The casual observer could be forgiven for believing that public education’s goals more closely represent a circus than an earnest pursuit of growth and learning. Each player on the education stage has an elaborately choreographed role that calls for performance for performance’s sake.
The students, of course, carry the bulk of this responsibility, memorizing a routine of answers to be performed on cue for statewide aptitude testing. Teachers play the role of lion tamer in this burlesque, establishing rigid, unimaginative curriculum designed to maximize the school’s ability to deliver positive test scores. Finally, administrators like school principals are tasked with the role of ring master in these proceedings, made responsible for herding dozens of teachers and thousands of students toward some vague higher standard.
Putting aside the farce that is education tailor-made for test taking rather than genuine learning, there’s a story here in the impossible situation created for principals.
Monday morning, NPR ran a piece about the role of a principal as a school CEO. Districts look toward principals as standard bearers responsible for reducing school violence, for inspiring teachers and for innovating policy — and, correspondingly, for improving standardized test scores.
But this is a dreadful position to be in as a principal. The chief responsibility of a leader is people. Having the right people doing the right thing in the right place. More than ever, this is an exceedingly difficult proposition in public education. A principal isn’t empowered to “clean out the dead wood,” since teacher’s unions and district policies have mistaken public education for a government-subsidized jobs program. Inept teachers can’t be removed — merely shuffled around. In addition to being unable remove non-performers, a principal conversely cannot do all that much to reward high achievers. Benefits packages and compensation are inflexible realities established at higher echelons than where these putative “school CEOs” sit. Finally, even the most inspirational of generals would be hard-pressed to motivate troops as besieged as a legion of public educators. These are smart, educated individuals who know how to do math. They can see that their classrooms are over-filled, that their resources are limited and frequently out-of-date, that their students are less and less inclined to play the education game.
You want violence in schools to be reduced? It’s going to take more than clever leader at the helm. Students need a proper reason for attending school. Weekly rehearsal for the choreographed performance piece of standardized testing will not pass muster. You want the best and brightest contributing to the education of our young minds? You’ll need to do better than an empty suit pretending to be an executive even as a 10-year-old paint job peels around him. Educators need a mission they can believe in. They need resources to discharge that mission while also being able to pay their bills and live to standards befitting their hard work and contributions to the betterment of our world.
It sounds like a tall order because it’s the biggest public policy challenge in the history of our nation. So far it goes unanswered. But these reforms are essential to the survival of the next generation of Americans in an unforgiving, knowledge-driven global economy.
It’s true. I don’t want the government involved in providing education. It does not deserve the opportunity. When made, this declaration often rankles my conversational partners.
Yet, in comparing the hundred year progress of the major industries of our lives to progress in education, what greater indictment can be made?
I’m not quite done with incentive. Let’s leave education for a little while as we examine incentive just a little more in another area.
The Department of Motor Vehicles.
I’m going to give you a moment to let the chill run back out of your bones.
The DMV is a perfect example of an essential government service that fails to serve its users. In most regions of the United States, the opportunity to own or at least operate an automobile is a crucial part of being a productive individual. In order to enjoy these opportunity, a citizen must first pass through the gateway of the DMV.
You don’t need an inventory of the ways the DMV sucks at is mission. But just for the record: the lines are long. The service is often very slow. The facilities are rarely comfortable and are often in impressive states of disrepair. The staff are frequently unpleasant if not altogether assholes. Your chances of accomplishing a task at the DMV in less than two hours? Almost non-existent.
The cause, and our recurring theme, is incentive.
Everyone wants or needs to drive, so encouraging users to spend time at the DMV with pleasant facilities and efficient service is unnecessary. Paychecks are drawn through taxation and other compulsory fees, so being unpleasant to customers has no bearing on a clerk’s chances at having a job next year. You can draw dozens of cause/effect relationships, but the result is always the same: incentive is divorced from decision making. The DMV sucks because it has no reason not to.
When I lived in the state of New Mexico, that state began a fascinating project that draws my point into perfect focus.
New Mexico privatized their customer-facing DMV operations. What happened when incentive reconnected to the world of the DMV?
Customers were guaranteed in-and-out service within 15 minutes. The private offices were comfortable and clean. Clerks were friendly and genuinely interested in helping. Perhaps most telling, enormous signs plastered the walls sharing customer service phone numbers and encouraging anyone who felt even the slightest bit disappointed with the service to call and seek redress. In exchange for all this, customers paid a nominal “convenience fee.”
This was a shocking difference and well worth the money when compared to the government-managed alternatives.
So now I’m going to ask you. You really want the same guys who brought you the DMV to go to work on the brains of our children?
The force that has allowed our educational system to deteriorate to its current condition is simple: incentive.
Books like Freakonomics share the obvious revelation that humans do nothing without incentive. Incentive is the fuel that drives all human activity, from our careers to our diets to our sexuality. Incentive is the motive power behind every human system at every level of complexity.
In the case of American education, this motive force isn’t hitched to anything that might benefit our children. Because the overwhelming bulk of our schools are funded through government taxation that has no chance of disappearing, no incentive exists for schools to innovate and improve. Want proof? Examine literally every other industry’s history since 1907. Small grocers have given way to Wal-Mart super centers and distribution hubs wired together by incredibly complex computer software programs that manage logistics without human intervention. Automobiles have gone from slow, rickety buggies to blazing hulks of shiny, sexy metal. Entertainment has quantum leaped from live performance to motion pictures to home televisions to interactive games.
Literally any industry you can conceive of has reinvented itself hundreds of times in a hundred years and barely resembles its atavistic forms.
Yet, in 1907 education consisted of crowding a group of young children into a room. They all learned the same things together. They all enjoyed a yearly progression from one stage to the next.
Does this sound nauseatingly familiar?
Yet how does this stasis occur? What factors allowed its creation and conspired to preserve its existence?
In the other examples I cited, incentives existed for pioneers to do things differently. Fortunes were won on the backs of good ideas. Filo T. Farnsworth, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, to barely begin a list, these men had the vision for a new world unshackled from the constraints that they knew were unnecessary. Part of what drove them was the power of their ability to imagine big solutions to big problems. The rest was incentive — the knowledge that they would be rewarded for their insights.
Because K-12 education is jailed within the constraints of all levels of bureaucracy, no such rewards exist for its innovators. Moreover, even the most altruistic of innovators will find no toehold in the mirror-smooth, impermeable surface of the government monolith that stands between themselves and the future of education.
I think a lot about education. This is probably to be expected, as I’ve made the beginnings of my career in higher ed. I’m surrounded by colleagues who are passionately dedicated to making learning better and the discussions I overhear can get pretty heated.
Yet, this isn’t anything new. I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about education.
When I was a boy, I hated school. Not because I didn’t respect the power of learning. I hated it because I desperately wanted to absorb every piece of human knowledge and schools were designed for some dull purpose entirely unrelated to that pursuit.
Sure, there was a bit of learning that happened occasionally. But the greater purpose of public education, as I view it in retrospect, seems to be more focused on the homogenization of young minds than in equipping them for a lifetime of growth.
In the United States, education forces our children along rigid, non-customized paths for at least six years of early life. Regardless of your talents or interests, you spend all of your time learning the exact same things as your peers. Think of this — six formative years, a tremendous span of opportunity, and it is squandered on one-size-fits-all busywork and enforcement of “color within the lines” thinking.
It misses the point that out-of-school activity gives these students the opportunity to diversify their lives in the few scraps of hours between their daily internment and dinner at home. The trouble is that school is a significant chunk of their waking lives and it is very likely to be time mostly wasted.
Would-be reformers of education share my fury at this reality . Yet I don’t hear much conversation surrounding the overall cause. That’s what I’ll talk about next.