And, Frankly, I’m Not Interested In Your Topic
Today’s national discussion on improving education is dominated by self-described experts.
Many are consultants who can spin out 50 data-heavy PowerPoint slides in twenty minutes (they could moonlight as anesthesiologists).
On the higher education side, some of these cogno-alls learned their trade as budget analysts for states or the federal government, some are former politicians, some are peter-principled foundation apparatchiki, some are called experts simply because their prose is entertaining (actually, this is an n of 1).
The story on the K-12 side is much the same, except that a significant proportion of the experts are professors who favor language so dense and twisted it makes you think of the deepest Amazon. As in the jungle, it seems that impenetrability yields protection.
The experts are of eclectic origin but are united in a belief that American education is in crisis and needs to be reformed. Some go so far as to say it needs to be “transformed.”
The experts’ preferred mechanism for the higher education side is achieving greater degree completion through “performance funding,” a budgetary approach that in essence pays institutions only for degrees awarded. The idea is that the traditional approach to funding, primarily based on enrollment, removes needed incentives. Faculty, the experts say, just want to do their own research and don’t care whether students learn. And administrators don’t focus on graduation because they’re greedy and incompetent.
Performance funding is higher education’s version of the expert-driven “testing accountability agenda” that afflicts K-12. Unlike performance funding which has merely failed in its first few iterations, testing-driven change has been around for long enough that we know for sure it doesn’t work. It stumbles ever onward, though.
Reform experts of both stripes overwhelmingly share the characteristic of never having taught the kinds of students their ideas are designed to help.
The key challenge in education is in improving the success of young people from low-income backgrounds where there’s little history of seeing education as a vehicle for economic success. These students attend two-year colleges and open-admission universities, arriving there from inner-city and rural schools.
Our experts know these students very well, but not from the classroom. Instead, they’ve encountered them as entries on a spreadsheet.
The UK, which is in the throes of a major educational reform, has the same ignorant-expert problem as the US. A Guardian reporter, noting the power of conservative think tanks in reform design, observed that a few practitioners were involved, but “…the concept of including anyone who knows what they are talking about is not institutionalized.”[i]
So much for intelligent design.
Drawing on my higher education background, I’ve devised a plan to bring the push for performance and accountability to an unfamiliar place--the experts themselves.
Since our theorists typically don’t have the academic experience or skills needed to teach at schools or universities, we can start our “substance agenda” at conferences.
Watch out, Mr. Theorist, it’s time for you to walk the talk.
From now on, your consultant earnings will depend entirely on how much the people attending your presentations learn.
In thinking about your next paycheck, remember that some of the attendees will care a lot about your topic, some not much, and some not at all. That won’t matter--every one will count in calculating your pay.
Also, remember that we’ll assess people who signed up but didn’t attend, those who just stuck their heads in but didn’t stay, those who wanted to go to a different session but couldn't find a seat, and those who spent the whole time surfing the web and texting.
I also have a plan for those of you who get foundation salaries rather than presentation piece-rate: if your reform plans don’t pan out in the real world, you’ll have to give back a chunk of your pay for the previous x years. And no claiming that your ideas weren’t implemented correctly—if professors and teachers have to live with the vagaries of the real world, you do too. (This “clawback” idea comes from the financial industry, where it’s much discussed but never used.)
Don’t think my “substance agenda” sounds fair? Faculty and teachers don’t like their versions either.
I’ve been harsh here, and have maybe overdrawn things a wee little bit, but sometimes you need to do that to make a point.
Certainly, I’m not saying you have to be a practitioner in a particular area to participate in developing strategies for its improvement. If doctors had medicine to themselves the public wouldn’t be any healthier but the medical spawn would be getting new Bentleys when they turn 16 (vs. just a C Class Mercedes now).
I’ll concede many of the education experts are very smart and care deeply about doing something important. So I wouldn’t ditch them.
Instead of banishing people, I’d restart the conversation about improving education with a different, more collegial tone.
A different tone would lead to some agreement. Take away the false premises about pervasive incompetence and lack of caring, and teachers would readily agree to some connection of tests to evaluation and professors would surely embrace some kind of performance funding. We all know that incentives matter.
Most important, a more collegial approach would help direct energy and resources to solving the real problem: how to motivate and support people at every stage of the educational process such that they succeed in learning and persist to earning some postsecondary credential.
Those of us who’ve taught students from low-income, low educational attainment cultures know that they present a huge challenge, one that can’t possibly be fully dealt with in the classroom. Instead, a viable solution must extend in a very active way to student’s families and to the larger culture children grow up in.
If you place the whole burden of educational improvement on instruction, you’ll get what we’ve gotten in a generation of expensive and intensive effort in K-12 since A Nation at Risk: almost nothing.
My hope for the New Year is that America’s education experts will step back, refocus, and re-engage with a broader, more thoughtful agenda. We can then move to a greater mutual respect among instructors on the one hand, and policy and financial analysts on the other. If we augment this with a higher level of collective humility, we’ll finally find ourselves on the path to creating better lives for a large percentage of our citizens.
