Innovation discourse produces serial policy failure and structural violence- old solutions FTW!

(Simon, Editor@BostonReview , 9-10)

Education — a field in which innovation is not just a buzzword, but sine qua non — provides a case in point. Innovation has brought us charter schools, performance pay for teachers, de-unionization, vouchers, Teach for America and similar programs that ensure a steady flow of inexperienced educators, cash incentives for student achievement, high-stakes testing, multilingual pedagogy, and increasingly standardized curricula focused on math, reading, and science at the expense of music, visual arts, home economics, and physical education. Most of these innovations are intended to fix an achievement gap, as measured by standardized tests, between whites and people of color, poor and rich. Yet there seems to be little recognition of the fact that the achievement gap is not the disease, but rather the symptom. The diseases are systemic racism and poverty. Those are not going to be eliminated by innovations in education. By “tinkering toward utopia” through the schools, to borrow a phrase from education-reform historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban, we are ignoring the true challenge, a challenge that Americans prefer to believe does not exist. So here innovation is presented as a solution-in-itself, with no normative content: we’re just trying to get those numbers to even out. Not surprisingly, the most heavily promoted education innovations are corporatist in nature, favoring market-style fixes that are also presented as non-ideological, as is the market system itself. As in education, similarly in the arts. Here innovation colonizes other values and displaces the kinds of questions we have always asked about art, questions that some of us, especially those who think about and write criticism, might foolishly have thought were essential to art itself. Conflicts over what beauty is and what should be art’s purpose get muscled out. Where one might have seen art as a tool for political expression, community engagement, or deepening spiritual commitment, the zeal for innovation says art need only be a vessel for novelty. Whatever form that novelty takes, the work will be judged quantitatively, according to its distance from what came before. Novelty may be a useful criterion when we judge the success and failure of a creative work. But it shouldn’t be the only criterion, or even emphasized. Just as it shouldn’t be the only or primary watchword in politics and education. Perhaps the solution to the conflict in Israel and Palestine is an old one: democracy for everyone who lives there. Perhaps the solution to the achievement gap is an old one: welfare and affordable childcare, to combat the pathologies bred by poverty in the five years before kindergarten. But we don’t want to rehash those arguments, do we? We’d prefer to think that those ethical and ideological conflicts aren’t real after all, or are only as real as our imaginations are stunted. Will our faith in innovation be rewarded? Will the fetish for new ideas that we see in TED Talks, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the World Economic Forum ideas lab, Obama’s speeches, and the endless stream of idea-of-the-moment journalism at last prove its worth? Maybe. Or maybe it will go on doing principally what it does now: offering the false hope that we will one day conquer exhaustion, frustration, boredom, ourselves.