I recently read a post by Larry Cuban about the difficulty of “scaling up successful reforms,” and I was reminded how much I dislike the application of industrial terminology to schooling. Larry offers some examples of successful efforts to “scale up,” but I question the effort itself.
While it is possible for schools to adopt and adapt a program or a practice that has worked out for others, the very idea of reproducing cookie-cutter schools designed to get high test scores invalidates the professional wisdom of educators. You can stamp out cars and tools with the right equipment, but you can’t reproduce good schools via mechanical processes.
People who work in business, industry, finance, or the tech sector like to speak of “scaling up,” of “innovation,” of “best practices,” and of “replication,” which they know how to do.
They are frustrated that success in one school is not easily packaged and replicated and scaled up to every school in the district, the state, the nation. They can’t believe how difficult it is to identify and package “best practices.”
The concept of “innovation” is also overrated. It is not innovative to introduce charters and vouchers and for-profit management. All that changes is who gets the money.
One of the reasons the corporate reformers have poured so many millions into KIPP is that KIPP has produced a scaled-up model. There are 150-200 KIPP schools, and they follow a model that is unvarying. The reformers are looking for a template that can be scaled up everywhere.
One of the reasons that corporate reformers want to put kids on computers is that they think this is the way to standardize and replicate and scale up “success,” even though sitting in front of a computer for several hours a day is not what most parents or educators think of as good education.
What they don’t understand is that there are areas of life that are not susceptible to industrial processes.
Can we scale up good families? We know what a good family looks like. Why can’t we make every family look like that? Can we scale up churches? Churches may grow into mega churches, but every church is different, even if they use the same Scripture and liturgy.
We cannot scale up great orchestras. A string quartet will always require four musicians, and there is no way to implement cost savings, or get productivity gains (this is known as Baumol’s Effect). Reformers themselves want their children to have a human teacher with a small class, the smaller the better. But when they think of “scaling up,” they look for mechanical replacements for humans, to cut costs.
Wherever creativity is required, wherever human interactions matter, scaling up remains elusive because it is an industrial process, not a human one.
We have many examples of excellent schools in the public and private sector, and they are very different from each other.
They are successful because of the culture they have created, usually one of respect, ethical behavior, collaboration, and shared values about learning and self-discipline.
You can describe the culture and you can admire the tone of the school, but it is impossible to scale it up to 1,000, 5,000, 99,000 schools.
Teachers can learn from one another. Schools can learn from one another.
They don’t get better by competing. They get better by sharing. Sharing is not the same as “scaling up.”
There will never be a school-in-a-box that works everywhere and produces love of learning, creativity, and all the good things we want for our children and our society.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I just put this comment on Larry Cuban’s website.
The solution of course (to scaling up) is to “innovate” by eliminating the teacher and architecture of the school system altogether.
As envisioned by KnowledgeWorks.org, all social institutions and some commercial settings are venues for learning, and potentially highly personalized.
The prospect of de-schooling and outsourcing education is enhanced by the proliferation of teacher-proof curricula, automated data management and assessment systems, the availability of online credit systems, especially badges and certificates of competence.
What is left? What is left is a social system freed from any obligation to acknowledge the intimate relationship between child care and education, the function of “school” as a bricks and mortar location for the socialization and education of each generation.
Homeschooling may be welcomed by parents/caregivers who find employment in a gig economy and are not longer tied to a fixed workplace and work schedule (or dependable employer).
Many who have relied on place-based schooling will be more aware of the function of this institution and the educator workforce as caregivers, especially in a society where the value of formal education is increasingly questioned (and openly disparaged). Schools as places for education may well be valued less for that function than as locations where you find a collective of nannies organized as caregivers for underage offspring for much of the week. Under this scenario, many adults are free to pursue work (and/or play) with few obligations to their own and other people’s children.
The Chan/Zuckerberg Initiative, the Emerson Collective, the billionaire members of the Education Strategy Group–all seeking a “collective impact” through their non-profit and for-profit ventures–are hell-bent on deschooling education, making it teacher-proof, and easy to scale up, especially through on-line delivery of content into screen-based devices (including mobile devices).Preschoolers who cannot read or write can now sign-in to such systems with a unique digital badge, then use simple gestures to be engaged in “learning” content developed by “the wizards of oz,” out of sight and enchanted with their algorithms as proxies for educational wisdom.
Yes, much agree. Mass education for the great mass of kids who are treated as throwaways unless their own parents are affluent and politically animated enough to intervene on their own children’s behalf and compel mass education to treat their own kids in their local school districts to which they pay their suburban taxes better than sitting them in front of screens.
Creating an LLC is not philanthropy. It is a capitalist scheme to generate profit.
It’s just capitalism, not education. My son is about to start his senior year and if he had been made to sit in front of a computer for three hours a day, I would have taken him out of school and helped him start his life in a different way.
When I did my survey for my AP Lit class, I was asked questions about Kahn Academy. The questions asked whether or not I would want my students to have access to this computer based program as homework. It is not my intent to debate the value of any AP course here, but just to inform that this “computer based learning” is trying to permeate every facet of instruction. I find this alarming…nothing can replace a good teacher, and teaching is about a lot more than what is on a test.
I have decided that these “capitalists” care nothing about people and individual stories. They want complete control, and they want to swallow up every single resource. They want a two-tier system: the rich and well educated (that would be them), and the poor and ignorant (that would be us).
My message to them is very simple: sit your own kid in front of a computer at some lousy charter school…leave us alone.
It is capitalism, you are tight, which cannot survive an educated, critical, and activist mass of citizens who defend democracy, equality, ecology and peace. Developing kids without the arts of democracy and the skills of civic intervention keep the billionaires in charge of this vastly rich nation.
Everything in moderation.
Three hours doing school work in front of a computer is not moderation.
Reading this post, I saw an image of an assembly line but instead of parts used to build a car or other factory build item, there were children being carried along and inspectors were plucking children off that they determined were rejects and were tossing them into a trash compactor to get rid of them.
Isn’t this what KIPP and many other cookie cutter corporate charter schools are doing to make it easier to boost profits?
“More than one-fifth of California charter schools have discriminatory admission policies such as illegally excluding students for having low grades or requiring parents to donate money, according to a report released Monday by the ACLU of Southern California.
“According to the report, 253 of 1,200 charter schools reviewed in the study employed the discriminatory practices, which also included expulsion of students who fail to maintain strong grades and discouraging immigrant students by requiring information about the immigration status of the students or their parents.”
https://patch.com/california/castrovalley/california-charter-schools-discriminatory-report
Reuters reports, “Charters are public schools, funded by taxpayers and widely promoted as open to all. But Reuters has found that across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law.” …
“Set up as alternatives to traditional public schools, charter schools typically operate under private management and often boast small class sizes, innovative teaching styles or a particular academic focus. They’re booming: There are now more than 6,000 in the United States, up from 2,500 a decade ago, educating a record 2.3 million children.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions-idUSBRE91E0HF20130216
If you Google “KIPP schools cherry pick students” like I did, you will also discover a host of counter propaganda that denies the cherry picking regardless of the facts discovered and reported by the two investigative reports mentioned above.
Thanks, Diane!
Sent from my iPhone
>
Business lingo doesn’t even work for business. It’s all MBA smoke and mirrors.
Someone really needs to take a good, honest look at the MBA programs at places like Harvard.
I once had to work with a Harvard MBA for two months at a high tech firm. I was working as a software engineer on product development (a spectrometer) and the MBA had just been hired to work on marketing it.
The person was utterly clueless. Had no idea at all about the technology we were working with. They would attend weekly engineering meetings and make comments that indicated as much. My boss would just roll his eyes. The person lasted only two months at the job before they were fired.
Of course, George W. Bush is another Harvard MBA.
And Harvard is supposed to be one of the best business schools. It’s an embarrassment as far as I can see.
Industrial lingo does nothing to improve our understanding of the needs of children. Industrial lingo applied to education can only be accepted if we consider public education a huge market in which the young people serve the market. I personally find this view destructive and harmful. From the perspective of this “relic” teacher, meaningful education must start with the needs of the student, not what best serves the advancement of corporate interests.
A perfect education is a blend of independent self study and a group collaboration and discussion led by somebody who can facilitate the discussion.
But first students must learn the foundations, and that my friends is where the problems currently reside.
Primary schools are failing in their ability to teach students foundational literacy & numeracy skills to help students reach age and grade level proficiency, let alone reach their academic potentials. And middle and high schools all but say it’s not their problem to remediate them because they should already have the foundational skills and it’s not their job to go back and firm up that foundation. (I personally have heard this over multiple school year from HS staff and administrators, in multiple schools and districts!)
Hence, if you would like parents and tax payers to respect and support public schools, you need to resolve this foundational issue and stop blaming it on their demographics, because even when it’s middle or upper middle class families complaining about how their kiddos are struggling in your classrooms, you do everything other than help them. You drag out testing, you drag out providing effective goals, your schools drag them through an antiquated, expensive and time consuming process of Due Process to resolve the problem and then blame them for suing your school and dragging you all through this process, when if you just work with them to begin with, it could be avoided. And I’m talking about schools with the programs available but who still refuse to provide them to students that need and would benefit from them. The ones you advertise as available on your web pages and in your newsletters!
Then when you add in the large number of students who arrive from Title 1 backgrounds, you give up on them from the start and group them as unable to learn and you never work towards closing the gaps with any real tenacity! They are rarely remediated and brought up to speed with the rest of the students to a baseline proficiency for their age and grade level; let alone excel above average.
So keep bashing those families that choose homeschooling or de-schooling over the public schools- in addition to those families that have been choosing public cyber and charters- in addition to those choosing private school options- because you’re going to see more and more families passing on the soon to be passe’ traditional public school model, because this antiquated and failing model just isn’t working anymore for those that value education and have the means to choose otherwise.
And for those that don’t, this storyline is pretty much on target, that schools are becoming more of a paid daycare and recreational center rather than a place where students are learning literacy & numeracy skills.
M,
That is sheer nonsense. How many schools have you visited? Please don’t post claptrap here. I won’t approve it.
If schools are “failing in foundational principles,” it’s only because the constant pressure of standardized testing and the threats of closing schools, which is the bread and butter of “reformers,” is narrowing the curriculum and taking precious days (and days, and days) from teaching time.
I think there is some truth in what M says, but that the reasons are poverty and choice that has led schools to become more segregated and lacking in the resources to teach, like qualified teachers, text books, even desks. I know this is true in Benton Harbor and Detroit Michigan. Teachers can only do so much in an environment where kids are hungry and stressed
“Deschooling”: If a word ever deserved an “Oy!”, this is it. The spirits of Orwell and Kafka are upset that they didn’t come up with this one.
Reformers are much better at screwing up than scaling up
Great line!
re: scaling up reforms
Why would anyone want to scale up a piece of crap anyway?
If standardizing education is so important, why do colleges have majors? Why can’t every college be the same, scaling up, using best practices?
Why submit portfolios for art schools? Or try out for the drama department or audition for entry into schools specializing in instruments or voice?
Can a student whose forte is English be a good doctor? Or a mathematical genius excel in microbiology? Maybe, but maybe not. Do we want our carpenters or auto mechanics to have a PhD in physics?
Each one of us has our talents. Placing us each in the same box only leads to frustration. We should rejoice in our diversity of skills, not punish those who can’t conform to a prefab one size fits all educational model.
Reblogged this on Literary Nirvana and commented:
Finally, someone articulated what has been on my mind for years, and yes the symptoms can be found locally as well from CMS (Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools) in particular.
Why do these morons keep equating education to making widgets? Do they do the same for medicine? For the legal profession? For CEOs? Why is it that CEOs keep getting more expensive with poorer results. In a sound business, they would be fired immediately and replaced with a more productive worker. Wouldn’t that “disruption” work in the favor of the company?
In other words, “one size DOES NOT fit all,” still.