Courtesy of flickr user kenteegardin. I have to admit a heresy: I cringe whenever I hear someone profess their sense of urgency about the need to reform education. It’s not that I don’t want to see our education system fixed as quickly as possible; it’s that I fear the detrimental effects of urgency, which can be a poison to education policy thinking. Urgency pulls its rhetorical power from a picture of an education system in crisis. This is a picture of (at least parts of) our system that I find persuasive, but that leads to suboptimal policy choices. Put another way, urgency comes from a good place, but leads to a bad one.
There are a few ways that urgency corrupts our thinking in education. First, if you see a crisis, your first impulse is to address the most obvious and pressing issues. However, the most obvious and pressing issues aren’t necessarily the most fundamental ones. So we choose fast solutions over enduring ones -- like rushing out new teacher evaluation systems so their effect is felt right away, instead of rolling them out a bit more slowly to ensure effectiveness and engender buy-in from teachers. This bias away from root causes can, ironically, end up making progress take even longer, but the more harmful result is that it blinds us to the paradigm shifts in our understanding of education that could be most helpful in producing meaningful change.
There are a few ways that urgency corrupts our thinking in education. First, if you see a crisis, your first impulse is to address the most obvious and pressing issues. However, the most obvious and pressing issues aren’t necessarily the most fundamental ones. So we choose fast solutions over enduring ones -- like rushing out new teacher evaluation systems so their effect is felt right away, instead of rolling them out a bit more slowly to ensure effectiveness and engender buy-in from teachers. This bias away from root causes can, ironically, end up making progress take even longer, but the more harmful result is that it blinds us to the paradigm shifts in our understanding of education that could be most helpful in producing meaningful change.
This is what is so refreshing about Jal Mehta’s essay on the perspectival changes necessary to remake our education system for the better. Precisely because Mehta does not get trapped by the most immediate concerns of the contemporary reform movement, he is able to use an historical perspective to inform his analysis and reveals an essential but subtle challenge for reform. Mehta’s thesis is that education is currently organized as a bureaucracy, characterized by rule-based managerial control at the top and interchangeable workers at the bottom, but that, for the system to fulfill the new, high standards we have for it, the education sector must be professionalized. The professional model (other examples of which include medicine and law) depends on extensive training of skilled individuals in a well-established and shared body of knowledge and practice. Without a system that creates teachers who are experts in their practice, recognizes them as such, and includes them in the process of reform, the sector will always be plagued by dissatisfied teachers who are undermatched to the challenges they face and unlikely to comply with mandates that they see as coming from distant and uninformed policymakers. As Mehta explains, “We are trying to solve a problem that requires professional skill and expertise by using bureaucratic levers of requirements and regulations.”
The point here is not to cast doubt on the policies put forth by reformers; certainly teachers should be held accountable for the results of their students and measuring those results in the form of standardized tests is an important, if not comprehensive, metric for doing so. Rather, the essential observation that Mehta provides is simply that the top-down, principal-agent nature of many reforms sits in tension with a vision for the education sector that is in many ways more radical in its vision for the future of the system. That is, you cannot have both a bureaucracy and a professionalized sector. Either teachers are heavily vetted and trained on the front end and then partake in efforts to reform the system or the system continues to undersupply schools with talented, well-trained teachers and so heavily prescribes their every action. But it can’t do both. And I worry that in our urgency to fix the system as it exists, we fail to see the ways in which the system might be fundamentally re-imagined.
Though the negative effects of an inadequate education system ought to concern us all, one corollary of understanding that our education system is badly broken is that it won’t be repaired easily or abruptly. Big fixes take time. If we are willing to swallow our urgency and concentrate our energy on the big, time-intensive changes, we might really make a difference.
CJ Libassi, a former teacher, is a public policy graduate student at the University of Michigan. Reach him via email or Twitter.
The point here is not to cast doubt on the policies put forth by reformers; certainly teachers should be held accountable for the results of their students and measuring those results in the form of standardized tests is an important, if not comprehensive, metric for doing so. Rather, the essential observation that Mehta provides is simply that the top-down, principal-agent nature of many reforms sits in tension with a vision for the education sector that is in many ways more radical in its vision for the future of the system. That is, you cannot have both a bureaucracy and a professionalized sector. Either teachers are heavily vetted and trained on the front end and then partake in efforts to reform the system or the system continues to undersupply schools with talented, well-trained teachers and so heavily prescribes their every action. But it can’t do both. And I worry that in our urgency to fix the system as it exists, we fail to see the ways in which the system might be fundamentally re-imagined.
Though the negative effects of an inadequate education system ought to concern us all, one corollary of understanding that our education system is badly broken is that it won’t be repaired easily or abruptly. Big fixes take time. If we are willing to swallow our urgency and concentrate our energy on the big, time-intensive changes, we might really make a difference.
CJ Libassi, a former teacher, is a public policy graduate student at the University of Michigan. Reach him via email or Twitter.
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