Why Things Won’t, and Can’t, Change for the Public System of Education
"We embrace reform, it’s those pesky changes that upset us."
Reform is lotsa churnin’, but no butter.
"There is one thing the government can do more efficiently than private enterprise. When we find out what it is, we’ll let you know."
"Why should socialism work better for education than for anything else?", Milton Friedman.
Public education is like communism. When it doesn’t work, believers tell you it wasn’t done right, and, if you give them just one more chance, they’ll nail it.
"Nothing can be more inefficient than a system where people spend other people’s money for someone else’s benefit."
"A bureaucrat must worry about what he is supposed to do in the bureaucracy, not what the bureaucracy is supposed to do."
"I’m from the government, and I’m here to help."
"…powerful forces conspire to protect careers, contracts, and current practices before tending to the interests of our children.", Howard Fuller on resigning as superintendent of the Milwaukee public school system.
In politics, action happens when the loudest voice reaches the biggest ear.
"The right structure does not guarantee results. But the wrong structure aborts results and smothers even the best-directed efforts." Peter Drucker.
"A union is employment insurance for the incompetent."
A story is told around the education campfires. Despairing of education reform, a New Age educationist decided to hold a seance and contact John Dewey. This done, he asked the father of North American progressivism how to do school reform. "I have two ways," Dewey said, "The realistic and the miraculous. Which would you like to hear?" "The realistic, of course.", the educator said. "It goes like this,", Dewey said. "One day a messenger from God visits everyone involved in public education and whispers the secret." "If that’s the realistic, then what’s the miraculous?" Dewey frowns and says, "The miraculous is that the educators do it themselves."
The French Revolution took the same kind of whack at reform as education is always taking. The King and nobility were the cause of heavy taxation and pointless foreign wars, so they changed the name of the King to Emperor and then names of the levels of nobility to General and got about the same, but with more casualties.
Education reform is like having the fox guard the henhouse. The people and organizations which created the problem are expected to solve it. The same people, with the same directing principles, operating under the same contingencies, consume a lot of money and rename old programs, because most of the people with real expertise have never been in, or have been driven out, of the system. The results are the same or worse. In Chicago, after 10 years of reform, 72% of the teachers said teaching improved. Student scores did not, but one of the people involved was elected President of the United States. Parents support concentration on student learning. Teachers do not. One reform method is to evaluate teachers by peer review. By having teachers look at the methods of other teachers, it is hoped that good teaching will emerge. It is only the amount learned by the students which matters. Peer-review is one more silly and expensive sham because the reviewers have no special talent for evaluating and supporting teaching and will be reluctant to say anything detrimental about a fellow teacher, especially if it has an impact on pay or continued employment. Peer review concentrates on the behavior of the teacher rather than on the academic behavior of students. There is no evidence that peer review produces better student results. Peer review will allow those in the education bureaucracy to point to yet another reform which looks good and does nothing. Reform usually consists of stating goals without working out the details of how they should be reached and without measuring whether they are reached. As one quality control person said, "What could be worse, goals without method?" One writer on education reform refers to reform as "churn", where a lot of movement appears to occur, but nothing changes, but churn, apparent movement while going nowhere, it vital in government.
The usual reform methods such as changes in curriculum, teacher education and stricter teacher requirements do not work because they are not correlated with student performance. Tests of teacher competence are based on theories of what a good teacher should know and do. The only relevant test of a teacher is how well students learn. Education reformers from within the bureaucracy typically choose a different combination of concepts from the Book of Wrong and revamp teaching on that basis. It does not work because it cannot work. Reform must result in radically different teaching and sustainable methods which produce better learning.
Since there is no accountability in bureaucracy, change can go some way in the right direction, by chance, and then stall. In Britain, the Ministry of Education decided that Whole Language was ineffective. The fact that is was being used was bad enough. The authorities then went to a weak form of phonics which was little better. They then became astonished that a weak form of direct instruction was superior. The three decades of this "churn" could have been avoided if the research available thirty years ago had been used. Given the results from other jurisdictions, one can be assured that the thousands of people involved, including university experts who know nothing, educational bureaucrats who know nothing, principals and teachers who supported this nonsense are still working or retired on full pensions. In business, success is replicated. In public bureaucracies, success is punished or ignored.
Often reform is couched in the language of "higher standards" and "getting tough" by not allowing students to advance or graduate until they have met "strict" criteria. Once a substantial percentage of students fail, the criteria are lowered or abandoned. Raising accomplishment by having higher standards is an old Soviet trick where the illusion of progress was created by having Five Year Plans which had higher quotas, fostering the notion that the previous goals had been met and current goals will be met. When the new goals were not met, the party officials simply said they were.
The surest sign that an education reform will not work is that its proponents maintain that it will take a "few years" for results to surface. If the teaching of reading is improved over standard methods, improvement will appear in three or four hours, or sooner, not three or four years.
Another reform currently in favor is early-childhood education from the ages of three to five. The same organizations which have failed with older students are expected to succeed with infants. There is no reason to believe they will. The cry used to be, "Give us more money." It is now, "Give us more time." which will, of course, costs more money. This might be sensible if there were a dose-response curve in education as there is in medicine–more input results in better output. Alas, with ineffective techniques and curricula, more will not be better.
There will be more on reform tomorrow.
Cheers and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
