What leads “diversity warriors” to oppose empirical inquiry?
Surprisingly for a volume aimed at practitioners, the book begins with a philosophical preface that asks, “How do we know what we know?” The authors assert that we too often reduce our understanding of what we know to that which adheres to “the Western theory of knowledge known as empiricism—which emphasizes the role of sensory evidence and patterns in the formation of ideas rather than innate ideas or traditions—and its relative, the scientific paradigm of positivism.”
Safir and Dugan draw a parallel between early anthropologists’ exploitative research on indigenous people and the way school systems assess student learning. In the authors’ telling, those who measure students are akin to Western researchers who imposed their cultural values on native populations. By extension, tests, surveys, and indicators of student behavior are instruments of control akin to the film footage, notebooks, and photographic records kept by anthropologists. This parallelism isn’t the beginning of their critique of measurement in education; it is the entirety of their argument.
If Safir and Dugan were aiming to persuade readers, they would have constructed evidence-based arguments against testing and other forms of quantitative data collection. Instead they invoke buzzwords and cite sources as if they hold magical powers. To defend their rejection of evidence as a foundation of knowledge, they rely mainly on Afrocentric epistemology, a choice that is both bizarre and unconvincing. Simply affirming “spirituality, communalism, cooperation, ethics, and morality” and African American liberation as a counterpoint to measurement and empirical inquiry is unpersuasive. The book reads more like a hymnal with Biblical citations than a work of scholarship based on reasoned argument. It requires that the reader embrace its assertions as a matter of faith.
What exactly do Safir and Dugan mean by street data? “Street data is a decolonizing form of knowledge that honors Indigenous, Afrocentric, and other non-Western ways of knowing.” They continue: “At the heart of this book lies an existential question: Why do we rely on current forms of data, and what would happen if we simply stopped . . . and embraced a new model?”
Come now. We rely on “current forms of data” to answer important questions about students, teachers, and the policies that structure their work. We rely on those data when deciding to what degree class-sizes affect learning. We rely on them when judging how schools are doing at advancing emerging bilingual students towards English fluency. To call this an “existential question” is hyperbolic. To pose “Indigenous” and “Afrocentric ways of knowing” as being in opposition to empiricism is not just an error of historical interpretation—empiricism was born among the pre-Socratics in Greece and advanced in Egypt—it is racial reductionism. The authors denigrate everything they view as European or “white” while presenting everything not white as praiseworthy. Reasoning this shallow should raise hackles, not boost a book to top-tier sales rankings.
