To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
If I didn't know better, I'd call this a disinformation piece: deliberately conflating two concepts into one large rant in order to try to join the two. The subtext goes something like this:we know Joe Sixpack has finally figured out how terrible the education system is, so let's throw together a big pile of things we don't like, stick a label on top (something like "bureaucracy") and that way we can get rid of pesky measurements at the same time we free up execution.)
The author isn't good enough to pull that off, though. I think it's much more the case that it's just a populist rant from somebody who already has a big label he wants to stick on things that don't work. That is a non-starter.
To continue the programming analogy, as a customer you guys are delivering crap all the time. I pay ten times as much and the crap just gets worse. Now we can sit around and dicker all day long about the process you have for making crap, but one thing we are not going to do is remove the testing at the end that makes it obvious to everybody just how shitty the whole thing is.
So let's talk about the software analogy. In software, the bar for formal acceptance usually really low. Do test cases pass? Maybe there's an auto-integration test that also must pass, and some requirements checkout QA has to do. You can write terrible code and have it pass the formal process, which is why you see a lot of terrible programmers coasting along at some of the worse companies. Some teams might have more formal requirements but that goes team by team. If you're working anywhere worth working, there'll be a much higher non-formal bar set by your manager, your team, your customers if you're in contact with them. So the incentives are there but they're personal and informal. The 'waterfall' pattern is one example of a misguided attempt to formalize the software dev process and align it with goals.
How would software devs feel if some perverse, untouchable bureaucracy measured their code according to ridiculous formal measures from the Central Bureaucracy and arbitrary rules that changed according political whims? That's what teachers are facing. I know some software devs face the same thing, but we always give them the same advice: find a better job. Teachers don't have that option because the bureaucracy is everywhere; but they can go to better (generally richer) schools, where it's a little mitigated, or they can drop out and leave that gaggle of little Kafkas behind forever.
I learned to fly people around in airplanes using various instructional techniques, including at times studying for the test. So do most airline pilots. Seems to work for them. The military has been training people for over 200 years with measurable teaching goals. In fact, some of the best teachers are ex-military. I could continue if you'd like.
"...if you're working anywhere worth working--there'll be a much higher non-formal bar set by your manager, your team, your customers if you're in contact with them..."
You are throwing out all requirements from any outside bureaucratic structure and then assuming that some informal standard of quality is going to fill the void. I don't know what your experiences are, but this kind of "let's see what happens" mentality doesn't trend toward good things. It's a tragedy of the commons problem. Why do a little bit extra here if somebody else in the organization is going to look at it anyway?
Instead, we find that really smart people are great at arguing on and on about technical stuff that has nothing to do with delivery. The only thing that naturally limits this is having testable work due on a fixed date. Otherwise, people would much rather create little complex systems that mirror their favorite technical book or management philosophy. There are no fights that are as vicious as academic fights over the smallest things.
The answer here is simple: if it's not measurable, we do not pay for it. I am sure there are lots of teams of really great people leading fulfilling lives creating quality in an ad-hoc manner that will continue doing so. We call these folks artists. There are also people who live the same kind of lives but have measurable results at the end of their creative process. These folks are usually called artistic professionals.
Teachers cannot be artists. The public cannot afford them to be so. They can certainly be artistic professionals, but like other artistic professionals there will be some kind of loose structure around their work product and it will be judged at regular intervals. This measure will be centered solely around students, which is natural because the only reason any teacher would be paid would be because of a student.
There might be a great argument about how the current tests are bad. But I think that's another discussion.
As a side note, and I want to make sure I hit this the right way, I do not care about teachers as such. Yes, I care about the dignity and humanity and kindness we show to all people, but teachers do not get some special place above, say, policemen. Or doctors. They're just like the rest of us. If you try to split up each profession and say we should treat them all in special ways due to the nature of their jobs, it gets much too complex for me to manage. Instead, when I meet somebody we pay our taxes to help us out, I usually try to say "thank you"
It doesn't matter to me whether we employ one teacher or ten million. If we could teach all of the students of the country with one teacher, that would be fine with me. The same goes for those other professions.
For instance, say you proposed creating music according to micro-goals. Say we live in the late 1800s. You look at the classical music and you come up with goals regarding tempo, intonation, meter, and some higher goals regarding fit and feel of the music. Then your Central Bureaucracy says, ok, this is the goal for creating music. Congratulations, you just killed jazz, and rock and roll to follow. All musical producers will have their acceptance criteria for recording a track, but it will be different from producer to producer, from musical style to musical style, more formal or less formal, and in general musical innovation comes from moving the goalposts or tearing them down. And yet these are the "creative professionals" you talk about.
In contrast, teachers are "artistic professionals" (except maybe at level of PhD advisers). Their goal is to use artistic techniques to create products which have achieved a fixed set of goals.
Bureaucratic goal setting is not desirable in all circumstances, but it is useful in some.
There is no central government agency counting how many lines of code per function point, how many spaces per tab, or what brace style I use.
Nor should there be. The people at the local level are the only ones qualified to determine how to test. And the success is proven by the fact that we are leaders in our segment, reviews are good, customers are happy, and we are profitable.
Government run schools do not have this feedback mechanism.
If someone gives money, they want measurable, or at least visible, results.
If you want autonomy at the level L (federal/state/county/local), you can't take any money from any level greater than L.
You may not want complete autonomy, just a better national system. If that's the case, then you need to come up with a better way to measure results -- not inputs -- and suggest that. If it's really better, then people will listen, and maybe the existing standardized tests will be replaced with this better system.
There is less of a demand for testing at the local level, of course, because people generally know pretty well how their local schools are doing.
But nobody in Kansas is going to take a tour of schools in Alabama to see if the federal money is being spent wisely. They need a number. It doesn't matter how counterproductive you say it is to collect this number, they will only stop asking for a number when we stop asking for their money.
Yes, they do, don't they? I think this is the essential fact that keeps getting forgotten.
I've long supported voucher systems for just this reason: they return control to the parents. Maybe vouchers aren't the best way to do that; I'm open to alternatives. But I think that's what we have to do.
(Edit: formatting)
By all measures test scores are not improving in spite of quadrupling the DOE budget over the past 40 years. How about them metrics? This suggests we should abolish the pervasive bureaucracy.
Let me rephrase to be more precise: a person who votes for federal education spending will also tend to vote for federal control over education (regardless of the effectiveness of that control).
And that goes for everything. Federal spending means federal control over anything related to that spending. Anything else is sustainable only by wishful thinking.
$200 million goes to the Institute of Educational Sciences to track score data. In the absence of the IES would people pay this much for the data? I don't think so.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Anything else is sustainable only by wishful thinking." Education is not fundamentally different than any other good or service, besides that it is "important" and easy to convince the majority of people that it will cease to exist if the government doesn't provide it.
At least two candidates proposed eliminating the DOE during the Republican primaries. One was Rick Perry, where the DOE was one of the 2 departments he remembered to cut; and the other was Ron Paul, who may or may not have said it explicitly, but I'm sure he has said so at some point.
I disagree. People do vote for federal education spending. This pressure to spend comes from somewhere. However irresponsible it is, many people simply vote for more money, regardless of where it comes from. Some people will even vote to have money taken from them and given back -- strings attached.
"I'm not sure what you mean by 'Anything else is sustainable only by wishful thinking'"
I meant that it's wishful thinking to expect money to keep raining down with no strings attached. I agree that education is not fundamentally different from other goods and services.
As a customer you're looking for a one-off administrative web application. In several years it's delivered (along with a warehouse of paperwork) in all of its 100% unit tested glory. As required by Federal Web Compliance 625, it uses EJB and JSP against an Oracle database. One of the tables has data duplication, requiring Federal Normalization Exemption 835.
It's so late because there was a brief controversy during development. One of the developers had increased his productivity by using a code generator to achieve 100% coverage. Suddenly he had a lot of time on his hands--he spent it refactoring the code, building prototypes, knocking out requirements, etc. Due to management oversight his transgression wasn't identified for several months, and the mysterious increase in productivity was hailed by local politicians as a shining example of how the system is working. Once identified, he was escorted out of the building, and a new developer had to rewrite his code from scratch. There was a brief splash in the local papers but that blew over, thank god...
During the meeting in which the resulting steaming pile of crap is delivered to you, the customer, one of the programmers breaks down crying. You can't put your arm around him and comfort him because it's against the law.
What are the problems with this? It seems rather fair right? A few problems: 1) The teacher in the previous year cheated on the test results (or the test changed), so that the students scored unnaturally high in the previous years 2) Gains may be unevenly distributed--is it as easy to move a student from 90% to 95% as it is to move a student from 20% to 40%? 3) Stability of the measure--if you look at this metric over say 5-10 years, is it consistent for a given teacher, or does it fluctuate? 4) If you run the metric backwards in time, is it still predictive? That is, if we look at this year's results, can we predict what the student would have achieved in the past? 5) What about background issues? This in some sense assumes that the background of student achievement is flat in the absence of a teacher--but middle class parents will spend a lot of time working with their kids, that poorer parents (on average) do not. This means that even if the teacher does nothing, the middle class students will likely still perform better. If these students are not equally distributed (which they won't be), this will also effect the metric.
I could go on, but my point is that this is one of the more objective methods of valuing student performance and it fails--I think there are several problems with schools--I think that professionalizing the teaching profession would go a long way in predominately middle class districts--for example, requiring teachers to obtain a masters, offering higher salaries to recruit more talented teachers into the field, requiring subject matter competency (my family has a friend who's background is teaching middle school math who got drafted into teaching geography! With relatively little time given in advance to prep.), etc. I think setting curriculum standards and tests that reflect them and allowing the teachers autonomy in how they teach the required subjects would be useful. Generally, promoting more understanding and less drill and kill--but just saying, "throw the whole thing out" is not terribly useful. There's a fun read called "Surpassing Shanghai" which offers a brief review of education systems in other countries that is worth reading...
What good is it to have measurable goals if you are measuring the wrong thing, or your measurements are corrupt, or there is no effective means of correction if goals are not met?
> To continue the programming analogy, as a customer you guys are delivering crap all the time. I pay ten times as much and the crap just gets worse. Now we can sit around and dicker all day long about the process you have for making crap, but one thing we are not going to do is remove the testing at the end that makes it obvious to everybody just how shitty the whole thing is.
Keep it in then. Your programming team can learn to game the system, and your management team can quietly lobby to change the metrics so the numbers look better, and you can even bring in a pair of Bobs for a development cycle to shake things up, but none of that actually gets you to working software.
The first is management of inputs - work rules, prescribed teaching methods, etc. The second is management of outputs - measurement of student performance and penalties/rewards for teachers who harm/improve this.
The first can certainly be scrapped at the global level (though of course experimentation should continue at lower levels). The second, not so much.
By analogy to programming, it would be silly to hire a programmer and tell him to use Eclipse and make sure all work is performed between 9AM and 6PM. On the other hand, it would be moronic not to give him a detailed description of what you actually want him to build, and put a clause in the contract tying his pay to his product meeting the specs.
Something interesting that I've observed is that most of the people complaining about metrics are really complaining about the goals of the system. I.e., many people want the school to increase mean(student scores), and then complain when the school attempts to increase count(student score > CUTOFF). If you want the school to have different goals, say so. Don't blame the goals of the system on the existence of metrics.
You can't argue that metrics should be the be-all and end-all of everything, and a teachers' intuition should count for nothing, when there are all these problems with the metrics we have. Here's a good story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/creative--moti...
This teacher was by all accounts a phenomenal teacher, but she was fired because her batch of kids came from a school that had suspiciously high scores the year before, and is currently under investigation for cheating. She didn't maintain that high level of scores so she was fired.
Our police system is dominated by metrics and we got The Wire as a result. In education, you hear about cheating scandals in DC, good teachers being fired due to unfortunate statistical conflagrances.. if you're gonna advocate turning your brain off and delegating all decision-making to your metrics, they have to be good.
...good teachers being fired due to unfortunate statistical conflagrances..
How do you know they were good? Because they said so, and one of their cronies agreed?
This link is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem
I'll note that you want to scrap objective metrics because they have some problems, but you don't seem to realize "teachers' intuition" also has problems. One of the biggest is comparability - how I can compare the intuition of teacher A with the intuition of teacher B?
With standardized tests, the answer is simple arithmetic.
Metrics are fine, they just shouldn't be fetishized, and we shouldn't allow them to make us fire good teachers. They also shouldn't dominate what's taught to the extent they do. Nation of multiple choice test-takers? That's what we want out of our school system?
If the students didn't perform, but her superiors liked her, why are you assuming the superiors know what they are talking about?
Again, how can I compare the opinions of heterogeneous superiors, and why do you believe the opinions are correct and objective metrics are wrong?
Opinions fail on many counts - comparability and objectivity being the most obvious. Why do you fetishize opinion, and assert it as being more accurate than objective metrics?
They also shouldn't dominate what's taught to the extent they do.
All standardized tests do is measure whether a school is meeting their goals. If standardized tests are preventing schools from ignoring their goals and teaching whatever they feel like (or perhaps nothing at all), why is that a bad thing?
Further, standardized tests don't really measure much, except for how well student can take tests and regurgitate information.
Client - parents Contractor - admin Sub - teacher
Now imagine that both the client and the sub contractor are influential in the final product (student ability). How do you isolate an incident like divorce from the overall performance measurement of the teacher?
OK, if you want a metric that might work ... testing a year after the teacher is gone.
If you test while the teacher is in charge, they will encourage the student to game the test. This has short-term gain and long-term pain. If you reward teachers for how well the student retains their knowledge (long term), it should work better.
That won't stop teachers pressuring their co-workers to teach to the test, or principals from telling teachers to teach the test, but it helps reduce it. You could rate schools on how well students do 1 year after leaving, to keep the principals in line. I'd guess teachers will just fob off their co-workers.
In the UK, governments have set up a system whereby schools can choose which exam board they want to have for each subject. Each exam board makes and marks its own exams.
Exam boards are motivated to be cheap, generous with the marks, and give workshops you have to pay to attend where they give you information about what will be on this year's exams.
The exam boards are not motivated to make decent exams. They are riddled with mistakes, and do not adequately test students' understanding of the subjects.
Look at some of the GCSE IS/IT/ICT exams; you can find them online. You'll see vaguely-phrased mini-essay questions, where students get marks based on how many of the required points they make, where the points are listed in the examiner's marking guide. If you make a point that wasn't anticipated by the people who set the exams, you're not getting any points.
Problem is, the questions are so open and vague that students will be fumbling around in the dark if they don't know specifically what examiners are looking for. It really is just a matter of teaching to the test. You need to have learned specifically what the examiners are looking for. It doesn't matter whether you know much about ICT or not.
So what's the point? It's supposed to be an ICT exam, not a jumping-through-examiners'-hoops exam.
Yes, it would be stupid to not give a teacher or programmer instructions, but we're talking about each individual school not being able to do this, right? Someone at the state level has already decided they want the federal funds tied to complying with whatever initiative and already passed down the order to each school.
They explicitly list both work rules and the need to satisfy minimum test scores in the 6'th and 7'th paragraph.
Yes, it would be stupid to not give a teacher or programmer instructions, but we're talking about each individual school not being able to do this, right?
Right. Similarly, you don't hire a contractor, and ask him to write the spec for whatever he wants to build. He'll just cook up some easy to meet standard and report success when it's met.
This isn't conflating. This is showing two different ways the laws (deemed by unelected bureaucrats) affect the culture of the school.
>Right. Similarly, you don't hire a contractor, and ask him to write the spec for whatever he wants to build. He'll just cook up some easy to meet standard and report success when it's met.
This is a faulty analogy. We're not suggesting teachers just do whatever they want.
Busting unions and destroying bureaucracies isn't going to change the way teaching is done fundamentally. What it will do is make teaching even less attractive as a profession. Most teachers I know value job security in exchange for salary. Take away security and you are left with little economic incentive to stay. And economic incentives are essential:
Some of that [tuition] growth has resulted from a phenomenon called Baumol’s disease, after the economist William J. Baumol, who described it in a 1965 article he wrote with William G. Bowen. The basic idea is that while productivity gains have made it possible to assemble cars with only a tiny fraction of the labor that was once required, it still takes four musicians nine minutes to perform Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, just as it did in the 19th century.
College instruction more closely resembles a musical performance than an auto assembly line. Although information technologies have yielded some productivity growth in academia, instruction still takes place largely as it always has.
To recruit professors, universities must pay salaries roughly in line with those made possible by productivity growth in other sectors. So while rising salaries needn’t lead to higher prices in many industries, they do in academia and many other service industries.
While the Atlantic story seems to comport with the frightening startup idea to "Replace Universities", it is crucial to recognize and deal with Baumol's disease.
That's ok, there is already a mismatch between supply and demand in teaching. Apparently there is a surplus of at least 280,000 teachers, according to the Department of Education [1].
This indicates that teachers are currently overcompensated - if comp were reduced, supply would come closer to meeting demand (at least if Keynesians/Monetarists/Austrians are to be believed).
Further, if union influence were reduced, then administrators would be able to force out the low performance and keep the high performers, rather than merely keep the teachers with seniority.
[1] http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/10/keeping-teachers-off-the-unem...
The American Jobs Act proposes a major investment that will modernize at least 35,000 public schools, and support 280,000 teacher jobs nationwide. See what impact the Act will have in your state, and read a complete overview of the American Jobs Act here.
There is nothing about a surplus of 280,000 teachers. This is a libertarian distortion. Disgusting.
The result is that this country's local governments are spending much less on education than they were a few years ago, and therefore employ many fewer teachers. Because they have a mandate to educate basically the same number of children as before the crisis, this means larger class sizes, etc.
To suggest that these unemployed teachers are 'surplus' in this environment is to mis-characterize the situation almost to the point of dishonesty.
If they reduced the compensation of teachers (i.e., reduce price in response to a demand decrease), there would be no need to reduce the number of teachers.
Of course there is - the quantity demanded at a fixed price is set to go down by (according to the DoE) 280,000. I.e., the demand curve has shifted left.
More likely they are undervalued. Your citation makes the point that there are unemployed teachers because educational funding has been cut. It's also not clear from the citation that there are actually 280,000 'extra' teachers, only that the goal of the program is to support that many teachers in the classroom.
I don't want to get into listing this or that counter-example, because you'll just say something along the lines of "but that's not the same at all!" I just wanted to point out that in some communities, there's a whole slew of commonly accepted examples of less money being used, less staff, teachers working without unions, and so on. In situations like that you're going to need to up your game a bit.
There are more than sufficient laws and with our well connected society there is means to protect both teachers and students. We just have to get the bureaucracy out of the system and that includes the unions.
public employee unions should never have been allowed.
The Department of Education is a good place to start when it comes to fixing the system, it needs to go. Since Carter implemented it the only noticeable increase in regards to education has been cost per student, it certainly has done little if anything to improve their outcome.
I don't believe there are sufficient laws in the US to protect teachers. The US's employment laws are poorly-regarded in the rest of the Western world. And what about at-will employment states? Teachers would be fired just because of accusations of wrongdoing. Cheaper to just get rid of the accused teacher and get a new one in.
It would be so terrible if a teachers who rub their genitals against students, mock homosexuals and simulate sex acts, or stalk their students were fired.
Thank goodness we have unions to protect these teachers and keep them in the classroom.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/nyregion/found-to-have-mis...
Meanwhile, everyone besides teachers can be fired if they grope their customers. The world hasn't ended for them.
"But to union officials, the right to an impartial hearing is sacrosanct, to protect teachers from losing their livelihoods because a principal or a student might have an ax to grind."
An impartial hearing -- sounds good to me.
We don't know that all the teachers in that article did those things you said. You're implying that we should fire them and make them leave that career, just because a kid and his friends said they did? Kids can lie, you know.
[EDIT: After reading further in that article, I see some of the teachers did misbehave, but they were punished for it.]
Without unions, teachers can look forwards to as much protection and fairness in the workplace as your average US restaurant server. Get on the wrong side of your boss or his son? Fired. Too many complaints from customers about you in one week? Fired. No proof required.
Remember, the goal here is not to ensure teachers are never incorrectly fired, it's to educate children. If a few teachers are incorrectly fired, but student performance goes up, that's a win.
This is what happens in many industries. For example, if a trader or hedge fund manager gets unlucky and the market moves against him, he can be fired. Unfair individually, maybe, but in aggregate the net result is that the traders who aren't fired tend to perform better.
I am very concerned about labour rights, as that will be very important in a world of ever-fewer jobs with more competition for those jobs, for the students when they grow up, and for now, when their parents need jobs to support their family.
If students can get teachers fired with just an accusation,
* The students will end up with a fragmented education from a chain of supply teachers and replacements.
* Teachers will have to pander to students even more than they already do, for fear that a disgruntled student will decide to cry wolf. Lessons will focus on fun, not education, and teachers will be unable to stop students from disrupting class.
The comparison to a trader or hedge fund manager doesn't stand, as the market cannot decide to deliberately move against him out of spite, a need for power, or boredom.
[EDIT: Forgot to mention that private companies are more motivated to care about the product. Public school administrators would be more concerned about 'liability' and eliminating a source of 'hassle', than with the quality of the product. There's little incentive for them to work to keep a good teacher who's been unfairly accused.
The comparison to programmers is also not appropriate, for those same reasons.]
The teachers in Atlanta that were taking their students tests for them may not even end up being fired. We aren't talking about teachers not being able to be fired on a whim. We are talking about bad teachers with a history not being able to be fired.
Others in the company can and often do. You seem unfamiliar with corporate politics.
Public school administrators would be more concerned about 'liability' and eliminating a source of 'hassle', than with the quality of the product.
This is why I favor holding them responsible for outcomes as well, and allowing them to be fired if things don't turn out well.
Teachers' modest salaries, have, for a long time, been countered with good benefits in other areas: pensions, health care, vacation time, job security. Most working Americans in the private sector have none of those things anymore, so the right points at the teachers and says "see, this is the problem right here, these public sector health plans and pensions!"
Teachers in US are paid a decent salary. For example, in New York City they earn $50k-100k per year with good health and retirement benefits. It is not easy to get that kind of job in private sector. In NYC suburbs teachers make even more, lots of them more than $100k. These jobs are very hard to get, and most require a MSc/PhD degree.
(Same thing with government employees; there are great scientists in the government who could make 10x that much outside the government, and plenty of seat-warmers.)