Education Book Review: Belonging Through a Culture of Dignity
A long review of a book I wouldn't recommend reading
[I thought I would try something a little different by writing a book review. However, it took longer to write than it took to read the book it was based on. I very much wish I had that time back. This will be the only newsletter this week. There will be one next week and then I hope to return to a normal twice weekly schedule. Merry Christmas and thank you for your continued support.]
I.
One frustrating part of trying to read Aristotle, especially something like the Physics which purports to tell you how and why the world exists, is the part of your brain that keeps whispering insistently, “But this isn’t actually right…none of it’s true. You know this is not how the world works at all,” and yet feeling ill equipped to point out exactly why it’s wrong or how you know it. Aristotle does everything right: he addresses competing theories, identifies the contradictions they entail, makes his own propositions and derives from them various implications and hard-to-refute-yet-totally-wrong conclusions. Because logically, it all just seems to hang together pretty well, and there’s something admirable and pleasing about starting with an abstract idea like ‘change’ and then deriving from that, over the course of subsequent books, man’s purpose in the universe, what that implies about how he should live his life, and what that implies about the type of government and society he should build.
You almost wish it were true, because it would be great to have solid answers to some of these things. Yet it’s really wrong, and you know this not because you can pick his argument apart on its own terms but because you have the answer sheet: 2,500 years of post-Aristotelian understanding and wisdom. But it makes me worry about how silly and wrongheaded some blogger in the year 4520 will think of the present-day things we—with our current knowledge and theories and models of the world—think are true because of how perfectly those theories make all the pieces fit together and how pleasing and satisfying it feels when they do.
I mention this as a way to contrast how I felt while reading Floyd Cobb and Jonathan Krownapple’s Belonging Through a Culture of Dignity: The Keys to Successful Equity Implementation. Which is that it did not seem to “hang together pretty well,” it does not point out the flaws of competing theories in a persuasive way, nor does it present alternative propositions and then rigorously derive from them coherent implications and conclusions. In fact it was kind of confusing and unhelpful, and I did not especially enjoy the long evening it took me to read it. Nevertheless, I do think it is probably correct about one or two fundamental things.
I was interested in reading this for a few reasons. One was that school board member Jessica Willis mentioned that the book was an important focal point of an education conference she recently attended. Another was that it seemed to be related to an academic article that Superintendent Demond Means mentioned at the same time as motivating his proposal for a “Strong Start” program at the beginning of next year. It also seems like the ideas in both the book and the article (which I also read but won’t really talk about) probably underpins some of his ideas about reshaping school culture and belonging as a way to correct the violence and declining achievement that he’s mentioned in off-hand ways during previous board meetings.
But also, my impression as an outsider is that education pedagogy is somewhat faddish and that the American public school system is frequently captive to the trends and fashions propagated by…who? Education consultants? Teaching colleges? Cobb and Krownapple, the authors of this book? I don’t really understand how the system works, and I’ve been looking for an “intellectual history of public education”-type introduction to the topic to help me understand. I haven’t found it yet, but in the meantime, I thought I’d read this one.
Thirdly, in the course of trying to write about school board meetings, I notice that educators use a lot of jargon and often write about their efforts and initiatives in confusing and somewhat impenetrable prose. A cynical take might be that this reflects confused thinking or a sinister attempt at obfuscation but a more charitable interpretation is that I just don’t know very much.
A final reason is that I’m curious whether the ideas in these books are persuasive and reasonable and well-founded.
II.
Cobb and Krownapple (C&K) begin their book with what I consider a surprising admission: many diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts don’t work.
This is what they say about anti-bias training:
It may surprise you that researchers have found that initiatives that have anti-prejudice training as the exclusive focus do not decrease stereotyping (Dobbins & Kalev, 2017). Instead, the trainings end up leaving participants with more deeply held stereotypes of people in marginalized groups than what they had prior to attending the training (Duguid & Thomas-Hunt, 2015; Legault, Gutsell, & Inzlicht, 2011).
A large-scale study on antibias trainings further confirmed the criticism of these approaches. Forcher et al. (2016) conducted a meta-analysis of almost 500 studies with a central question that focused on understanding which approaches were the most influential in changing implicit assumptions of participants. The researchers found that efforts focused on reducing implicit biases had relatively weak effects on changing participants’ implicit assumptions. Perhaps more importantly, even when people did change their implicit assumptions, their long-term consistent behaviors did not change. This is particularly important since increasing attention to inequities has led many organizations to mandate some sort of bias training (Pritlove, Juando-Prats, Ala-Leppilampi, & Parsons, 2019).
They go on to cite similar research about the lack of effectiveness of many anti-bullying and anti-drug programs.
If I had to guess I’d probably say that many of these interventions probably had at least some initial success which encouraged their wider adoption, and you might imagine why they nevertheless failed with more wide-spread adoption.
The initial promise of the intervention was just a fluke or the result of poor experimental design. Other people who tried weren’t as lucky.
People copied them poorly. They fail to implement critical components of the intervention or weren’t as highly trained or dedicated as the people who tried it first and were successful.
The promising intervention works really well in some contexts but not others, and there are important external factors that need to be accounted for.
The intervention has only tenuous, ambiguous, or non-existent impacts on the big picture things you really care about. In the Pritlove et al. (2019) mentioned above they say:
Implicit bias training has had some success in changing individual-level beliefs and actions,4 but meta-analyses suggest it is largely ineffective in diminishing institutional inequities.6 For instance, women remain disproportionately less likely to receive faculty appointments, obtain leadership positions, earn comparable wages, receive grant funding, and are more likely to leave the academy prematurely.1,3,7,8
But what is the problem according to Cobb and Krownapple? It’s not any of those things. Instead, they say, it’s because being anti-something is not the same as being for something. There can be many reasons to be against something but when people are for something it is because they have a shared vision and having a shared vision is necessary to do any good at all.
To support this conclusion they mention affirmative action:
Two people could seem united against affirmative action, but each have a different (and unrelated) reason for their opposition. One person could oppose it because they believe it discriminates against people outside of historically disenfranchised groups, while another could disagree with the policy because it stigmatizes people from historically disenfranchised groups (Eastland, 1992). Yet, for two people to be united for the policy, they must be on the same page, sharing a commitment to its intended aims: to protect members of historically excluded groups from continuing to be disproportionately harmed by discrimination (intentional or not).
But this just seems trivially false. I can immediately think of lots of distinct reasons to support affirmative action policies, and this is not just some special ability I have. The progressive think tank Center for American Progress published an article entitled “5 Reasons to Support Affirmative Action in College Admissions” that mentioned things like:
Because students of color are underrepresented on college campuses
Because diversity benefits all students on college campuses
Because students of color have historically faced many barriers to attending college
Because it promotes social mobility
You could support affirmative action for all of these reasons or only some of them. You could support it for different reasons entirely, like because it benefits you personally or because you know nothing about affirmative action other than that it seems vaguely like something good people support.
They do this again when they describe the “dysfunctional cycle of equity work.” According to the authors, it begins with some high profile event that draws everyone’s attention to inequity or injustice. Maybe somebody found a drawing that looked like a swastika or someone realized there are no Black students in AP Calculus class. School leaders respond that they like equity and hate inequity and take all of this very seriously. They demonstrate their seriousness by forming a committee who hires a consultant that promises “an attractive or en vogue” solution to their problem. Usually there’s training involved which some subset of the people forced to attend it find useless or insulting.
The consultant eventually leaves and the committee is left to carry on the training they paid good money for. They do this poorly, reaffirming the skeptics’ assumption that “this is kind of useless.” Fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread among the rank-and-file, cynical and optimistic alike. Some people hate all the changes. Others hate that nothing is changing. The school board asks when they’re going to see some progress for all the money they’re spending. Teachers ask you just to tell them what they need to do, preferably in checklist form, so they can stop attending these trainings. The committee incants, “equity pedagogies operate responsively and not prescriptively” and “there aren’t any checklists” in the hopes that teachers will stop asking for them, but they eventually cave and provide a checklist anyway.
The checklist is full of things that seem very basic and that teachers say they already do. They eventually throw the checklist out because it’s kind of a waste of time. Things return to about the way they’d always been until somebody spots another swastika drawn on a men’s bathroom stall and the whole cycle repeats.
I found this portion of the book pretty reasonable, because, despite never having been trapped in a “dysfunctional cycle of equity work,” I could imagine it going exactly the way they describe. However, I will attempt a brief defense of the checklist people. Mentally, it’s an easy move from hearing the word checklist to the metaphor “checking the box” to an image of the lazy, uninspiring bureaucrat simply going through the motions so that she can file her paperwork and go home.
But checklists help planes take-off, and nuclear submarines get underway, and they keep surgeons from infecting their patients or leaving tools inside their body. They are responsible for large improvements in health and safety, because humans are bad at keeping track of little things and doing repetitive tasks correctly over and over without error. My first boss would speak extemporaneously at the lunch table about the utility of checklists. He gave me a checklist for managing my own life as a gag gift when he left. I still have it. A surgeon, Atul Gawande, wrote a bestselling book—the Checklist Manifesto—about how great checklists are, and why it’s so hard to get cocky surgeons to use them even though they keep forgetting their tools inside people’s bodies. I have that too.
If you know what works and what works involves getting lots of little things right day-in and day-out, then checklists are miracles.
III.
But I don’t get the sense that the authors really know what works which is maybe why they dislike checklists and don’t provide a lot of solutions and spend most of the book providing spiritually-tinged encouragement to “look inside and transform yourself to create the equity and inclusion you’ve always dreamt of” instead. I’ll mention two reasons for this.
Some of this seems like a failure of imagination.
For instance, they spend the first chapter or two describing their cycle of equity dysfunction, and the reason it was believable to me despite my not being an educator is that what they’re describing is literally a failure mode of every organizational initiative in every industry ever. The idea that people are creatures of habit and resist changes that don’t have clear and immediate benefits for them and that leaders lose heart in the face of spiraling costs, unclear results, and popular backlash is a general problem of human organization. As a general problem, there are probably success stories across many domains they could look to for inspiration and insight and generalized solutions they could consider like aligning incentives or paying attention to principal-agent problems or reducing transaction costs or re-evaluating and clarifying goals.
But they don’t really do this. C&K take the cycle of dysfunction they outline with all the individual problems and hiccups and failures it draws attention to and set it aside. All of these things, they say, are just symptoms of a deeper, root problem that is being ignored:
Our current strategies are the problem—our current ways of “doing equity”—and not the goal of equity itself.
Throughout this book, we’re going to look beyond business as usual. We’re going to examine the foundational reason why the current approaches don’t work. That foundational reason is the non-inclusive and non-welcoming (certain students, families, or staff members don’t belong) climate that is inherent in our school system. We’re going to address the question of how it is that we’ve granted ourselves permission to create classroom, school, and district cultures where we can and do disregard the inherent value and worth of certain people.
I don’t know. Maybe?
Some of this feels like a shallow understanding of the relevant science (Or, a brief review of the Replication Crisis)
If I was going to summarize the development of C&K’s argument through the middle half of the book, it would be something like this:
Educators need to stop focusing on the “false goal” of diversity and focus on the real goal of inclusion. Inclusion has a dozen different definitions and they are all kind of bad, but what we mean by inclusion is that everyone feels accepted and valued and like they belong. Educators have forgotten about the importance of belonging, because they’re too focused on things like high-stakes testing which makes students, especially minority students, wonder if they even belong in school after they fail their high-stakes tests. Science calls this “belonging uncertainty.” It is caused by this other thing Science found called “stereotype threat.” To have belonging we must eliminate belonging uncertainty by eliminating stereotype threat and transform a school’s culture into one that accepts all students unconditionally by recognizing the common dignity inherent in every human being. Only then can we close the Black-White student achievement gap.
You might quibble with this argument for a couple different reasons, but I’ll just mention one: stereotype threat probably doesn’t exist.
A primary goal of science is to make generalizable or universal knowledge claims about the world. One implication of generalizable knowledge is that if you understand a phenomena well enough, you should be able to predict its occurrence or reproduce its effects in other times and places. This means that ideally someone should be able to repeat your experiment and get the same result.
One of the interesting realizations scientists—particularly social scientists—have had over the past 10-15 years is the extent to which this is not actually true. Someone does an experiment and discovers some interesting medical, psychological, or economic phenomena and then publishes it in an academic journal. People take those results, cite them a lot, and use them as the building blocks for their own more elaborate theories.
But it turns out that many foundational studies on which other scientists have spent decades elaborating and building upon don’t actually replicate and the effects and relationships they describe often aren’t real. When someone else reads the paper and tries to repeat the experiment it often fails, or the effect is much smaller than expected. From Wikipedia:
[R]esearchers redid 100 studies in psychological science from three high-ranking psychology journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, and Psychological Science). 97 of the original studies had significant effects, but of those 97, only 36% of the replications yielded significant findings (p value below 0.05).[11] The mean effect size in the replications was approximately half the magnitude of the effects reported in the original studies.
Rates of replication were even lower in certain subfields of psychology. For instance, only 25% of a sample of social psychology findings were successfully replicated.
There are many reasons for this, I find them all pretty interesting and they're not hard to understand, but I'll mention two. One is that people like to discover new things and journals like to publish them. They are both less excited about failed experiments that don’t discover anything. If a scientist’s experiment fails, he puts the results in a drawer and moves on to the next thing. If he sends them to a journal, the journal will tell him it’s not very exciting and then refuse to publish it.
Another problem is that experiments involving people and behavior and psychology tend to be noisy. People aren't robots, their actions aren't perfectly deterministic, and there are lots of factors and things we don't understand that affect people's behavior besides the thing we’re paying attention to in an experiment. So you don't want to run an experiment with one person, you want many randomly chosen people, so that hopefully the differences between them cancel out and you can identify some average effect. The more people you include in an experiment the better, but this also can get quite expensive. The end result is that scientists run experiments using samples that are too small to reliably find the thing they’re looking for. They’re also more likely to get spurious results just by chance and think they’ve found something when they actually haven't.
If you combine these two things—people are only interested in publishing the results of experiments that are successful and many experiments often give false positives—the end result is lots of published research describing things that don't actually exist.
Stereotype threat is the idea that people subject to negative stereotypes who are reminded that others hold these negative stereotypes will tend to perform to these stereotypes. There is a naïve or intuitive understanding of stereotype threat where people internalize a sense of inferiority and “live down” to the low expectations people have for them. I think this is what C&K are probably thinking of when they cite these studies in support of their arguments. But this is not what those social psychologists mean when they talk about stereotype threat.
As far as I can tell when social psychologists talk about stereotype threat, they mean something very narrow and specific. The canonical example is the stereotype that Black students have lower intellectual abilities. If you remind them of this stereotype—by, for instance, telling them that a test they’re about to take will measure their mental or reasoning abilities—they’ll do worse on the test than if you hadn't explicitly reminded them of this stereotype. To induce stereotype threat, you need three things: someone must care about the particular skills being tested, they must be aware of the negative stereotype (e.g., that Black students do worse academically or that girls aren’t good at math) and there has to be some type of challenging task (e.g., a difficult test).
Of particular note is that the authors of the original paper only claim that stereotype threat can make existing gaps in performance even larger and that it doesn’t explain already existing gaps in performance. See this article, “On Interpreting Stereotype Threat as Accounting for African American–White Differences on Cognitive Tests” by Sackett, Hardison, and Cullen (2004).
A good way to see whether an effect is real is by looking at a funnel plot. Funnel plots aggregate the results of many experiments and show the relationship between the size of a particular study’s effects (the x-axis) and the study’s sample size (the y-axis).
If some effect really exists and there isn’t publication bias, you’d expect to see experimentally obtained effect sizes symmetrically distributed around some positive or negative value,. By random chance any given study will estimate an effect that is smaller or larger than the true effect, but over enough experiments you’d expect the estimated effect to center around the true value. Also, as the sample size of individual studies grows, you’d expect this variation to become smaller (i.e., you’d expect to see the funnel narrow).
If there was publication bias, you’d expect the funnel to be lopsided and non-symmetrical as studies that don’t find an effect or find an effect opposite to the one predicted just don’t get published. If there was no effect, you’d expect the funnel to be centered around zero.
I know of two meta-analyses of stereotype threat. The first from Nguyen and Ryan (2008) has this funnel plot:
The second is from Picho-Kiroga et al. (2021). Their y-axis is “Inverse standard error of effect size” but this is just a function of sample size and illustrates the same thing as the first figure:
It’s not clear that C&K are really aware of these studies or the implications of the broader replication crisis in general.
IV.
But ultimately, I’m not sure C&K would really be bothered by all this, because I don’t think they actually use scientific findings in the way scientists do—to build increasingly accurate models of the world. Instead, they mostly cite scientific research in a rhetorical, “Can you believe what those Scientists found!” kind of way, to buttress a point of view they’d already come to by other means.
So I had a hard time categorizing what type of book this was. There were some scientific underpinnings and a refreshingly sober assessment of past failures. But it wasn’t a science book or policy analysis or even a case study—the authors offered almost no examples of a successful implementation of their principles and solutions. I even agree with their conclusion that culture is quite important and has a deep effect on the way people’s preferences, habits, and beliefs are formed and that changing an organization’s culture is hard and sometimes necessary. But the solutions mostly seemed to be matters of faith and personal transformation.
I originally summarized some of these solutions, but then I came across this Amazon book review that I think does a better job.
I work as a Regional Capacity Builder for raising regular attendance in the state of Oregon. I believe (and have believed) that the core of our work is increasing the sense of belonging our students feel within their school community, and with that, their sense of safety and the knowledge that they truly matter.
Our chronic absenteeism rates are soaring today because those students are the canary in the coal mine who are warning us that our system is poisoning them. The poison? The lack of human dignity at the core of our existing system. This book very explicitly explains that without dignity there is no belonging. Without belonging it is increasingly more difficult to unlock achievement... the common denominator of every student group that has experienced disparities historically within our educational system is that their human dignity is not recognized.
We. Can. Fix. This. This book tells us how. It starts with looking at ourselves and understanding that our own human dignity is our birthright: we don’t have to earn it. Period. When our own dignity is intact, then we will naturally begin extending it out to all we meet because we understand the value and power it holds.
The best way I can describe this book is to think of it as a catechism—a guide for recent converts on the principles of their newfound faith. It cements their belief and reinforces their will as they face the trials of a skeptical and malign world. This explains the loose reliance on scientific research, the unfounded conclusions, the quotations by Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus, and St. Augustine, the bold and unqualified assertions unsupported by argument (“an institution can’t consider itself excellent unless it is excellent for every person”) , and recommendations that mostly rely on cultivating fundamental personal change (“the good struggle begins in and with each one of us”).
But I have my own parable. It’s from a short essay by a psychiatrist named Scott Alexander titled, “Book Review: All Therapy Books.” It starts like this,
All therapy books start with a claim that their form of therapy will change everything. Previous forms of therapy have required years or even decades to produce ambiguous results. Our form of therapy can produce total transformation in five to ten sessions! Previous forms of therapy have only helped ameliorate the stress of symptoms. Our form of therapy destroys symptoms at the root!
All therapy books bring up the Dodo Bird Verdict – the observation, confirmed in study after study, that all psychotherapies are about equally good, and the only things that matter are “nonspecific factors” like how much patients like their therapist. Some people might think this suggests our form of therapy will only be about as good as other forms. This, all therapy books agree, would be a foolish and perverse interpretation of these findings. The correct interpretation is that all previous forms of therapy must be equally wrong. The only reason they ever produce good results at all is because sometimes therapists accidentally stumble into using our form of therapy, without even knowing it. Since every form of therapy is about equally likely to stumble into using our form of therapy, every other form is equally good. But now that our form of therapy has been formalized and written up, there is no longer any need to stumble blindly! Everyone can just use our form of therapy all the time, for everything! Nobody has ever done a study of our form of therapy. But when they do, it’s going to be amazing! Nobody has even invented numbers high enough to express how big the effect size of our form of therapy is going to be!
Consider the case of Bob. Bob had some standard-issue psychological problem. He had been in and out of therapy for years, tried dozens of different medications, none of them had helped at all. Then he decided to try our form of therapy. In his first session, the therapist asked him “Have you ever considered that your problems might be because of [the kind of thing our form of therapy says all problems are because of]?” Bob started laughing and crying simultaneously, eventually breaking into a convulsive fit. After three minutes, he recovered and proceeded to tell a story of how [everything in his life was exactly in accordance with our form of therapy’s predictions] and he had always reacted by [doing exactly the kind of thing our form of therapy predicts that he would]. Now that all of this was out in consciousness, he no longer felt any desire to have psychological problems. In a followup session two weeks later, the therapist confirmed that he no longer had any psychological problems, and had become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a renowned pentathlete.
Not every case goes this smoothly. Consider the case of Sarah. Sarah also has some standard-issue psychological problem. She had also been in and out of therapy for years, tried dozens of different medications, none of them had helped at all. Then she decided to try our form of therapy. In her first session, the therapist asked her “Have you ever considered that your problems might be because of [the kind of thing our form of therapy says all problems are because of]?” Sarah said “No, I don’t think they are.” The therapist asked “Are you sure you’re not just repressing the fact that they totally definitely are, for sure?” As soon as Sarah heard this, she gasped, and her eyes seemed to light up with an inner fire. Then she proceeded to tell a story of how [everything in her life was exactly in accordance with our form of therapy’s predictions] and she had always reacted by [doing exactly the kind of thing our form of therapy predicts that she would], only she was repressing this because she was scared of how powerful she would be if she recovered. Now that all of this was out in consciousness, she no longer felt any desire to have psychological problems. In a followup session two weeks later, the therapist confirmed that she no longer had any psychological problems, and had become the hand-picked successor to the Dalai Lama and the mother of five healthy children.
Previous forms of therapy have failed because they were ungrounded. They were ridiculous mental castles built in the clouds by armchair speculators. But our form of therapy is based on hard science! For example, it probably acts on synapses or the hippocampus or something. Here are three neuroscience papers which vaguely remind us of our form of therapy. One day, neuroscience will catch up to us and realize that the principles of our form of therapy are the principles that govern the organization of the entire brain – if not all of multicellular life.
I noticed some similarities between Cobb and Krownapple’s book and the above description. I’m nor sure if (or why) this will hold true as I read more in the same vein.
Get this book. If you insist. It might make you a slightly nicer person? On the margin. It probably won’t fix the achievement gap.