Hey Gov! Want to dramatically improve the educational
success of low-income students? You know, solve the problem that’s been
baffling the US for three decades?
It’s simple! Just test the students and connect the tests to
their specific teachers. Teachers whose students do very badly will be fired
and those who only do OK will be forced to improve. Simple, straightforward, and
you can see it here on this spreadsheet. I’ve created an algorithm that shows
how it works! It’s like magic!
Magic is much easier than a lot of hard work, so New York’s Governor Cuomo and
nearly all of America’s governors have signed on for the Magic Algorithm ride.
The idea of the Magic Algorithm has been spread by a new
class of education pseudo-experts, people with little or no teaching
experience, especially not with low-income students. But they know for sure exactly
how to solve education’s problems, because you don’t find truth in classrooms
and communities, you find it in Excel. (Bill
Gates could really help education by asking Microsoft to have Excel open with a
disclaimer: “Beware! Numbers alone
aren’t knowledge!”)
Actually, the idea of locking test scores to teacher ability
isn’t simple. And simplistic is far too weak a descriptor.
“Moronic” would be the best way to categorize the idea of
improving education by robotically chaining teacher quality to student tests.
There’s a vast tapestry of experience and research that
tells us human-to-human interactions are extremely complex and not at all
subject to simple solutions. Business has learned that.
GM, struggling in the 1980s because of poor manufacturing
efficiency and low-quality, blamed their problems on the workforce. If we could
only get the union to allow us to fire the bad workers, they said, we’d be
fine.
Then Toyota took over the management of GM’s worst plant, in Fremont,
California. Quickly, with the same union workforce, Fremont rose to levels
of quality and efficiency not approached by any GM-managed facility.
Toyota succeeded by creating a collegial atmosphere with the
workers. Management knew that the staff had lots of good ideas about how to do
their jobs effectively, and actively sought their advice. Managers also ignored
the 19th Century punish or praise ideology favored by Detroit and
replaced it with one which assumed that everyone wanted to be effective and
encouraged people to work together to help others.
The new managers also recognized that many of the problems
in the plant arose because workers felt they were often blamed for things
beyond their control – specifically, defective parts from suppliers. Toyota then
improved the supplier network by employing the same approach as with the
factory staff – instead of simply firing suppliers, they worked with them to foster
improvement.
I’m sure teachers’ unions have created problems and been
difficult on some issues. But maybe that’s because we don’t value teachers and
don’t engage them in solutions. When automakers engaged in a respectful way,
things changed radically and US union plants are now equal to the best in Japan
in key metrics.
Remember, the quality revolution in Japan began with
unionized companies, and highly profitable top-end manufacturers like BMW and
Mercedes are unionized.
We don’t need social scientists to tell us that employees
who aren’t respected and supported usually don’t do their best work. When
morale sinks, effectiveness goes with it.
We’d like to assume that teachers will always go to the wall
to do their best, even if they aren’t respected and even if the students and
parents often don’t think “people like us” can be good at learning. But the
reality is that teachers are humans like the rest of us and, after a few years
of feeling defeated, some proportion don’t go all out because they think no one
really cares.
Schools aren’t auto plants and teachers aren’t assembly line
workers. But, despite many important differences, the common principles of
human relationships obtain.
Engaging respectfully with teachers could begin by
recognizing that their success is highly dependent on whether families and communities
value education and believe that “people like us” can be good at learning. This
isn’t theory; it’s clearly demonstrated in international research, which shows
that even low income students do well in communities where the prevailing
attitude is that education is essential and that it’s effort not talent that
drives success.
With appropriate respect and support, teachers could have a
key role in helping build community-based solutions to low-income families’
attitudes about education and educational success. There are lots of
community-schools organizations, but they aren’t focused on the core problem --
affecting those in the surrounding culture who don’t join such groups, those
who believe that success in education isn’t for “people like us.”
Toyota made “ineffective” workers into good ones. The
process wasn’t simple. It required extensive analysis as well as overcoming
union and supplier fears. It was hard work and took time. Unfortunately, that
makes it a bad example.
Building common understandings about success in education,
including especially with parents and others in neighborhoods and communities,
won’t happen easily or quickly. That’s
why politicians (perhaps now excluding Governor Cuomo) prefer to follow the spreadsheet-worshipping purveyors of algorithms.
It’s much more appealing to believe in magic.
