Polishing a Rotten Apple

Did you ever think about how the “reforms” in bureaucratic organizations (education, governmental regulatory agencies, etc.) always start with the assumption that the status quo has value as a starting point? That is, the approach is to try to “polish a rotten apple.”

It is easy to understand why this is so. The bureaucrats are deathly afraid that if any needed changes were looked at objectively, their own jobs and “cast in concrete” habits would be in jeopardy. This is why, for example, the Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of 11/05 states that while billions of dollars have been spent attempting to close the gap that the current situation is worse than when Robert Kennedy, a third of a century ago, called the gap a stain on our national honor. The efforts always start and end in the same place, the status quo, wasting huge amounts of money and limiting our kids’ futures because they are not educated to their full potential.

Here is a look at current assumptions common in education that I believe are roadblocks in the way of serving our kids as they deserve to be served.

1. Big school districts with a strong central office, top down structure are more efficient and more effective. The centralized structures have been done away with in large organizations outside of government funded bureaucratic operations because they found that competition forced them to admit that a decentralized structure performed much better. The fact that the same is true of education settings when it has been tried is discussed in William Ouchi’s new book, “The Secret of TSL.”

2. Education school training is required to be able to teach or lead effectively in education. The education schools are basically “diploma mills” milking the public trough for all the money they can garner. The preparedness of their graduates when compared to the requirements to do an effective job is weak at best. The education schools’ graduate programs have no rigor and are in what Arthur Levine called “A Race to the Bottom” reducing admission and graduation requirements while shortening program length in an effort to attract more and more people interested in the paper not the education that would allow them to do an effective job.

3. The research in education is rigorous and can be relied upon to make important decisions on curriculum and methods, etc. In fact, the research in education is generally of poor quality because it is slanted to favor products or services of the researchers or poorly done from a statistical rigor point of view. See the What Works Clearinghouse at the US Dept of Ed website.

4. The education oversight bureaucracies at the Federal and State levels are doing a good job of setting standards, achievement testing regimens, certification requirements, etc. Because the denizens of these bureaucracies have been trained in the education schools’ graduate programs they don’t have the knowledge or objectivity to break the cycle of low standards and support for education processes that don’t stand scientific scrutiny as pointed out by E.D. Hirsch in The Knowledge Deficit. Would you think it strange that someone with an education doctorate that Levine found in his research to be of no value in any public school administration job, would fail to criticize the very degrees that many of them have? Right.

5. Educators are expert in the subjects they teach. This is one of the biggest problems that goes unaddressed. Oh, there have been efforts like the highly qualified requirements in the NCLB law but they have failed to make a difference. This is because the “remedial” classes required are populated with educators so that they are taught down to that level of competence. This is just another example of going through the motions to satisfy a legal requirement but not the intent. Thus, the intent of the law is short-circuited. Rita Kramer describes the problem well in Ed School Follies, “The people who become ‘educators’ and who run our school systems usually have degrees in education, psychology, social sciences, public administration; they are not people who have studied, know, and love literature, history, science, or philosophy. Our ‘educators’ are not educated. They do not love learning. Naturally enough, they think of the past as dead because it has never been alive to them. And they will not bring it alive for their pupils.”

So, what is to be done? It seems we have two choices. First, we can give up and cut the money spent on “improving education” to zero (which would require dramatic cuts in admin staffs in school districts) by admitting that it hasn’t happened and won’t happen under the current modus operandi. Or, we can dismantle the assumptions listed above and cause a “reset to first principles” to determine what is the right way to proceed. As part of this we would need to set very high expectations to prevent the re-establishment of the same processes with different names. Inevitably lots of toes would have to be stepped on and some of the worst actors sacrificed as an object lesson for the rest that reform was not a talking exercise but a walking exercise with real and positive results required. You might blanch at the thought of sacrificing some of the educators to make the point. I have absolutely no problem with that as millions of kids are continually sacrificed at the “status quo; let’s make it cushy for the adult educators” alter. It is time to start behaving as though the kids have some priority in our education system.