The real reform agenda: cheapen the cost of public education

Politicians still play to the middle class despite its shrinking numbers, and much of what's being played in the name of education reform is really simply a call to reduce costs for public services primarily due, as Gene Glass puts it, to growing personal debt and financial crisis hitting that sector of the population hard.

"The crisis in elementary and secondary education is not a crisis in achievement, but rather a crisis in cost, or more properly, a crisis in the willingness of the middle class to support a long-standing institution. The reforms proposed in the name of making education better and the nation's children more competitive internationally are in reality proposals to cheapen education for the poor and privatize it for the White middle class."

From Fertilizers, Pills & Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America, 2008

Taxes aren't always about political philosophy

We often chalk up the arguments for or against new or higher taxes as a political philosophy. Hence, liberals never saw a tax they didn't like while conservatives, and particularly libertarians, never saw a tax they liked.

It's far more complicated (or simple?) than that. I tend to agree with Gene Glass in his remarkable tome, Fertilizers, Pills & Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America (Kindle edition):

"Credit cards first changed America's spending and saving habits. Now they are beginning to shape public life; generations saddled with personal debt are unlikely to vote for taxes to build libraries, parks, museums, and schools." (Chapter Five)

Reincarnation of the Efficiency Movement is Here!

"U.S. schooling may be on a historic glide path toward lower per-pupil resources and significant labor-force reductions. If not thoughtfully considered, budget-balancing decisions could damage learning opportunities for schoolchildren."

"School productivity, measured as educational outcomes divided by labor or financial inputs, has declined dramatically."

"If the entire public-education system could be rendered more productive, that is, if higher levels of achievement could be coaxed from existing resource levels, some of the pain could be avoided or at least mitigated."

  Public Schools and Money  By James Guthrie and Elizabeth A. Ettema 

While the language may be modernized and centered around a high-tech, global economy, when you wipe the lipstick off this pig, we're hurtled back to 1911 and reliving the age of the efficiency movement. Why is that bad you ask? Because it's what led to an entrenched factory-model of K-12 schooling we're living with today that's not only an abhorrent to the entire concept of learning, but  costs continue to rise as a result. Pretty much everything that is wrong with education today can be directly linked to the time-bound, graded-school model we continue to chain ourselves. We don't need more efficiency, we need less. We need an education system that is not modeled after Henry Ford's assembly lines but instead is messy, chaotic, personalized, focused on competency, and respectful of the fact that learning can (and does) occur anytime, anywhere, anyhow. It does not require a square box with twenty-five seats in rows and one adult standing in the front of the room.

What came out of the end of the early Ford factory was not creative nor personalized. Ford provided one model and you could only get it in black or black. It was fairly easy to measure costs related to outputs when that's all you produced. 

If we want our schools to be efficient, please choose your color: We have black -- or black.  And anything that doesn't come off the line on time in perfect condition at the cheapest possible cost is simply just a reject.

Related posts:

Education reform appears caught in a time warp

Education reform appears caught in a time warp (Part 2)

The Last Time the Corporate World Meddled with Public Education

More evidence inequitable funding contributes to achievement gaps

Another day, another report on the damage done to public education and urban poor students from inequitable school funding. I can see our state leaders now -- most of whom represent affluent, high achieving school districts -- standing their with their hands over their ears shouting, "La, la, la, la, la, la...," hoping it all just goes away so they don't actually have to earn their pay by solving the problem.

"According to a report out of the Center for American Progress, inequitable per-pupil spending perpetuated by regressive state and local school-finance systems remains cause for concern in U.S. public schools, despite state aid formulas designed to work to the contrary.

"Inequitable funding of U.S. public schools contributes significantly to the under achievement of our low-income and minority students. It's something we have to fix if we are to progress as a society," Cynthia G. Brown, vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress, said in a statement."

Open Letter to Amy Wilkins - The Education Trust

Dear Amy Wilkins, Vice President, The EducationTrust:

I read your article in the September 2012 District Administration journal (Testing isn't the Problem, p. 40-42) and must point out your suggestion that educational testing bears any similarities to weighing oneself is a bit unremarkable. First of all, as you point out in your article, kids "have taken tests – lots of them – for as long as we've had an education system." That is certainly a true assertion but if testing is directly related to academic success, one would have to ask, "Why aren't all of our students earning high grades and demonstrating high achievement levels?" After all, if more testing begets better results as your "bathroom scale" analogy suggests, we should not even be having this national debate about testing.

But more testing does not lead to better results anymore than weighing yourself more often will cause you to lose weight. I personally have struggled with maintaining my own weight, despite the fact that I have run ultramarathons and served a 22-year military career, and I can assure you weighing myself more often was not, nor will it ever be, a productive solution because it usually leads to some degree of negative feedback. In my mind I see the results typically as either negative or never good enough and given the growing pattern of overweight people in this country, I suspect most people experience the same. Typically, I have one or more good days followed by a bad one, but either way the scale never tells me why this pattern persists. I receive no constructive feedback from a scale. It stares at me and simply says, "You're a loser!" (and not in weight, either) over and over again.

In researching this idea several years back, I came across the following blog post:

What do you think about when you step on a scale? Some common thoughts:

·       "That can't be right."

·       "I knew I shouldn't have had that extra breath mint yesterday."

·       "Did I really gain 5 lbs since yesterday?"

·       "I haven't lost a single pound. What's wrong with me?"

Whatever you think about when you weigh yourself, one question you may not consider is this: Is weighing yourself helping you lose weight or standing in the way of success?

For some of you, the idea of not knowing your weight on a regular basis may seem as foreign as not knowing you hate lima beans. This is true despite the fact that a scale, unlike lima beans, has all kinds of emotions, thoughts and beliefs attached to it. The moment you step on it, you decide things about yourself: Whether you're fat or thin, whether you've succeeded or failed, perhaps even how you feel about yourself as a person.

For some people, the scale is an important and useful tool for maintaining weight loss but, for others, it can stand in the way of success.

Reasons to Ditch the Scale

Is the scale helping or hurting?

By Paige Waehner, About.com Guide

Updated June 18, 2009

http://exercise.about.com/od/weightloss/a/ditchthescale.htm

Your article assumes that students (and overweight people) can simply choose other behaviors as a result of testing or weighing themselves more often. Such an assumption demonstrates limited understanding of human behavior. Children and their teachers are not robots who respond to cold, hard results the same as cattle would to an electric prod. As humans, we make choices based on results and thousands of years of recorded history demonstrate those choices are not always positive.

I agree with Paige in that continuous testing, like weighing, will actually work against both teacher and student for the most part. There are always exceptions but those don't point the way to breaking this barrier for all. Using another analogy, if I were to attempt to become a sketch artist and each time I finished all or a portion of my work I received feedback that was less than inspiring or complementary, it wouldn't take long before I abandoned my pursuit. The emotional drain would sap my desire to learn.

On the other hand, if I were interested in creating something for my own purpose and had a way to determine if it worked or not by testing it out over time, I may continue plodding through experiment after experiment until I achieved success or determined the energy being expended wasn't worth it. However, if periodically during my learning process you came along and stopped me to administer a multiple-guess bubble test about what I have learned, I doubt it would add even an ounce of inspiration or drive me to seek the answers to the questions I scored low at. If I didn't have the ability to virtually ignore your test and treat it as just another venemus bug bite, I might even give up my pursuit as not worth the hassle.

Don't get me wrong – we all love feedback of some sort and younger generations get caught up in the feedback frenzy of video-gaming as well as traditional athletic pursuits. But feedback is not testing. Feedback is measured against the results I'm trying to achieve and basically says if you wish to achieve those results here's what you need to do differently. High stakes bubble testing on the other hand says, "I've spent all this time reading, writing, memorizing and practicing but I STILL SUCK!" Nothing from high stakes testing gives a student or teacher the feedback each needs to achieve their respective end goals.

You allude that testing should have an impact on the adults at the school, one way or another. In fact, I might argue those outcomes are the real motivation behind educational reformers like yourself and The Education Trust. You treat testing as if it actually is a cattle prod that will move the adults in a different direction based on results. In the meantime, students are left with the damaging results of incessant test results instead of productive feedback that will help them achieve their own learning goals. This abusive use of test measurement dates back to the World War I era when popular magazines and a growing industrial business world ganged up on traditional learning to regiment schools, create assembly-line learning processes, test the results regularly, and classify both educators and students as either successful or failures. Much of this type of reform – similar in many ways to what we see happening again today but in high tech fashion versus manufacturing – is what created our industrial model of education and led to the problems we have today. Will more testing and meddling by people who think they know what they are doing because they once attended school themselves lead to positive reform? I think not, and I firmly believe that positions like yours and The Education Trust are simply leading us further over the cliff.

Respectfully,

David Britten

Lieutenant Colonel, US Army, Retired

Superintendent of Schools

Godfrey-Lee Public Schools