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TechnoratiSchools Are Not Businesses
We should stop treating our schools as businesses.
Since the early 20th century, prominent business leaders have acted on the belief that since they are good at making money, they are the most qualified people to decide how to best educate the country's young.
Entranced by the power and efficiency of American industry, many educational leaders have looked to these businessmen for leadership and for models of operation. They have tried to govern school systems as if they were corporations, organize schools as if they were something akin to factories and orient education toward testing and tracking students toward presumed "real world" destinies.
Today's mantra is to allow the much-ballyhooed magic of the market to solve educational problems. Thus the emphasis on consumer choice among schools through vouchers or charters or plans to pay teachers based on test-score improvements.
There are many flaws inherent in imagining that schools will work well once they adopt factory or free-market models. Perhaps most fundamental is the presumption that schools work best when they emulate business.
But schools are not businesses.
When they flourish, they are living communities defined by powerful and caring collaboration.
Students are not things to be produced. They are human beings who are learning and growing in ways that are too complex for any standardized scores to truly measure.
Nor are teachers mere robots that drill students in how to take a test. The most talented and dedicated teacher is better nourished by a supportive work culture than by narrow appeals to individual self-interest, which pit teacher against teacher.
The purposes of schooling should not be degraded into privatized preparation toward the fattest paycheck.
Clearly, schools should prepare students to earn decent livelihoods. But just as importantly, they should prepare students to look toward - and even demand - jobs that are a major source of fulfillment and creative expression.
Schools should go far beyond preparing students for work. There are many non-market (perhaps even anti-market) lessons that schools impart: They inculcate an appreciation of the arts, establish healthy habits of exercise, teach cooperation, promote citizenship and show our children how to live together peacefully.
If schools do these tasks well, students when they become adults are much more likely to participate in socially positive ways, such as creating art and music, preventing domestic violence, working for racial equality, promoting clean energy and opposing war.
We have to remember, education is a humane and human process with social values beyond the bottom line. Business leaders have no expertise in this quest, and business models do not apply.
For that matter, now that casino capitalism has imploded, isn't it time to stop looking to the corporate elite for advice on how to run the schools? These "experts"- the bankers and corporate CEOs - couldn't even manage the one thing they are supposed to be good at: running their own businesses.
Educators should shed their subordinate status and sense of inferiority. Schools work best when teachers - in dialogue with parents and other citizens - design the educational experience, not corporate officials.
33 Comments so far
Show AllWhen we realize schools are not businesses or factories but first, last and always webs of human relationships that must be the matrix in which any learning happens we will start treating students as humans and not as replaceable parts or raw materials; we will re-fund schools (by de-funding prisons, police and the military) and provide a reasonable ratio of students to teachers--8 or 12 to one to start with, moving as close to real human interaction (that is, one to one) as possible over time. That is, schools would not be places where the young are segregated to do the "job" of their age, but centers of community where people of all ages, incomes, occupations and interests come together to help each other learn whatever it is they need to learn at the moment--ideally as part of some larger vision of what their life is for.
What we now call education is a matter of accumulating information and knowledge from books, which anyone can do who can read. Such education offers a subtle form of escape from ourselves and, like all escapes, it inevitably creates increasing misery. Conflict and confusion result from our own wrong relationship with people, things and ideas, and until we understand that relationship and alter it, mere learning, the gathering of facts and the acquiring of various skills, can only lead us to engulfing chaos and destruction.
As society is now organized, we send our children to school to learn some technique by which they can eventually earn a livelihood. We want to make the child first and foremost a specialist, hoping thus to give him a secure economic position. But does the cultivation of a technique enable us to understand ourselves?
While it is obviously necessary to know how to read and write, and to learn engineering or some other profession, will technique give us the capacity to understand life? Surely, technique is secondary; and if technique is the only thing we are striving for, we are obviously denying what is by far the greater part of life.
EDUCATION AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LIFE
J. Krishnamurti
Oh, the medley of ambivalence about our state of education (indoctrination?) is infinite and growing. To cut to the essence of the problem I would look to the historic India model where there is a pupil (apprentice), teacher (guru) who is a long term mentor of said student. The mentor educates, teaches, molds, and guilds the student. In the end, if the student is worthy enough, the mentor shares his innermost secrets with the principle student and he becomes the next chosen one to lead and teach.
This is a deep and serious apprenticeship where all facets of life and learning are transmitted to the willing pupil. Naturally a vain of morality, wholeness and integration run through this process, whether one is a tabla player, poet, social activist, craftsperson, monk, etc. etc.
The ancient slow ways was superior and with the forthcoming post modern/industrial age coming to an end, hopefully will return.
Students as products? Well isn't every aspect of our lives commodified these days by these very same bizness as usual folk? Everything has to be run as a Henry Ford inspired assembly line?
That, we are told, is the essence of Liberty and Life, and America (or, at least its dollar $) is the shining star of light (replacing Jesus himself) in the universe!
Schools Are Not Businesses
No, they're not but they've been run into the ground like our banking system and auto industry. The result: millions of Americans watch the psychotic Glenn Beck on Fux News and hang on his every word. In a well and truly educated society, Beck would be a sleazy nightclub owner straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel, or own a doughnut shop on the wrong side of the tracks.
The NCLB-era of educational policy in the US is the evil spawn of the globalization of our economy. That process is at the very foundation of the business model for schools, charters, vouchers, data driven instruction, merit pay, standardized testing, and most perversely of all, paying students to consume the corporate version of knowledge. It was the reason the Business Roundtable, Bill Gates, and the Walton and Bush families were the driving forces behind these absurd and counterproductive educational policies. Big Business wanted a profit making private school system in their race with China and India to lowest possible wage for workers.
These Milton Friedman-inspired Reagan revolutionaries will mark the Bush years as the zenith of their power. This era spit up hucksters and charlatans like Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings, Armstrong Williams, Michael Bloomberg, Jack Welch, Jeb Bush, Ruby K. Payne, and more ominously for any future return to health, Arne Duncan. It was certainly the time the attack on public education appeared ready to bear fruit. They had public school system wreckers like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein in place, kids were dropping out in droves, and teachers were in full flight.
But just as they were breaking out that "Mission Accomplished" banner from the White House basement, just then their rationale for being, their precious global economy, crashed! The five biggest US banks are all insolvent and soon to be nationalized, GM and Chrysler are headed for bankruptcy court, Madoff has made off with about $50 billion and he's just one of many ponzi schemers. There's only panic on Wall Street and investor flights to safety. Treasuries and negative returns are hot now. The financiers who are not killing themselves or at least faking their deaths have the fingers on both hands crossed for President Obama to save them with taxpayer money.
Any talk of NCLB are prayers said over a corpse. Soon it will be every private school and charter school investor for himself. Private school students are being moved to the public schools by their debt ridden parents in significant numbers already.
I will have to respectfully disagree will the authors.
I personally think that a factory is a very good metaphor for a school. The raw material that goes in is the student and the finished product is a good citizen when they graduate high school. A good citizen would have the basic skills to perform any generic function and the ability to learn new functions. They would also know our governmental setup and our laws in general.
In Florida our schools are churning out a product defect rate of 25% which would be unthinkable in any respectable business. This is up from 31% from just a few years ago.
A began researching how this could happen and talked to school board members, teachers, etc and found that the education industry is more fashion conscious than Paris or Milan. There is something new every year that's the latest and greatest. Just google "Education Conference 2009" and check out their agendas to see what this year's fashions are.
The truly strange thing is that NO ONE is happy. Out of the three major stakeholders: parents, teachers, and students ... not one of them is happy with the system.
Why we can't determine what the best way to teach a group of kids reading, writing, math, science, and civics and stick with it is beyond my comprehension. If this were a business they would have figured this out a long time ago.
One last point because the authors briefly hit on vouchers. I had been in favor of them until late in Bush's 2nd term when I had a revelation about the real reason conservatives were pushing vouchers ... they wanted to use public funds for the religious indoctrination of children. Sad but true.
Education is NOT like a factory. Factories order raw materials or parts for production. They choose a standardized quality of materials to meet their needs. If they receive a shipment of defective parts or inferior quality material, they send it back. Public schools can't send kids back to their parents. They have to work with what they get, even if it is defective.
If any factory in the United States were faced with the same lack of control over their parts or raw materials, they would produce an equally poor or inconsistent product.
The vast bulk of effort in public schools is spent on these "defective" kids. A classroom teacher, driven by school policy is forced to devote the majority of their time reinforcing the defective parts while our best and brightest are left to rust, since they are already propping up the test scores.
Can you imagine a factory which was devoted to fixing defective parts that it had to use?
IF indeed you want to stick with the factory metaphor, then you need to consider who sits on the assembly line before the schools. Parents.
Studies show that the two biggest factors that determine academic success of a child is if both parents are at home, and how much time the child spends watching television. Both of those things are outside the influence of school. Other determining factors include: Amount of time spent reading at home, hours read to before entering preschool or kindergarten, educational level of the parent and IQ of the child.
All of this is coming to schools down the assembly line from parents. Schools are desperately trying to compensate, and they're failing. And they take the blame.
Public schools are guilty of more than enough. They certainly don't need to get scapegoated for their "product defect rate."
Maybe a Refinery is a better metaphor than a Factory. I completely agree with you that the schools must take all comers and their goal is to gradually refine and build them to be proper citizens by the time they graduate, which for most is when they are 18 and are of legal majority and can vote, sign contracts, etc.
Outside of a forum like this you will never get an honest discussion about the causes of student underacheivement. Few parents will accept that little Johnny isn't up to par.
One study that I read found no correlation between the money spent per student at a school and their student's performance but they did find a direct correlation between the socio-economic status of the student and their (under)acheivement.
When you reasonably think about it, it makes sense. A student from a poor family probably doesn't have access to a computer, there may only be one parent at home, that parent might work 2 or more jobs, that parent might not have the skills to help their child with their homework. These parents are more likely to completely abdicate responsibility for the education of their children to schools because they don't have the time or skills to participate.
Understandably, teachers who have to work with such a wide spectrum of students will grow increasingly frustrated. Any effort to split the students up based on ability will be quickly stopped based on allegations of racism.
I would like to know if there are any studies of systems that work, like in Finland and Japan, to determine why they work and if they can be imported to the American system.
"One study that I read found no correlation between the money spent per student at a school and their student's performance but they did find a direct correlation between the socio-economic status of the student and their (under)acheivement."
I have a friend who is doing high level statistical analysis on loads of data from the Texas public school system. The goal is to find correlations between student performance and anything at all that isn't socioeconomic status. According to him there isn't much (of course, this only takes into account factors for which data is available).
"Any effort to split the students up based on ability will be quickly stopped based on allegations of racism."
Good point! I would have never thought of that, but it makes sense. So long as there is a racial divide in income and a strong correlation between wealth and student performance, this will be inevitable.
So people in business are happy? If business people had everything figured out so well why the economic crisis?
You are an engineer aren't you?
Perhaps the real reason why schools are being treated this way is to prevent people from thinking. If people could think, would they put up with our world?
You are exactly right. Nobody in the school system, if they conform to the system, are allowed to think. Any who do think and encourage others to do so are renegades.
The authors state "Students are not things to be produced" and then follow it up with "[schools should] inculcate an appreciation of the arts, establish healthy habits of exercise, teach cooperation, promote citizenship and show our children how to live together peacefully." along with stating that a product of the ideal system would "[be] more likely to participate in socially positive ways, such as creating art and music, preventing domestic violence, working for racial equality, promoting clean energy and opposing war."
Health habits and exercise are nobody's business but the individual. When I read this I picture Winston Smith standing in front of the telescreen doing toe touches. I also don't see why inculcating an appreciation of the arts is any more important than inculcating an appreciation of fine wines and cheeses. I might agree with the idea of offering the opportunity/option of learning about the arts--but I wouldn't say it should be a goal of a public education. When the authors said that students aren't things to be produced, I thought they meant that the thoughts and values of the student weren't to be considered the property of the state. I guess not!
"The purposes of schooling should not be degraded into privatized preparation toward the fattest paycheck."
It would be better if being a better teacher was commensurate with making a better living. That leads one to the question of what being a better teacher means. Well, that means different things to different people so why not let the consumers choose (oh wait, we know what is best for them and they can't be trusted with their own lives). People ought to be able to tailor their own education to their own values. If they want to start their own business, then they should be able to take the classes that they think will suit them best and not be forced to take irrelevant courses like P.E. or even geometry and biology(I know you all will disagree with me here!). For the student who wants to become a doctor, I believe that they should be able to take advanced courses in medicine in lieu of humanities and whatever else. If they are in classes that they aren't interested in, they won't get much out of it anyway and the courses will get watered down. So in summary, I think that we should make education available to everybody but not force them to go through a standardized and inflexible curriculum.
MIT has a website where they post their course materials from past classes and several contain video lectures. I personally watched the video lectures from two different courses and got way more out of them than I did in my actual university course. In fact, I quit going to class after a few weeks and only showed up to turn in my homework and take the exams. I can envision a system where state schools provide free archives of video lectures from past courses online and then offer exams to those people who would like to test out of a subject. In math and most of the sciences, the material is pretty standardized and a person could earn a degree without ever having to pay for an education. This would certainly be more cost-efficient and make it so education is available to anyone willing to learn.
Unfortunately schools are big business. (Check the compensation package of your local college president).
There is a way to fix the educational system, but it is not politically correct. A single-payer, K thru grad school voucher system would work. Not the kind of voucher system that has been proposed by the current political parties but a system that would be fair to all - and include support for home schooling.
The problems in the current system permeate all aspects - poor teachers (some of them), irrelevant curriculum, horrendous culture within the system, bullying, lack of critical thinking, robotic patriotism, violence, glamorization of competition and sports,...
I have been teaching in the public system since 1956. I now home-school.
I am with you on this. If you think about it, it's just like single-payer health care.
"The problems in the current system permeate all aspects - poor teachers (some of them), irrelevant curriculum, horrendous culture within the system, bullying, lack of critical thinking, robotic patriotism, violence, glamorization of competition and sports,..."
Yeah the teachers suck. I got undergrad degrees in math and physics and I recall that all of the poorest students in my upper division classes were always education majors who didn't have an ounce of passion for the subject. You could almost count on the worst performers being education majors and I remember being appalled at the idea that these people were a few years away from teaching naive and helpless high school students. To be fair, there were a few education majors who were passionate and intelligent, but they were almost the exception.
When you say "bullying" and "violence", are you referring to the culture of the kids or is this a reference to the culture of the teachers?
OK teachers are misfits. They probably choose their profession by default. What do you expect? They get low pay and lower respect.
Think you can do better? Please be my guest and try it for a year. Then I'll listen to you.
I don't blame the individuals so much as I blame the system. I think the whole institutional structure makes lousy teaching inevitable.
I do think I could do much better and so could a lot of other folks. I have tutored many high school students in math and physics and when I look at the homework problems that they are asked to solve, it is clear that whoever wrote the problem (may or may not be the teacher) doesn't know very much about the subject. Moreover, the problems never elucidate concepts, they are always just drills to make certain things automatic---or rather, to make it so that people can solve problems without knowing what they are doing. It is all syntax and no semantics--or at least the analog of that. Math especially seems to be taught in a strange way where people are taught algorithms but never asked to understand why those algorithms work. I would guess that a lot of adults couldn't explain why long division works just to take one example.
No. Tutoring is not being in the system. You are right about the system and if you participated in it you would understand it a lot better.
I know it is not and I actually don't think we are disagreeing.
as an ex-public schoolteacher who could no longer collude with the system i will amplify this article's points. for years i took part simultaneously in workshops on 'critical thinking', 'resilience training' and standardized testing and found the hypocricies so demoralizing, i got out of the crowd control business and cannot fathom how my few colleagues who've stayed sane throughout decades-long careers have done it. i was only at it for one decade, and had to get out before i became a lobotomized robot or else an enraged, frothing at the mouth lunatic. if you haven't read john taylor gatto's 'dumbing us down', do check it out.... i just ordered his 'weapons of mass distraction' since i am actually considering braving a new job as an educator that may genuinely allow for real creativity and critical thought. we'll see. the way education/'credentialing' etc is set up now is basically a training for life as an unquestioning, self-centered, fearful & addictive consumer who is beset with delusions of grandeur and independence and simultaneously made utterly helpless and dependent upon 'experts' who bluff their way through following the siren call of the almighty dollar. dang. i've been out of the classroom for years and it still makes my blood boil. we all seriously need to reskill and stop commodifying everything from 'intellectual property' to water to basic skills that should be freely shared with anyone interested.
on a lighter note, google swami beyondananda's '2009 state of the universe address':THE SHIFT HAS HIT THE FAN. now that guy's an educator....i may not agree with everything he says, but he sure gets people thinking....and laughing. thanks for the article...and bill, your RETHINKING SCHOOLS rocks!!!!
I did it for thirty years. I've been retired for fifteen years and still have nightmares about school. I have a sort of PTSD. I just finished having lunch at 2:30 I was the only one in the restaurant, just as I always hope for. I haven't knowingly exposed myself to a crowd since retirement.
I don't know what to make of people. they couldn't be as stupid as they act. I know they are not as mean as they seem; they are always polite and pleasant to me. My family (what's left of them after two divorces) tolerate me because of my "condition".
I live in a small community where I cannot avoid seeing the occasional former student or co-worker, but you can bet I don't seek them out.
I suppose I'm sane enough, but I must seem like one strange character.
School administrators are about as trustworthy as the politicians they are. Students are the last priority while the continuous PR campaign insists they are the first priority. Everything is upside down, inside out, backwards. Black is white, yes means no.
When kids learn it is in spite of the system, not because of it.
"Mista Kurtz, He dead."
Nietzshe,
Agree or disagree with your many comments I respect you and hope you are getting or will get help with your "condition". Therapy has changed many lives, and while I occasionally joke that it should be mandatory, it should at least be nearly universal. Virtually none of us gets what we need growing up or after; therapists are in the practice of giving it. If one doesn't match what you need, find another.
Our voices are too valuable to let them be silenced or distorted by neglect, repression or abuse. Good luck.
"Man is distinguishable from the lower animals by two characteristics. One is his unmatched capacity for learning. The other is his steadfast determination not to use it. " -attributed to Mock Twain.
Thanks to the authors...
I strongly urge anyone who hasn’t come across it to read Chris Hedges:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090323_america_is_in_need_of_a_moral_bailout/
This is imo an overpoweringly strong statement about education. [The title doesn’t convey its fundamental importance.]
Fusion
Thanks for the suggestion. It was, indeed, a very powerful article.
If I were Bernie Madoff or the head of GM, to name but two examples, the LAST thing I would want would be an educated citizenry in touch with its revolutionary heritage.
Well to me, it seems that school is a business in certain parts of America. It is a factory for the poor and under resourced to become a cog in the machine.
Often in Public schools and other schools hurting for funds there is no chance for a student to have an opinion or to get elaboration on any particular subject. Teachers often frown on raising your hand to much. It is a distraction for them.
I don't blame the teachers as they are forced to teach only what's going to be on the test. Any deviation from that costs money. Money that the schools don't have.
I have been to underfunded schools and ones that seems to have unlimited funds and the environment is completely different. Luckily my four years of high school were spent at a place where questions were welcomed and answer that were not known, were then researched.
When I was in the public school system. That was not the case at all. So until we create a environment that teaches our students to learn versus teaching them how to work at someone's job and create wealth for the already wealthy.
We are going to continue to lag behind the rest of the world in education and several other categories.
Schools are not businesses and we would not want our children treated as raw materials to be manipulated for a corporate outcome either. Teachers and students are people who need to be treated as people, not corporate outcomes.
It is a big mistake to think that a profession as artful as teaching would benefit from corporatization process. Look what happened to furniture when it switched from art (heirlooms) to business (crap). Do we want the same in our schools?
"Schools Are Not Businesses"--neither are: law enforcement, roads, water and sewage treatment, garage removal/recyclilng, healthcare insurance, broadcasting, or for that matter government--unless you are wedded to the fascist model of governance to which this country has been ball and chained for the past 35 years or so.
Poet
Well said. It's time that we allow for things that should NOT be done for profit to be treated as what they are: PUBLIC obligations. Put "justice" at the top of that list. We don't have a justice system anymore, we have an extortion racket.
Some things should NOT be done for profit. Wages, yes, but profit? NO.Ever since Reagan, education has been starved and short changed (not that it was EVER treated as seriously as it should have been), and what we have now is a whole generation that can't spell, can't write so that you can understand them, and is in serious need of remedial retraining in the basics of communication. The saddest part is that these are the peole that we will one day have to turn the country over to. What a miserable example those of my generation have proven to be.
as long as our model of the meaning of life is to brutally abuse the planet to make unnecessary things to sell each other at ever-increasing profit, education has no meaning outside that framework...education, in fact, opposes such activity...
if we were to begin a child's educational process with the individual's rights and responsibilities toward their own sustenance (shelter, water and food) in their given locality, everything would change...what constitutes life's meaning, an adult, planetary stewardship...
great point! The entire paradigm of "education" must change.
Right now the corporate paradigm reigns and they may try to eliminate public schools. I think they are trying with NCLB Act and requiring more and more from schools to track standardized progress via IEP (individual learning plans) that become so cumbersome that only a computer program can track it....that is the ultimate goal: they want public schools to be run by computer programs not teachers who can teach students to question the dominant paradigm.
We need to teach metacogntion: "the mind aware of itself is a pilot...vastly freer than a passenger mind." (marilyn ferguson)
People worldwide need to wake up before the corporations take over the human race.