We Are Not Commodities

Among American sports, baseball occupies an unique place as “America’s pastime.” Part of its charm for working class Americans is that baseball resists the tyranny of the clock and the standardization of time, the work discipline which defines wage labor in the factories of a market society. While basketball, football, soccer and hockey are all races against the clock as much as a competition with another team, baseball has its own distinct rhythms, which are quite different game to game, pitcher to pitcher and batter to batter. If anything, time in baseball conforms to the patterns of nature — the ever hopeful moments of spring, the hot proving ground of the summer, the final and decisive moments of the fall. There even was a time, long valiantly defended by fans of the Chicago Cubs, when baseball games ended with the dusk. Seen in this light, one can understand why baseball has given rise to “traditionalists” and “purists” — defenders of the unique character of baseball — in a way that has never taken place with other American sports.

Take a moment to recall this context, before you read Andrew Tabor’s commentary on the exchange between Kevin Carey and myself over the applicability of the statistical measures of the Oakland A’s Billy Beane to value-added evaluation of teachers in education. Then gird yourself. You will quickly find yourself waist deep in a big muddy of ad hominem arguments, which begin with an all-out Tabor assault on the distinguished New York Times sports columnist Murray Chass, the author of the column I cited as criticism of Beane’s statistical measures. Chass is a baseball “traditionalist,” and for Tabor this means he is “obnoxiously wrong,” “grating,” “a crotchety, stubborn, pigheaded SOB,” …well you get the drift. And that’s only the half of it. It seems that the fact I cited Murray Chass is grounds for another wave of ad hominems aimed in my direction: this proves that I am “witless” and “engaging in disingenuous propaganda.” “Very UFT of you,” he writes about me, as I were supposed to take this as the supreme insult.

But wade through the invective, because in an inadvertent way, Tabor sheds some light on the subject. Not in the straw men he demolishes, such as when he substitutes the nonsensical claim that Beane’s operation is the first use of statistics in baseball for criticism of Beane’s attempt to replace expert human judgment, wholesale, with statistical measures. But there is insight in the position Tabor — and his anonymous baseball management analyst — puts forward as a defense of Beane’s method. Here’s what the analyst writes, to Tabor’s approval:

Moneyball was about the identification and exploitation of undervalued commodities. This is not applying statistics to baseball, it is applying business acumen to baseball, and understanding players as commodities…

the point of Moneyball was that it was time to move further toward the analytical commodity side of the spectrum and away from the personal interpretation of scouts…

Is identifying undervalued commodities, the true point of Moneyball, applicable to recruiting quality educators? Perhaps.

If you have wondered why well-paid baseball players still need a union, read those passages once again. Curt Flood once spoke eloquently for baseball players on this very subject, although if Tabor’s contact is any indication, baseball management still does not grasp the import of Flood’s message. The very same statement can be made for teachers: We are not commodities, property to be bought and sold on a marketplace, waiting to be exploited by someone with “business acumen.” We are men and women, proud of our profession, skilled in our craft and dedicated to our students. And as long as our union is standing, it will defend that profession, that craft and those students against those who would reduce us to a commodity.

Tabor’s suggestion that reducing teachers to commodities has anything to do with improving education is a perspective only possible from outside of actual classrooms and schools. Ever since Socrates, teachers have known that at its core, education is a matter of human relationship and human dialogue, between ourselves and our students. It is about the development — not the exploitation — of human potential.

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