Mate Wierdl, a professor of mathematics at the University of Memphis, explains to another reader why the management model of education is different from that of business:
“Another reader wrote: “Before you even ask those questions, I believe you have to establish a consensus about purpose. What are public schools supposed to accomplish? Then you ask, Are they accomplishing it? How well?”
“I gave my opinion on this in other posts in this blog thread: in math, kids need to understand math (calculating using crazy formulas they forget within a week is unimportant), they need to enjoy thinking, problem solving, experimenting.
“What teachers don’t accomplish very well is to get kids excited about learning. I submit, the main reason for this is overwork: US teachers and students have to work way too much. For example, in Hungary, a teacher’s daily load is four 45 min classes with 15 minute breaks between classes—about 60% of what US teachers have to endure.
“Since teachers have to keep kids excited, they also need to be excited, enthusiastic, but that’s impossible to do 6 hours a day—plus grading, preparing, communicating with parents. If we want to improve education, the first thing to do is reduce teaching load, and reduce school and home work time for kids.
“My understanding is that you are worried that if the public doesn’t look over the teachers’ shoulders, they won’t do a good job. But teachers have a completely different management style from corporations.
“Simplistically, there are two kinds of evaluation/management systems. One is what we can call the military style with its hierarchical chain of authority. This is what seems to be preferred by big corporations: the “CEO system”.
“The other one is the democratic management system where each worker has full authority over her work. In this system, the quality of work is ensured by a peer review process. This democratic management system has been used in education, but many small businesses have been using it too.
“The controversy is that powerful people like Gates, who believe in the almighty CEO system, refused to believe that the democratic system works well in education—or anywhere, and so they decided to implement the military style management in education. This happened despite the fact that the US had the best higher ed system in the world and it’s based on the democratic management system.
“When people on this blog are pissed about, say, Gates, and they say, they don’t want to be evaluated by a military system Gates invented for them, they don’t imply that they don’t want to be responsible to the public. No, they just have a democratic management system that has been working very well for decades, and in some instances, for centuries. What teachers see is that outsiders want to force a different management style on them which has been proven ineffective in education numerous times in the past.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is an excellent observation. And I organize my small company in this more democratic approach – hire good people and ask them to use their skills, insight, and intuition. It’s very powerful because the top down approach wastes vast amounts of ingenuity and insight.
Even more… Education is so complex that the ONLY people who know what’s right for a specific student are those at the front lines – the teachers.
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Teachers don’t necessarily know what’s “right” for students, but they certainly have a much better chance of it than Duncan, Pearson, or Gates…
Accountability (and reform in general) should not be an argument of absolutism. The key is to figure out what’s better from a list of options, without assuming any party or method is perfect.
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Students need to be taught how to be dissenters and be given the latitude to act on their dissent and critical thought. They need to understand and exercise the true meaning of education other than attend school to get a job. Education was not designed to get a career. Students today are not allowed to dream, think, or project. They are not allowed to question authority or much less the system. But then again, neither can a person working in a factory/store turning out a product or service that is only viewed as data and a means to measure output and a person’s value or worth. Students have become data points on a chart and are known more for how much they can remember, rather than how memorable they are as a person.
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Most reformers that I know personally would be just fine with a comprehensive peer review process as well that drove specific improvement plans, professional development, etc.
Unfortunately, what we have in most public schools is neither of the alternatives that the author mentions. Unfortunately, in most traditional public schools that I’m familiar with, teachers get 2 visits from an administrator (typically with little or no teaching experience).
This resembles the top down approach, but without any accountability because there are no consequences, positive or negative, based on the outcome of the review, and no ongoing individual professional development plan.
I’m sure it’s different in some places, but I’d maintain that most reformers and legislators just want to see a comprehensive plan that is in some way tied to the outcomes and has some differentiation.
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You will have to convince teachers of your assertion as to the goals of Reformers. First, your assumption is that schools are in need of Reform. Perhaps reasoned improvement is a better term. In most conditions, improvement is incremental and stands on the shoulders of giants. What appears revolutionary on the surface, is nearly always based on existing ideas and knowledge upon closer (honest) inspection. The hubris of scorched earth policies ignore the past at a peril, always trading one set of problems for another. We do not need fly-by-night Reformers who destroy what has taken years to build. Rather, we need reasoned thought, talking to actual educators and seeing what works, what doesn’t, and where are the obstacles. Right now, teachers are ignored at best, demonized at worst.
Second, no one can define outcomes without first agreeing what is being measured -if it can at all. Learning is like friendship, you know what it is when you experience it, there is no algorithm for creating it, and it is different for ever person. Teachers know that, Reformers do not. Reformers grow frustrated and choleric when confronting this fact. It is a big reason why the Reformers exact a perverse and vindictive type of retribution on teachers. The fact they cannot control teachers by metrics and must actually TRUST educators is a cognitive dissonance that Reformers resolve with all kinds of irrelevant and irrational ideas cloaked in bizarre rubrics, VAM, rigid standards, and meaningless tests.
Differentiation is easy – every person is inherently different. The Reformers seem obsessed with using any measure, even if only remotely based on an actual classroom environment, to force students and ultimately teachers to a guassian curve. It is as if the Reformers are either too lazy or too challenged to actually understand the complexities and nuances of education, and instead value simplistic models over reality. We then have such insanity of using test scores as the basis for improving test scores, not wanting to stop doing the wrong thing just because what we have been doing is wrong, and holding teachers accountable for knowledge they did not even teach. The idea of Reformer “accountability” seems to be confused with just firing the bottom 10% by some arbitrary measure until 100% of all teachers are above average. Maybe the idea is to intimidate and threaten teachers to become ideal pedagouges?
For the past 30 years since “A Nation at Risk” stoked American paranoia, teachers have been increasingly demonized, blamed, undermined, isolated, subjegated, marginalized, manipulated – all by self-appointed experts who insist on various incarnations of “accountability” and “consequences”. The one idea Reformers have not tried is “listening”.
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I don’t disagree that teaching is very complex and defies measurement in a lot of ways. However, when we’re talking about (for example) a 50% graduation rate at a high school as in my city, yes, the system needs improvement.
I’m not saying it to trivialize it or blame it on teachers. I mean it simply in that we have to do better than that or we’re pretty doomed as a country. We have more students from low income families than not, so we have to figure this out and be willing to spend what it takes to fix it.
Just a note on a guassian distribution, it is a natural phenomenon. What is unnatural is to assume that somehow all teachers are above average.
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Ask teachers about low graduation rates. Few politicians do. Central Limit Theorem is a wonderful thing, but teachers are not random and distributions vary. Never will I lose sight of the human factor as I continue learning math.
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MathVale,l
I should add that I like your term “reasoned improvement” better than I like the term reform.
I also don’t think there are any magic bullets in education, but I do believe in a tipping point that occurs when you address a set of systemic issues in a given school.
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Yes all teachers are above average only in Lake Woebegone where all children are above average and all women are beautiful. Everywhere else statistics applies.
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John writes “However, when we’re talking about (for example) a 50% graduation rate at a high school as in my city, yes, the system needs improvement.”
Of course, the question is, what kind of improvement? In order to figure it out, we have to understand what’s been happening in education.
What I really know is higher ed, but the issues in K-12 are similar according to the literature—and this blog, of course.
The quality of the top universities is as high today as, say, 20 years ago: the worldwide reputations of Harvard, Berkeley, UCLA, Princeton are as shiny as ever.
But the education level, graduation rates at my university have gone down in the last 20 years. Why? Have I or my colleagues become a worse teacher than we were in 1995?
Well, 20 years ago, the calculus class size was 40. It’s now double of that. 20 years ago, students barely had severe financial challenges. Now? I have 8 undergrad advisees. 4 work two jobs. One slept in her car last semester for 2 months. One has cancer but no health insurance. Two cannot afford internet in their homes.
Are profs at fault for a different reason? Like, have profs become expensive? At my university, we got a total of 4% raise for the last 6 years. The tuition, on the other hand, went up tenfold of that rate (40%) during the same period.
So it seems, the public pay their dues but the money is taken out of education and is going elsewhere. Where?
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John
Are you suggesting that teachers, administrators, or even “the system” are to blame for 50% graduation rates? That somehow the HS you reference is denying students opportunities for success? That students and their parents bare no responsibility for their own learning? That what schools offer should matter to those living the shittiest lives in America?
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NY Teacher,
“Are you suggesting that teachers, administrators, or even “the system” are to blame for 50% graduation rates?”
Not blaming, but I do think there’s a lot more that we can be doing. The populations have changed drastically, especially in these underperforming schools, yet we haven’t adapted much, if at all, to meet students where they are.
Students are coming in with big deficits, but they are just as intelligent as their suburban counterparts. We need things like longer school days and years to get them caught up. We need more economic opportunity as well, but you only have to look at the difference in unemployment rates based on level of education to understand the value of making this work for more kids.
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Yeah, a 50% graduation rate among certain populations may reflect Miracle Worker-level effort on the part of schools. Not long ago, almost no human went to high school; universal education was a pipe dream. Who’s to say that 100% high school graduation rate is feasible without serious dumbing down of the curriculum? And is a low graduation rate the tragedy many seem to think it is? I, for one, don’t think a human’s worth is a function of his Algebra credits or his wage earning power. We need to value all humans as humans and fellow citizens, regardless of their academic or economic rank. Why should we view manual labor with such derision? Why must we pay manual laborers so abysmally? The “free market” is not God; we don’t have to obey it; we choose to. As Robert Reich and Robert Kuttner point out, if we wrest our democracy back from the corporations, we can use the organs of democracy to ensure that all citizens who are willing to work live a dignified life free of want.
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The vast majority of students are certainly capable of graduating from high school. More than half of our students are now from low income families. If we say that many of them can’t even get high school diplomas, we are truly on the fast track to banana republic.
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John writes “We need things like longer school days and years to get them caught up.”
If kids are coming from poor families, let’s put more stress on them?
Kids in the US already are in school much longer than in other countries. They are burning out. More is not always better, and in this case, certainly isn’t.
The kids who come to my university, and work two jobs, need more time to graduate—they probably should be able to go to college for 6 years. But many quit before being able to graduate since after 4 years, they run out of financial aid.
Still, politicians and billyonaires talk about increasing graduation rates, and they think, they can accomplish that by hiring tutors, counselors, and pestering profs to get to know the kids better so that they can help them more.
No. What these kids need is more financial aid. But favorite billyonaires don’t believe in that. For example, when they created the Tennessee Promise, that is, the “free” community college program, they decided to cut the financial aid for 4 year colleges in order to pay for this free CC program. The end result will be that more of my students with the most difficult backgrounds won’t graduate. In fact, they won’t even try a 4 year college; they just go to a 2 year one.
Mission, which is screwing the poorest, is accomplished.
I am sure that it’s easy for the readers of this blog to give similar arguments in K12. For example, kids from poor families probably start working early on in high school. They may do the dishes at a local pizza place, go to bed late with no time to study.
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“Typically with little or no teaching experience”. I would hesitate to call that “typical”.
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I love Mate’s suggestion about reducing the teaching load. He’s absolutely right: no human has the stamina to put on six exciting performances a day five days a week. This causes teachers to fall back on group work and work sheets, or flat lectures. The only reason I can come close to providing exciting teacher-directed lessons to all my classes is that I exercise like an Olympian-in-training and I spend a lot of my evenings and weekends carefully designing lessons to pique kids’ curiosity (all enabled by the fact that I don’t have kids of my own). We underestimate what goes into a truly top-notch lesson.
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Do you have a family? I recognize the kind of teacher you describe; that was me before I had children. Sadly I realized that I couldn’t continue at that pace, devoting many of my nights and weekend to my career. I have not gone back to teaching because I didn’t want to be seen as a slacker, but I just knew I couldn’t keep up at the same level that would be expected to be”excellent” . I loved my job, but I felt that I didn’t have the stamina to serve two masters and do it well. Todays teachers seem to have do many clerical duties, even more than I did a decade ago. I’m not sure how they complete those and then teach all day, only to go home to more work in addition to the demands of family. Teachers are dedicated and undervalued in our society.
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No, I don’t have kids. I don’t understand how my colleagues with kids do it. I sometimes feel guilty because I know I have a big competitive advantage over them.
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When you start sacrificing your own children’s needs to improve the success of other people’s children – most who do not appreciate your efforts – you begin to adjust your expectations of teaching. I do tire of sending other kids to college on scholarships while my own kids cannot afford it.
Perhaps this self-sacrifice (exploitation?) is a noble pursuit. I still enjoy helping people. But it seems Reformers demonize teachers so we no longer have even that as a reward. It is a big reason I cannot recomnend teaching as a career.
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This is a good explanation of different management styles and why the top-down, authoritarian style doesn’t work in education. I would add another point: Educators are not making widgets. In business, every widget must look exactly the same and conform to the same standards in order to be top-quality. But students are people, and people aren’t widgets. People are individuals, in all of their diverse, messy, confounding and confusing glory. We cannot and should not try to force every student to be a widget. Yet that’s what the reformers want because it’s most convenient for their businesses.
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Senator Al Franken was on one of the late night talk shows the other night talking a bit about education. His brother and he were the first in their families to get a college education. His brother went to MIT in physics and became a photographer. He went to Harvard and became a satirist/comedian (and then a politician). Welcome to two American style widgets.
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Ponderosa,
I didn’t know teachers had to be in competition with each other. Although, that is probably what will be happening soon in the business-model world of education.
I totally agree about the necessity to reduce the teaching load. Some teachers have 5 or 6 classes in a row. Some teachers travel between buildings and have no planning periods. Teachers know it takes a lot to plan their classes. Sorry, but nobody will listen to us on this point (or pretty much any point for that matter). Also, in this country most people wear their over- work ethic as a badge of honor. They are constantly complaining of no time, no energy, over stress, etc. Yet they continually push themselves. I can’t tell you how many teachers I know who are on some kind of anxiety or depression medication, sleeping pills, etc. The only thing all this will lead to is burnout. This is not a well country in terms of work-life balance. Working yourself to exhaustion is not something to be proud of!
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Mamie Writes “I totally agree about the necessity to reduce the teaching load. Some teachers have 5 or 6 classes in a row. ”
Here is the chart on yearly in-class teaching hours per countries. US is second most, and it’s 50% above the average.
Click to access 48631419.pdf
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Thank you. Isn’t Chile, the only country listed w. higher hours, the nation that tried privatization/voucher approach without good results?
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Indeed, booklady. It was reported here on this blog with the following remarkable video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=tu4tPw5ND7M
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Observation: When the improved “performance” of schools is perceived as a corporate management problem, then there is but one major aim: Getting what Bill Gates has called “best value” education–more bangs for the buck.
The bangs that are easy to track and that seem to be totally objective are gains in test scores across all subunits of the schooling enterprise–disaggregated data for teachers, schools, and with comparisons among states plus the subgroups of students who are served.
The metrics can be expanded to high school graduation rates, entry into post-secondary education, earnings of those who complete that program and so forth.
Then you look at where the costs are. The costs are in lofty visions. The bottom-line purposes of schools are two: job prep and college prep. The managerial vision of schooling has truncated the aims of education to “career and college readiness.” Forget the rest.
As in most organizations (but not all) employees are expensive. Pensions and perks for them are expensive. Experienced teachers with advanced degrees are expensive. Low class sizes are expensive. Special education students and those learning English are expensive.
Ancillary services are expensive: transportation, food and janitorial servicesare expensive, so are school libraries and on site nurses, guidance counselors.
School facilities are expensive, especially buildings with “amenities” in excess of the minimum required for the delivery of strictly academic instruction, rigorous and demanding–instruction in the truly, truly core subjects.
These truly-truly core subjects are, of course, the three R’s…recently reincarnated as the “common core” of math and English–paid for by the foundation assests of Bill Gates. So you cut instructional programs in the arts, in languages, in health and physical education, and the disciplines within social studies, and yes, even the sciences.
And since math and English can easily be taught by completely programmed instructional modules with these provided on line and by computers, you can take the “savings” from all of these other cuts and deliver the two core subjects in high tech form. In doing so, you enlarge the market for another sector of the economy. You can market that system of delivery as “personalized instruction,” and voila–you have one version– the Gates version of “best value” education.
Now, this “reinventing” process cannot occur without data. Big,huge clouds of data.
Since 2005 the Gates Foundation has awarded grants totaling about $400 million for projects to gather data and build systems for reporting on teacher effectiveness.
This multi-faceted Gates-funded campaign is now called the Teacher Student Data Link system. It is envisioned as serving eight purposes:
1. Determine which teachers help students become college-ready and successful, 2. Determine characteristics of effective educators, 3. Identify programs that prepare highly qualified and effective teachers, 4. Assess the value of non-traditional teacher preparation programs, 5. Evaluate professional development programs, 6. Determine variables that help or hinder student learning, 7. Plan effective assistance for teachers early in their career, and 8. Inform policy makers of best value practices, including compensation.”
The TSDL system is intended to monitor the work of teachers in a manner that ensures all courses are based on standards, and that all responsibilities for learning are assigned to one or more “teachers of record” in charge of a student or class. A record is generated whenever a teacher of record has some specified proportion of responsibility for a student’s learning activities. Learning activities must be defined in terms of the performance measures for a particular standard, by subject and grade level.
The TSDL system requires period-by-period tracking of teachers and students every day; including “tests, quizzes, projects, homework, classroom participation, or other forms of day-to-day assessments and progress measures”—a level of surveillance that is said to be comparable to business practices.
The TSDL system will keep current and longitudinal data on the performance of teachers and individual students, as well schools, districts, states, and educators ranging from principals to higher education faculty. This data will then be used to determine the “best value” investments to make in education and to monitor improvements in outcomes, taking into account as many demographic factors as possible, including health records for preschoolers. Teacher Student Data Link Project. Website at http://www.tsdl.org/. “Use and Purpose” and “Key Components.”
This concept of surveillance is thoroughly embraced by policy makers and legislators who think non-stop testing of students is needed to secure “objective” measures of gains in test scores (mistaken for reliable, valid measures of learning) and use those gains in test scores to rate the “effectiveness” of teachers, schools, and the overall cost-efficiency of the public system–versus other systems that might be more profitable, especially if tax-subsidized with ‘customers’ guaranteed by compulsory education laws.
The virtue of the online-computer-based delivery system is thought to reside in the big data generated by every student’s use of the computer and the capacity of software to monitor, for example, the dwell-time between key strokes or touch pad operations, how efficient these are, which paths are taken among optional routes to an answer. Add some biometrics to determine the degree and kind of attention given to parts of the screen and graphic interface by eye-movement tracking, fingerprints to get data about who is using the computer (among other schemes).
The marketing bonus for such truly “personalized” will be “less time for testing.” We do not need to test. Testing is the same thing as being connected to the computer with the software for teaching the 3Rs, aka common core, aka college and career ready modules in math and English beginning in pre-school and Kindergarten, learning progressions mastered, certificates awarded, and so on.
Managerial thinking is about cost reduction, efficient service delivery, and clearly defined “outcomes.” Managerial thinking is generic.
That is one reason why all values of and in education except “measureables” linked to the economics of education are so widely ignored. That is also why economists are the new experts in education whose skills in number-crunching are so often cited as if authoritative.
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Nice summary. It deserves it own post.
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Wow, Laura –you go deep. The Gates system is so smart and rational –but fundamentally flawed. As you say, it assumes that what is hard-to-measure is not valuable. This is a fatal assumption. I teach seventh grade history. Recently I heard from a parent of one of my former students, now in 10th grade. He says I made her love history and that I inspired her to take 10th grade AP history. She is amazed at what an excellent foundation of knowledge I gave her. Now she is disappointed with her AP class because it is so dry compare to mine –I had given her the “full experience” of history–food, art, literature, acting out, etc. Much of what I taught –.e.g. learning about cacao in the Maya unit –was not on the list of state standards that I was supposed to teach. Because of such supplements I always have to skip a few of the standards each year. Undoubtedly this impacts my kids’ standardized test scores. But these supplements –though unmeasurable –are invaluable, as this parent’s testimony shows. I am very afraid of what the new Common Core tests are going to do to my teaching. At least the old state history tests measured some of what I gave the kids. The SBAC ELA test, which is the new holy measuring stick, measures little or nothing of what I provide –yet it seems that many states contort this test as a measure of all teachers, not just English teachers (and I’d submit that it’s an atrocious measure of English teachers as well).
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Laura writes “And since math and English can easily be taught by completely programmed instructional modules with these provided on line and by computers, you can take the “savings” from all of these other cuts and deliver the two core subjects in high tech form. ”
I understand your point, since you explained it well, so I just remark that the above statement is as true as claiming, art or music or anything else can be taught online.
Also, I think if we agree to call math and English core subjects, we agree to use the language of the hillbillyonaires and their mob. According to George Lakoff, that’s a grave mistake.
Education is supposed to be very democratic and I think both the language and the equal respect of the subjects taught need to reflect that.
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Laura writes “And since math and English can easily be taught by completely programmed instructional modules with these provided on line and by computers, you can take the “savings” from all of these other cuts and deliver the two core subjects in high tech form. ”
I’m guessing that was said tongue in cheek, wierdlmate.
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Ponderosa writes “The Gates system is so smart and rational –but fundamentally flawed. As you say, it assumes that what is hard-to-measure is not valuable. This is a fatal assumption.”
I don’t think so. In the 21st century, anything can be measured. Just order the universal measuring kit called VVV at http://wd369.csi.hu/apu/vvvorder.html
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Assuming that children are identical widgets and applying the same process to each will insure the best outcome for each student is ridiculous! Each student comes to school each day with a wide variety of experiences, raw intelligence and a home life that varies from abject poverty to a comfortable life of entitlement. Some will come with a desire to learn, others come because they are forced to. Each has different priorities, different needs, and different wants. Measuring a teacher’s skills based on the outcomes of these students with their wildly different makeups is preposterous.
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There is a fundamental problem with treating education as a production/manufacturing industry instead of a coping organization. The goal of a data driven production industry is to reduce variation in processes in order to manufacture a product that customers are certain will perform according to expectations/specifications. In a coping organization you are confronted with uncertain inputs, uncertain processes, and uncertain outcomes. Added to the inability to control inputs, processes, and outcomes, what parents are looking for in schools are instructional programs that increase variation in outcomes—further develop the unique abilities, talents, and interests of their children. For this reason, as Deming attempted to point out, but which our school leadership and political class still don’t understand, is that managing a production industry and managing a school require entirely different set of intellectual and organizational tools. Not understanding the fundamental differences between manufacturing and educating is the reason that all the intellectual and organizational tools—merit base, standards, standardized testing, curriculum alignment—that the Duncan’s, Rhee’s, are implementing will fail, and in fact will result in the dysfunctional outcomes Deming describes in his books—cheating, drop outs, early exiting of teachers, etc.
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NY Teacher writes ” The goal of a data driven production industry is to reduce variation in processes in order to manufacture a product that customers are certain will perform according to expectations/specifications. ”
Good clarification. I just got a post by Kevin Fathi on Facebook (of all the places) about “machines thinking like people vs people thinking like machines”.
While artificial intelligence researchers are commendable for trying to create machines that can take over boring or stressful jobs from people, it seems the corped mob is trying to create people who are willing to do boring or stressful jobs without protest.
From this point of view, we may choose “Nurture diversity!” as the slogan for the purpose of education.
http://edge.org/response-detail/26056
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I worry about humans starting to think like machines too. Machines are such perfect rule followers! Perfect! So reliable and obedient. More and more I hear denigrations of humans –when an accident happens it’s “human error” or “the [unfortunate] human factor”. As if humans are a contaminant in an otherwise pure and beautiful machine-centric economy. Humans, have some pride! You deserve to exist too.
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