THE PRIORITY OF DEMOCRACY TO EDUCATION RESEARCH KEVIN MURRAY B.A., University of New Hampshire, 2008 M.A.T., University of New Hampshire, 2010 University of Colorado Boulder A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Education 2017 This dissertation entitled: The Priority of Democracy to Education Research Written by Kevin Murray has been approved for the School of Education Dr. Kenneth R. Howe, Chair Dr. Daniel P. Liston Dr. Michele S. Moses Dr. Janice Peck Dr. Terri S. Wilson Date The final copy of this dissertation has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. Murray, Kevin (Ph.D., Education) The Priority of Democracy to Education Research Dissertation Directed by Professor Kenneth R. Howe This dissertation comprises three independent but related papers (chapters 2-4), framed by an introduction (chapter 1) and a conclusion (chapter 5). The main theme of the work is that democracy should be seen as foundational to – prior to – education research. Drawing on pragmatism and feminist philosophy of science, I make the case that democracy is threaded into the constitutive fabric of good education research and, indeed, of good social science in general. The benefits of democratic values for education research are at once ethical and epistemic. Education research suffers when it is not thoroughly permeated by democratic values. But many education researchers continue to neglect the epistemic significance of democracy for education research. They chase after “pure” education research, insulated from moral and political values, to set education research on absolute foundations. I contend that the hunt for pure education research should be abandoned once and for all: it is unattainable, grounded in a fatally flawed conception of social science, and would prove, in any case, undesirable in democratic society. I argue that neoliberalism, in particular, has powerfully incentivized the quest for pure education research, pushing many education researchers to adopt a prestigious but wrong-headed and anti-democratic model of social science. iii CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1 Organization of the Work .................................................................................... 7 Central Concepts ................................................................................................ 10 Democracy ............................................................................................. 10 Pragmatism ............................................................................................ 12 Feminism and Feminist Philosophy of Science ..................................... 15 Neoliberalism ......................................................................................... 18 Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 30 CHAPTER 2. THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION FOR DEMOCRACY IN EDUCATION RESEARCH .................................................................................. 33 Values and Education Research ......................................................................... 33 Positivism ............................................................................................... 36 Neopositivism ......................................................................................... 38 Feminist Pragmatism ............................................................................. 44 An Objection to Feminist Pragmatism ................................................... 52 Democracy and Education Research ................................................................. 56 Neglecting Democracy in Education Research .................................................. 64 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...70 Bibliography…………………………………...………………………….……72 CHAPTER 3. DEMOCRACY AND THE DEMARCATION PROBLEM IN EDUCATION RESEARCH ....................................................................................... 75 The Education Science Question ....................................................................... 77 iv Kuhn and the Demarcation Problem .................................................................. 81 Neoliberalism and the Demarcation Problem .................................................... 87 Neoliberal Funding Cuts ........................................................................ 90 Neoliberal Audit Culture ........................................................................ 97 Democracy and Demarcation ............................................................................. 99 Anti-Democratic Demarcation ............................................................. 104 Is Demarcation Possible in Education Research? ............................... 109 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………... 116 Bibliography………………………………………………………………… 119 CHAPTER 4. NEGLECTING DEMOCRACY IN EDUCATION RESEACH AND POLICY: SCHOOL REPORT CARD ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEMS .............. 122 School Report Cards ........................................................................................ 124 Rationales for School Report Cards ................................................................. 126 The Validity of School Report Cards as a Measure of School Quality ........... 130 The Validity of School Report Cards as a Policy Instrument .......................... 138 The Validity of School Report Cards as a Democratic Assessment Framework…………………………………………………………… ........... 146 Neglecting Democratic Educational Outcomes ................................... 147 Imposing (Neoliberal) Conceptions of Schooling and School Quality...................................................................................................151 Presuming “Pure” Conceptions of Schooling and School Quality .... .158 Conclusion and Recommendations .................................................................. 162 Bibliography…………………………………………………………… ........ 175 v CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION ................................................................................. 180 Bibliography……………………………………………………………… .... 188 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................. 189 vi TABLES TABLE 1. State Report Card Accountability Systems…………………………………165 vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION Democracy is not just one form of social life among other workable forms of social life; it is the precondition for the full application of intelligence to the solution of social problems. Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy It now seems commonplace, even boring, to state that the world has been thoroughly disenchanted. Many citizens in liberal democracy do not see meaning floating, independently, beyond human activity. These citizens do not wait for meaning to reveal itself to them, because they know that it will never come. They find it difficult to imagine the “good life” as submission to some external authority. While another set of citizens will disagree, and seek comfort and answers in that external authority, many of us, most of the time, are comfortable to live in this way: we see our lives, our society and our customs, not as historically fixed, but rather as continually created and refined in conversation with fellow human beings. Richard Rorty captures this sensibility: in liberal democracy, he writes, “social institutions can be viewed as experiments in cooperation rather than as attempts to embody a universal and ahistorical order.”1 We citizens live together, as harmoniously as we can, and build our lives and our communities along the way. We learn from past human experiments, but no universal scheme for living and living together has been handed down to us. 1 Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Prospects for a Common Morality, eds. John P. Reeder and Gene Outka (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 274. 1 But, at least in education research, we are tempted to relapse. Many education researchers often do relapse. They are tempted to re-enchant the world with science. They work to set up “pure” science, scientific inquiry said to be free from values, norms, and other contextual ephemera, as a kind of surrogate god. They imagine that, by appealing to this deity, they can discern the true nature of the world, independent of human minds and human values. They imagine that they can discover which educational interventions really do work to promote student learning, blocking out the noise of the tiresome, perpetual political struggle over education. It is not difficult to understand why many education researchers feel the siren call of pure science. The democratic terrain where measured deliberation and, too often, unreasonable struggle over education take place is messy. Populated by a disorienting range of competing values and practices, it resists neat categorization in inquiry. Pure science would allow us to skip over the foggy landscape of democracy. It would provide a dose of “metaphysical comfort”2: it would inure us to the creeping dread that all we can have is an endless struggle among limited perspectives, each as blind and as dumb as the next. Those who relapse into the quest for pure education science