I think it's fair to say that, in education policy, some of us have gone too far. People who disagree with us are depicted as not merely wrong, but evil.
This characterization is most noticeable in the what is broadly called the reform movement.
People who advocate reforms such as merit pay, the use of value added models of teacher evaluation, charter schools, and vouchers are not merely labeled misguided because these reforms won't work. They are depicted as bad people who are unsympathetic to the difficulty of teaching and who are in the pockets of the rich.
Likewise, those who see value in teacher's unions, who are leery of current methods of teacher evaluation, who think that vouchers threaten the neighborhood character of schools are not merely wrong: they are accused of looking out for the welfare of lousy teachers.
And of course both sides are accused of "not caring about kids."
Why am I bringing all this up on a blog called "Science and Education?" Because studies of ingroup and outgroup thinking show that people who disagree with us are seen as immoral.
A recent study (Leach, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2007) evaluated three dimensions of ingroup status: sociability, competence, and morality. They reported that we like groups we are a part of and think the group is special because it is moral. The most important reason that we deem our group superior to other groups is not that we are smarter or more likeable; we are on the side of right.
Another comforting fiction: we think that we know what people on the other side of an issue would say, or how they would behave.
For example, one study from the 1990's (Robinson, Keltner, Ward & Ross, 1995) investigated the reactions of liberals and conservatives to the Howard Beach incident: a young Black man was struck and killed by a car as he was running away from a group of White pursuers in the Howard Beach neighborhood of New York City. After reading a synopsis of the incident, subjects were asked a series of questions meant to probe what they thought about (1) who was responsible for the death (2) the role of race in the incident, (3) the severity of the criminal sentences for the White teens.
Subjects were also asked to judge how liberals and conservatives would answer these questions.
In sum, we think that people who agree with us are moral, and people who disagree with us, less so. Further, we think that we know how other people will interpret complicated situations--they will driven more by ideology than by facts.
Of all the bloggers, pundits, reporters, researchers, etc. I know, I can think of two who I would say are mean-spirited--both of them unrelentingly vitriolic, I'm guessing in some wretched effort to resolve personal disappointments.
Of the remaining hundreds, all give every evidence of sincerity and of genuine passion for education.
So this is a call for fewer blog postings that, implicitly or explicitly, denigrate the other person's motives, or that offer a knowing nod with the claim "we all know what those people think."
It may be a natural bias, but it makes for a boring read.
Leach, C. W., Ellemers, N., & Barreto, M. (2007). Group virtue: The importance of morality (versus competence and sociability) in the positive
evaluation of in-groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
Robinson, R. J., Keltner, D., Ward, A., & Ross, L. (1995). Actual versus assumed differences in construal: "Naive Realism" in intergroup perception and conflict. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 404-417.