If you interested in a model of what is going on with all these equity audits in Urbana School District 116, here’s one.
Imagine a group of social manipulators aiming to address a need: a thing that the schemers pretend they can deliver. They start with claiming that the thing, – no, the Thing, – is so special, that it’s impossible without looking a moron (or jeopardizing your job), to state that the precious Thing they peddle just does not exist. The desperate clients believe them.
What happens next?
The hucksters focus, of course, on the sublime properties of the marvelous Thing, and on the skills necessary to understand it properly. They introduce a fancy argot (adds a scientific feel) necessary to describe the Thing, and. perhaps, long lists of definitions, and require a rigorous protocol of addressing the features of their amazing product.
Then the social pressure kicks in. One should either make a (seemingly risky) step telling what one thinks, – no, what one sees, – or to take the easy path, and to comment on this or that feature of the construct. One by one people take the path of least resistance. Step by step, the social contagion takes over, and lo and behold, soon most everyone succumbs to the manufactured consensus. No one anymore is asking whether the Thing is there in the first place, but rather what are its patterns and colors, moire and texture.
And then it gets serious.
The remarkable parable by Andersen feels so relevant today, continues to resonate so strongly because it reflects a very natural social dynamics.
Let’s briefly analyze it in game-theoretic terms. In our setup, there are three classes of players: the swindlers, the mark (the emperor) and the enablers (the courtiers).
The emperor and the swindlers have clear preferences: the emperor wants to look nice, the crooks desire precious gold and silk. The enablers initially have no skin in the game. But then the swindlers get the buy-in from the emperor (who expects a reward, – everyone praising his good looks) thus introducing costs for the deviation from the narrative.
At this moment the rules change: as long as you talk about the Thing you’re fine, but to question its existence is costly.
From the game-theoretical perspective, the situation is quite clear: we have a mechanism that generates a socially inefficient Nash equilibrium – stable, at least as long as alternatives are considered at the level of an individual, – arrangement of the social actions: once you’re there, it’s hard to break.
So the faithful old minister went into the hall, where the knaves were working with all their might, at their empty looms. “What can be the meaning of this?” thought the old man, opening his eyes very wide. “I cannot discover the least bit of thread on the looms.” However, he did not express his thoughts aloud.
The impostors requested him very courteously to be so good as to come nearer their looms; and then asked him whether the design pleased him, and whether the colors were not very beautiful; at the same time pointing to the empty frames. The poor old minister looked and looked, he could not discover anything on the looms, for a very good reason, viz: there was nothing there.<…>
“Well, Sir Minister!” said one of the knaves, still pretending to work. “You do not say whether the stuff pleases you.”
“Oh, it is excellent!” replied the old minister, looking at the loom through his spectacles. “This pattern, and the colors, yes, I will tell the Emperor without delay, how very beautiful I think them.”
Everyone is stuck.
Of course, the real life is far more exciting than our little model. For one, the hucksters themselves are not one unit: there might be competing teams. What is more, there might even be a cottage industry of swindlers whose business is to assert that the shiny Thing is the epitome of Un-Americanness, and should be fought relentlessly (donations button here, thank you very much). The existence of the Thing benefits both sides!
Naturally, the operational and aesthetic modalities of the pro- and opponents of the Thing are remarkably similar: they love alliterations (while, say, TEI strives to equip, empower, and engage, their hard-hitting ideological opponents profess to empower, engage and expose…), lists of definitions (the right wing swindlers promulgate their definitions of the Thing with as much gusto as our knaves spin their empty looms); they send their emissaries to all the places they see their competitors active. For all practical purposes, the fierce combatants for and against the Thing are companions in the same business model, extracting very tangible benefits from the fight over literally nothing.
Fighting these battles in a bottle requires developing some specialized skills like adopting codified language to keep narrative unchallenged. When the hucksters talk about something like “shifting my mindset to one that is restorative and intentional towards supporting the whole child,” it becomes quite difficult to ask, what the hell this means (“Is it possible that I am a simpleton? I have never thought so myself; and no one must know it now if I am so“).
To retain social status, while avoiding the increasingly costly entanglement into the performative fight between tribes of swindlers, the enablers become sharply incentivized to label the fighters over the Thing as the experts, possessing knowledge far exceeding theirs. This stance has the advantage of relieving the enablers of responsibility to examine in any fashion the basic premises of the deal they are enabling.
Why should they indeed? As the president of the Board of Education in USD116 said, “we are wardens of public money, not experts” in the Thing. So they have no choice but to authorize whichever the experts will converge on. The members of the Board compare the different textures and colors of the fabric the knaves produced, – I mean, whether the proposed audits are more or less qualitatively tilted, and what software the peddlers are using, but not one of them questions the fundamental issue: how specifically these audits and the roadmaps they approev would help underserved children. Because they perfectly know they won’t, but cannot say that aloud.
And they do it while there are very specific, very clear questions to answer: are we testing our kids enough for dyslexia or innumeracy? Are we throwing enough resources at the cases where the educational lags are discovered? Would the lagging children benefit from being put into smaller groups with focused help, and how much, and where should we sacrifice to afford that? Is whole language vs. phonic approach good for the disadvantaged populations? Where the volunteers are especially needed to close the educational gaps?
Working hard on these and myriad of similar mundane, difficult, boring problems is hard work that would make a lot of difference. That cloth would be warm. It would be there. But within the structure of our educational system, those outcomes do not translate into the rewards for the enablers. Questioning the necessity of the empty fights about the intentionality, or the provenance of the weavers, or Marxist roots of the critical race theory, – that could lead to public opprobrium. That is costly.
And so the show goes on.
One of the hardest things about social institutions is to change the collective behaviors within the given payoff structure. The stable institutions we observe are stable intrinsically (those that weren’t aren’t here anymore). To restructure a stable organization in an essential way requires enormous coordination. Even in small organizations with a lot of strong personalities, – like Politbureau in the Soviet Union, – the coups were rare, because one needed a remarkable degree of (sub)group commitment to overcome the risk of the co-conspirators defecting back to the status quo.
This, clearly, is the basis of so many social ills, including the many manifestations structural racism: once the stable modality of an institution has formed, all the players are dissuaded by the structures of societal and other rewards from reneging on the current behavior. Hence only a massive collective action would reform the organization, something that is hard to achieve and that typical emerges only in response to a significant exogenous upheaval.
Or one can try to change our (perceived) reward structure. Calling out the simulacra of performative DEI actions is a good first step. It should be followed with the understanding the deadweight societal costs the fake weavers imposed on us, to extract their profits. Accepting the fake weavers rules only extends the patterns of inaction and inefficiency where it matters most, where the inequities are especially glaring.
And, perhaps, that new clarity would lead to attention to the actual outcomes, – not the numbers of buildings where the lists of definitions are exhibited, not the hours of social-emotional professional development, but focussed deployment of science-based modern teaching methods, efficiency driven allocation of resources, true, not symbolic, involvement of the people of the city.
Or not. In the end of the Emperor’s New Clothes, even after the presumably liberating call “But the Emperor has nothing at all on!” nothing changes for the emperor and the courtiers: “The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold“.
(What a remarkable preview of the fundamental disconnects of words and realities in modern America: something that we associate with the internet-driven, Trump facilitated dysfunction was brilliantly predicted or observed almost two centuries ago…)
So the administration and the members of the Board will continue to waste their time and attention span on discussing qualitative versus quantitative, messages of solidarity, and glossaries of definitions. That is how they think their success or failure in fighting inequity is measured: by who is better doing the performative dance.
But ultimately this is up to us. The administration of Urbana School District is not a Politbureau. They are responsible to the Board, and the Board is responsible to us. And if the Board feels they can “appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold”, we cannot and shouldn’t.
We owe it to the weakest among us.