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The poor state of jobs and equity in USA is the fault of the bad education system

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The poor state of jobs and equity in USA is the fault of the bad education system

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The statistic you either love or hate

Thanks to the Shift Happens videos (2007), you will likely be familiar with this statistic about the future of work:

"The top 10 in demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet, using technologies that haven't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet."

People repeat the claim again and again, but in slightly different forms. Sometimes they remove the dates and change the numbers; 65% is now in fashion. Respected academics who study education, such as Linda Darling-Hammond (1:30), have picked up and continue to repeat a mutated form of the factoid, as has the World Economic Forum and the OECD.It takes some work to find out that the claim is not true. When I tried to find an original source for the claim, I was surprised to find out that versions of it date from at least to 1957. Interestingly, in 1973 Norman Kurland said such statements 'typified' the 1970s discourse about how jobs are supposed to change, but the claim now appears new and radical in 21st century videos like Shift Happens.I'll get to that deeper history soon.

The Shift Happens video, originally made by Karl Fisch as a presentation and turned into a viral video by Scott Mcleod, situates the claim in Thomas Friedman's 'flat' world perspective that concerns itself with America retaining a 'comparative advantage' in rapidly changing times. Right between statistics about the rise of China and India and the historical decline of the British Empire, the video drops the claim about 'in demand jobs' and attributes it to Richard Riley, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Education. Even though it lacks his linguistic 'secret sauce', I had bet that Thomas Friedman might have been an original source for the claim because it fits so well with his neoliberal perspective. In the notes to the video, Fisch gives Ian Jukes as a source, and in an email conversation with Jukes, he was kind enough to confirm: "I was in attendance at an event (the SC Summit) in Columbia, South Carolina on or about Aug 7, 2006 - Riley was the opening keynote - that quote is word for word (or as close as I was able to record) to what he had to say."Incidentally, Bill Clinton - certainly a flattener in Friedman's eyes - made such a claim a decade earlier in 1996 in Birmingham:

"This is the last election for President of the 20th century and the first election for President of the 21st century. And you have to decide. Many of you young people in this audience, in a few years you will be doing jobs that haven't been invented yet. Some of you will be doing work that has not even been imagined yet. And you have to decide: what kind of America do you want."

The brush Bill Clinton painted 'free-trade' with is still being used to color in an awful lot of education books in 2017:

"Change is upon us. We can do nothing about that."

Is the claim stated as a statistic true? Andrew Old and more recently Michael Berman and the BBC have provided a solid de-bunking.

But why does the claim continue to circulate? What ideology does it serve?

Future Proof?

The OECD uses a version of the claim to frame their Case for 21st Century Learning, as does the World Economic Forum in their Future of Jobs (2016) report. More recent versions of the claim have removed specific dates, and switched from talking about the top 'in demand jobs' to talking about a percentage - 65% is the magic number - of children who will work in jobs that haven't been invented yet.

Yet, the claim serves the same function as it did in the Shift Happens videos: to suggest that education has failed to keep pace with, and prepare our children for, an ever changing world of work. In the face of this known unknown, the only answer is to instill flexibility and adaptability along with 'skills' like creativity. Keri Facer gives us a helpful term for this narrative: the 'future proofing' narrative "suggests that there is only one question about socio-technical change that the 'future-proof' school needs to address: namely, how successfully will the school equip young people to compete in the global economy of tomorrow?"

This logic is so pervasive that we barely notice it. Even reformers that appear progressive, such as Ken Robinson, ultimately link progressive values like creativity to work. A century ago, the logic of future proofing went under the name 'social efficiency', but that branch of the progressive movement found vigorous opposition in John Dewey who said that as a matter of politics, the "education in which I am interested is not one which will 'adapt' workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that."

Now, social efficiency in the language of 'future proofing' is embedded in the neoliberal ideology that equates freedom with free markets, and makes the individual solely responsible for her own fate. As much as the claim is an indictment of schools, it also serves as a warning to individuals. Be a 'lifelong learner' or else. When Andreas Schleicher of the OECD repeats the claim (with no source), he makes clear that only our imaginations and not material circumstances might hold us back in life: "As columnist and author Thomas Friedman puts it, because technology has enabled us to act on our imaginations in ways that we could never before, the most important competition is no longer between countries or companies but between ourselves and our imagination."

The WeF Future of Jobs report exemplifies the future proofing ideology and Thomas Friedman's methodology by making an "extensive survey of CHROs and other senior talent and strategy executives of leading global employers" (p. 3) to learn about the future of work, which then drives their future of education policy:

"By one popular estimate 65% of children entering primary schools today will ultimately work in new job types and functions that currently don't yet exist. Technological trends such as the Fourth Industrial Revolution will create many new cross-functional roles for which employees will need both technical and social and analytical skills. Most existing education systems at all levels provide highly siloed training and continue a number of 20th century practices that are hindering progress on today's talent and labour market issues. ... Businesses should work closely with governments, education providers and others to imagine what a true 21st century curriculum might look like."

In this narrative, the education system hinders progress, thus steering the conversation away from explicit economic policies, which are often driven by corporations and Capital. The Future of Jobs cites the Shift Happens videos as their source, but switches the statistic (or confuses the prediction) from 'top 10 in demand jobs' to the figure of '65% of children' while dropping the date which has expired by seven years now. That post-modern pastiche, and repetition without referent, becomes exhausting.

Perhaps most importantly, the Future of Jobs relies on the perspective of CEOs to suggest that Capital has lacked input into the shape and direction of education. Ironically, the first person I found to make the claim about the future of jobs - Devereux C. Josephs - was both Businessman of the Year (1958) and the chair of Eisenhower's President's Committee on Education Beyond High School. More tellingly, in his historical context, Josephs was able to imagine a more equitable future where we shared in prosperity rather than competed against the world's underprivileged on a 'flat' field.

The Political Shift that Happened

While the claim is often presented as a new and alarming fact or prediction about the future, Devereux C. Josephs said much the same in 1957 during a Conference on the American High School at the University of Chicago on October 28, less than a month after the Soviets launched Sputnik. If Friedman and his 'flat' earth followers were writing then, they would have been up in arms about the technological superiority of the Soviets, just like they now raise the alarm about the rise of India and China. Josephs was a past president of the Carnegie Corporation, and at the time served as Chairman of the Board of the New York Life Insurance Company.

While critics of the American education system erupted after the launch of Sputnik with calls to go back to basics, much as they would again decades later with A Nation at Risk (1983), Josephs was instead a "besieged defender" of education according to Okhee Lee and Michael Salwen. Here's how Joseph's talked about the future of work:

"We are too much inclined to think of careers and opportunities as if the oncoming generations were growing up to fill the jobs that are now held by their seniors. This is not true. Our young people will fill many jobs that do not now exist. They will invent products that will need new skills. Old-fashioned mercantilism and the nineteenth-century theory in which one man's gain was another man's loss, are being replaced by a dynamism in which the new ideas of a lot of people become the gains for many, many more."

Josephs' claim brims with optimism about a new future, striking a tone which contrasts sharply with the Shift Happens video and its competitive fear of The Other and decline of Empire. We must recognize this shift that happens between then and now as an erasure of politics - a deletion of the opportunity to make a choice about how the abundant wealth created by automation - and perhaps more often by offshoring to cheap labor - would be shared.

The agentless construction in the Shift Happens version - "technologies that haven't been invented yet" - contrasts with Josephs' vision where today's youth invent those technologies. More importantly, Josephs imagines a more equitable socio-technical future, marked not by competition, but where gains are shared. It should go without saying that this has not come to pass. As productivity shot up since the 1950's, worker compensation has stagnated since around 1973.

In other words, the problem is not that Capital lacks a say in education, but that corporations and the 0.1% are reaping all the rewards and need to explain why. Too often, this explanation comes in the form of the zombie idea of a 'skills gap', which persists though it keeps being debunked. What else are CEOs going to say - and the skills gap is almost always based on an opinion survey - when they are asked to explain stagnating wages?

Josephs' essay echoes John Maynard Keynes' (1930) in his hope that the "average family" by 1977 "may take some of the [economic] gain in the form of leisure"; the dynamism of new ideas should have created gains for 'many, many more' people. Instead, the compensation for CEOs soared as the profit was privatized even though most of the risk for innovation was socialized by US government investment through programs such as DARPA.

Those robots that are always threatening to take our jobs, like Baxter, are the product of government funding going back at least to 1990 when Rodney Brooks, creator of the Roomba, founded iRobot whose first project was to "build a six-legged insectlike robot named Attila for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory." The article explains that "early revenue [for iRobot] came from research contracts with government agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, at the Pentagon." Now, Brooks has started a new company, Rethink Robotics, backed by venture capitalists. According to an interview with Brooks, "Baxter was developed at a VC backed company, Rethink Robotics. So there is no funding to receive from governments or funding agencies. In the past the pre-research for the technologies that went into Baxter have been funded by the US government, via NASA and DARPA."

Josephs and Keynes predicted shared prosperity from the rise of automation. They did not foresee such a massive welfare program designed to help corporations.

We must not confuse the hope that Josephs and Keynes shared with Thomas Friedman's facile claim that "America, as a whole, will do fine in a flat world with free trade" because "there is no limit to the number of idea-generating jobs in the world." So-called 'knowledge work' depends on sacrificial people toiling in sacrificial places, doing the dangerous and dirty work we still rely on. Writing in 2003, Doug Henwood asks:"We've been hearing about post-industrial society for at least thirty years; if it had come about, would we have to worry about global warming?"

Yet, because 'thought leaders' follow Friedman, they conclude that schools must work to provide the kind of skills that will allow individuals to create their own knowledge work. In The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills already observed a shift taking place where public issues were being blamed on personal troubles that "occur within the character of the individual". So we should not be surprised when Thomas Friedman interviews Tony Wagner - an education 'thought leader', friend of Friedman, and advocate of the skills agenda - and suggests that people who need jobs should invent them. Wagner tells Friedman that "Young people who are intrinsically motivated - curious, persistent, and willing to take risks - will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own - a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear." In contrast, Josephs was still able to believe in a collective responsibility, writing that "the price tag on this [coming economic] abundance is the responsibility of society for the welfare of the individuals who are, from time to time, dislocated."

Instead of factoids without substance, we actually have good statistical projections about the future of jobs, and it's bleak. A look into the future of paid work shows persistent gaps and cracks rather than a 'flat' world. The Bureau of Labor Statistics ' projections for numeric job growth from 2014-2024 indicate that four out of the top five growing jobs pay salaries that are less than $21,400 per annum. With the exception of Registered Nurses (#2), who on average earn $66,640 and require a Bachelor Degree, the other top five growing jobs require no formal credentials.

Beyond Press Releases

Audrey Watters has written about how futurists and gurus have figured out that "The best way to invent the future is to issue a press release." Proponents of the 'skills agenda' like the OECD have essentially figured out how to make "the political more pedagogical", to borrow a phrase from Henry Giroux. In their book, Most Likely to Succeed, Tony Wagner and billionaire Ted Dintersmith warn us that "if you can't invent (and reinvent) your own job and distinctive competencies, you risk chronic underemployment." Their movie, of the same title, repeats the hollow claim about 'jobs that haven't been invented yet'. Ironically, though Wagner tells us that "knowledge today is a free commodity", you can only see the film in private screenings.

I don't want to idealize Josephs, but revisiting his context helps us understand something about the debate about education and the future, not because he was a radical in his times, but because our times are radical.

In an interview at CUNY (2015), Gillian Tett asks Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman what policy initiatives they would propose to deal with globalization, technology, and inequality. After Sachs and Krugman propose regulating finance, expanding aid to disadvantaged children, creating a robust social safety net, reforming the tax system to eliminate privilege for the 0.1%, redistributing profits, raising wages, and strengthening the position of labor, Tett recounts a story:

"Back in January I actually moderated quite a similar event in Davos with a group of CEOs and general luminaries very much not just the 1% but probably the 0.1% and I asked them the same question. And what they came back with was education, education, and a bit of digital inclusion."

Krugman, slightly lost for words, replies: "Arguing that education is the thing is ... Gosh... That's so 1990s... even then it wasn't really true."

For CEOs and futurists who say that disruption is the answer to practically everything, arguing that the answer lies in education and skills is actually the least disruptive response to the problems we face. Krugman argues that education emerges as the popular answer because "It's not intrusive. It doesn't require that we have higher taxes. It doesn't require that CEOs have to deal with unions again." Sachs adds, "Obviously, it's the easy answer for that group [the 0.1%]."

The kind of complex thinking we deserve about education won't come in factoids or bullet-point lists of skills of the future. In fact, that kind of complex thinking is already out there, waiting.

The Tangled History

Cathy Davidson (May 2017) explains up how she came to the factoid:

"I first read this figure in futurist Jim Carroll's book, Ready, Set, Done (2007). I tracked his citation down to an Australian website where the "65%" figure was quoted with some visuals and categories of new jobs that hadn't existed before. "Genetic counseling" was the one I cited in the book.

After Now You See It appeared, that 65% figure kept being quoted so I attempted to contact the authors of the study to be able to learn more about their findings but with no luck. By then, the cite was down and even the Innovation Council of Australia had been closed by a new government."

Let's put aside that the field of genetic counseling was invented over half a century ago in 1947 by Dr. Sheldon C. Reed, and his first edition of Counseling in Medical Genetics appeared in 1955. Now You See It (2011) lists this source:

"U.S. Department of Labor study cited in "The Changing Workplace," FamilyEducation.com, http://life.familyeducation.com/work/personal-finance/47248.html (accessed Jan. 10, 2010). See original study, "Futurework: Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century at http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/herman/reports/futurework/report.htm (accessed Jan. 10, 2010)."

You won't find a version of the claim in that report, and Andrew Old independently came to that same conclusion as did Audrey Watters.

Davidson is not the only person to attribute the claim to the Futurework report. InWomen in IT in the New Social Era, Sonja Bernhardt writes:

"Over a decade ago Herman (1999) predicted, "65% of school-aged students will work in jobs and industries that haven't been invented yet." (page 179)

Andrew Old references Progressively Worse by Robert Peal that quotes version of the statement that dates back to 1966.

I also found these:

"In 1966, Mr. Lowry was invited to write an essay for The Atlantic Monthly defending the liberal-arts college.... In a passage that could have been published in the 21st century, he wrote that small colleges give students 'the capacity to survive change' during 'a time when colleges are trying to prepare students for careers 10 years away that do not now exist.'"

And again in 1973:
"The basic characteristic of the world for which the school must be preparing its students is change. Whether the pace will be in the order of as much change in the next 25 years as in the last 25,000, or something considerably less, it is clear that education is faced with an unprecedented challenge. How do we plan a curriculum, an educational program today, to help prepare people to live in a world whose outlines can only be dimly envisioned?... The nature of the world of work is going to be radically transformed, as typified by such statements as, most of the jobs that the students will hold do not now exist; or that most individuals will change careers three to five times during their working lives; or that the proportion of low-skill manual jobs will go down and the jobs requiring high skills will increase rapidly; that the length of the work week, year, and life will be shortened and scheduled very differently. These changes must be taken into account if education is not to be totally irrelevant to the needs of individuals and societies."

This capture from the internet time machine of the Marquette magazine (Winter 2006) also quotes Richard Riley.

Needed: a jobs revolution
In the past decade or so the United States began lagging other countries in some areas of technology. We now rank 16th in broadband connectivity, well behind many former Third World countries.

What caused this precipitous decline? America, in fact, created the global marketplace, primarily through technological leadership. The United States developed the Internet as well as the graphical interfaces that free computer users from learning complex command languages and make it easier to move data from one application to another. The worldwide proliferation of satellite communications and fiber-optic cable connected anyone with a computer even in remote parts of the globe to a world of equal opportunity.

A 2004 book, The Jobs Revolution: Changing How America Works [I'm unable to get a copy], notes that as recently as 1991, fewer than 50 percent of U.S. jobs required skilled workers. By 2015, 76 percent of American jobs will demand highly skilled employees. I f that talent isn't here, companies will be forced to turn to better-educated workers in other countries.

Regardless of outsourcing, the book notes that the emerging work force must be flexible, ready to spend a lifetime learning new skills because new kinds of work will continually be created and old ones will vanish.

"None of the top 10 jobs that will exist in 2010 exist today," the book says, quoting former U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley. Those jobs will require technology that's still being developed. The most important thing a student can do today is learn to learn. The book adds, however: "Rather than focusing on specific technologies or specific problems, we need to equip students with those concepts that are common to all problems, all technologies, all skills, ranging from workplace engineering to ethics to entrepreneurship."

The article in Fortune concurs: "No one is saying that Americans can't adapt and win once more. The No. 1 policy prescription, almost regardless of whom you ask, comes down to one word: education."

To really get to the bottom of this claim, I emailed Ian Jukes, who Karl Fisch lists as a source. I'm directly quoting his email (with permission):

"In answer to your question, I was in attendance at an event (the SC Summit) in Columbia, South Carolina on or about Aug 7, 2006 - Riley was the opening keynote - that quote is word for word (or as close as I was able to record) to what he had to say.

At the time, it struck me as being a significant observation. Since then, I have read or heard several paraphrases or derivatives of his quote used by other speakers and writers but it never struck me as being important to source as I had heard it directly from the horse's mouth, or in Riley's case, the horse's ass. When I included the quote in one of my recent books, I simply referred to his comments at the SC Conference."

While I can find no original statement (a published transcript of a speech) by Richard Riley or Alexis Herman, Bill Clinton did make such a claim in 1996. In Birmingham, Clinton said:

"This is the last election for President of the 20th century and the first election for President of the 21st century. And you have to decide. Many of you young people in this audience, in a few years you will be doing jobs that haven't been invented yet. Some of you will be doing work that has not even been imagined yet. And you have to decide: what kind of America do you want."

Guess who was standing beside him?

"And I'd like to say to that I'm very, very glad to be here with another distinguished Alabamian, the President's Special Assistant for Public Liaison and the highest ranking African American ever to serve in the White House, Alexis Herman, from Mobile, Alabama, who's here with me today. Thank you, Alexis. (Applause.)"

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A Field Guide to 'jobs that don't exist yet'

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Thanks to the Shift Happens videos (2007), you will likely be familiar with this statistic about the future of work: "The top 10 in demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet, using technologies that haven't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet."

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The "achievement gap" is due to students not having grit/trying "hard enough"/ guardians "don't care"

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The "achievement gap" is due to students not having grit/trying "hard enough"/ guardians "don't care"

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Students who are under performing need more exposure to standardized testing in order to improve assessment scores. 

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Students who are under performing need more exposure to standardized testing in order to improve assessment scores. 

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Opportunity gap in historically underrepresented communities

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Opportunity gap in historically underrepresented communities

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Sylvia Mendez's Westminister case is actually what allowed Brown vs Board of Education to pass

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Sylvia Mendez's Westminister case is actually what allowed Brown vs Board of Education to pass

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https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/tn-wknd-et-0417-sylvia-mendez-70-anniversary-20160417-story.html

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Global-Majority – White people are, in fact, not the demographic majority of humans on the planet; white is not “majority” and people who do not identify as white are not “minority”.  Additionally, folks who do not identify as white should not be described by what they aren’t (“non-white”). In instances where we are referring to people who do not identify as white, we use the term “global-majority.”

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Global-Majority – White people are, in fact, not the demographic majority of humans on the planet; white is not “majority” and people who do not identify as white are not “minority”.  Additionally, folks who do not identify as white should not be described by what they aren’t (“non-white”). In instances where we are referring to people who do not identify as white, we use the term “global-majority.”

# data[].attributes.headline
Global-Majority – White people are, in fact, not the demographic majority of humans on the planet; white is not “majority” and people who do not identify as white are not “minority”.  Additionally, folks who do not identify as white should not be described by what they aren’t (“non-white”). In instances where we are referring to people who do not identify as white, we use the term “global-majority.”

# data[].attributes.subject
Global-Majority – White people are, in fact, not the demographic majority of humans on the planet; white is not “majority” and people who do not identify as white are not “minority”.  Additionally, folks who do not identify as white should not be described by what they aren’t (“non-white”). In instances where we are referring to people who do not identify as white, we use the term “global-majority.”

# data[].attributes.body
Global-Majority – White people are, in fact, not the demographic majority of humans on the planet; white is not “majority” and people who do not identify as white are not “minority”.  Additionally, folks who do not identify as white should not be described by what they aren’t (“non-white”). In instances where we are referring to people who do not identify as white, we use the term “global-majority.”

# data[].attributes.body
Global-Majority – White people are, in fact, not the demographic majority of humans on the planet; white is not “majority” and people who do not identify as white are not “minority”.  Additionally, folks who do not identify as white should not be described by what they aren’t (“non-white”). In instances where we are referring to people who do not identify as white, we use the term “global-majority.”

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New angles on grit, but not necessarily in the education space

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New angles on grit, but not necessarily in the education space

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https://hbr.org/2016/11/have-we-been-thinking-about-willpower-the-wrong-way-for-30-years

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Malcolm Gladwell is the best-selling author of books that explore the implications of behavioral science research on our lives and society. His books include Outliers, The Tipping Point, and What the Dog Saw. Last year, he launched a new podcast, Revisionist History, which recently began its second season. The podcast is dedicated to taking a closer look at the past, and Gladwell's treatment of the events and people he examines is often informed by behavioral science. In the interview below, we discuss a recent episode which revisited the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate the American school system. Gladwell contends that the ruling was flawed because the Supreme Court's decision was based too much on the psychological harm that segregation caused and not enough on the structural inequality that continues to this day.
Dave Nussbaum: You're well-known for psychology and behavioral science writing and story-telling. Your new podcast, Revisionist History, which is starting its second season, takes a bit of a different angle. Tell me about that.
Malcolm Gladwell: The point of Revisionist History is that it's supposed to be eclectic. I think it works if it's eclectic and doesn't work if it's not. So, as opposed to another very popular and very good podcast called Invisibilia-which is squarely about psychology and about relating ideas about psychology to things in our world; that's their DNA-mine is deliberately intended to be the opposite. I want things to be sometimes serious, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes frivolous, sometimes unnecessarily provocative, sometimes deeply thoughtful.
DN: I certainly noticed that-whether it's about why people won't shoot a free throw in basketball underhanded or how people react incorrectly to a stuck accelerator pedal DN: Absolutely. So, if I'm correct in understanding your argument, one way to think about it is that there's a misalignment between the remedy the court applies in the Brown decision and the complaint itself? -your perspective on all sorts of stories is infused with behavioral science. Is there anything coming up that tackles behavioral science more directly?
MG: [Episode 3,] " Ms. Buchanan's Period of Adjustment," is very much about that. It's a re-examination of the Brown decision, which is formally a legal document but famously relied on social science to reach its conclusions. [In the episode,] I'm really examining the social science at the core of it and saying that the social science argument that the court made was wrong-or at least was painfully and tragically incomplete. There're are million really important questions that arise out of the general re-examination of Brown that's gone on, and one of them is that social science arguments are incorporated into public policy often at social science's peril.
DN: I'd like to pause on the psychology, because I think it's really interesting. I agree that the Clarks' research, [which finds that black children prefer white dolls to black ones] is problematic, because it places the injury internal to the person. But I'd like to push back a little. You say in the episode that the Browns thought that their school, Monroe, was a good school-they just wanted the right to enroll in the white school, Sumner. You argue that the Supreme Court instead says, no, it's not a good school, it's inherently inferior. I don't think that's quite fair. Monroe may very well have been an excellent school, better than Sumner, but the argument as I understand it is that as good a school as it is, when the law says that students who are black must go there and not Sumner, that carries a cost. It may not damage them irreparably, but it causes harm. It's not the inferior school that's causing the injury; it's the system and how black students are being treated under the law.
It's really easy for public policy people to get it wrong, or to misunderstand what the science is telling them, or to twist the findings of researchers. To me, the great appeal of social science has always been that research is not definitive. It's always posing a proposition to be debated. That's not the way the rest of the world is; the rest of the world wants very definitive answers. And Brown is a really good example of this. Let's face it: The social science that the court used in the Brown case is pretty flimsy social science-it is not psychology at its best.
*Editor's note: The episode details the benefits black students receive from having black teachers. It also explores how the Supreme Court decision, while it integrated students, barely mentioned teachers. As a result, the ranks of black teachers were decimated. DN: Agreed, but it feels like we're overlooking the feasibility of winning the case using a structural argument. Legal strategy is well beyond my expertise, but it seems like they made a choice to pursue an argument that would convince the court. It didn't seem obvious to me that they could have won making a structural argument, since that would involve taking power from people who would stand in their way.
To draw the sweeping conclusion that the court did-that unless black kids can sit next to white kids in a classroom they can't get an education-is nonsense!

MG: Yes, that's part one. The court, for its own peculiar reasons, wanted to claim that black people, as a result of segregation, had suffered a kind of grievous and catastrophic psychological injury. And I'm sorry, that's just not true.

Were there black people harmed by segregated schools? Yes-although I'm not sure whether it was the fact of segregation or the fact of institutional racism and inadequate funding and general neglect that caused the injury. But to draw the sweeping conclusion that the court did-that unless black kids can sit next to white kids in a classroom they can't get an education-is nonsense! It sets you down a path that, as I detail in the episode, gets really problematic really fast. They compound the problem with their inattention to the details under which integration is executed.
DN: That's a really interesting question, whether you could get meaningful equality in the context of segregation. For me, this is where the structural issues become interwoven with the psychology. For example, we have no problem with all sorts of segregation. We segregate school children by age, and this makes perfect sense to us because that segregation is pragmatic and doesn't carry any meaning. As a social psychologist, I wouldn't focus on the damage done to a person's psyche, the way the Brown lawyers did for legal reasons, but rather on the burden of existing within a context that treats you as inferior. Other people's beliefs, especially when they determine your outcomes, matter a great deal.
MG: Yeah, I don't know if I disagree with you. No one is disputing that segregation was a heinous policy with far-reaching ramifications; the question is where do you locate the harm of segregation? And the court chose to locate the harm squarely inside the hearts and psyches of black children, whereas I would locate the harm in the world. I would say that the harm is located in the structure of laws and institutions that have the effect of systematically inhibiting and disempowering African Americans.

That may sound like a minor distinction. It is not. It's a fundamental distinction. And particularly when you understand that it is the deliberate strategy of Southern whites to try and shift the racial conversation from institutions and political structures to hearts and minds. They're trying to do that because they understand that if we can locate the argument entirely inside black people's psyches, then we can leave institutional structures in place that systematically disenfranchise African Americans.

So this seemingly subtle difference that we're discussing has a kind of nefarious intent. And the court's indifference to that nefarious intent is what drives me crazy and what I think ultimately proves so problematic. It's because they're locating the problem inside the hearts and minds of black kids that they can't focus on teachers.* That's the crucial thing.

MG: Many African-American intellectuals have looked back on that and said, "You know what, we would've been better off if they had not overturned Plessy v. Ferguson," and, "You want to play separate and equal? Let's really do separate and equal," and call them on their bluff. Remember the precedent that was being overturned by Brown was the precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson, [in 1896], which said that separate facilities for black people were fine so long as they were equal to those of white people. That was never the case in the South; there was separation without equality.
DN: This speaks to integration of structure and psychology. When they have a black teacher, black students are much less likely to be suspended and are more likely to get into the gifted program. But we don't yet know what's happening psychologically. Do the black teachers open doors, or do they motivate or inspire students? Are they overcoming implicit or explicit prejudice? Structures matters, but whatever they're doing plays out psychologically. It's one thing to say, be careful using social science to affect policy-but do you have any thoughts on careful in what way? Where should social scientists pause? Who should they be talking to so that they're not coming into it blind, running into the perils you describe?
Like I said, many black intellectuals have subsequently said, "Look maybe what the court should've done in Brown in 1954 is say, 'Alright, let's actually do separate and equal-prove to me they're equal before we go any further. Let's start by equalizing funding. Let's go down the list. If you want to have a separate law school for white people in the state of Texas then you have to prove to me that every element in the black law school is the equivalent of the white law school.'" That strikes me as being both a radical and a doable argument, at least in the short term. And then when you have equality-real equality-then you take the next step, and remove [segregation]. I'm not entirely convinced that would've been the right way to go-but I think that is an argument worth hearing.

They understand that if we can locate the argument entirely inside black people's psyches, then we can leave institutional structures in place that systematically disenfranchise African Americans.

MG: The strategies of a social science-driven understanding of how to relieve racial injustice are different from the legal strategies. Many black intellectuals have subsequently said we should've gone for equal before we try to undo separate. One of the primary reasons is it would have essentially called the bluff of the white establishment. The faster way to undo separate is to fight first for equal.

Maintaining separate school systems for blacks and whites in the south was very expensive, and they were able to maintain those systems only if they impoverished the black half. That's what made it economically palatable to taxpayers in rural and urban southern school districts. They're running two systems. It's not cheap. And they get away with it by not giving any money to the black half. If you came along and said, "You have to fund the black half the same as you fund the white half," you effectively force integration. But you force them to integrate themselves, as opposed to doing it from above, which is much more politically perilous. That's part of the calculation. They're making an argument about political expediency as much as they're making an argument about principle.
DN: In a sense, economists are much better suited for dealing with these big data sets. It's incumbent on psychologists to figure out how to do that or collaborate with economists. But economists don't necessarily care about the mechanisms, as long as there's a difference. The problem then becomes, where's that difference coming from? Is it about having someone that cares about you, regardless of race? Or is it about seeing someone like me in a position of authority, or seeing that person-like-me be successful? These suggest very different policy solutions that all get swept under the rug if we ignore the mechanism. Speaking on behalf of psychologists, there is a lot of work that explores these questions, but interventions, doing experiments in the field, have been limited. These big data sets are wonderful, but they also don't allow you to look into people's minds very effectively.
So we're back to this idea that policy questions and social science questions run on different tracks. I'm not saying we should never mix them, of course we should-but it gets complicated when you mix them. You've got to decide, what am I trying to do here? Am I trying to win a political battle, as expeditiously and expediently as possible, or am I trying to make a larger moral argument about race and society?

I thought the attempt to make a moral argument self-evidently failed. The backdrop for this whole conversation is that the strategy that was taken to integrate American schools, judged 50 years later, was a failure. You can't point to any part of this and say, wow, what an amazing transformation we undertook! Under those circumstances, it's useful to think about what alternate strategies might have worked better.
DN: To shift gears back to the podcast, I'm curious what's coming up next?
MG: I'll give a very small example. I talk in the episode about the literature that shows, as you just alluded, that when a black student has a black teacher, a number of educational outcomes become more positive. More likely to be in a gifted or talented program, less likely to be suspended, more likely to graduate, higher GPA, etc. You just said we don't have a proper understanding of what's going on there. That's opportunity number one for social science. It's 2017. This has been an active, open wound in American society since 1954. Maybe it's time for social science to answer that question for us.

The second thing I would say is that I was more than interested to discover how much of the work on these effects-which in education they call "same race effects"-has been done by economists. If I'm a social psychologist, the economists are eating my lunch. They're doing very persuasive, very elegant studies using these data sets that come out of the education reform movement. The economists are the first to jump on it. I feel like that is rich hunting ground for social psychologists as well, and they can bring a perspective to the analysis of that data that the economist can't.

I'm not criticizing the work that's been done by economists, but if you read it, you will notice that there is a beat that's missing-they're economists, so they come at it from a different perspective. I would love to see social psychologists go over that same data and interpret it their way. And that again would be something that would be insanely useful to the conversation we have in this country about how to make schools better.
DN: And beyond the podcast, is there anything in the works that goes back to behavioral science?
You've got to decide, what am I trying to do here? Am I trying to win a political battle, as expeditiously and expediently as possible, or am I trying to make a larger moral argument about race and society?
DN: And what piece is that?
MG: This is a wonderful example of how interdisciplinary research could really move public understanding. You have an opportunity here. There are three ways in. The economists can look at the data set and describe the phenomenon with real precision. The psychologist can look at that same data and give us possible mechanisms-why is it happening? And then there is a role here for the sociologist, or even the anthropologist, to go in and, in a fine-grained way, to describe the experience of the participants.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
What I've found very compelling in doing this podcast episode was that there were enormous numbers of oral histories done over the last 30 to 40 years, and I drew on some of them. Interviews done in the 60s and 70s with black teachers, talking about the experience of being a teacher moving from an all-black school to a white school. That stuff-very anecdotal, very individual, placed alongside psychological accounts of mechanism and economic accounts of exactly what happened-that stuff is really powerful. Those three things in combination, I think, can tell you something really important.

MG: I have seven more episodes, all done and ready to go. I have three more on race and civil rights, telling stories from the early days, the 50s not the 60s. Two are criminal justice stories and one is about what it meant to be a black lawyer in Georgia in 1959.

Then I have a very frivolous piece about french fries. I have a really fun piece about emotion and music; it talks about the difference between country music and rock 'n' roll, and the way they deal with emotion. Music that comes out of an enclosed, close-knit world is qualitatively, profoundly different from music that comes from a very diverse, open world. That's the essence of the difference between country and rock 'n' roll. I use the example of the saddest country song of all time to talk about how it could never have been a rock 'n' roll song. Rock 'n' roll is just incapable of speaking that kind of emotional language.

The last piece is all about science. It's about a son who betrayed his father's career. He had participated in a bit of research that undermined everything his father had spent his career doing. It's all about what is the responsibility of a scientist to evidence and, more importantly, what is the responsibility of a son to a parent? That's how we end the season. It's a very personal piece and sort of unexpectedly moving. It starts out with you thinking it's a very dry piece about academia, and it ends up being a very moving story about a son's relationship with his father. It's highly eclectic, and there are all kinds of interesting things yet to happen.

MG: Yes. I've started a new book, and it very explicitly comes out of the world of psychology. There was a paper that Lee Ross wrote 50 years ago, maybe 45 years ago, called " Shortcomings of the Intuitive Psychologist." It's a famous paper, and I'm tearing off a little, tiny piece of that argument and having fun with it.

MG: I'm interested in how we deal with strangers. How good are our intuitive ideas about dealing with strangers? I haven't thought it through entirely, but I'm fascinated by what it means to deal with someone who you don't know and, most importantly, whose credibility you cannot assess easily. Strikes me as a very contemporary problem, and from a psychological perspective, super interesting. There's just so much fantastic psychology on that question.

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A Conversation with Malcolm Gladwell: Revisiting Brown v. Board - Behavioral Scientist

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Malcolm Gladwell is the best-selling author of books that explore the implications of behavioral science research on our lives and society. His books include Outliers, The Tipping Point, and What the Dog Saw. Last year, he launched a new podcast, Revisionist History , which recently began its second season.

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https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/Dismantling_the_School_to_Prison_Pipeline__Criminal-Justice__.pdf