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 dream The chastened dream Limits 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 dream The chastened dream Early public policy schools Public policy schools today Little change Mismatch 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…)

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)

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)

Limits of predictive social scientific knowledge Social science vs. natural science R 2 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 is at the Nexus of the Dream Knowledge + Action Action Arts and SciencesProf. SchoolsPolicy & 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 era optimism about dream Gov’t need for policy analysts Seeking academic legitimacy from disciplinary scholars Curriculum Quantitative policy anal. Statistics Operations research Faculty Mostly econ & poli sci Quantitative emphasis Policy “relevant” Less emphasized Practitioners CHILE (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 dream The 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 Politics Policy (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?