Samuel Abrams, experienced high school teacher, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatizarion in Education, and author of the new book “Education and the Commercial Mindset,” has some good advice for Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos.
He knows they want to run schools like businesses but he says it is important to take the right lessons from business, not the wrong ones.
“The fundamental problem with the free-market model for education is that schools are not groceries. Education is complex and the immediate consumer, after all, is a child or adolescent who can know only so much about how a subject should be taught. The parent, legislator and taxpayer are necessarily at a distance.
“Groceries, by contrast, are discrete goods purchased by adults who can easily judge each item according to taste, nutritional value and cost. Supermarkets can likewise be easily judged according to service, atmosphere and convenience.
“Although the free-market model isn’t a good fit for schools, there are five business concepts that should be embraced by education reformers and policymakers.
“Much as early stage investment in promising companies can deliver outsized rewards for investors, early stage investment in schooling can deliver significant rewards for society. Another Chicago economist, James Heckman, analyzed data from Michigan and North Carolina going back several decades and found that no other infusion of public dollars comes close to matching the rate of return of high-quality early childhood education.
“Since the days of Henry Ford, business has understood “efficiency wage theory.” In 1914, Ford doubled the pay of assembly-line workers from $2.50 a day to $5. Economists later validated the results: It costs less to pay more, as employers attract and retain better workers and thus improve production and even reduce costs of both supervision and turnover. Studies show a similar tight relationship between teacher pay and educational outcomes.
“An analysis of teacher salaries and student performance in science (at age 15) provides an example. The data come from the five Nordic and six English-speaking countries involved in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment. The U.S. and Norway paid teachers 68% and 71% as much as fellow citizens with university degrees, respectively, and posted scores just below the PISA average. Finland and Canada, on the other hand, paid teachers 97% and 105% as much as fellow citizens with university degrees and posted scores far above the average.
“Retaining good teachers and grooming administrators from within the ranks instead of handing over the reins to outsiders constitutes another significant lesson from the corporate playbook. As the business historian Alfred Chandler documented, great organizations develop talent internally. Education researchers have repeatedly shown, in particular, that teacher turnover impairs student achievement. In addition, as Los Angeles may remember from its experience with David Brewer, superintendents without classroom experience tend to be out of step with pedagogical needs.
“Pay for performance — another cardinal objective of business-minded reformers like DeVos — sounds logical but backfires. Instead, reformers should follow the lead of W. Edwards Deming, the father of the modern Japanese auto industry, who contended merit ratings and pay generate fear and undermine teamwork. “The organization is the loser,” he wrote.
“Separate longitudinal studies of merit-based pay for teachers in Nashville and Chicago, completed in 2010 by researchers at Vanderbilt University and Mathematica, bear him out. They found no effect on student achievement.
“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality,” Deming wrote. “Routine inspection becomes unreliable through boredom and fatigue.” That recommendation should be applied to the annual testing of students in reading and math mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and reauthorized by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.
“Instead of “routine inspection,” Deming urged detailed analysis of small samples. Bucking widespread practice, the Finns do exactly that, with high-quality exams administered to small groups of students. Teachers consequently feel no pressure to “teach to the test,” students get a well-rounded education and administrators gain superior understanding of student progress. Finnish teens score at or near the top of international educational assessments.”
Unfortunately, the “apply business methods to government” crowd are just claiming that as a guiding principle but all they want is to provide cover, a smokescreen basically, for doing whatever they want. Would any business accept charter school performance (higher price + lower performance) as an indicator to “buy” (I want me some of that!)?
For the edification of the readers of this blog…
Following the appearance of the piece in yesterday’s [1-8-17] LATIMES, featured & linked to in this posting, is another that appears in today’s [1-9-17] print edition, entitled “For better schools, abolish DOE.” Online title reads “Op-Ed For better schools, abolish the politicized Department of Education and give local districts more control.”
Link: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-meredith-paige-abolish-education-department-20170106-story.html
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Thank you for posting this, Krazy. It reads, “Washington has a role to play in education. The federal government alone is positioned to prevent “local control” from becoming a pretext for discrimination.” Oh yeah, that’s right, the USDoE has a responsibility to PREVENT the segregation caused by charters and vouchers. Oops, says Bush. Oops, says Obama. Oops, says Trump.
I almost forgot one of the worst. Oops, says Bill Clinton.
Trump never said he cared about segregation. He doesn’t.
He does not care. But it’s the main thing about which he’s supposed to care.
Jimmy Carter’s U.S. Department of Education has been abused, used against the original intent of the ESEA since shortly after the Department’s inception, from Reagan to Obama. Trump is about to, well, trump all his predecessors in that regard. The DoE has been a tool for directing funding away from public schools in socioeconomically depressed neighborhoods, via test-and-punish and charter scams. I wouldn’t mind seeing the DoE go if federal education spending could continue without the faux accountability measures the Department oversees. Even when Obama beefs up the Department’s Office of Civil Rights, I still don’t think Civil Rights are being protected by the USDoPrivatization&Segregation anyway. I could let it go.
I know this goes against most of what I read in ed reform, but I don’t think parents actually know what goes on in schools. I’m not at all sure parents are “experts” on their child’s education, and I say this as a parent. I sometimes took advice on my children from teachers and sometimes not, and honestly I was wrong several times and they were right. I feel the same way about “student voice” if it’s taken to extremes. My 13 year old doesn’t make the best decisions sometimes. Should he really be running the school? If he had his druthers he would have 4 hours of music a day and lunch and recess. That’s not what’s good for him, I don’t think. He doesn’t have to be perfectly happy and satisfied every minute of every day and a lot of times he has to do things he doesn’t want to do like everyone else. We’re not talking about a cell phone plan. “Customer satisfaction” isn’t really my top goal.
Excellent points. Customer satisfaction has become hardwired into the ratings of schools as if a valid and reliable measure.
Ohio cybercharters use this stat- “96% of parents are satisfied!” Well, whoop de doo. What does this even mean? I could get 25% of parents in this district to be “satisfied” if the public school used the Bible as the single text. That doesn’t mean the school should do it. Another 25% would only be “satisfied” if their children always receive A’s. Should we satisfy them or are they just wrong?
All models are wrong. Some are useful. But the business model for schools is not even useful.
Those who can teach, do. Those who can’t, go into business.
…or at least should.
“None of their DAM business”
The “School as Business” model
Is wrong as wrong can be
A bunch of hooey twaddle
As far as I can see
SomeDAM Poet:
Here’s a very old and very dead and very Greek guy to lend you a hand:
“Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.”
Aristotle.
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You’re right, in that too much of what passes for the “business model” in actual business is foolishness that too many in business school and executive circles have come to accept as conventional wisdom. Just look at the idea of “stacked ranking” that started in the business world and was then ported over to education (that is, the idea that you rank employees by performance on some numerical scale and then fire the lowest 5-10% of performers to motivate the rest.) It was all the rage for a while, since giant “innovative” companies like Microsoft used it, but it proved to promote internal competition that was actually detrimental to real performance and overall company success. Yet it is still being touted by education reformers (both for teachers and for schools) long after businesses have dropped it.
The same for the idea of pay-for-performance. Dan Ariely’s new book Payoff has shown that this idea doesn’t work in virtually any environment (unlike simply paying people well to obtain and retain talent) and actually produces worse results than not rewarding them in any way (i.e., by recognition or praise) for performance. Yet this is still accepted business practice and is being touted as a panacea by ed reformers.
It’s long past time that we dropped the idea that education is business or that business models can be directly applied to education. But it’s also past time that we recognized that business often doesn’t apply good models even to its own behavior, much less provide them to anyone else.
Delighted to see that someone is working to debunk the phony economic arguments used to support charters and vouchers. Conservatives actually have something called “public choice” theory, which treats government officials as selfish and self-seeking exploiters. What happens in education, it seems to me, is that you get the worst of both worlds, a kind of “crony capitalism in education”. You need checks against government—including elections and standards of transparency—as well as checks in the private sector, from both government and competition.
The checks of competitiveness in the private sector don’t work for charter schools, partly because those parents who need most to chose—poor parents—are generally the least educated. And it’s not their money at stake, as in true private schools. On top of that, you have incentives of charter schools to hype, and hide the real information, which is allowed because they are private in that respect.
I look forward to seeing this book and hope it deals with these issues.
The book is well worth the read.
We in NYC saw the PR tactics of the Jack Welch business model during the Bloomberg-Klein era. Denounce everything that existed before as a failure (“the bad old days”). Announce a new “reform” at least once a week. Declare the latest “reform” a smashing success on the day it begins. When it fails, ignore it and keep moving on to the next big reform. Whenever test scores are released, declare “historic gains.” Repeat.
No one in the United States listened to Deming after WWII, so he took his ideas to Japan. Deming’s work is excellent. Bet the deformers have no clue about Deming’s work and if they did, they would just ignore it. After all, that is what deformers do – IGNORE evidence of a more eqalitarian way of doing things.
Yvonne Siu-Runyan: thanks for the nod to W. Edwards Deming.
For those not familiar with his ideas, I strongly recommend: The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality (2012, Joyce Orsini, ed., hardcover).
One of his most powerful ideas eviscerates a rarely acknowledged rheephorm axiom. To wit: students MUST be stack ranked in order to separate (and save and advantage) the few winners from the many many losers. As I interpret him, in Deming’s eyes this would be an example of a worst business/management practice that assumed that everything is a win/loss situation. He didn’t promise miracles but much of his work focused on showing how win/win situations could be achieved, both in public and private organizations.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
“An analysis of teacher salaries and student performance in science (at age 15) provides an example. The data come from the five Nordic and six English-speaking countries involved in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment. The U.S. and Norway paid teachers 68% and 71% as much as fellow citizens with university degrees, respectively, and posted scores just below the PISA average. Finland and Canada, on the other hand, paid teachers 97% and 105% as much as fellow citizens with university degrees and posted scores far above the average.”
I hope Mr. Abrams didn’t make the same mistake as many other people make when comparing PISA scores. Finland and Canada have much lower poverty rates than the US, which directly results in our scores being lower than theirs. When school districts with equal rates of poverty are compared between us and Finland, we come out ahead of them in the PISA scores. And we get paid less besides.
The business model in education lures people in with appealing buzz words like “choice” and “civil rights.” What a business model for education does is only to only consider the assumptions relevant to businesses, and these assumptions are erroneous when applied to education. Young people are not commodities. Every high performing nation has invested in strong public education implemented by trained professionals. America has become so dominated by corporate power that only what is good for corporations is presented as fact, but there is no evidence to support these false assumptions. These corporate assumptions have failed to provide any solutions to improving our schools. When Pasi Sahlberg, noted Finnish educator and researcher, looks at America’s public schools, he understands that America does not have a “failing school problem,” it has a poverty problem. It is a problem that no one wants to address so our policymakers continue to blame schools and teachers. The corporations will continue their forced march and hostile takeover of public education with the support of our corporate owned government. The only way to stop them is through united resistance.
All areas of American life are suffering from our nation’s destructive case of “The Billionaires’ Disease.” Many billionaires are delusional: They have accumulated not only great wealth, but also sycophants who tell them they are geniuses. These sycophant-surrounded billionaires come to believe themselves not only to be geniuses, but that they alone are responsible for the wealth they have accumulated; they rationalize away the key and essential roles played by others in the success of their businesses. In their delusional minds they see their “genius” as being applicable to other areas, such as government and public education, notwithstanding the fact that they have no experience or expertise in these areas. So what we have today are billionaires with no governmental experience who think they know best who our elected officials should be, what government should and should not do, and billionaires who never taught a classroom full of children but who think they know exactly what “reforms” are needed in public education. And, of course, what’s needed in public schools is the charter school business model because the business model is the only thing the billionaires know even a bit about. And of course there are plenty of simpering sycophants to tell the billionaires how insightful they are about reforms and charter schools because these sycophants see an opportunity to cash in on unregulated charter schools to bleed tax money away from children and into their own pockets. If only there was a simple cure for The Billionaires’ Disease, then perhaps cured billionaires could turn their resources to combating the true root causes of problems not only in schools but throughout our nation: Poverty and racial discrimination.
Not just billionaires and advocates of free market education are a problem. We have too many economists trying to call the shots and with avery truncated view of educational “outcomes.” Easy to measure.
I will read the book, but whether the approach is from business of from the work of Nobel Laureate economist James J. Heckman, the value of education seems always to be linked back to economic “impact.” This is true even for Heckman’s wide-ranging research that provided a rationale for the Chicago pre-school program.
Unfortunately, that pre-school program was designed to to reduce expenditures for special education while also soliciting investors in a pay-for-success contract–fronting the money for the program with a return on investment to them for meeting some predetermined “expectations” for student performance. You can see the Chicago contract here. Look at the tab for the legislative text and do a keyword search for “special education.”
https://chicago.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=1939527&GUID=3BEE6740-99AE-4E59-A6A5-B7A447D99617&Options=Advanced&Search=
The research and business models for social welfare programs, including education, certainly need criticism.
Robinhood.org produced a series of calculations on the economic worth of preschool for some of the children in NYC. They pegged the value at $50, 650 per student, circa 2014 (pp. 10, 13) https://www.robinhood.org/sites/default/files/user-uploaded-images/Robin%20Hood%20Metrics%20Equations_BETA_Sept-2014.pdf
Long overdue is a focus on children and education from viewpoints not tied so exclusively to economic benefits and business models, such as civic engagements and cherishing even apparently “useless” knowledge.
Hi Diane,
My name is Phoebe Ferguson. I am a documentary filmmaker in New Orleans, La. I have been documenting the takeover of our public schools since Hurricane Katrina allowed the state to fire all of our public teachers and install the Milton Friedman reform agenda. I read Prof. Abrams op-ed in the LA Times last night. I wanted to let him know that we did an episode on the Chicago Boys and the illusion of choice. In fact, it is called, The Illusion of Choice. We actually used the Heritage Foundation’s grocery store propaganda video in it to show how ridiculous the comparison is to public education. I thought that you might like to see it and perhaps help us get it out to the public before Wednesday. You can see it here https://vimeo.com/119897370 https://www.facebook.com/APerfectStormFilm/ .
One of our producers is Dr. Raynard Sanders who brought you here some years ago to speak to us. Our other producer is Karran Harper Royal an education advocate who I believe you know, she travels around the country and abroad to talk about the failures of privatizing public education. Can you help disseminate this video as well as the others you can see on the Facebook page to help push back on Devos nomination? I am sharing his op-ed along with the video. Perhaps you can embed the link into the post.
Anything we can do, let us know.
Best,
Phoebe Ferguson Bayou and Me Media pcf@bayouandme.com 504 931-3013
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Thanks, Phoebe,
I well recall meeting you esp because of your family connection to Plessy v Ferguson