The headline is right. Tom Ultican, scourge of the Destroy Public Education Movement, loved Andrea Gabor’s new book After the Education Wars.
We often speak of the misguided, arrogant Corporate Reform movement as an effort to impose market thinking on public schools. It’s allegedly “all about the kids,” but its premise is that experienced teachers stink and public schools are failing and must be replaced by private management, no matter how mean they are to the kids and no matter how harsh they are to teachers, who come and go with frequency.
But Andrea Gabor is a professor of business journalism, and she says that this approach is wrong!
He writes:
Andrea Gabor has written another outstanding book. This latest is titled ‘After the Education Wars’. In it, she makes a radical departure from the top-down models of education reform that have dominated the last two decades. Gabor, a Bloomberg chair of business journalism, has applied her expertise toward analyzing modern education policy. Through five case studies she convincingly argues that business leaders brought the wrong lessons to education when they imposed Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management and shunned William Edwards Deming’s continuous improvement.
Bottom line: the people imposing ideas from corporate America have learned all the wrong lessons.
As I have written before, I think Gabor’s chapter on New Orleans is the best narrative I have read about that sad district, where the Reformers finally wiped out the last public school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There has been a huge myth-making machine around the success of District 2 schools — which have never outperformed the demography of their students. D2 as compared to other districts in NYC was and remains primarily white and Asian, with a large number of wealthy and middle class students. Moreover, Tony Alvarado did not believe in democracy and listening to teachers when he led the district. He and his girlfriend (who later became his wife) Elaine Fink believed that the only factors that were important in improving school quality were professional development (usually given in a top-down fashion) and standards. Class size was constantly discounted as unimportant to them – even though that was a central element in the original small schools philosophy, and clearly very important to teachers. In that way, they led the way for the Chancellorship of Carmen Farina, who first gained renown as a principal in D2 in an Upper East Side school.. Carmen always said that only PD and standards mattered, and if she had an concern about class size in NYC schools it was that class sizes were too small (!!). When Tony went to San Diego, he continued in the same top-down vein, appointed Elaine to run his Leadership Academy (a forerunner of the Leadership Academy under Bloomberg and Klein) and commandeered Title I funds for that purpose.
In New York State the seventies and early eighties were a period of labor unrest and contention. From the mid-eighties up to 2000 there was a progressive era in the state that fostered collaboration, continuous growth and self reflection. During this time there was a great investment in teacher training, teacher empowerment and community engagement. In my district we developed a plan for portfolio assessment of students. Then, abruptly, NCLB arrived with top down test and punish, and the portfolio plans were put on hold. Since this time mandates have impeded positive change in New York and other states. RTTT and the new ESSA continue this top down trend that interfere with rather than spur growth and innovation.
I have not read Gabor’s book. My reaction is to Utican’s post.
I am put off by praise for “continuous improvement” as if a model for education. The concept is an updated version of operations research developed for managing mass manufacturing and especially for military operations.
Deming’s ideas are perpetuated with help from Columbia University’s “The W. Edwards Deming Center for Quality, Productivity and Competitiveness.” https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/deming/about/history
I have read two of Deming’s books. From my perspective, the one lesson that makes sense for education is Deming’s focus on the importance of intrinsic motivation.
My reaction is to Utican’s post about Gabor’s book also comes from the hoopla about “improvement science research,” not just in traffic planning and medicine, but now popularized in education by Anthony S. Byrk, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Here is a major report based on a longitudinal study where “improvement” meant raising test scores in reading and math in Chicago Schools.
Enough with the fetish around test scores. If those scores are treated as if continuous variables, then an increase in test scores will always be an example of “continuous improvement.” https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/organizing-schools-improvement-lessons-chicago
My reaction is also shaped by some extended study of the awful metrics being pushed in the CORE Districts of California (for which the Carnegie Center for the Advancement of Teaching provided technical assistance). CORE stands for California Office to Reform Education, a non-governmental reform initiative, privately funded.
The CORE Districts are among the largest in California and they are participating in data-gathering for a “School Quality Improvement Index.” This “improvement index” combines and assigns weights to test scores, school climate measures, surveys (students, teachers, staff, parents), and other measures– then throws these into a ranking scheme. https://coredistricts.org/our-data-research/improvement-measures/
This takeover of “accountability measures” is enabled by superintendents in the participating districts (some of them are Broadies) who just sign a memorandum of understanding.
The money for this version of improvement comes from the funders: Stuart Foundation; William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation (Stephen Bechtel Fund), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is a version of privatizing schools by stealth via a privately funded non-governmental organization, the “California Office of Educational Reform,” who enlisted others to conjure as many “improvement” metrics as possible, as if these are great and wonderful accountability measures. CORE was aided by GAGA superintendents eager to join this takeover.
AMEN re: W. Edwards Deming: “I have read two of Deming’s books. From my perspective, the one lesson that makes sense for education is Deming’s focus on the importance of intrinsic motivation.”
AMEN, here, too. Still the four “lesson” components that compose Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge make, well, profound sense for education, as I see it, which is my frustration with school deformers.
1. Knowing what a system is
2. Having some understanding of variation
3. Having a theory of knowledge
4. Having some understand of psychology (here is where intrinsic motivation comes in, but in relation to the other three components, Deming warns)
“no matter how mean they are to the kids and no matter how harsh they are to teachers”
Something else to take notice of. Since President Nixon, the GOP has been the standard-bearer for zero tolerance policies.
Nixon’s zero tolerance policy on drugs that were legislated as illegal caused the prison population to soar. Before Nixon’s War on Drugs, the prison population increased about 2.8 percent annually. After Nixon’s War on Drugs, the average increase in prison population climbed to almost 9 percent annually. Many of the victims of this war on drugs did not have any criminal history but spending time in prison exposed them to hard core criminals who educated them on how to be a criminal.
The private prison industry lobbies for more legislated crimes that send people to prison and longer prison sentences.
The same thing has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where the US is waging wars. As a combat vet with PTSD, I attend regular meetings with other combat vets that have PTSD and the younger combat vets say that the mercenaries the US hires don’t have to follow the rules of engagement that US troops must follow. One Marine who served for tours in Iraq said that his patrols avoided any areas these mercenaries were operating in because they would fire on the US troops before they took the time to identify they were on the same side. Instead of following the route the patrol was supposed to follow, the US troops would detour around the area the DOD paid mercenaries were operating in. But Washington DC calls them private contractors who can earn anywhere from $60k to $140k annually. These private contractors operate without transparency and can literally get away with murder and atrocities the media tends to totally ignore.
It is a fact that there are more of these private contractors in Iraq and Afganistan than US troops.
For instance, “When a squad of Blackwater contractors killed 17 civilians at a Bagdad traffic circle in 2007, it provoked a firestorm in Iraq and at home, marking one of the nadirs of that war.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/08/iraq-afghanistan-contractor-pentagon-obama/495731/
The pirates waging war on the Public Schools and Public School teachers are no different. Publicly funded, private sector charter schools are no different than the DOD’s private contractors fighting without rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our children are now becoming the victims of this zero tolerance policies that has spread like a terminal cancer for more than fifty years mostly because of the GOP and GOP presidents. Remember, I said “mostly”, because some in the Democratic Party area also guilty of supporting these zero tolerance policies in almost every walk of life.
Indeed, love and heed Andrea Gabor new book. Definitely a must-read.
But, ah, there is “continuous improvement” and then there is “continual improvement.” Two terms that read and sound so much alike, as if to be interchangeable. Yet, the two terms have very different meaning that can lead to very different consequences.
“Continuous improvement” is business-speak and comes from corporate America. It coopts the Deming way. It is unavoidably driven by fear. Being able to show Wall Street ever-higher quarterly returns depend on it. CEO’s want and demand nothing less. Or ever-higher test scores. Again, Atlanta’s infamous test cheating scandal should be demonstration enough of the hard chasing after “continuous improvement” can lead people to do, even to children.
On the other hand, “continual improvement” argues learning to keep getting better at getting better and realizing doing so will not always happen. The key word here is “learning” to do, along with the implication of being able to unlearn in the face of new knowledge gained.
Continuous improvement is but a special case of continual improvement, in that the former allows only one, straight-ahead, do-or-die path to success or achievement. It doesn’t matter if learning or getting new knowledge happens. Continuous improvement puts a focus on results, the objectives, as in Deming warning that “Management by Objective” is an “evil practice.”
In his seminal book, Out of the Crisis, Deming writes the term “continual improvement” 28 times and writes a variant of the term “continuous improvement” only once, that variant being “continuously improving.”
Then, in his last book, the more accessible and distilled The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (Second Edition), Deming writes the term “continual improvement” nine times and the term “continuous improvement” not once.
The difference between the two terms matters, greatly. I don’t recall every hearing Deming speak “continuous improvement” in his seminars.
This Galton Box automation is useful for noting the difference between continual improvement and continuous improvement. Note each of the two beads that bounce in only one direction down one side of the pyramid. That’s “continuous improvement.” Each other bead bounces one way or the other on its journey through the pyramid. That’s “continual improvement.”
https://binged.it/2QShodn