Larry Cuban wrote an insightful post about the Reformers’ revival of the ideology of social efficiency that was popular a century ago.
He writes:
“The current incarnation of “Taylorism” and focus on student outcomes can be seen in the standards, testing, and accountability movement launched over three decades ago in the wake of A Nation at Risk report. The application of business practices and lingo under the umbrella of scientifically acquired evidence reappeared anew albeit with different labels.
“Since the 1980s, reforms that called for uniform curriculum standards and increased testing while holding districts and schools responsible for student outcomes aimed to harness education to a stronger economy. With the increased power of computers to gather and analyze data, new techniques to prod schools to teach more, better, faster, and cheaper appeared (see here, here, and here) *
“The frequent gathering and parsing of test data, school-by-school, district-by-district, state-by-state, and nationally became a major enterprise. The lure of increased productivity and efficiency through evidence-based decision-making in light of huge (and available) data-sets has led to increasing use of algorithms to grade performance of individual schools, evaluating teacher performance, and customizing online lessons for each student (see here and here).
“States and districts now evaluate the performance of schools based on test scores, growth in achievement, graduation rates, and other measures and then assign rankings by issuing a grade to each school ranging from an A to a F, awarding one to five stars, or similar systems. Such grades signal parents which schools are high-performing and attractive to enroll their children and which schools are to be avoided—an efficient way of sorting out schools especially since parental choice in public schools has expanded.
“Determining which teachers are productive, i.e., “effective,” using students’ test scores has occurred in many states and big city districts. Such outcome measures should not shock anyone familiar with the spreading influence of the business model (e.g., earning profits, market share, and return on investment) upon schooling.
“Policymakers’ concerns over inefficiency in sorting effective from ineffective teachers (most districts graded 90-plus percent of teachers satisfactory) led to an embrace of an economic model of providing incentives to increase organizational productivity and efficiency.
“Within classrooms, both effectiveness and efficiency have come to the fore in customizing lessons for individual students. Earlier efforts to introduce “teaching machines” in the 1920s and later in the 1950s testify to the history of educators seeking ways to tailor teaching and learning to fit individual students. With the spread of faster and cheaper technologies since the 1990s, new classroom models of integrating devices and online programs took hold in many schools. The growth of huge data-sets of information on student performance in math, reading, and other school subjects also segued into a Niagara of software spilling over schools in the past two decades. The rationale for extensive buying and distributing of new devices and software has been to make teaching and student learning faster, better, and individualized.”
This mode of thinking, mandated and imposed as federal policy, threatens to extinguish childhood and the joy of learning.
What works in an automated warehouse is not what should be applied to a schoolroom.
Any and all involved in public education should read the classic look at educational efficiency “Education and the Cult of Efficiency” by Ray Callahan. This short book from the early 60s thoroughly explains how the business sector came to believe that schools were “inefficient” (whatever the hell that means) and needed the guidance of said businessmen. It shows just how that “cult” became deeply embedded. Read it and you’ll realize the insanities proposed by that those who know nothing of the teaching and learning process are to be implemented have a long (and sordid) history. Currently, the same type believes that they have the answers to that “inefficiency”, ya know, more “personalized” computer-based learning these days.
Just more of the same ol, same ol, eh!
I second this! Callahan’s books was best I read in graduate school in the early 1970s… During the same semester I took a course on testing where we were assigned to read the first chapter in a book on designing multiple choice test questions and handed the national standardized test used in Philadelphia at the time and told to find five errors in the construction of test questions on that test. The prof who gave the assignment told us it was an easy assignment because 13 of the 65 questions had flaws. Larry Cuban should write “Education and the Cult of Efficiency 2.0” and release it to accompany Diane’s newest book.
It fits beautifully with budget cuts and disinvestment in education, however, which is why so many wealthy people are huge fans of ed reform.
When ed reformers say it’s about “outputs” not “inputs” that means no one has to invest in public education. We’ve seen that, too. Public schools have lost funding in states totally captured by ed reformers.
DeVos spouts this dogma constantly, and ed reform invented it.
Perhaps the term “efficiency” can apply to widgets on an Amazon assembly line, but students are not widgets, and teachers are not dairy cows. The teaching-learning dynamic is complex which is one reason why any attempt to concoct a one size fits all algorithm falls short trying to determine the value of the complex relationship. Business types want to define and mold education on their own terms because they want to control it. It is no accident that one of the big players trying to redefine education in technological terms owns a company that stands to make big profits from blended and personalized learning. Once again the wealthy are trying to monetize a public, democratic institution that they have no use for in order to enrich themselves. It is the other 90% that must defend their right to a free public education.
Learning “efficiency” is the false promise of “personalized learning” via software programs. You would think that code writers could do the math:
50 million students X 180 school days X 8 periods/day =
72 billion personalized lessons – per year . . .
and these lessons would have to be tweaked for each new cohort and whenever a student developed a new interest, ability, or knowledge set.generated by individual students. Ha!
What works in an automated warehouse is not what should be applied to a schoolroom.
Right, but killing the analogy is hard. It is being revived by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) relabeled as “Improvement Science.” …
”The overall goal (of Improvement Science) is to develop the necessary know-how for a reform idea ultimately to spread faster and more effectively. Since improvement research is an iterative process often extending over considerable periods of time, it is also referred to as continuous improvement,”..because the aim is “identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education.” This initiative is being lead by Anthony Bryk, President of CFAT.
In 2018 Bryk cited six projects with noteworthy work on continuous improvement. Most were interventions to forward competency-based education, college readiness, and improved reading and math performance. Another “multifaceted” example came from a suburban school district near Milwaukee where 92% of students enrolled were classified as white, and enrollments were well below state averages for students classified as living in poverty and qualified for special education. Bryk seems to think a network of researchers and practitioners working on continuous improvement can replicate good ideas as if best practices and accelerate improvement “at scale.”
This initiative on behalf of “Improvement Science” is an effort to refresh W. Edwards Deming’s work on organizational efficiency, and post WW II operations research, “at scale.” The underlying complaints seem to be that: (a) local and small scale improvements are amateurish, need to be examined for efficacy and outcomes by an extended network of participants in the same sort of effort, including outside researchers (e.g., Education Testing Service, American Institutes of Research) and (b) good results from “collective knowledge” can be scaled up to “accelerate” the rate of improvement in the whole US sytem. This effort aso a version of turn of the 2oth century Taylorism aimed at increasing factory productivity by meticulous measurement of the behavior of workers
I have a deep aversion to the idea that schools, students, and teachers, and parents need to be seen as problematic and subjects for “remediation by interventions” with nearly endless (recursive) cycles of “ Plan-do-study-act” in order to see “if we implemented the practice as intended” …. and “if so, what impacts or effects it had on teacher and student practice(s).”
As I see it, the purpose of this venture is to impose ideas about efficiency in manufacturing and factory operations to the work of schools and performances of teachers and students. In this respect, the values attached to the factory model of education are alive and well and ironically being led by the president of CFAT.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/deliverology-from-idea-to-implementation and https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/our-ideas/
Yep, the rich long for the Roaring 20’s alright. Soaring inequality, no social safety net, churn and burn, social Darwinism (efficiency), great Gatsbies, everything.
To a degree, this HAS to explain the fetishisation of overworking school systems in East Asia, instead of say, the Scandinavian models which aim for the healthy integral development of the students (and teachers, too). I am happy to have never attended school in South Korea or Malaysia, for example.