Original URL: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_10/reviews/index.html

Torin Monahan. Globalization, technological change and public education. London: Routledge, 2005. cloth, 213 p., ISBN 0–415–95103–8, US$26.95. Routledge: http://www.routledge-ny.com

Responding to the inducement of grant monies, members of a Puente Piedra College (pseudonym) committee, during the Fall 2005 semester, squabble over defining, and then creating outcome–based measures for, the institution’s official notion of information literacy. In the end, they formulate the narrowest of all possible definitions and the attendant outcome measures, duly cataloged and embedded across specific courses. Peering at the emailed MS Word table composed by a tenured full professor in the social sciences, I blanch, slightly, as the Jehovahsque mini–proclamations–on–a–template, distributed through that discipline’s curriculum, imperceptibly flickers on the LCD screen: “The student shall learn how to construct an Excel spreadsheet,” or “The student will be required to gain a working knowledge of PowerPoint.” While the development of modest technical proficiency in Microsoft Office modules is useful, defining such narrow competences as “information literacy,” is, at best, an ersatz appellation.

For this committee, crafting an official definition that fostered habits of critical reflection on and assessment of emerging information sources and representational formats was not of sufficient import. Also absent was an open acknowledgement of how technological ensembles, because they differentially constitute bodies, identities, discourses, networks and relations of power, are deeply, profoundly and inherently political. The committee’s final product reinforced an industrial–era, de facto Fordist sensibility of working–class students as malleable objects, subjected to power, rather than agents actively exercising power. What was left on the committee’s “cutting room floor” was as revealing as what was meticulously cleansed and shrink–wrapped for presentation to the institution’s internal and external clients.

Torin Monahan’s Globalization, technological change and public education frequently engages such definitional issues. Pace Foucault, Monahan redirects these questions from the typical fussing over performativity issues (How do we document whether, and how well, “this or that” works?) to how information technologies, and their accompanying ideologies and operational definitions, produce and reproduce social relations and networks of power. Although Monahan’s object is the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), a massive K–12 system with a very different history and demography than Puente Piedra, the external forces and internal logics reshaping public education are so broad, systematic and deep that his ideas and experiences are recognizable, across all levels of U.S. public education, in the first decade of the twenty–first century.

Key to Monahan’s definitional approach is, in part, the combination of two notions. First, Monahan discards the narrow and often self–serving fiction that information technology ensembles are but mere pedagogical “tools.” Instead, Monahan draws on the more productive analytical frame of technologies as social actants (derived from the field of science and technology studies) and, more specifically, as forms of media. Secondly, as social actants and embedded media, information technologies are also artifacts of a macro–political economy. For Monahan, how information technologies and their enabling ideologies (and accountability routines) are deployed in the LAUSD illustrates a primary social fact: In the manner they are often aggressively touted and formally implemented across public education sites, information technologies are often the distilled products of a massing of early twenty–first century corporatist social control and capital extraction mechanisms, typical of globalization and its enabling ideology, neo–liberalism. The major effect is a rapid and intensive re–engineering of the mitochondria of U.S. public education. As Carlos Alberto Torres notes in his foreword, Monahan’s conclusion is

“... that the built pedagogy of technologized schools shuffles traditional relations between students and teachers, [as] it dramatically increases [the nourishment of the private sector while intensifying] bureaucratic control over both groups while aggravating their institutional vulnerability.” (p. x)

How this happens, in Monahan’s multi–site ethnography of the LAUSD, is a layered, complex, fragmented, resisted, sometimes contradictory and always overdetermined process. It is to Monahan’s credit that he does not gloss over the profuse details. Fortunately, he’s able to corral a significant element of the phenomena, across various institutional actors, networks, and spaces, by weaving through his narrative the notion of “fragmented centralization.” As a meta–governance element, the logic of “fragmented centralization” spreads across spatial and institutional strata, from classrooms to boardrooms. What does Monahan mean by “fragmented centralization?”

“[Despite] the ostensible decentralizing valences of information technologies, a form of centralized control persists ...

[In] fragmented centralization ... decision–making authority is ... more centralized [reviewer’s emphasis] while accountability for centrally made decisions is ... more distributed [reviewer’s emphasis] down the hierarchy ... This ... gives organizations the appearance of responsible management but simultaneously decreases worker autonomy while intensifying workloads ... Centralization is now a stealth endeavor hidden in the seemingly apolitical settings of specifications and standards while risk and responsibility are fragmented and copiously distributed to those on multiple peripheries ... .” (pp. 94, 106)

Composed from a variable mélange of Fordist and post–Fordist economic and organizational logics, fragmented centralization is reinforced by historical, structural and operative factors. These include pre–existent physical and social architecture; durable organizational fealty systems; the pre–conditions set by external funding and granting agencies; day–to–day corporatist specification and operational standards; risk avoidance restrictions imposed by actuarial planners, etc. So, rather than the protean “flexible specialization” attributed to an idealized and mythical “lean” post–Fordist organization, Monahan argues that this (below) is what we get:

“[LAUSD] mutates in response to changing perceptions of the role of education in society; it accepts the responsibilities given to it by funding agencies, industry, and the public ... it performs elaborate rituals of disclosure and restructuring ... it develops many cooperative relationships ... [while] feed[ing] the global economy with generous industry contracts and pliable workers and consumers. In other words, [LAUSD] flexibly adapts to the global economy but does not provide a flexible environment for workers or students. This current form is the paradigm for a post–Fordist organization.” (p. 109)

As I was reading Monahan’s description, Puente Piedra’s four–color glossy Annual Report arrived, via post. The report’s themes reinforced Monahan’s observations. For example, at the top of page 12, in large type, capitalized and bolded was the assertion: “We have a responsibility to be agile, dynamic and responsive.” The text below this particular headline reads, in part, as follows:

“Puente Piedra’s success is predicated on our ability to be proactive and nimble. It also demands that, on occasion, we change our ways of thinking ... to further marshal our resources and coordinate our endeavors so we can be wherever we are needed ... The people we serve told us that new thinking was needed to ... ensure consistency ... The [endowment] has grown ... This reliable, private stream of revenue has helped ... [offset] ... fluctuating state appropriations.”

The Annual Report enthusiastically emphasizes technological development and expansion:

“Perhaps nothing speaks to Puente Piedra’s innovative spirit as much as the continued growth and use of technology in teaching and learning. A full (sic) 100 percent of first–year students came to campus in 2004 with laptop computers ready to connect to our wireless infrastructure ... (p. 5)

To walk into one of our classrooms is to be amazed ... the majority [have] ... faculty computing stations, LCD projectors and high–speed wireless network transceivers ...” (p. 6)

Although it’s easy to be entranced by technological toys, Monahan reminds us of a basic lesson, one that I frequently encounter in the classroom: “Computers do not signal equity,” (p. 154) nor genuine flexibility, in institutional environments, anymore than standardized test scores reflects deep learning. Whether at the LAUSD or Puente Piedra, information technology deployments in public education are often part of a condition where “self–governance and self-adaptation to system rigidities become naturalized.” (p. 149) What are the common systemic internal rigidities that have an elective affinity with the swarming of information technologies in U.S. public education? According to Monahan, they are as follows:

First, the rapid growth of information technologies in schools is tightly paired with an equal or greater growth in “audit culture,” imposed in the name of global competitiveness, and enforced by various levels of accreditors. “Audit cultures” are micro–accountability routines that reformat institutional practices and individuals as “auditable.” “Audit culture” produces forms of “self–policing and obsessive documentation” that multiply like rabbits.

Secondly, Monahan discusses the ramping up of “regulation culture,” a term that refers to “the many laws ... policies, tests and other mechanisms that govern practices within public spaces.” Pace Foucault, these can be seen as the formal and informal intensification of governmentality effects that shape “the conduct of conduct.” Most interesting is a third term, coined by Monahan’s LAUSD informants: “Firewall culture.” Firewall culture can be described as a form of individual and institutional reaction against the unwanted visibility produced by audit and regulation regimes. Generally, such reactions consist of setting up communication outside the institution’s zone of recordability. The results of such behavior can be positive, negative and, at times, paradoxical. (For example, a firewall strategy, such as the use of a non–institutional e–mail address, may shield low–level actors from excessive scrutiny. However, the same strategies may also be used by those who actively construct and police zones of visibility, as well, when these auditors, regulators or other “policing agents” desire the same invisibility). Writ large, the result is an increasingly self–policed, suspicious and restricted communicative environment that Monahan tags as inherently inimical to deep learning.

Clearly, much in Monahan’s book is starkly recognizable. In its format, the text’s conceptual organization is stratified. Monahan unpacks his ideas by semi–compartmentalizing different levels of his object, moving from the physical spaces of classrooms, to the analysis of the distortions and exclusions in the neo–liberal verbal tropes than promote information technologies, and then to the tensions between local IT personnel in schools, and their nemesis at the LAUSD central office. The tensions between the standardization and control ethos of “central office” and the variant, site specific needs and coping strategies that typify the multiple, distributed periphery of specific schools are usefully reframed in subsequent chapters (on “Fragmented Centralization,” “Policy Games,” and “Flexible Governance,” where ethnography meets political economy and contemporary theory). In the next to the last chapter, “Future Imaginaries,” Monahan offers up counterstrategies to mitigate the restrictiveness imposed by early twenty–first century techno–pedagogical practices, even as he shows us a frightening rendition of an ideal learning environment, sketched by one LAUSD student, that resembles the architecture of a Nazi concentration camp. In the brief final chapter, Monahan discusses the role of neo–liberal ideology, as the master narrative for the intensification of social control via technological means. Ultimately, Monahan charges his readers with the task of redeploying information technologies to ferret out, nurture, amplify and invent practices of freedom. In public education, we should, and we must, he says, foster creative, productive and deeply human interactions, mediated via information technologies, rather than use these ensembles to subject students, faculty and staff to the new ghosts of excessive social control embedded in the distributed machinery of capital.

Monahan has generated a useful, troubling and thought–provoking set of ideas and observations, in his first book. For this reader, the author was something of a proverbial Jacob, wrestling with the angel (the LAUSD, his object of analysis). The resistant angel finally responded by flooding Jacob with a tumult of connections and ideas. The author worked diligently to shape this cornucopia into a semi–pliant narrative. But this is such a rich, complex and important topic that the controlled profusion is, on balance, far more stimulating than distracting. (Monahan’s deft use of tropes is a substantial asset, in this context). If there is an area of the text that is underdeveloped, it is in the truncated references to public relations and marketing culture. With U.S. public education increasingly driven by a notion that education is a private, rather than a public good, public relations and “relationship marketing” discourses and practices have become more prominent part of institutional strategies. Across the U.S., top administrators and their Chief Information Officers (CIOs) diligently police the details of self-representation in furtherance of positive “brand” identification. However, in all fairness to Monahan, the phenomenon of “branding” in public education is a separate, if closely aligned, object of inquiry. With this book, Monahan has already given us plenty of material to chew on. In its own way, the book’s overarching message is an academic equivalent of the Buffalo Springfield’s Vietnam–era song, For what it’s worth: “I think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound, everybody look [at] what’s going down.” — Dion Dennis, Department of Criminal Justice, Bridgewater (Mass.) State College.

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