This post started as a long reply to comments that Stan Hirtle made in response to Thinking Through Purposes and Principles Needed To Guide the Re-Design of Public Education
Stan, you write about finding adequate funding for schools: “Only if people realize that we can not afford the results of an inadequate education system which saddles the whole region with a below average workforce and a school to prison pipeline, may they be willing to spend the money. Plus you get what you pay for. Spending an inadequate amount and getting an inadequate job does not mean that you should spend even less. The question is who pays and how.”
I’ve been thinking about that phrase, “You get what you pay for.” It is a phrase that expresses regret: if your cheap clunker of a car breaks down, you blame yourself and grumble, “You get what you pay for.” I agree that our education system is dangerously inadequate — a clunker — and if we don’t fix it, we are headed for a lot of hurt.
People probably used the phrase, “You get what you pay for,” in the horse and buggy age as well. Some horse and buggy outfits were far superior to others. In many ways, we are still in the horse and buggy age when it comes to education. Some of our horse and buggy outfits are working smoothly and other horse and buggy outfits are broken down. We miss the big picture when we proclaim that some schools are “excellent” and that other schools are in need of improvement. In the big picture, all schools operate using an outdated and inefficient design, and operate at a level of quality far inferior to what is possible. In the big picture, even those schools most highly rated fall far short of what they should and could be.
How to transform our system of education so that it moves to a new level of quality is the central challenge. We have the science and understanding needed to move to this new level of quality, we lack the motivation and the leadership to do so. The buggy empire sees all questions of improvement in terms of improving the horse and buggy system and, funded year after year by the government, the buggy empire has little motivation to make upsetting change.
What we need is transformation in our educational system and transformation will not happen simply by working hard to make our current system better. We need to use proven principles available to our time and school risk assessment evaluation to create a fundamentally new design. Creating a new design for our system of education is an unwelcome notion to the many individuals whose income and professional life is anchored in the current paradigm. It was hard for buggy makers to come to grips with a new reality as well.
We have settled for so little in education compared to what is possible. But this should not surprise us, because quality is a function of system. Government controlled enterprises, with their reliance on hierarchy and bureaucracy, are notoriously inept. Managed economies — Cuba or North Korea, for example — fail to produce wealth, fail to work efficiently. We should not be surprised that our government controlled education system has failed to produce quality. In fact, its failure is in direct keeping with the central belief of most Americans. Ask most Americans, for example, whether they think it would be a good idea for the government to have monopoly control of our grocery stores and they would hoot at the idea.
We need to leave the horse and buggy age and arise to a whole new level of education. As Obama is quoted as saying, we need an educational system that will, “provide an education for children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential.” An educational system that would focus on understanding and fulfilling individual potential would require a transformed system because this goal requires a level of quality much beyond what is possible in the present system. It is not reasonable to think we can reach such a goal using the system already in place, any more than it would have been reasonable to think that a horse and buggy system could have provided safe 50 mph or greater personal transportation.
We need to move from the horse and buggy age to the modern age. In most aspects of our society, we rely on the force of the free market to make improvements. We don’t rely on the government. How to use the force of the free market to transform public education, while at the same time keeping public education accountable to voter control, is a key question that deserves a lot of research. Stan writes, “I see no reason to expect a free market to succeed in this area. There is just not enough profit to be made educating the poor, in order to create a profit incentive to do better…. To create a profit incentive would take the very enormous increase in urban public school budgets that people are resisting.”
I disagree. There is a lot of money in the system. The idea is to use the money already in the system in different ways from how it is now being used. Making a transformation to a new system probably would require additional money. People, I believe, would be willing to “prime the pump,” so to speak, with new money — if they were convinced of the validity of a plan that would, over time, transform the system and that eventually would lead to lower costs and higher quality. People would be more likely to spend money to support an inspired vision of change than they would to spend money simply patching up a clunker that they know, at best, will always be low quality.
It is unfair that urban schools, the weakest members in the education system, must lead the process of system transformation. But, urban education is a disaster. Disaster brings about motivation, and motivation is the key to all improvement and growth. The fact that the urban horse and buggy system is broken down, in the ditch, is an opportunity, a motivation to rethink the system that is lacking in our complaisant suburban districts.
People, I believe, agree that you get what you pay for. The task for educational leadership is to envision a quality system that will inspire voters to move from the horse and buggy age and invest in the system of the future.
That’s a nice sentiment, Mike. Nobody would deny that a superlative transformation in education would be wonderful. But do we arrive there via a horse-and-buggy analogy?
I keep hearing how schools should be run like businesses–and I keep asking “which business? GM? Enron? Hewlett-Packard?” Businesses have a far higher rate of failure; most of them don’t last five years. The schools–even the worst ones–achieve a graduation rate over 50%.
Analogies can be useful for communicating certain ideas, but eventually an objective analysis needs to be done. What, in your opinion, is the shape of the education evolution that you desire? Does it incorporate John Holt’s 1960s ideas that our current education system fails in part because it’s based on the old Theory X management styles with emphases on efficiencies and time measurement–spend so many hours on your seat in the classroom and you get credits which add up to a diploma? Do you envision mastery learning, outcomes-based assessments, skill sets? How, without spending more on teachers, do you attract highly qualified people, especially in the high-demand technologies and sciences?
You’re also making the presumption that there is plenty of money already. I suspect there may be, but there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. The people who are guaranteed an outstanding education are those who pay $42,000 per year to send the kid to a top private academy. In Ohio, the few charter schools that have succeeded at anything have often found ways to supplement their per-student expenditure–ISUS gets lots of charitable donations, and WEB DuBois academy benefited from erroneous over-funding by the state and then by Fordham Foundation providing similar funds after the state cut off the overpayments.
Note that manufacturers understand that innovative new products require massive investments in R&D. We didn’t suddenly have hybrid automobiles or flat-panel LCD monitors; millions of dollars were invested in such things before a dollar of return was generated. I’m sure you understand, this is why new innovative products are inevitably quite expensive.
So if you want innovative, transformative education, why do you think you can get it done without a proper infusion of R&D funds? Oh, it might happen to some minor extent–we got the first personal computers from Steve Wozniak fooling around with a Heathkit, a portable TV, and and IBM selectric–but in the long run, the computers that we’re using to debate these ideas did not spring up in the absence of venture capital. I don’t see why schools are any different.
Dr. Ruddick, Thanks for commenting. Yes, I agree that additional money may be needed to help establish a transformation in education. I wrote, above, “Making a transformation to a new system probably would require additional money. People, I believe, would be willing to “prime the pump,” so to speak, with new money — if they were convinced of the validity of a plan that would, over time, transform the system and that eventually would lead to lower costs and higher quality.”
You write, “Analogies can be useful for communicating certain ideas, but eventually an objective analysis needs to be done. What, in your opinion, is the shape of the education evolution that you desire?”
Yes, as I said in my previous post, my friend Terry I recently visited also said, “I want to see specifics.” I’ve given a lot of thought to the topic. I had the rare opportunity of a year sabbatical, in 1999, to write a plan for a conversion charter school. I did write a school plan, but the school was never implemented. The plan emphasized self directed learning via a teacher-adviser system and was inspired, in part, by a visit to an alternative school in Denver called, “Mountain Open High School,” and by a pedagogy suggested in the book by Michael Strong, “The Habit of Thought.” I read a ton of books by other authors as well. One big constraint on the plan was the fact that it needed to define a “school within a school,” and that teachers in the school would be those already hired in the system and that the master contract that applied to all teachers in the district would apply to this conversion school as well. Without this constraint, I would have designed a different plan that would have attempted to achieve a differentiated pay by applying free market principles.
So, I have spent some effort on objective analysis. I want to spend a lot more. But I’m one person. What I’m wondering, why is there not more analysis, why is there not effective models of new school designs emerging from the multitude of resources and talented people in our multi-billion dollar educational establishment? Our universities should be honored as beacons of light showing the way. It seems that the heart of the Education Profession should be at the Schools of Educations and that these Schools should have as their mission the development of a deeper understanding of the profession, a mission similar to a School of Medicine. But Schools of Education are focused, for the most part, on preparing individuals to be successful employees within the present system, not on gaining a deeper understanding of what education means, what teaching means, what creating a school means.
You ask, “How, without spending more on teachers, do you attract highly qualified people, especially in the high-demand technologies and sciences?” The view I am coming to is that there must be a lot of new opportunity for high paying jobs in education, but that this will require a differentiated pay structure quite different than the structure outlined in master contracts. I’m wondering if the education profession can learn from the medical profession. The highest paid members in that system are not the administrators of the system. Some professionals in that system are doctors, some are doctor assistants, some nurses, some practical nurses. In education, we are all dumped together. Some doctors arrive at the top of their profession in a few years, for others it might take many years, or never. It’s not determined by a master contract, but by a quasi free enterprise system. In education, to arrive at the top of the teaching profession, as measured by income, takes many years, regardless of performance or market accountability — as determined by a master contract. It is small wonder that many of the most promising teachers leave the profession within five years.
It seems we may have too many people who are considered a “teacher,” maybe that designation should be much more infrequent. We would think it inappropriate and odd if everyone with a college degree involved in medicine would be considered a doctor. Rethinking who a teacher is, what his or her role should be, I believe, is a key aspect of thinking through a new design for education. We’ve denigrated the role of teacher to a dispenser of curriculum; we need to uplift a vision of teacher that is transformative and inspirational. At the heart of authentic education is the teacher / student relationship. The fact that current school design utterly fails to apply this truth says a lot about why the current design is a failure.
What I am challenging myself to do is to write a Request for Proposal (RFP) — spelling out what a new school design should accomplish — appropriate for a board of education to promulgate as a means of starting a transformative process in its district. Such an RFP, I’m thinking, if of sufficient quality could attract funding from sources outside of the board of education’s usual budget. Attracting additional money would be one incentive for a board to approve such an RFP.
Mike Bock constantly refers to the free market as the way to go, with a kind of market good – government bad article of faith that one sees among conservatives. Faith may be a large part of it since as T Ruddick points out, Mike Bock in his many posts spends less time getting to specifics, although he says he is going to do so. That is the real challenge of expecting the free market to improve schools. How? What are they going to do better? What about how markets work should make us expect them to do better? T Ruddick comes back with some examples of the down side of the free market; Enron (you could add the highly innovative and ultimately destructive subprime mortgage securitizers and hedge funds that have created a disasterous foreclosure epidemic.) and their ilk flourished by corruption and deception, General Motors who managed to lag behind their Japanese competitors in making quality cars for decades etc. Some down sides of the market include the tendency to monopolize (Microsoft), sieze the referees by corrupting the government which is supposed to protect other stakeholders, convincing people they need things they don’t need, creating imbalances of information, manipulating emotional needs that markets can not fill, and abusing power as we see with union busting and personal fiefdoms. We also see the kind of cultural resistance to change, good and bad, for which government is often blamed but which happens in the private sector as well.
The horse and buggy analogy is not necessarily a good one in that cars replaced horses and buggies because of the assembly line. No one thinks an assembly line is going to work to create better schools. Schools at their hearts are really collections of relationships. Similar things that advance technologies and manufacturing are not necessarily the way to go with schools.
Competition works the best with things that are fungible and measurable, so people can compare them and evaluate them easily. The unfortunate reality is that businesses tend to prefer to overwhelm and confuse, and always want to know more than the customer or employee. Competition doesn’t work as well with things whose differences can’t be measured easily and quickly. Education may take decades or a lifetime to measure its effectiveness. Businesses also like to “skim the cream,” that is serve the most profitable customers, usually the wealthiest and easiest to serve who pose the fewest problems. For example, we have been building big suburban houses for the wealthy but not smaller houses for people of moderate means or less. Similarly it is easier to measure educational success at Harvard than in a Dayton public school. This means that those who can pay less are going to be left out, which is in many ways how our society works.
Government gets bashed a lot by conservatives, particularly when they aren’t running it, but we expect it to do a lot of things where competition doesn’t make sense. Make wars, have police, maintain streets and often utility services. We also expect government to make things affordable, like parks for people who can’t afford private estates, or public transportation. On the down side, government can be inclined to monopoly and favoritism, and is often pushed to be bureaucratic. Moreover in America public services are almost expected to be lousy to encourage people to spend money on private ones.
Government did schools in part because they were expected to serve particular areas (neighborhood schools remain a popular concept as they are easier to get to, as well as reflecting the tendency of people to live near similar people) and because private schools did not make any sense, except for religious groups that wanted schools geared to their religious views. People do not enter the market with schools and expect to profit. Schools tend to be small institutions, and the attempt to imitate McDonalds with a franchise of schools has really not worked because franchising does not translate from hamburgers which can be mass produced to schools that can not be.
Mike Bock also says that education schools prepare people to be successful employees within the present system. But don’t law, medical, business and other schools do the same? They all talk about the big picture and hopefully get students to spend a little time thinking about ways things may change in the future. Education schools do that too. But these other schools are all about creating staff members for their industries too.
Probably the biggest issue is that many of the other professional schools draw students heavily from the social and economic elite, and certainly point them in that direction. Education has been the home of women and upwardly mobile immigrants (internal ones like Appalachians and African Americans as well as immigrants from abroad) and has paid “female level wages.” Teachers didn’t earn jack until they unionized and still are subject to internal and external expectations to spend their own money on materials for their classrooms. No wonder they don’t trust that they will be treated fairly by “merit pay” systems that can easily appear to be based on subjective criteria, favoritism or things out of their control such as the social resources of the student’s family or the level of chaos in the student’s environment. In the meantime if people can make more money as car salesmen, mortgage brokers or pyramid direct marketers, to say nothing of hedge fund managers, we are going to get teachers who are economically drafted or for whom it is a labor of love.
Mike Bock’s other ideas are intriguing, with teacher adviser systems and schools within schools. America isolates its teachers far more than other countries, and probably gives them less respect and more bureaucratic harassment, which implies assumptions that they are either lazy or incompetent. Similarly the idea of having all these structures resembling medicine, with doctors on the top, and various levels of nurses and technicians under them. Not exactly a rejection of a top down hierarchical system, to be sure. There is some of that in schools where they are paraprofessionals and parent volunteers. Also we note that hospitals, like colleges, the trend is to push the work down and use the cheaper help more, so doctors’ jobs can be done by nurses and RNs’ by LPNs, and college professors’ by adjuncts. This is the market system at work also. Actually when government gets involved in business it tends to act a lot like any other business, which may explain the Soviet-era Trabant car that Mike Bock often cites.
Are we seeing “R&D” investment in new models of schools? Some conservative and business groups are trying, and you have to respect the success a place like ISUS has with its niche of at risk youth. But it is never clear whether these sorts of success stories reflect a peculiar alignment of individuals or if they can be “rolled out” to others. Some in these blogs have pointed out the lack of consensus among education professionals, plus the lack of trust in a society driven by ethnic, religious, racial and class divisions. Educational fads wax and wane, and there is little political will to stick to something long term. Leonard Pitts has written on “what works” “Longer school days and longer school years work. Giving principals the power to hire good teachers and fire bad ones works. High expectations work. Giving a teacher freedom to hug a child who needs hugging works. Parental involvement works. Counseling for troubled students and families works. Consistency of effort works. Incentives work. Field trips that expose kids to possibilities you can’t see from their broken neighborhoods, work.
Indeed, the most important thing I’ve learned is that none of this is rocket science. We already know what works. What we lack is the will to do it. Instead, we have a hit-and-miss patchwork of programs achieving stellar results out on the fringes of the larger, failing, system. Why are they the exception and not the rule?” Not all but a lot of this involves investment of resources, and that gets resisted. Some of it is contrary to how we treat poor people and that gets resisted. Some of it is good if it happens but might not. Principals may hire bad teachers and fire good ones. People may hug kids for bad reasons as well as good ones. Parents may be problems because of their own lives and bad educational experiences.
Anyway Mike Bock closes reminding us that the student teacher relationship is the heart of education. Let’s see where his RFP goes.
Stan, thanks for your comments. You write, “Mike Bock also says that education schools prepare people to be successful employees within the present system. But don’t law, medical, business and other schools do the same?”
By calling education a horse and buggy system, I am saying that the system is hopelessly out of date, daily applying theories and principles that have been proven false, counterproductive, and dangerous — false ideas about discipline, learning, motivation, teaching, you name it — and, at the same time, failing to apply theories and principles that have been proven valid. The system controls, often in minute detail, the behavior of the “professionals” in the system, giving little opportunity for the meaningful exercise of professional discretion. Preparing teacher candidates to be successful teachers in such a system, means preparing candidates to know how to get along according to the requirements of a bureaucracy — not preparing candidates to have a knowledge base, experience, and personal confidence needed for professional independence.
It is hard to imagine a medical system so controlled by political processes — so that if there was a big enough public constituency for the use of leeches, for example, the political process would have the authority to demand their use — and bureaucratically controlled to the point that the professional actions of doctors would be directed and constrained, in contradiction to the doctor’s best judgment and knowledge. But this describes the educational system.
You would think that our universities, as places of learning and research, would be beacons of light that would influence the system to move to more enlightened and effective practices. This is true in varying degrees in medicine, law and business. But we seem to have an intellectual and leadership vacuum in education that has allowed governors and state legislatures to make key decisions about the practice of the profession and has generally agreed to whatever an ingrained and powerful bureaucracy wanted. Schools of education are an important part of the horse and buggy empire; they enjoy their status and the never ending revenue flow that their position provides to them.
Stan, you write, “Indeed, the most important thing I’ve learned is that none of this is rocket science. We already know what works. What we lack is the will to do it.”
Often, when people talk about “what works,” they are focused on one thing: test scores. And so we eliminate music and art education, discontinue recess and field trips, require uniforms, implement military type discipline on 8 year olds, increase home work, require teachers follow to the “T” teaching scripts, and practice, practice, practice test taking techniques and sample test questions — all because, to one degree or another, such techniques are believed to be what works to raise scores.
When we talk about “what works,” it’s crucial to define what in the world we are talking about. Of key importance for school design is a clarification of purpose. As I said above, I like Obama’s goal for schools: “provide an education for children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential.” What works to accomplish such a goal is not so simple as raising test scores, but it is a much more worthwhile goal. I said, above, “An educational system that would focus on understanding and fulfilling individual potential would require a transformed system because this goal requires a level of quality much beyond what is possible in the present system.” As I said, “In Education, Let’s Stop Trying To Improve a Horse and Buggy System.”
Actually Leonard Pitts wrote the “what works” quote. I don’t think he was talking about a scores are the only thing model either. The emphasis on scores is primarily there because the business types who believe in measurable outcomes and the politicians they support wanted a club to beat up on urban schools, in part because their results are perceived as bad. Accordingly No Child Left Behind provides sticks without carrots and facilitates failure and subsequent punshment. Affluent suburbs are concerned about the thing you mention and don’t want the stabdardized tests to mess up their kids education.
Whether the system wants any but a few people to reach their God given potential, which certainly poses a problem for measurable outcome fans, is another question.
Actually the political system has a lot to say about how medicine is practiced too. Abortions, medicinal marijuana, birth control, what Medicare and Medicaid pay for and the absence of a universal system paying for everyone to have health care, are subject to political choices. As is the schizophrenia treatment of scientific theories that assume the validity of evolution. And perhaps the extent that providers must follow a standard of care and the consequences if they don’t. Some of this is based on the free market, particularly the idea that we ration health care by having insurance providers compete to insure healthy people and dump sick ones. But allowing the markets to dictate that result is a political choice.
Every school reform situation I’ve looked at around the country has a lot of local flavor in it’s structure. Dayton has made some steps toward reorganization with the Children First campaign 8? years ago. Not all reform packages are easiy transferable form district to district or state to state but the general structure of the NYC reform is not a bad starting point.
To implement change in the New York City School System they started at the statehouse passing a new law allowing the mayor to step in and essentially take over the district and reformat its governance. He centralized some aspects while decentralizing others in an interesting balance that has led to some improvement.
There has been an exorbitant amount of research accomplished and well reported across the country on a multitude of school reform solutions. Dayton doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, just pick and choose which available spokes are will fit the best. But that itself is not a simple task and will require some educated analysis.
In Ohio it will also likely require statehouse support to implement true lasting reforms.
Here is a short overview of the NYC results so far.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3025863/New-York-City-School-Reform-2002-to-2008-Presentation-Paper
That’s a nice sentiment, Mike. Nobody would deny that a superlative transformation in education would be wonderful. But do we arrive there via a horse-and-buggy analogy?
I keep hearing how schools should be run like businesses–and I keep asking “which business? GM? Enron? Hewlett-Packard?” Businesses have a far higher rate of failure; most of them don’t last five years. The schools–even the worst ones–achieve a graduation rate over 50%.
Analogies can be useful for communicating certain ideas, but eventually an objective analysis needs to be done. What, in your opinion, is the shape of the education evolution that you desire? Does it incorporate John Holt’s 1960s ideas that our current education system fails in part because it’s based on the old Theory X management styles with emphases on efficiencies and time measurement–spend so many hours on your seat in the classroom and you get credits which add up to a diploma? Do you envision mastery learning, outcomes-based assessments, skill sets? How, without spending more on teachers, do you attract highly qualified people, especially in the high-demand technologies and sciences?
You’re also making the presumption that there is plenty of money already. I suspect there may be, but there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. The people who are guaranteed an outstanding education are those who pay $42,000 per year to send the kid to a top private academy. In Ohio, the few charter schools that have succeeded at anything have often found ways to supplement their per-student expenditure–ISUS gets lots of charitable donations, and WEB DuBois academy benefited from erroneous over-funding by the state and then by Fordham Foundation providing similar funds after the state cut off the overpayments.
Note that manufacturers understand that innovative new products require massive investments in R&D. We didn’t suddenly have hybrid automobiles or flat-panel LCD monitors; millions of dollars were invested in such things before a dollar of return was generated. I’m sure you understand, this is why new innovative products are inevitably quite expensive.
So if you want innovative, transformative education, why do you think you can get it done without a proper infusion of R&D funds? Oh, it might happen to some minor extent–we got the first personal computers from Steve Wozniak fooling around with a Heathkit, a portable TV, and and IBM selectric–but in the long run, the computers that we’re using to debate these ideas did not spring up in the absence of venture capital. I don’t see why schools are any different.