Alan C. Jones is an associate professor of education at St. Xavier University in Chicago.
In the last decade, educators have been asked — no told — to adopt a business platform for running schools. Mandated business platforms require educators to give up the soft stuff — emotional and social development of children — for the hard stuff: standards, competition and higher test scores.
Mayors and city councils in urban settings have fired soft superintendents and employed Jack Welch-types — hard CEO's — who promptly fire principals, close schools, purchase more tests and hire teachers with alternative certifications. If time is left over from restructuring, reconstituting and reconnoitering, these hard CEO superintendents appear on media outlets to bash tenure, bash parents and bash the antiquated thinking of the educational establishment.
In these economic times, I find it ironic that our masters of capitalism, who brought the entire country to its knees, are now telling educators how to bring schools to their knees.
The weapons of choice of newly crowned educational CEO's are "scientific approaches to teaching and learning," the establishment of high standards and a test to measure the implementation of the first two weapons of choice. The almost religious belief in the ability of any test score, data point or psychometric indicator to measure the quality of education in America is now being stretched to the breaking point with policy initiatives promoting merit pay/bonus schemes linking achievement scores to teacher performance — as if such a strategy is rigorously pursued in the business sector.
If we have learned anything in the last year of cascading failures of one business entity after another, it is that statistical modeling of the real world is at best so fraught with chance that Vegas would not bet on the outcome. At its worst, it creates a world of virtual reality which individuals, no an entire global economy, believed was real.
The horrors of the global economic meltdown are now being visited on school administrators and teachers, who are powerless to stop the business hype of performance-driven school systems. No matter how hard CEO superintendents and the new U.S. Secretary of Education promote a business model for our nation's schools, they are doomed to fail because schools are not businesses. As we begin a new round of business-led reform initiatives, it bears repeating why children, teachers, administrators and parents do not fit well into a performance driven school system.
Schools do not control the most important variables. A half-century of scientific research overwhelmingly concludes that out-of-school factors (birth weight, drug and alcohol abuse, lack of adequate medical care, mobility, family violence, time spent on homework, number of hours students work after school, peer groups, etc.) are the most potent variables for influencing student success in schools.
This is not an excuse, but the reality school administrators and teachers work under. Merit pay, an onslaught of Ivy League-trained teachers and renaissance curricula are no match for emotional and social strains induced by poor health, poor housing, poor nourishment and little time spent on academic learning.
There are just too many variables. I defy anyone who sits in a classroom for more than five minutes to identify a variable or set of variables that causes student learning. Educational researchers readily admit, usually in the "Limitations" section of their research articles, that all attempts at finding causal relationships between teaching and learning are at best problematic and at worse fraudulent. No educational researcher will ever be able to control or develop a statistical construct predicting what teacher inputs cause certain student outputs.
The black swan effect. Recent studies of the current economic meltdown note that the statistical modeling of risks and rewards in the business sector was founded on normative statistical concepts (the bell shaped curve). The persistent effort to force economic indicators into standard statistical constructs ignores a gathering storm of abnormal levels of greed (how does one quantify greed) — and other irrational economic indicators — luck, accidents, venality. Schools are filled with talented students who, under the right conditions, could be future "black swans," the more outliers the better. Unfortunately, our schools, like their business counterparts, only reward talents that are measurable — skills that can predict future success on the next test at the next level of schooling. None of these achievement tests measure, or will ever be able to measure, success in real world endeavors or who will become a "black swan."
The dance around the classroom. The eternal pursuit of a method, a program or a model to rationalize what occurs between students and teachers in classrooms results in rational recommendations for controlling how teachers are remunerated (merit pay), how teachers are employed (alternative certification), how teachers carry on their profession (tenure) and how schools are constituted (privatization).
CEO superintendents feel a sense of accomplishment when they fire principals, shut a school down, and hand out bonuses to deserving teachers and school administrators — those who have increased some data point. What gets left behind in rational models of schooling is the hard work of sitting in classrooms, learning about theories controlling improved pedagogies and joining with teachers to make collective sense out of complex curriculum interventions.
Who gets fired. A large body of research describes what happens to middle managers in accountability systems designed by CEO's whose bottom line mentality leave themselves with golden parachutes and middle managers holding the bag. In the case of schools, CEO superintendents acquire the power to adopt tests, establish cut scores and execute sanctions for personnel who do not meet annual yearly progress goals. At the same time that these CEO superintendents are raising the bar higher, they are boosting class sizes, slashing money for staff development and allowing students to sit in substandard buildings. Caught in the middle of higher bars and lower capacity are principals with diminished power over budgets, personnel or curriculum.
When a public good becomes a commodity. Despite the mediocre performance of charter schools, politicians continue to be enthralled with privatizing public schools. The powerful myth driving the privatization movement is the "simple truth" that tenure, properly credentialed teachers and inclusion of certain groups of students has all but destroyed educational achievement in our country. The common good of public schooling, where all students are provided the opportunity to flourish, is replaced by a private good where some will flourish and most will perish. Of course the perishing is done under the guise of higher performance.
The reality of privatization, as with all efforts to transform a common good into a competitive good, will mirror how wealth is distributed in our country: some parents will benefit enormously from privatized schooling while most children will languish in under-funded public schools.
The intent of No Child Left Behind was to guarantee that no child in America would receive a substandard education. What educator disagrees with a principle providing all students in America with the kinds of schools where their diverse talents are nurtured?
However, what this noble vision left behind was the funding and organizational configurations necessary to grow the diverse talents of our children. Replacing a normative belief in pluralism are performance-based regimes of testing, standards and sanctions designed to leave almost every child behind. When a means (a test score) becomes the sole end of a policy initiative, great cruelties are visited on children whose talents and proclivities do not conform well to a one-size-fits-all course of study.
The willingness to commit great cruelties to children is especially visible in CEO school leaders whose pathway to power and promotion rest with their ability to narrow talent to a single score on a test and then, embarrassing in public students, parents and teachers who fail to hit the number.
It is now an obvious truism that business leaders and our citizenry lost their material moral and ethical compass in an environment fostering a "greed is good" mentality. Instead of the economy founded on hard work, innovation and attention to quality, our business sector became a giant Ponzi scheme — with the country at large now left holding the bag.
I fear the same Ponzi scheme is now engulfing our schools. The stringent emphasis on test scores, common standards and sanctions masks the true condition of an under-funded, under-manned, and under-led public school system. The tragedy of Ponzi schemes now being run by CEO superintendents is not the relentless push for higher test scores, but a loss of what Dewey termed democracy in education.