Steven Singer writes here about how economic thinking has distorted the purposes of schooling and is wrecking our society by turning everything into a transaction.
Here is an excerpt, in which he defines the transactional view of teaching:
The input is your salary. The output is learning.
These are distinctly measurable phenomena. One is calculated in dollars and cents. The other in academic outcomes, usually standardized test scores. The higher the salary, the more valued the teacher. The higher the test scores, the better the job she has done.
But that’s not all.
If the whole is defined in terms of buying and selling, each individual interaction can be, too.
It makes society nothing but a boss and the teacher nothing but an employee. The student is a mere thing that is passively acted on – molded like clay into whatever shape the bosses deem appropriate.
In this framework, the teacher has no autonomy, no right to think for herself. Her only responsibility is to bring about the outcomes demanded by her employer. The wants and needs of her students are completely irrelevant. We determine what they will become, where they will fit into the burgeoning economy. And any sense of curiosity or creativity is merely an expedient to make children into the machinery of industry and drive the gross domestic product higher to benefit our stock portfolios and lower corporate taxes.
And since this education system is merely a business agreement, it must obey the rules of an ironclad contract. And since we’re trying to seek our own advantage here, it’s incumbent on us to contain our workforce as much as possible. This cannot be a negotiation among equals. We must keep each individual cog – each teacher – separate so that they can’t unionize together in common causeand equal our power. We must bend and subject them to our will so that we pay the absolute minimum and they’re forced to give the absolute maximum.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes to this unfortunate but true post on the economic view of education.
The student is product. The value added is learning of use to the local, state, and national economy…or not.
Econometric modes of education at the extreme are evident in pay-for-success contracts, also called social impact bonds. In these arrangements investors hope to cash in by fronting some money for education, cherry picking who will receive “education services,” and hiring new managers if the payout is not up to the expectations of the investors.
Here are some briefs on so-called Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), also known as Pay for Success Contracts.
James J. Heckman, https://heckmanequation.org/resource/the-heckman-curve/ His Bio is at the website
Jorge Luis García and others, “Quantifying the Life-cycle Benefits of a Prototypical Early Childhood Program” (The Heckman Equation, 2017), available at https://heckmanequation.org/resource/lifecycle-benefits-influential-early-childhood-program/
Metrics from another promoter of Social Impact Bonds also known as Pay for Success contracts. Who these promoters are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_Foundation
Robinhood’s metrics are often used to estimate the economic worth of “a high-quality preschool program.” These metrics are used to market SIBs as an investment, including preschool education.
You can bet the Robinhood and Heckman metrics are not used by politicians to argue for federal or state investments in public programs serving all pre-school children. The Robinhood Metrics estimated the social worth of ” a high quality” preschool program at about $53,000 per year. https://robinhoodorg-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/04/Metrics-Equations-for-Website_Sept-2014.pdf
Teachers Unions Not the Only Ones Opposing Charter Schools | Dissident Voice
https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/01/teachers-unions-not-the-only-ones-opposing-charter-schools/
United States Spend Ten Times More On Fossil Fuel Subsidies Than Education
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/united-states-spend-ten-times-more-on-fossil-fuel-subsidies-than-education/?fbclid=IwAR3m1r58xzL55z8uGsJuuicsWzcQItYJgtCLud7F5FbrHwODkf9ogt4-QP4#2d10b74f4473
The “invisible hand” is strangling our public schools. It is turning students into monetized widgets and teachers into drones. As Singer points out, education is not a transaction. It is relational. Any teacher that has talked a student off a ledge, helped a family find a decent apartment, bought a pair of glasses for a poor student or provided a safe caring learning environment for young people knows this. We as a society must fight the money changers that seek to destroy our fundamental democratic public asset that is managed by and for our communities and states. We must continue to push back against the commodification of our public schools. Our collective future depends on it.
teachers are being turned into drones which will surely soon be only “teachers are being turned into computer facilitators”
“The input is your salary. The output is learning.
These are distinctly measurable phenomena.”
Um, no. Economists may think learning is “distinctly measurable” but it is most distinctly not. Standardized tests are in no way related to learning. And even if they were, there’s still no standard unit of measurement. What would a standard unit of learning look like? One test question? But test questions are not the same. There are no “inches” or “kilograms” in which to measure learning.
Diane Just from your excerpt (I have not read Singer’s book) Singer also captures what happens when we think of “capitalism” as equivalent to a political system; when, in fact, capitalism is only one kind of economic system that can inform several kinds of political systems.
Perhaps that’s why so many have so little or no understanding of the more comprehensive and complex meaning of democracy–we’ve been saturated with capitalism, advertising, selling, and zero-sum game thinking so much and for so long that we don’t know how to think differently, to use a cliche`, outside of a capitalist thinking box.
The tech industry and charter advocates are riding on the coattails of that kind of thinking as they “market” to parents (why not?), jangling well-funded bright bells and blowing loud whistles to appeal to an also-captured audience of capitalist-only thinkers. Even our language usage follows suit, e.g., students are customers. . . . why not? as Felicity Huffman seemed to think, why not? . . . if she can pay for it? CBK
The two largest industries in the US are first, health care, and, second, education. If you try and make the institutions of these industries for-profit, what pot do you take money from to pay investors? You can’t garnish the salaries of the products of this industry– a healthy individual who can now go back to work or a child with enormous potential who can become a teacher. In the interest of health care, do we want a sick society from which we can draw our raw material? Daniel Pink said that the three things people crave to be happy in their work is: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. If jobs pay a living wage, most people will work as long as they can. That’s why merit pay is not an incentive to improve the quality of teaching or nursing.
Merit pay is not an incentive to improve the quality of anything. It has failed in every single field it has been tried, not just teaching and nursing.
“It makes society nothing but a boss and the teacher nothing but an employee. The student is a mere thing that is passively acted on – molded like clay into whatever shape the bosses deem appropriate. ”
It’s a weird thing to tell kids over and over again too because it totally removes any responsibility they have to contribute to this process.
I don’t want ed reformers telling my kids that their entire school experience is dependent on which teacher they get or what school they attend. For one thing I don’t think it’s true and for another it contradicts what I tell my kids- which is that they are the other half of this exchange. They have a role in whether they learn something or not. They have agency.
I literally don’t want them around my kids. I think that’s a terrible idea to plant in their heads. It doesn’t comport with how I’m raising them.
Teachers would find natural allies in health care workers. They say the same things. They think their professions have been taken over by finance and economics people who have no real understanding of the work or the vocation. A lot of them are miserable and constantly conflicted because the “input/output” crowd don’t share their values.
They literally value different things.They may as well be on different planets. What that creates is a constant conflict for the people who do the work- they know what they SHOULD be doing but they are told that’s not the priority. It’s an ethical problem for them and it’s a recipe for misery.
Chiara Well said. They don’t like the autonomy of the teacher or the developing autonomy of students because it flies in the face of their own set of values, which are saturated with capitalist-only ideas.
The irony is that autonomy is a basic capitalist principle. It’s rightly connected with individual human agency albeit in a humanly (communitarian) developmental context. It goes off its own rails when that development becomes stunted and where greed, predatory practices, and tribal conflicts take over the thought of those involved. Then, MY autonomy must defeat YOURS. If you are not already wealthy, you don’t belong to my tribe. CBK
Grasshoppa Taibbi:
“So long as the public is busy hating each other …”
“The trick here is getting audiences to think they’re punching up, when they’re actually punching sideways…
Rules of Hate
THERE ARE ONLY TWO IDEAS – Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative.
Educators and NONeducators…
THE TWO IDEAS ARE IN PERMANENT CONFLICT
EVERYTHING IS SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT
NOTHING IS EVERYONE’S FAULT
I have posted much the same thing for a very long time.
It is well stated.
The student is a mere recipient of the “truth as stated by the government. The era of post truth, alternative truths is upon us and teachers must give tests to assure that whatever is taught by government, on their approved tests, not by true truth seekers who use scholarship to investigate is what is wanted.
This is “democracy at its best.
“The student is a mere recipient of the ‘truth’ as stated by the government.” (Gordon W)
“The irony is that autonomy is a basic capitalist principle.” (Catherine K)
Someone [the cashier at my 7-11], in the same breath w/denouncing CCSS as communist, was telling me yesterday to check out Charlotte Iserbyt’s work. I found Iserbyt to be a wee tad beyond the pale, tho she was skewering all the ed stuff we do here; she traced it back to Skinnerian theory & “non-profit NGO” [Carnegie et al] conspiracy. She was speaking as an ‘old-fashioned’ [’60’s-era] ultra-conservative, & saw it all as the road to communism. But I found it interesting that she threw the -isms into pretty much the same basket [“Call it what you will: centralized planning, regionalization, corporate fascism…”].
I think the knee-jerkedly anti-socialist [& anti-communist] folks conflate the -ism w/the totalitarianism of the USSR, military dictatorship in Venezuela, periodic outrages to human rights in China. They ignore the marriage of capitalism w/implementation of socialist ideals in Scandinavia & much of Europe. And they miss entirely the swift & slippery slope of unfettered capitalism to oligarchy and fascism illustrated by so many SA dictatorships as well as Russia.
bethree5 That’s the point: It’s the marriage of economic with political principles and their systems, not an identity of them. When that identity happens concretely, where capitalist principles and practices overtake political principles and practices, capitalism (in its specific implementation at the time, e.g., today’s transaction-only, 1 percent mindset) becomes the rule of the day.
“They ignore the marriage of capitalism w/implementation of socialist ideals in Scandinavia & much of Europe. And they miss entirely the swift & slippery slope of unfettered capitalism to oligarchy and fascism illustrated by so many SA dictatorships as well as Russia.
CBK
Didn’t he go on to say teaching is relational, not transactual? That was such an insightful comment from an economist, and I was glad to see a shift in thinking here. We are wasting so much money on tests that bring naught but pain. Good article.
“These are distinctly measurable phenomena. One is calculated in dollars and cents. The other in academic outcomes, usually standardized test scores.”
The former is calculable but not necessarily measurable unless money is the only valuable aspect. The latter is not measurable at all. What is the agreed upon standard unit of measurement of “academic outcomes”? Standardized test scores are not measurements, as again what is the agreed upon standard unit of measurement used? Hint for the two questions: There is none, therefore there can be no measuring.
We hurt our cause when we continue to misuse language and bastardize the meanings of words like measure. Plays right into the hands of the edudeformers.
Duane, I believe the article is on the same opinion as you.
No, not exactly. Which is why I responded as I did. Steven and I have been back and forth (in a good sense) with the measurement meme many times.
I thought, he wasn’t serious about the measurability of teaching.
For me, the problem of the medicalization of the teaching and learning process is just as dangerous and harmful as the economicalization of said process. Test as a diagnosis to determine mental inadequacies, faults, deficiencies, the intervention, then more tests.
Again, for me, any assessment that is not developed by the teacher (or teachers of a department) locally with the intention of aiding the student in his/her learning has the wrong focus. The focus should be to aid the student’s learning, not to give the teacher or adminimals “data” (not that some relevant information can’t be gleaned from the results).
All standardized testing falls in data collection intention and is again the wrong purpose for why a test/assessment is developed.
See myresponse toyou below under general comments.
Ah, economics, SDP’s favorite rant-subject. I’ll wait for him, before I comment. 🙂
Here is a suggestion: create some laws that govern where statistics can be used and how. After all, this is exactly our big problem: in many of the softer sciences, statistics gets misused on nonmeasurable things. The usual claim is that “yeah, this stuff appears very qualitative, but we can describe it well enough by choosing a large number of different quantitative descriptions.” No, such quantitative approximation of qualitative stuff exists only in the imagination of some people.
The issue is not as complicated as it may appear. Take the case of love. Some scientist may claim
When person A loves B, we detect an increase of body temperature in A in 87% of the cases. So this is a already a pretty reliable way of measuring love. It’s also clear that the greater the temperature increase, the greater the love. Then we can also detect increased brain activity in the upper-left Coriolis-Faraday cortex in A’s brain 93% of the time. The greater the activity (we measure it with electro-nucleotic devices), the greater the love. In our paper, we detail two other measurable quantities associated with love, hence we have an extremely accurate way of detecting and measuring love.
Before we get swept away in the reasonable sounding scientific mumbo-jumbo, we need to ask the scientist the question “What definition of love are you using?”
We can similarly take the wind out of the sail of those scientific analyses which claim to scientifically study
learning
teaching
knowledge
education
For a reasonably high offer, I am willing to withdraw my comment above, and for some more money, I can offer my support for developing a device that would measure love. Indeed, many people would appreciate such a device to check the honesty of the individuals who say “I love you, honey, even with your beer belly” or “I love you mom” or “I of course love you and not Cindy” or “I love your new shoes, they were worth every penny”.
The device can be standalone, disguised as an earplug, or can be built into a phone and would communicate its findings with us via a simple but highly configurable app.
¡Sí, Señor, exacto!
Mate Even if you ask kinds what they are learning or how they have grown, they cannot give you an “adult” kind of answer. If so, it follows that even if you could quantify all aspects of education, children’s lack of differentiation prohibits, on principle, the gathering of accurately deep or hidden education. And so, it’s not that statistics must be “wrong;” its that what we CAN get and what statistics can “tell” us (shallow stuff) gets interpreted as the whole.
Below is an example of the above where EDWEEK is publishing:
“TINY TEACHING STORIES
“Teaching is packed with powerful moments. Teachers capture them in only 100 words in our “Tiny Teaching Stories” series. Here’s one of those little gems:
”’I Go to a School That Teaches You to Read’
“Quan arrived at my 1st grade classroom daily with his fast-food breakfast and sat in the back. As tall as a middle schooler, and as street-smart as an adult, he came to us recognizing only one word: his name. I tried dozens of reading strategies with him over a few months, including writing songs and jump-roping to the alphabet. When I met his mother to discuss Quan’s educational path, she said he’d stepped off a bus in his neighborhood recently, and the children asked where he’d been. He proudly responded, ‘I go to a school that teaches you to read.’
“Kathryn Starke
K-5 literacy
Richmond, Va.
“Click here for more Tiny Teaching Stories.
https://www.edweek.org/tm/?M=59016704&U=“
I of course agree: statistics is inappropriate to describe or evaluate the quality of education. In the last 50 or so years we have been misled by economists and social scientists into believing the wide applicability of statistical methods. The whole approach needs to be reexamined. If in doubt, just think about educational research.
This is not the first time scientists have to step back, and reexamine their basic assumptions. Psychology, social sciences, economy are relatively new sciences and it may be the first time, they have to do this reexamination. Mathematicians, physicists, chemists have gone through this a few times already. People overestimate the reach of their scientific principles, and then they honestly have to face the fact that their conclusions are not as infallible as they thought.
Sr Swacker, it’s the first time I’ve heard you bring the term “medicalization” into your thesis regarding testing. I think you’re absolutely right on the money, & hope you’re expanding on this in your writings.
I saw 2 of my 3 boys, back in the ’90’s, pegged as ADD early in elemsch, & the inability to “test well” figured largely in that [faux, AMA-invented] dg. Basically what teachers were taught to flag for SpEd evaluation was a large discrepancy between observed intelligence (i.e., articulate, critical thinking at the verbal level) & comparatively lower test performance [often accompanied by slow writing, slowness in completing hw assnts, physical symptoms indicating difficulty maintaining extended focus on class activities].
Back then that combo spelled [amateur dg] ADD for teachers, peddled via PD sessions, resulting in SpEd evaluation & the inevitable sub rosa suggestions to medicate – totally bought into at the time by pediatricians, who were then [perhaps still?] dispensing ritalin like candy w/o stopping at “Go” to refer the kid to a shrink. [They were following latest AMA fads like sheep – & Child/ Adolescent Psychiatry had few practitioners in most areas]. Some parents persisted stubbornly thro priv evalns, only to get more refined LD dg like auditory processing disability, discalcula, et al ad naus.
To me, all of that was simply a consequence of academics pushed down into K-2 [K in early ’90’s, K = 1st-2nd gr, a decade or 2 prior] & a bizarre notion of ed as a relentlessly-moving belt measured by testing/ hw/ grades– where the non-conforming were offloaded for pit-stop repair then re-uploaded. Many of those kids just needed a few more years for neural systems to mature. Many others just needed schsys to be OK w/ the idea that ave-to-below-average “performers” exist, & are not causes for hand-wringing. And many, MANY more just needed recognition that intelligence manifests in multiple ways: look for the strengths & encourage them, don’t try to conform them to some fantasy ideal median.
The sad upshot: my eldest when finally dg ADD in 5th gr (after yrs of teachers pushing us to evaluate) was actually latent bipolar I– which, even in mid-’90’s, cutting-edge psychologists warned looked like ADD in youth [but AMA still maintained that bpI had no pre-teen symptoms]. Bp I notoriously responds badly to stimulants: stimulants administered early bring on preternaturally-early depression: now we go to a real shrink, who arrests that w/ anti-depressants [in midsch! – not recommended, off-label, but widely done then & I bet, now…], hastening & intensifying that first teen-aged manic episode.
Luckily my youngest [the other school-dg ADD case] was enough younger that, by the time he was in 6th gr & the full-bore Child Study Team/ teachers/ admins brought me on the carpet to discuss how to deal w/him, I was able to tell them: his brother is in the mental hosp w/psychosis brought on by the stimulants that got him all A’s, then the AD’s needed to stem resulting depression. This kid has the same blood running in his veins. YOU figure out how to educate him WITHOUT med dg, drugs, etc.
And they did! SpEd had everything needed up their sleeve to get youngest thro hisch & on to college. The hoops were apparently just all about the $ reqd to do it. Meanwhile SpEd had to spend a whole helluva lot more on eldest, including guidance & child study coordinating w/ tutors at county post-hosp center, where it took months for the side-effects from bad meds [including med-induced Parkinsonism] to subside, incl in-home tutoring to get him back on track w/his graduating class.
I shudder to think what goes on now: the pressure for high test scores still incentivizes classification [offload – pitstop repair – upload], but states have disinvested in SpEd & are mainstreaming wherever possible… ?!
By medicalization I do not mean to limit the concept to what you have experienced although that is a part of it. What I mean is the concept that we can “diagnose” a student’s learning through the standards and testing regime. And by diagnose I mean “find deviations from the supposed normal (standards)” and then come up with some plan to address that “abnormality” when in fact those deviations are just normal differences in growth and maturity of the students.
It seems to me that educators are attempting to make the teaching and learning process into something it isn’t-a medical process. The teaching and learning process, as I believe most here know, should be geared toward, focused on helping each individual child grow and learn as a pace that is consistent with their very being and not consistent with some made up supposed “standard of learning”. The false medicalization process is a vain attempt to “raise” the teaching and learning process to a higher social status when it’s best when it is down to earth teacher with student relationships that enhance the learning for the student.
Your broader definition is actually exactly what I’m talking about. When I was coming up thro pubschs [’50’s-’60’s] there was general expectation of a wide spectrum of performance, & no notion that everyone could be corralled to a norm, much less fantasizing some future where the ‘norm’ was continually upgraded thro some sleight of hand composed of higher stds/ better teachers etc etc. All that seems to have somehow flowed from intentions to improve ed outcomes for minorities/ poor.
My kids were simply caught in that net, which had been cast so wide by the ’90’s that the system was trying to catch butterflies w/a supposed flaw revealed by testing– i.e., a ‘too-wide’ [statistically outlier] discrepancy between IQ & bureaucratically-defined ‘output,’ i.e. how fast you can read/ write/ produce hw/ take a test– & how high you can score on a test.
Thanks for clarifying what you meant!
I hope you take to heart my encouragement to write lots more about this. Your argument here cuts thro a lot of chaff & pinpoints glaringly the wrong path we continue to follow:
“By medicalization… I mean the concept that we can “diagnose” through the standards and testing regime… deviations from the supposed normal (standards) and then come up with some plan to address that “abnormality” when in fact those deviations are just normal differences in growth and maturity of the students.”
bethree5 and Duane If we “go theory” for a moment, at the core of the problem you speak of is the overplay of two methods and the neglect of the other two. This fundamental issue is pervasive to the social sciences and education fields:
Overplayed: Classical and statistical methods
Underplayed: Developmental (genetic method) and Dialectical methods.
Most evident in your comments is (1) the neglect or distorted views of truly NORMATIVE developmental patterns and (2) their vast variety and range as comes manifest in individual students (this is where well-trained teachers can recognize those differences and take methodical steps to support growth–not merely test students to death). Remember that the natural sciences lean mostly on classical and statistical methods. Their data, of course, is not the fullness of what it means to be human.
Yes, we are still stuck in that historical-theoretical cul-de-sac. Nuff said. CBK
CITATION: B. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding Collection 3 (2000).