Friday Fragments, September 10th
Twitter thread on teaching in pandemic semester #3, the "sludge" of bureaucracy, and PlaySpace
What I’m reading…
Twitter isn’t the best media for longer pieces, so let’s hope that Carl Bergstrom decides at some point to piece this thread together into an article or blog post, because there are plenty of insights and advice on teaching if you read down the thread.
Philip K. Howard’s review of Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do About It (by Cass R. Sunstein) has piqued my interest in reading the book.
Howard summarizes the basic premise of the book:
Sludge is intended to be a clarion call to clean out the time-wasting red tape that bogs people down in many work settings, including in schools: “In education, there is far too much sludge, and it hurts students, teachers, and parents alike,” he writes. Sunstein sees sludge as a grab bag of “paperwork requirements, waiting time, reporting requirements, clearance processes, and the like.”
While Howard’s review veers off into broader critiques of the functioning of modern government, a central focus of his work with the Campaign for Common Good, notes about the increased administrative burden on schools and teachers certainly ring true. I’m not sure that Howard’s assertion that “an unbroken chain of accountability is key” to de-sludging bureaucracies is one that I agree with, given the long and complex history behind the idea of “accountability,” but I’m certainly interested in reading more.
If you want more on red tape and bureaucracy, I also read an essay by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic, “The Time Tax,” Howard recommends. Lowery explains the “time tax” as the administrative burdens placed on citizens who are trying to obtain benefits they are owed:
I started thinking about these kinds of administrative burdens as the “time tax”—a levy of paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens in exchange for benefits that putatively exist to help them. This time tax is a public-policy cancer, mediating every American’s relationship with the government and wasting countless precious hours of people’s time…The time tax is worse for individuals who are struggling than for the rich; larger for Black families than for white families; harder on the sick than on the healthy. It is a regressive filter undercutting every progressive policy we have.
In some potentially interesting tech news, Google Workspace acquires Playspace, a service that integrates video, screenshare, whiteboard, calendars, and Slack, and organizes “rooms” for teams to drop into. If you’re on a Google campus, this might be something available - probably not soon, but at some point in the future.