. Like Fred Turner’s (2006) study of the countercultural roots of cyberculture, Florida emphasized the bohemian aspects of many knowledge workers. For a thorough review of scholarship on the knowledge economy, see Powell and Snellman (2004). For a review of recent scholarly interest in creativity and innovation, see Sawyer (2012). On creating makers, see Wagner (2012).
7 Which is not to suggest that all these local cases are the same or that they are all being caused by the same actors, forces, or processes.
8 On the limits of technological determinism, see Williams (1974), Escobar (1994), and Buckingham (2000). Critics of liberal presuppositions about schooling include Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), Bowles and Gintis (1976), Eckert (1989), Lamont and Lareau (1988), Lareau (2003), Varenne and McDermott (1999), and Willis (1977).
9 On historical rates of inequality, as well as the influence of World Wars I and II on international capitalist competitions see Piketty and Saez (2003) and Piketty (2014).
10 See “Educate to Innovate,” on WhiteHouse.gov. http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/k-12/educate-innovate.
11 For example, see Goldin and Katz (2008). See also Langdon et al.’s (2011) report for the US Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, titled, “STEM: Good Jobs Now and For the Future.”
12 These dynamics have long been studied and analyzed by science and technology studies scholars (Callon 1986; Akrich 1992; Latour 2005).
13 Progressive educational reform comes in many different forms, leading some analysts to suggest that it is a meaningless term. For a history of progressive versus traditionalist reforms, see Tyack and Cuban (1995), Ravitch (2000), and chapter 7 of Labaree (2004).
14 See, for example, the report A Nation at Risk (1983), treated by many as a canonical expression of this reactionary moment, which has carried on through reform policies such as No Child Left Behind. For an assessment of how progressive reformers were marginalized over the last several decades, see Hayes (2006).
15 Educational historian Diane Ravitch has famously taken both sides of this issue. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, Ravitch advocated for reforms based on test-based accountability and a marketlike choice and competition (Ravitch 2000). More recently, however, Ravitch (2010) has reversed course in the wake of the turn toward high-stakes testing as mandated by No Child Left Behind, a bill she helped bring into being.
16 For a review, see Ravitch and Viteritti, eds. (2000).
17 For a review of the Children First reforms, see O’Day et al., eds. (2011) and Hill (2011).
18 For a review see Jennings (2010) and Corcoran and Levin (2011).
19 NCLB requires schools to make “adequate yearly progress,” as measured against state-defined performance targets. Schools that fail to do so gradually lose their local monopoly. First, students are allowed to transfer to other schools and then educators and curricula can be replaced by higher-level bureaucrats; finally, higher-level bureaucrats can close and replace failing schools with alternatives, which could include charters or multiple small schools.
20 On the wealth gap, see Paul Taylor et al. (2011). On stagnated wage growth, see Drew Desilver, “For most workers, real wages have barely budged for decades,” published on October 9, 2014, by the Pew Research Center. http://pewrsr.ch/1tEMM7w.
21 See for example, Lizette Alvarez, “States Listen as Parents Give Rampant Testing an F,” in the November 9, 2014, issue of the New York Times. http://nyti.ms/1wJ8g8z.
22 For a summary, see Gonzalez et al. (2010).
23 These quotes are drawn from a report on the reformers’ planning processes.
24 The digital generation stereotype (Prensky 2001; Palfrey and Gasser 2008) is quite old now and yet it remains remarkably difficult to dislodge.
25 On the recurring hopes that reformers attach to the new media of an era, see Cuban (1986, 1996, 2001) and Buckingham (2007).
26 Shaffer (2006) calls these ways of thinking and acting epistemic frames. It is worth noting the emphasis on differences in epistemic modes as the basis for defining and distinguishing various communities of practice. Such an emphasis allows this version of techno-philanthropism to resonate with notions like knowledge workers and the creative class as idealized models of work and citizenship for the twenty-first century. It also allows situated theories of learning and knowledge (Haraway 1988; Lave and Wenger 1991) to be domesticated, albeit with good intentions, into the inherited institutional arrangements that these theories criticized.
Chapter 3: Spatial Fixations
1 For a review of this scholarship, see Sefton-Green (2013).
2 All these terms are popular in the learning sciences. For diverse examples of learning environments see Sawyer, ed. (2006). My use of these terms is intended as a mention-based reference to this discourse, but I do not use quotes repeatedly for the sake of readability.
3 One of the ways that I negotiated access to the school was by agreeing to also work as a graduate student researcher on another project funded by the same philanthropic foundation that funded the Downtown School. That project attempted to form a learning network by getting various cultural institutions in New York City—from the Bronx Zoo to the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum to New York Public Library—to coordinate the ways in which they designed and offered programming for youth.
4 See, for example, controversies over kindergarten access at lower Manhattan’s coveted schools in Elissa Gootman, “New York’s Coveted Public Schools Face Pupil Jam,” New York Times, May 8, 2008- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/nyregion/09schools.html. For evidence that much of this strain on capacity has come from the influx of professionals, see Thompson (2008). Neighborhoods that were facing serious overcapacity problems include: Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO, Downtown Brooklyn, and parts of Fort Greene. All are neighborhoods with high, and in many cases rapidly increasing, household incomes. The median household income in Downtown Manhattan, for example, is twice as high as the median household income in Manhattan as a whole; see Amanda Fung, “Downtown’s Population Boom Seen Rolling On.” http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20100518/REAL_ESTATE/100519839.
5 The Civil Rights Project at UCLA has been tracking school segregation around the country. See “New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future.” http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/ny-norflet-report-placeholder.
6 As far as I can tell, there’s no clear statement about exactly how this matching process works. Anecdotally, I heard school administrators mention numerous ways in which the DOE shaped school admissions, looking at factors such as the percentage of students with learning disabilities, the percentage of students who spoke English as a second language, and so on. Some professional families complained that the DOE was “dumping” low-performing students on the Downtown School, but I could find no evidence of such practices. I discuss this sort of pollution rhetoric in more detail in chapter 6.
7 One parent told me there were more than 3,000 applicants for one of these schools. My research on the DOE website suggests that the number of applicants was closer to 1,200.
8 I also heard that one selective middle school had a relationship with NYU and gave priority access to children of NYU professors.
9 This stereotype about Asian parenting styles was pervasive, and it dovetailed with Orientalist rhetorics that figure developing countries from Asia, and especially China, as perhaps technically sophisticated but not innovative and creative like the West, particularly the United States.
10 Other scholars have also observed a similar process playing out, suggesting that the sources of such practices are more structural. See, for example, Posey-Maddox (2014).
11 While not explored extensively in this study, one unforeseen consequence of the small school movement is that small schools are often unable to adequately accommodate students who are legally entitled to accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The problem, it seems, is that many small schools do not receive enough funding to support the various specialists who work with students with different disabilities, and, as such, parents of children with disabilities often find that they have to seek out schooling options that specialize in working with students who have similar disabilities to those of their children. Several parents of children with various institutionally diagnosed disabilities chose to leave the Downtown School after its first year for this reason.
12 While I was unable to interview families who did not choose the Downtown School, the school’s demographic statistics suggest that the school’s emphasis on games and media production helped attract families with boys at a much higher rate than families with girls. Indeed several families who did attend the Downtown School suggested that the school’s games and tech focus had been a deterrent to families with girls from their elementary schools.
13 For a review of sociological scholarship on this topic, see the section on sieves in Stevens, Armstrong, and Arum (2008).
14 This shift corresponds to a decline in children and young people’s independent access to public space, the greater acceptance of women in paid labor markets, and increased fears about stranger danger and other perceived threats to and by children and young people. See Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson (2014) and Jenkins (1998).
15 Tech-ed reformers and scholars make this school/not-school distinction in all sorts of ways. Perhaps the most popular way to do so at the time of this study was the distinction between formal and informal learning. The distinction also tends to map onto the traditional versus progressive distinction in pedagogic commitments, with supporters of progressive pedagogies often conflated with informal learning. For a review of formal versus informal learning see Sefton-Green (2004, 2013). For a criticism of this entrenched distinction see Lave (2011).
16 The term geeking out has become shorthand among educational reformers who aim to promote intense and committed engagement with new media technologies. I was a coauthor of the volume (Ito et al. 2010) that introduced the term as a normative goal within the world of education reform.
17 If so, this tendency would be in keeping with the long-standing tradition of gendering play spaces, and, in particular, the tendency of adults to exert more control over play spaces that have been specified for girls rather than boys. See Jenkins (1998) for a discussion of how this dynamic relates to video games.
18 Callon (1998) and Mitchell (2002) observe a similar phenomenon as economists render all of the residual factors that cannot be included in their models as “externalities.”
Chapter 4: Pedagogic Fixations
1 Educational game designers refer to this form of “edutainment” as the “chocolate-covered broccoli” approach, a phrase whose origin is frequently attributed to Laurel (2001). What is puzzling is that the designers of the school knew about and even shared this critique of edutainment and yet they also appeared to believe that they were doing something more substantively transformative.
2 I find parallels between this management technique and the “scrum” and “sprint” techniques used in Agile software development. In both cases, managers impose an ambitious temporal constraint on collective tasks, and in doing so they can make the tasks feel urgent and important. As those who have worked in startups know, this feeling of being constantly rushed can be quite intoxicating and can help motivate employees. The original metaphor seems to have been taken from rugby, a highly physical and competitive sport that can evoke a similar rush among players.
3 Each Wednesday afternoon educators, school leaders, some of the school’s designers, and often representatives from the school’s SSO held a professional development session. While I was not able to observe these meetings, I noticed that all the educators would introduce a new technique at the same time, typically following a professional development session. I got the impression, confirmed in some informal conversations with educators, that professional development sessions were often a mechanism for distributing classroom-management best practices among educators. More experienced educators and school leaders appear to have introduced some best practices, but others appear to have come from the SSO. In subsequent conversations with educators from other schools, I have learned that many of these techniques are quite pervasive in contemporary urban public schools in the United States.
4 When the school moved into its new home, they were able to renovate some of these spaces, but they could not change basic architectural arrangements, such as classrooms.
5 In response to didactic and infantilizing lessons, students would often express solidarity with their peers by doing things like making eye contact and rolling their eyes, or, more confrontationally, by pretending for educators that they were in fact ignorant about the lesson, hence baiting educators to offer even more didactic instruction, a response that could delight other students when the educators took the bait.
6 Anthropologists and qualitative sociologists have long observed such dynamics in the processes by which persons learn to become members of a social group. See, for example, Geertz (1972) and Weider (1974) as classic examples. Such rites of passage are especially common in tightly knit organizations like fraternities and sororities, boarding school, the military, and the police.
7 See Stallybrass and White (1986), who drew on Mikhail Bakhtin. See also Taylor (2007), who drew on Victor Turner’s (1969) analysis of relations between structure and antistructure in rituals.
8 Anthropologists and cultural theorists have long drawn attention to the importance of these ritualistic stagings of group self-representation. My interest is in a variant of these stagings in which insiders present themselves as counternormative in moral terms.
9 For a similar account of the production of effervescence in contemporary software production, see Fred Turner’s (2009) analysis of relations between Burning Man and Google. Turner draws in part on Durkheim’s famous analysis of the basis of religious feeling but argued that such ritualized practices are central to contemporary models of tech production. As already noted, such models informed the plans for the Downtown School.
10 The phenomenology of these sorts of experiences has been documented in different disciplines and discourse communities, perhaps most famously in Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) notion of flow. The designers of the Downtown School referred to such experiences as “the rise,” which has much in common with other notions that have recently become popular among tech-ed reformers, one of which, “geeking out,” I helped propagate (see Ito et al. 2010). In the schooling context I see sanctioned counterpractices such as these as akin to the Friday night football games that constitute such an important community ritual at many more conventional American high schools.
11 David Nye’s (1994) historical study of what he calls the American technological sublime reaches a similar conclusion about the potential for new technologies to engender feelings of awe and belonging, but Nye focuses on the project of constructing an American national identity. In my case, the subliminal power of new technologies also contributed to reverent feelings of belonging, but with respect to the philanthropic initiative of which they were a part. See also, Leo Marx’s (1964) discussion of the technological sublime as well as Vincent Mosco’s (2004) analysis of the digital sublime.
Chapter 5: Amenable and Fixable Subjects
1 Students’ emic categories for peer formations varied from more neutral phrases like “a group of friends” or “a group of kids” to more critical terms, such as “pack”, “gang,” and “clique.” I am using clique because it emphasizes the social boundaries produced by friendship groups.
2 A great deal of scholarship on identity begins with an analysis of the semiotic systems or discursive regimes that produce the subject positions available to persons at a given historical moment. The approach I am advocating begins with social practices and locates the reproduction of discourse, representation, and subject position in people’s ongoing practices. Under this framework, practices and semiotic systems are dialectically related in that practices draw on existing semiotic systems as they produce them anew. For a discussion of this relationship, see Lave (1988, 177–80).
3 One of the ways I started to feel accepted by students was when they started inviting me to participate in these practices.
4 The students who attended the Downtown School are, of course, not representative of students in New York City more broadly since families had to opt into the school. As such, the student body, on average, was likely much more aligned with the school’s distinctive focus than would have been the case if families had been randomly assigned to the school.
5 Pokémon, Bakugan, and Naruto are all references to transmedia phenomena—manga (comics), anime (animated television shows), video games, card games, and merchandise—that originated in Japan but now enjoy a transnational fan base, especially among young people.
6 Some students, such as Raka, wished to pick their own pseudonyms, which I have tried to honor, although doing so can create confusions for the reader. In this case, Raka, who was white, chose his pseudonym in reference to the satirist YouTube sensation that was popular among many of the members of his friend group at the time.
7 See also Michel de Certeau’s (1984, 24–28) notion of “la perruque.”
8 See Willis (1977) for an important rebuttal to structural accounts of social reproduction, all of which, in varying ways, gloss over the contested and, hence, uncertain ways in which people come to occupy positions in hierarchical social divisions. The process is by no means smooth.
Chapter 6: Community Fixations
1 I interpreted much of the put downs and teasing among clique members as status contests where one could win prestige by being able to effectively dish out teasing and put-downs while also appearing not to be affected when others attempted to return them. Clique members also policed each other. For example, when a student went too far and noticeably hurt someone’s feelings they would often suggest that they were joking, or other members of the clique would push them to apologize.
2 Never once did I hear privileged parents or reformers suggest that these small acts of nonconformity were perhaps a way for members of nondominant groups to express their resistance to domineering conditions and institutions. See, for example, Scott (1985).
Chapter 7: Conclusion: The Resilience of Techno-Idealism
1 My thinking in this section benefitted from the notion of the well-intentioned beneficiary in Bruce Robbins’ (2016) essay “The Logic of the Beneficiary,” published in n+1. Robbins defines the well-intentioned beneficiary as “the person who knowingly profits from a system she believes to be unjust” (24).
2 For example, at the Downtown School reformers responded to low rates of participation by girls in the school’s after-school programs by diversifying their after-school offerings, and, in a related vein, by eventually dropping the tagline “a school for digital kids.” All the same, the student body remains nearly seventy percent boys at the time of writing.
3 I thank my colleague Chandra Mukerji for suggesting the tidal metaphor.
Appendix: Ethnographic Fixations
1 About halfway through the first year, some students started inviting me to be friends on sites like Facebook and YouTube. I had not anticipated these invitations and was initially unsure about whether to accept them. The policy I settled on was that I would accept invitations, but I would not initiate them. I also set limits on how I would engage with their online material. I felt that students were inviting me into their online social worlds much as they had at school, but I did not feel that they had invited me to systematically record and analyze every move they made on sites like Facebook. As such, I tried to interact with the students online much as I would with my other friends on social media: I checked out their profiles when we first connected online, I noticed their updates when they appeared in my news feed, and I would occasionally check their profiles if we had not seen each other in a while.
2 Interviews with students were approximately forty-five minutes, and interviews with adults ranged from one and one-half hours to six hours, averaging around two hours. Media tour interviews were between one and two hours. Of the seventy-five students who attended the Downtown School in its first year, forty-three students (twenty-four girls and nineteen boys), twenty-two families (eleven of whom had daughters at the school), and five school staff, four of whom were teachers and one of whom was one of the school’s founders, agreed to a semistructured interview. In terms of family members, I interviewed nineteen mothers, seven fathers, one grandmother, one aunt, one uncle, and one boyfriend of a student’s mother. Additionally, I conducted countless ad hoc interviews with students, parents, educators, and reformers as part of my participant observation work.