Don Peppers in a LinkedIn article pursues an old libertarian dream:
State-sponsored public education in almost every country in the world is unsatisfactory and inept, a scandal we’ve tolerated far too long. …
In Matt Ridley’s ambitious book The Evolution of Everything, he dedicates a full chapter to a sweeping story of how people educate themselves, when left to their own devices. If you look at how schools develop “in the wild” today, outside of government programs, you’ll be amazed at the kind of systems that evolve on their own – simply because parents want to educate their children, and they’re willing to spend money to do so, especially when they see that a state-sponsored system is dysfunctional.
I’ll freely grant I’ve not read Mr. Ridley’s book, Mr. Pepper’s inspiration. Perhaps I should. But simply based on Mr. Pepper’s column and the material concerning American societal sectors developed elsewhere in this blog, beginning here with relevant additions here, here, and here, as well as some random observations and thoughts, I think we can induce some doubts as to the apocalypse of public education.
Categorization
Readers must be familiar with the material previously noted concerning societal categorization, in particular this one, in order to understand my point of view in this section. To return to Mr. Pepper, he then steps in a hole:
And why not? After all, no one thinks a government monopoly is necessary to ensure an adequate supply of fitness centers, or hotels, or grocery stores, right? But just like hotels and groceries, non-government schools maintain their quality because they compete with each other; state schools do not.
He freely skips over the character of the goods to be delivered, to use the argot of the private sector, and this is quite important. In the private sector, the chief deliverables are goods (tangible items, if software can be regarded as tangible) and services. Is an education either one of these? As noted in the link, it is not. So when we’re asked to compare an education to a fitness center (possibly one of the best comparisons), it doesn’t hold up: oranges and apples.
The entire point is conflicting goals. The purpose of the business sector is production of goods and services in order to trade for other goods and services; the goal of the education sector is to inculcate an education in the student, where education is about both facts and thought processes (effective thinking, if you will). Consideration of the requirements of education reveal it to be a different beast from the purposes of the private sector.
As I’ve discussed in the above links, the operationality of a sector is naturally optimized to achieve the goals of the sector in which it is embedded; moving it into another sector raises the dangers of unexpected consequences and subpar performance. Some say that if we bring private sector methods into the educational sector then schools will compete and improve, with hardly a nod at the real purpose of most of the private sector: to generate profits.
Repeat that in your mind: to generate profits. While the best businesses concentrate on quality and even love what they do, a disconcerting number of businessmen have learned that the private sector is all about making money. So get that into your frontal cortex: this is about generating profits.
The general, implicit understanding is that a profitable school will take on more students to generate more profit. This is an incomplete, and in some cases incorrect, appraisal of the situation. After all, to select a perfectly applicable example, a manufacturer generates a profit by delivering product at a lower cost than his competitors, particularly in an industry where differentiation on quality is not a salient factor. How does this translate when moving a businessman into the educational sector?
What is a large expense in the educational sector?
Salary.
So, you have some options. You can cut salaries of the teachers which will attract, on average, a lesser quality teacher (and perhaps drive the better teachers out of the profession entirely), or you can fire the high earning teachers at the outset. These are typically the highly experienced teachers. You know, those who know how to teach.
Think this wouldn’t happen? Already has. The Curmudjucation blog has a post on this behavior, derived from a scholarly report.
This is but a single example. Here’s another: think about the fact that the educational sector usually owns its real estate, which can be quite valuable. Some private school efforts are little more than attempts to acquire the real estate, with a vague wave at schooling.
Remember, in the world of the private sector this isn’t even immoral behavior. Bad businesses schools fail. But assets are left behind for salvage. That’s just how it goes. Right?
So – parents – how do you feel about throwing your kid into a school where this may happen to them? Where the teachers are second rate? Where the best teachers may simply be forced from the profession?
For a biased, but inside, view of charter schools see this Daily Kos diary.
Standards & Cherry Picking
Another aspect of concern is standards. I know, I know, private schools can be subject to academic standards – but remember that generating profit is the name of the game, not meeting standards. An allied concern are the fields studied – often a matter of contention in schools even today, occasionally making trips to SCOTUS over such concerns as Creationism. But Pepper envisions a more radical future:
[Sugata] Mitra’s research suggests that the schooling system itself may soon become obsolete, replaced by what he calls the self-organized learning environment, or “SOLE.” His plan is to have three to five children share a computer with internet access, then propel their learning simply by giving them questions to answer on their own, like figuring out puzzles. Can trees think? Why do we dream? How does an iPad know where it is? Why do humans breathe, and what happens to the air we breathe?
This has a couple of problems. First, let’s turn this example inside out and view it through the lens of a rational question: Would you let a 10 year old choose his course of study?
I shan’t even ask you to think about it, because the answer is NO. I know when I was 10 I wouldn’t have gone to half my classes, given the option. Most boys wouldn’t. Indeed, the suggestion that they should negates the very intent of education: to become smarter about the world.
Secondly, the use of CAE (Computer Assisted Education) has its limits that are starting to become visible. My impression is that this is still an active field of research, but I’ve noted at least one study (here) indicating there are limits to how much the Internet can enhance education:
But while PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] results suggest that limited use of computers at school may be better than not using computers at all, using them more intensively than the current OECD average tends to be associated with significantly poorer student performance. ICT [Information and Computer Technology] is linked to better student performance only in certain contexts, such as when computer software and Internet connections help to increase study time and practice.
By “cherry picking”, I’m referring to the practice of selecting which students to admit with an eye towards enhancing performance by having only the best students admitted to your charter school. This has a couple of problems.
Intellectual Segregation
There are undeniably positives to grouping high performing students together, such as the phenomenon I call laddering, in which the intense competition between students serves to inspire them to better performance. I often see this in fencing, as new students join the club in groups, become quite competitive with each other, and end up reaching national competition levels simply because of their friendly desire to outdo each other.
However, the flip side of such segregation is a lack of exposure to the slower students. This can cut both ways, as the superior students lose the valuable experience of working, or even just interacting, with the slower students, and the slower students may not receive the tutoring the superior students could have provided. This may lead to resentment and other negative social consequences.
In the end, this division works against one of the most important aspects of society: we’re all in this together. The social cohesivity and inclusiveness of American society has been one of our greatest strengths (and thus the resentment towards those who could buy their way out of the draft during wartime). As much as it pains me, as an engineer, to suggest that peak efficiency is not as important as other factors, this may be one of those situations.
Ghettos
And then what will happen to the slowest, the disabled? Today we try to mainstream them, making them part of our classes and part of our world, rather than pushing them off into a group home where we wait for them to die. How many charter schools will take them? Especially since many of those parents may not have the financial wherewithal to select a favorite school – such schools may not exist as the population of such students will be small.
As painful as it is, we do have a solution today: they become part of the general school population. They are, if you like, a reminder that we do have a shared ideal and heritage.
Cost
The end of public education implies, as well, the end of general taxation support for those public schools. In other words, parents will have to pay for the education of their children.
Is this good? I put it this way because too often we wish to suggest there is not enough personal responsibility in the world, and it would certainly be a better world if we were better at it. I certainly am as guilty of that as anyone, from getting vaccinations to getting the proper physical exercise.
But consider this: an educated populace is a superior populace. I should hope this is not a controversial statement. We are, in the end, a collective, a collection of people whose lots are thrown together, voluntarily or otherwise, and our individual fortunes depend to a large extent on the capabilities of our fellows as well as ourselves. It is to our mutual benefit to make sure everyone is educated to a level which permits productive functioning in today’s society while enabling advanced education as appropriate.
Furthermore, there is a matter of justice. Mr Peppers points to research showing some students can educate themselves. For those of us who like multisyllabic words, these are autodidacts. Not all kids can do this, and probably not even half of them. When an adult has a child and cannot pay for that child’s education, then I have to ask: what has the CHILD done to deserve the punishment of losing an education? This is simply a matter of justice – that a child, not responsible for the situation into which they are born, not be asked to pay for the inability of the unprepared or uncaring parent.
As a society, we collectively benefit from the education of all children, and therefore we should collectively pay for that education, and not saddle unprepared adults with that burden. While we could then return to taxation and distributing the taxes to the private schools using a voucher scheme, or any other scheme, we’re now in the dangerous territory of taxing the populace and redistributing the funds to private businesses; not that this is unprecedented, but the opportunities for corruption at the intersection of disparate sectors (private to government, in this case) are well documented and, sadly, rife.
Pepper’s Examples
I did find it interesting how the examples of private schooling outdoing public schooling comes exclusively from third world countries: India, Ghana and Somaliland (where the metric is simply the number of operating schools!): countries where corruption is not only rampant, but customary. To use these examples to condemn public schooling is rather like suggesting that Little League baseball’s failure to make it on ESPN 1 means that Major League Baseball hasn’t a chance against the National Football League. Is Denmark, Sweden, Germany in similar straits? Do their public schools produce illliterates?
And he doesn’t really seem to be aware of the United States educational system:
But unfortunately the public schools, saddled with bureaucracy and undisciplined by any real feedback from customers (i.e. students) will simply not be up to this task. No top-down, take-it-or-leave-it process ever could be.
There is plenty of feedback: in certain circumstances, we may replace members of the school board. We may attend PTA meetings. We may volunteer at the schools. The US system of educational dispersion (recently impinged on by the Republican’s testing regime of No Child Left Behind; it’s not clear to me if the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act removes that impingement) permits plenty of feedback at the local level; sometimes, given local prejudices, it seems like too much.
Conundrums
OK, all this said, I make no claims that what we have is all that great. My suspicion, based on some limited conversations with teachers, is that it’s a management problem. From a verbal discussion:
Hue, I don’t even care what style of teaching they want us to do. Just Stop Changing It!
In other words, the State legislature periodically changes how teaching should happen, and the hapless teachers have to fall into line by law – throw out what’s been developed because the latest fad caught some legislator’s attention, and now we’re a-heading thataway. Whether this applies to all States is beyond my ken, but it does seem likely.
Add to that a drought of funding, a malicious changing of rules so that the charter schools can take over, and you can see why public schools can seem to be worthless.
Conclusion
All that said, all of my pessimism about the efficacy of private sector methods in the education sector, doesn’t amount to a hill of beans as to the future of public education, because that will be set by the attitude of the populace. Continued superficial discussions of education such as this one, if they dominate and are unchallenged, may indeed result in the death of the public education, and the loss of its role in uniting the populace behind the ideas that make the United States a cohesive entity, and may in fact result in the dislocation of the country.
But that’s another rant.
