Public-Private Partnerships, Sans Poets

General Electric just gave the New York City public school system $17.9 million. It’s the largest single grant given to the city schools and will be distributed over a five-year period. The mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, had this to say: “Public-private partnerships like this one with the GE Foundation have been essential to our success in turning around a failing public school system. This generous grant will help to prepare our students to be the leaders of the 21st century economy which will be built on science, math and technology” (http://www.thecro.com/node/725). While it’s not clear how exactly the money will be used to help schools (something about funding a “pilot program” in ten city schools), I’m intrigued about the mayor’s, GE’s, and other politicians’ emphasis on science, math, and technology. As an English teacher, I’m trying to avoid the pitfall of discipline jealousy: a sort of Marsha-Marsha-Marsha response to watching the above three content-areas be given so much attention and money as funding for the arts dwindles. And we see the effects of this in the research being produced, for example.

Literary studies have played Jan to other disciplines’ Marsha for at least a century. The famous scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams graphs poetry based on the instructions from a popular textbook is an example:

In the early 20^th century, lacking scholarly respect and funding, literary scholars developed a method of critiquing literature that sought to be as objective about poems as the scientific method was about data. It was no longer about the art of poetry; it was about the poem as an object for quantifiable study. The idea was that literature and poetry were too open to rampant interpretation—the reader could read a work however he wished—and some other academically rigorous method was needed if the study of literature was to be taken seriously. We see the results of this movement, referred to as New Criticism or Formalism, even on the New York State Regents exam today:

The notion of showing how an author used certain literary devices evidences the type of attempt at objective literary analysis that developed in the wake of the reverence and funding for the sciences that was alive and well a century ago. Take, as another case in point, the work of researchers in what’s being called content-area literacy. Rather than just focusing their studies on what it means to read and write, some researchers are aiming their work at what it means to read and write in a specific discipline, like science. I don’t wish to discount or discredit this type of research. I only wish to point out that a professor researching how students process information in science class might well be more likely to get funding than a professor doing a similar study in English class, and certainly music class. It’s not, however, that the tide has suddenly shifted towards funding the sciences or technology.

For example, the mayor’s use of the word “technology”carries with it an interesting story. Often nowadays we are likely to hear science, math, and technology all lumped together. Not to mention “21^st Century” education. What pols mean by “technology” isn’t what scholars mean by it, though. One scholar, Walter Ong, posited the notion that the act of writing is in fact a technology insofar as it uses a tool (a pen, pencil, stylus) to aid humans to do something they can already do: communicate. But writing is not what GE or the mayor have in mind when they bestow millions on the City school system. I wonder what they imagine technology to look like: do they think of computers (hardware, networking, repair), the internet (web site design, research), or maybe even blogging? Would the overseers of this grant consider students who blogged about their learning to have been worth GE’s investment?

Doubtful.

Words like “science”, “math”, and “technology” have little meaning to the dolers of monies. And without clearer meaning, the grant is as likely to trickle into sub-contracted organizations that can justify the measurement of their success any way they like, using words like “achievement” and “succeed” and “growth” or phrases like “move students” and “the data suggests”. Whereas the value of literature will always be inexplicable, much to the frustration of the teachers and scholars in its field, the real value of GE’s grant is likely to be as inexplicable--only its results are likely to come with the graphs and charts and data that have always appeased businessmen and mollified scientists. The Dead Poets might say these same graphs and charts and data frighten the art out of poetry.