In this ongoing series inquiring into the recognition of the division of human (or at least American) society into sectors and the impact that the reality of these divisions, defined by their goals, have on the practices indigenous to that society, I’d now like to discuss the related problem of import of technical terms.
A technical term can range from a Latin name for a life form to a simple word connoting a practice common to a sector. By importing a technical term, I mean using a technical term, common in one sector, in another sector’s purview. I am interested in how this practice can confuse the operationality and confound the goals of a sector.
The example I have in mind is the idea that an education can be bought. The idea of buying and selling is indigenous to the private sector, where things are made and traded for other things (at its most basic; often currency is used to facilitate transactions, among other purposes). The point is to make a living by providing things and services of use to other people, who in turn are willing to provide other things to you.
The educational sector is about imparting an education to students, the overwhelming majority of which are children. Children are the future of society, and general opinion holds that highly knowledgeable and creative citizens are a keystone to a successful society.
It has recently been suggested that students are clients of the educational institutes. Clients are, again, a private sector technical term: the person who is buying a thing or service from another. The importation of this term into the educational establishment has an interesting effect on the expectations of the student: That something, an education, will be delivered to them.
But those of us who’ve successfully conquered the education mountain, whether it’s just surviving high school, or acquiring the right to place Ph.D. after their name, is well aware of a simple fact: unlike a car, which you can pay for and drive off the car lot with only the effort necessary to acquire the money desired by the car salesman, an education, for most of us, requires hours of effort and study, the acquisition of mental models which systematize knowledge and make it amenable to use for calculation and prediction, and many other facets which need not be mentioned here.
In other words, the educator does not present an “education” in gift wrapped box to the student who has dutifully put down a pile of currency on the educators desk. There is neither thing nor service bought.
An educator, to my mind, is a guide into the knowledge and processes of the field in which the educator professes to hold some expertise. They open the door and give advice, but the student must also contribute: native intelligence, a motivation to master the material, the resources to do the work necessary for mastering the material, and a payment sufficient to the educator’s time.
In these terms, the differences between the educational sector and the private sector are stark, and not to be glossed over. The educational sector presents knowledge, of facts and processes, as available to the avid learner, requiring their attention and energy in order to acquire them; the customer in the private sector must provide the currency or other product desired by the seller, but may otherwise be relatively indifferent to the transaction, perhaps even neglecting maintenance and matters of that sort. In these differences lie the heart of the argument that sectors are not only different in goals, but in practices, and this differentiation in practices is key when analyzing problems plaguing the educational sector.
The intrusion of private sector technical terms into the educational establishment has contributed in some small part, I suspect, to the problem of grade inflation. The demands of student who’ve paid full freight and not received the grades they believed they deserved will cause vociferous complaints, and for those educators, be they front line or administrative, who do not fully understand the implications of the operationality of the educational sector, these complaints will indeed move those educators to attempt to placate their tormentors, however ill-advised this may be. Thus the sector loses its traction in its Sisyphean (and I do mean never-ending) task of educating those who are ignorant and must be made less so.
Another symptom is losing the focus on the long-held, hard learned lessons of education in favor of the latest fashion. From this post concerning North Carolina’s educational establishment, desperately struggling against a political system dead-set against public education, comes this:
“We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand.”
– Steven Long, member of the Board of Governors for the University of North Carolina system. He identifies not as an educator, but as a member of the private sector, and, that being his provincial experience, attempts to manage education as if it’s a private business. It’s not difficult to predict disaster for the educational establishment and accomplishment of its goal, which is to increase the knowledge and ability of the citizenry for the benefit of society – not just the benefit of the private sector. The concept of the well-rounded citizen dates back millenia, a fact that seems to have escaped Mr. Long.
Over the last thirty years we’ve seen various experiments with the privatization of education. Private universities have always been a part of the American educational establishment, often with great success. It’s beyond my expertise to comment on how a private institute corresponds to the private sector (an unfortunate correspondence of words without guarantee of any inherent relationship); many private institutes are of a religious, rather than private sector, nature, while others are uncertain in my experience.
But we do know there are two recent types of intrusion of private sector into educational sector in the form of institutes: charter schools and for-profit universities. Both are coming under a shadow. Charter schools were the subject of a study by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado. Rather than quote the report, as I’m in a hurry here, I’ll quote from an associated blog, Curmuducation by Peter Greene:
1) Much of the money intended for educating children never makes it to the classroom. Instead, somebody is making money.
Charters can only make more money by increasing revenue or cutting costs. Revenue enhancement techniques include private donations and in-kind “donations” from parents. Revenue can also be enhanced by paying special attention to enrollment and watching things like enrolling students who are labeled special needs, but whose needs are not that large (aka costly to take care of). Chester Upland in PA is a great example of a school that actually earned negative state support because charters were draining them with large payments for low-cost students with special needs. Baker and Miron also note that one reason not to take new students in January is that students added mid-year don’t count toward the money the charter gets from the state.
Charters can cut costs by hiring low-cost inexperienced teachers and not keeping them long.
But all that money the charter “finds” doesn’t end up in classrooms. Instead, charters pump the money into big administrative costs, including hiring both personnel and services. Charters also invest heavily in capital assets. And all of this expense is hugely inefficient as it duplicates work. IOW, when ten charter students leave a hundred-student public school, we end up with two principals and two buildings where one was previously enough.
This is just one of his points culled from the report. I do intend to read the report; my purpose here is to point out that charter schools are coming under increasing scrutiny, and not holding up well. Unfortunately, studies like this are not the sort that hit proponents (or detractors) in the nose with their results. The for-profit university scene, on the other hand, has had some recent results that do. Consider, for example, now-bankrupt Corinthian College, Inc. Daily Kos diarist Walter Einenkel has a lovely incendiary post on the matter:
Over the past 10 years it has come to light—through numerous lawsuits and state and federal investigations—that untold billions of dollars has been swindled out of student and taxpayers’ pockets by this private educational company. Earlier this year the Obama administration forgave almost half a billion dollars in federal student loans that were fraudulently acquired and today it’s being reported that further cancelations of federal student loans are coming.
Money is often mistaken as the primary goal in the private sector. While swindle and fraud is not unknown in the educational sector, a criminal act of this magnitude would be very difficult to pull off. Walter also helpfully points at another prosecution:
The criticisms of the administration are far from unwarranted as just last month another private educational organization, Educational Management Corporation, settled with the Justice Department for a reported $95.5 million dollars—a far cry from the billions they ripped off.
But enrollment is falling as students discover for-profit institutions do not deliver the same value as traditional institutions. Inside Higher Ed has the facts from the National Center for Education Statistics:
The data show that postsecondary enrollment over all dropped by 4.2 percent over two years, with undergraduate enrollment falling by 4.8 percent and graduate enrollment by 1.6 percent.
The overall numbers were skewed heavily by declines in the for-profit sector, at all degree levels, and by a 7.5 percent drop in community college enrollment from 2011-12 to 2013-14, as seen in the table below.
I will skip copying the table, as it wasn’t amenable – but private enrollment dropped 16% for four year colleges. With anecdotal reports of students finding their education from for-profit institutes not receiving the same respect as traditional institutes, this is not unexplainable. The New Yorker reported in November 2015 that
Enrollment at the University of Phoenix has fallen by more than half since 2010; a few weeks ago, the Department of Defense said that it wouldn’t fund troops who enrolled there. Other institutions have experienced similar declines.
Although U.S News & World Report reported in Feb 2015 that
What’s startling is that for-profit universities have halted their enrollment declines. They’re both recruiting more new students and hanging on to more of the ones they have. According to the same National Student Clearinghouse data, the number of enrolled students at for-profits dropped only 0.4 percent in the fall of 2014, compared to a year earlier. That’s a dramatic improvement from the previous year’s decline of 9.7 percent.
Perhaps the signal from students is not unequivocal, but I think, based on the insights from categorization, I would expect a jagged line in terms of a signal from students as they are enticed to use the for-profit schools as the lower-income students search for a usable education, and then discover the practices optimized for the private sector are not suitable for use in the educational sector. For example, Mr. Greene’s report, cited above, that charter schools often cut costs by utilizing only inexperienced teachers is really an indictment of this entire approach to education, as one would expect an experienced teacher to be more effective at guiding the student to properly absorbing the desired education. This should starkly illuminate the paradox at the heart of the matter – the purpose of many in the private sector is to make money, while the purpose of the educational sector is to produce knowledgeable citizens. These goals are at odds with each other, and for this reason the practices of the private sector are inappropriate to the educational sector.
The first post in this series is here.
