Many today believe schools should emulate the competitive business environment in order to improve educational outcomes. Others believe a competitive environment does not mesh with children’s developmental stages and abilities. With ten years experience owning and operating my own business, an MBA, and 14 years experience teaching in inner city Philadelphia, I have perspective from both schools of thought.
If schools were a manufacturing facility we would spend our resources on early childhood education.
Why?
In a garment factory quality starts when bolts of material are laid on a table, stacked high, a pattern laid over them, and the fabric cut into shapes which will later be sewn together to form the garment. If the cutting is not accurate the garment will not meet quality standards.
When the pieces are sewn together an operator adds one piece to another, if the first piece is wrong, the second piece will not be correct. Thus garments are inspected in stages because the earlier a problem is identified, the less expensive it is to correct. The last place we want to find an error is in the final inspection process. Inevitably this requires the most time and greatest expense to repair. Additionally it slows down the shipping process and shipping equals dollars.
Schools operate much the same way. Our dropout rate (rejection rate) in inner cities is at 60%. It is more difficult and expensive to re-educate a teenager, than it is to work with a third grader and insure they can read at grade level by 4th grade. Thus, this talk of paying science and math teachers more than elementary teachers is counter productive. This talk of merit pay for teachers does nothing to improve the raw materials teachers work with. Imagine the sewing factory: If the cloth is flawed there is no way the garment will be error free. The same is true in education. If the child arrives in the next grade with out pre-requisite abilities how can he/she achieve at the proper levels? The end result is grade inflation leading to high drop out rates in high school.
So those who favor a business model for schools must put in place the quality controls needed for children to succeed and we must start early in the education process.
We see schools compete all the time in sports. Every year I check to see if my old High School won or lost in our annual football game with public enemy number one. And what red blooded American Male doesn’t have a favorite college football team? (O.K. there are a few but let’s be real, there are always a few whom like Doctors with terminal patients we can’t help).
So why not bring this spirit of athletic competition to academics? The truth is it is already there. Teachers in school are very cognizant of how their students score on standardized tests and not just because of No Child Left Behind. Before NCLB we were aware of what schools in the region had the highest SAT scores, which schools sent the most children to college, and which were the safest places for our children. Academic competition is not a new concept; it has just been taken to a new and unhealthy level.
Today there are third graders testing to get into special admittance elementary schools. An eighth grader tests to see what high school he/she will attend, and what high school they attend goes a long way toward determining their future. So why is the drop out rate so high? Imagine a 13 year old receiving a life sentence because he/she is being sent to a violent, low achieving high school. At that age do the majority of children have the resilience to overcome?
All of our schools should be good schools, but will they be when we send all the struggling students to the same schools with no role models for success and inadequate resources enabling them to improve?
Imagine the resources required to help a “D” student improve compared to the resources required to help an “A” student achieve. Which teacher has the more difficult job? Which student has the greater chance to succeed?
When society points to “drop out factories” let us remember that it is school administrators who created the policies which resulted in these drop out factories and only their actions will change the results. Accountability for our struggling education system can be laid at the feet of those who perfectly implemented a poorly designed policy.
The solution is not “business model” competition, the solution is quality control.
One such quality control gaining popularity is differentiated student funding. The State of Pennsylvania recently completed a “Costing Out Study” which determined based what it costs to educate a child in each zip code, based on socio-economic factors. More importantly, in the 2008 state budget, they increased education spending based on the results of the “Costing Out Study” hoping to make up their $4 billion dollar shortfall in education spending by 2013.
Differentiated Funding is a concept to my knowledge created by Dr. Arlene Ackerman when she was in San Francisco. The concept she called “Weighted Student Funding” is gaining in popularity. In Montgomery County Maryland, (as reported in Education Week February 19, 2008) Differentiated Student Funding enabled schools in low socio-economic zip codes to raise their test scores narrowing the difference existing with test scores of students attending schools in high socio economic zip codes. The students in the high economic zip codes showed no decline in test scores. The Academic Achievement Gap in Montgomery County Maryland is being reduced.
This is not how a business operates. In business a company is going to invest in its most profitable lines and sell off or reduce expenditures in its non-profitable lines. For many years this is what education did; rewarding high achieving schools with extra funding, while reducing funding for struggling schools, and yes, the stupidity of this actually did happen in Philadelphia. (Obviously with Dr. Ackerman now in Philadelphia I expect it will cease).
Education is not a business. There are items from the business community we can borrow to improve outcomes, but to think and act like we are producing widgets and competing against another company producing the same widget, well that would be a faulty model to imitate. It explains why Edison Schools which operates on the franchise model has failed miserably in difficult education environments.
What parent wants their child attending a school where they are treated like widgets; where they are expected to behave, answer questions, and produce outcomes in a pre-determined way?
Our competitive schooling climate encourages correct answers but does not create a questioning environment. Is it good for society, for business, to produce a generation which only answers, but does not question? That would be un-American and only today’s NCLB climate can be held accountable for it.
No where on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs do you see a competitive environment as a pre-requisite for self actualization and no where in the business model do you see Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. We have in the recent past delivered a quantity of resources but our quality stinks. For instance the school in which I work has three computer labs, but no certified computer teachers. The computer lab’s primary function has become standardized test practice. If we change our focus to teaching perhaps student learning outcomes will improve. It is time the quality delivery of our resources to children takes center stage.