The Chastened Dream:

Knowledge, Action and Professional Education

(former titled: What are We All Doing Here, Anyway?

Professional Education, Social Science and the Question of Values)

Jal Mehta

CMEI Colloquium

April 21, 2009

Overview: The Enlightenment Dream

The Dream:

Science/reason +

public policy=

liberal progress

Overview: The Chastened Dream

The dreamThe chastened

dreamLimits of the dream

• Values

• Politics

• Knowledge

• Policy

Overview: The Chastened Dream

The dream

Early public policy schools

Public policy schools today

Overview: The Chastened Dream

The dreamThe chastened

dream

Early public policy schools

Public policy schools today

Little change

Mis

mat

ch

Limits of the dream

Plan for the Talk

1. History and strengths of the dream

2. Four Limits of the Dream

3. Mismatch: Policy Schools struggle to respond

4. Recasting the Dream, Recasting Professional Education

1. The Dream

Science, Rationality and Progress:A Thumbnail History

The dream: scientific knowledge + policy = progress

Emergence of social sciences as disciplines

Progressive Era & scientific management

Creation of early schools of public administration

Science, Rationality and Progress:A Thumbnail History

Reached zenith in mid 1960s

Newly awakened to huge social problems

“End of Ideology” & “best and brightest”

State action informed by professional expertise

Creation of public policy schools (including JFK school)

Do you believe in the dream?*

*More precisely: Do you believe that public policy, guided by scientific knowledge and reason, is our best hope of achieving progress?

What Are the Virtues of the Dream?

Collected thoughts of the audience

Progress is based on information, drawing on the scientific process

Public policy is a necessary tool for creating social change – we can’t sustain social change w/o public policy

Scientific knowledge brings objectivity to the process

We have achieved progress in raising people’s standard of living through these methods

What would an alternative sound like? The policies have to happen, and the theories have to be good theories

Science in the strict sense vs. scholarship

Strengths of the Dream: Hallmark Virtues of the Enlightenment

Truth: Science/data preferable to supposition, ideology

Reason: Science preferable to naked power/politics “Republican War on Science” (Mooney)

Obama: “science-based administration”

Progress: Public policy leverages “what we know” for improvement at scale

We are living the dream! KSG – My doctoral program: “Sociology & social policy”

GSE – “Nexus of research, policy and practice.”

2. Limits of the Dream

What Are Some Limits of the Dream?

Collected thoughts of the audience

Public policy isn’t created in an apolitical vacuum

People justify the policy by justifying what they want to do anyway

People who experience public policy have little opportunity to shape it.

Disconnect between what policy intends nad implementation

Once in place, difficult to change as circumstances change

No moral underpinnings

Four Limits of the Dream

1. Values

2. Politics & claims of expertise

3. Knowledge

4. Policy & implementation

Limit #1: Values

Limit #1: Values(People disagree with the dream…)

Limit #1: Values(People disagree with the dream…)

Science cannot settle questions of value

“Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to the only question important for us:

‘What shall we do and how shall we live?"‘

-- Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” quoting Leo Tolstoy

Collapse of the “fact-value” dichotomy (Putnam)

“End of ideology” gives way to massive cultural and social conflict Busing, abortion, crime, welfare – not by data alone

Limit #1: Values(People disagree with the dream…)

Science cannot settle questions of value

“Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to the only question important for us:

‘What shall we do and how shall we live?"‘

-- Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” quoting Leo Tolstoy

Collapse of the “fact-value” dichotomy (Putnam)

“End of ideology” gives way to massive cultural and social conflict Busing, abortion, crime, welfare – not by data alone

Limit #1: Values

Attacks from the right because “liberal progress” narrative undermines: Individualism:

Government is the problem (Reagan)

Gov’t support dependency (Murray)

Community:

Policy vs. civil society (Glazer)

The people:

Elitist and anti-democratic (Kristol)

Markets:

State planning vs. markets (Hayek, Friedman)

Example:

Welfare/AFDC

Limit #1: Values

Attacks from the left, which sees it as “technocratic” change which ignores:

Bottom up change

Conflict, power, class

Race, gender, and identity

Speaking truth to power – should not just be instruments of the man

Social movements and organizing

Example: World Bank/IMF Loans

Limit #2: Politics

Limit #2: Politics(And not only do people disagree, they have

the right to have their voice heard)

Limit #2: Politics(And not only do people disagree, they have

the right to have their voice heard)

Dream “depoliticizes” politics*

Expertise vs. democracy

Weiss: Limited use of research in policy

Public policy schools lack “jurisdictional claim” of other professions

* Objection applies to the “strong form,” less to the “weak form.”

Limit #3: Epistemology/Knowledge

Limit #3: Epistemology/Knowledge(Even if people would listen to us, what we could tell them is limited and often fallible)

Limit #3: Epistemology/Knowledge(Even if people would listen to us, what we could tell them is limited and often fallible)

Limits of predictive social scientific knowledge

Social science vs. natural science

R2 often less than 10 percent

Limits of moving from (often weak) causal knowledge to practical action (Mark Moore)

Jump from A causes B to “we should do X”

Jumps from general to particular

Limits in how we “see” created by measurement Commensuration and the problems of “legibility” (Scott)

Discretion a necessary part of any bureaucracy

The Problem of Legibility:The Forest and the Trees

From James Scott, Seeing Like a State, New Haven: Yale, 1998

Limit #4: Limits of Policy

Limit #4: Limits of Policy(Even if policymakers did what we wanted, top-down policy

can be a weak tool for changing human behavior)

Limit #4: Limits of Top-Down Policy

Changing people (hard) vs. moving money (easy)

Difficulty of changing behavior of agents of the state Discretion & street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky) Practice as well as policy

Backwards mapping (Elmore), policy as hypothesis (Tyack and Cuban), distributed leadership (Spillane and Diamond), Networks, incentives, legitimacy, constructivism, etc.

Difficulty of changing client/citizen behavior Society & culture “Nudge” and behavioral economics

3. Mismatch:

Professional Schools and the Chastened Dream

Professional Education isat the Nexus of the Dream

KnowledgeKnowledge

+ ActionAction

Arts and Sciences Prof. Schools Policy & Practice

Public policy schools bear the organizational imprint of the original dream (1965)

Creation of public policy schools

Reacting against public

administration schools

JFK/LBJ eraoptimism

about dream

Gov’t need for policy analysts

Seeking academic legitimacy

from disciplinary scholars

CurriculumQuantitative policy anal.

StatisticsOperations research

FacultyMostly econ & poli sciQuantitative emphasis

Policy “relevant”

Less emphasized

PractitionersCHILE (culture, history,

institutions, law, ethics)

Political Factors

Academic Factors

New Policy Schools

Have public policy schools adapted to the limits of the dream?

Macro: Forces sustaining the original dream

Status and academic legitimacy

Academic over practical

Quantitative modeling over institutional analysis

Disciplinary mix largely unchanged

Practitioners increasingly present, but lesser role in governance

Have public policy schools adapted to the limits of the dream?

Meso: Forces sustaining the original dream

Academic cache

Cultural milieu

Meso: Forces for a revised dream

Loose coupling and fragmentation Mansbridge, Moore, Ganz, etc.

Business school example (practical + high status)

Have public policy schools adapted to the limits of the dream?

Micro: Pragmatism a force for a revised dream

Teaching masters students & executive education

Value add question

More case studies

Result: More courses in things relevant for public action, but no overall rethinking of core purpose or mission.

Much is not social science at all (accounting, etc.)

The Ed School: A Brief Look

Trends favoring the original dream:

Legitimacy rooted in social scientific knowledge

Don’t confront questions of values (even less than K sch)

Don’t confront whether expertise should translate to power

Don’t confront limits of knowledge

Don’t emphasize limits of policy

Feminized profession = greater imperative for status

Imprinting: Research by researchers, teaching by teachers

The Ed School: A Brief Look

Trends supporting a revision of the Dream:

Wider mix of disciplines

No legacy policy analysis; more institutional analysis

Practice as well as policy

Leadership degree

Capstone project as opposed to dissertation

Beginning to think out of the other end of the telescope

4. Recasting the Dream, Recasting Professional Education

Towards the Future

The dreamThe chastened

dream

Early public policy schools

Public policy schools tomorrow

Limits of the dream

Match

Recasting

There is still a case for science (albeit a humbler science)

Science can’t tell you how to act, but it can help you with (among other things): Evaluating interventions Identifying problems Creating ways of seeing Unpacking reasons for gap between policy and practice Understanding alternatives to usual policy mechanisms

(horizontal networks, etc.)

Creates broad grained picture, even if can’t help make more specific decisions

But, still, traditional model limited in ways discussed

1. Doesn’t speak to questions of values

2. Doesn’t deal with questions of role of expertise in democracy

3. Doesn’t directly respond to limits of own knowledge

4. Still largely assumes policy only and best vehicle for change

Wisdom, judgment, practical reason

Science (and its limits)

Values

Practical knowledge

PoliticsPolicy (and its limits)

Recasting: What Would You Need to Know to Act Effectively in the Public Sphere?

(A sacrificial proposal)

Questions to Ponder in any Recasting

1. What are the critical elements needed for public action?

2. Is our role to serve power or critique it?

3. How can we teach people how to act when knowledge is limited and fallible?

4. Will we be replaced if we don’t get this right?

Q & A: Questions from the Audience Is there urgency to responding to this now? If we’re not doing it right, then maybe we should be replaced What do we mean by values?

Practically – how deal with contested values? Also issues of religion

Isn’t it taking a positivist stance to see values as disentangled from questions of knowledge Example: Religion excluded from secular questions Haven’t I constructed science in a value free way (science has values: skepticism, humility, and so forth)

Underlying metaphor of science/engineering process Craft like knowledge is important in science

Maybe we should think about architecture as a metaphor Public policy schools undefined in the roles they are training people for: policymakers, administrators, organizers,

people who whisper in the ear of policymakers Are ed schools (at least this one) undefined in what we are trying to achieve We suffer for all of the confusions we are implicating

Students come with a dream, it gets chastened – if all you have is the chastened dream, why would people come? Passion and inspiration – Roosevelt, kennedy, Reagan, Obama? --- People who brought passion to the subject area important Question: Why would we expect schools to take on five tasks rather than one or two

What would ground the norms or questions? How would we talk to each other?

Response (Meira): Pentagon is reframing of what it would mean to be a knowledgeable actor – everyone would have these same capacities?

What are the implications for disciplines that aren’t trying to being professional schools?