Exactly

It is no surprise, of course, that American leaders think this way. Since 1900 the US educational system has been conceived and operated as nothing more than a factory taking raw material and turning it into fodder for the capitalist system. It was never about creativity, or knowledge acquisition, but simply about training compliant employees.

Now, the very US businesspeople who have fallen dangerously far behind the rest of the world in innovation for the new century are telling the education system to do “more of the same.”

The very idea of using manufacturing metaphors to determine ways to teach incredibly varied human adolescents about the future world they will live in, is, of course, as ridiculous as NCLB’s assumption that all children can and should progress at exactly the same rate in all things.

US universities need the opposite of all the ideas of the Spellings Summit — which represent the very reasons US K-12 schools are failing so miserably. They need creativity, flexibility, a wide view of how the world is changing, and an emphasis on knowledge rather than testing, and on “what” instead of “how.”

Right now US education begins when they tell you that you are “making [your] fives wrong” (that is writing them in the wrong direction, not making incomprehensible fives). It ends 17 or 20 years later when they tell you that you are “making [your] citations wrong” (that is, not following the nonsense of APA style, not in making indecipherable citations). As long as preservation of style and method trumps openness to future possibility, US education, and the US itself, will continue to slide into decline.

Ira Socol, Michigan State University, at 8:06 am EDT on April 5, 2007

Amen, and say it again! While most institutions of higher learning are bureaucratic mazes similar in character to most large businesses, colleges and universities should not be fashioned following a business model. If the so-called end product is an educted human being, the product will, hopefully, turn on its production operators, questioning their right to control, and map their usefulness. This is what humans do. If we did not disappoint or bring ecstasy to our line workers during our college years, we would be the robots the Spelling commission attempts to corner, package, and market. This article, like said earlier, needs to be shared far and wide. Seems to me the real corrective to the system should be to let professors teach, protect academic freedom, and let students pass or fail based on merit. It is from failure most learn to overcome. If anything has failed to educate students, it is grade inflation. Let an A once again mean something! Let students once again strive to achieve, not occupy a desk, fail the material, yet pass the course, and enter the world unprepared to work. The professor, the traditional higher education system require protection, not dismantling and restructuring on the business model.

I ramble, but the article inspired me this morning. Thank you to the author.

doc, at 8:21 am EDT on April 5, 2007

Polarity Management

I have to diasagree with Seth. Rather than contribute to “confusion” this article is a clarion of simplicity cutting through the B.S. of business that we are all being spoon fed. Noone seems to be concerned with helping students become fully realized, self actualized, thinking adults and citizens. Instead the emphasis seems to be on how we might better train workers in a very one dimensional way. Giant mega corporation needs 200 workers that can solder two wires together. But what happens when the technology changes and they need to start soldering three wires together. If they are really educated they would be able to participate in the solution. If they are merely taught to an industries specs (no more/no less-not cost effective) than they will have to be “retrained” and this is “obviously” the fault of educaters who did not do it right the first time, even if they did do it exactly the way the big mega company asked. Not only is manufacturing exactly the wrong model for education, but “the big business” model is the wrong paradigm for running our government. But so many of our govt leaders have been indoctrinated by business and are beholden to business, the proposals of the Spellings “better business” Commission should not come as a surprise.

Bob, at 8:51 am EDT on April 5, 2007

This is a good article. Simply put in economic terms: our raw materials have the ability to make choices. Unlike, the raw materials used in making an automobile.

Our students can choose to succeed or fail. Failure is an option of higher education unlike high school, where no one fails. We all know the results of this policy. Failure happens for many reasons in higher education. It has been my experience when a student says they can’t afford college and drops out, they have other issues: academic (normally the real reason), social or psychological. Maybe if we made it all free, everyone would graduate and become very productive, etc.

I guess the US education system must be failing, we try to educate everyone. I wish all the other nations of the world would do the same, then we could really compare apples to apples. If our system is out of touch, etc, then why do so many international students want to come here? China seems to be sending many students to the US to get educated? Why? Makes a person wonder.......

The Spellings commissions has short changed our students by not addressing their ability to choose. After all, these are not children we are talking about, they are adults with adult rights and responsibilities. These are not high school students who are told what to do, when to do and how to do, so the outcomes can be measured.

As long as our students have choice, everything that the government expects and wants will be very hard to do. And very expensive, but no worry about the cost, the government will pay for it, right?

Jim, at 9:22 am EDT on April 5, 2007

Status quo?

While I agree that the business model is not the correct approach to higher education, I applaud the effort spent on finding ways to improve higher education. It seems like this is only half an article — the part where the author offers a counter-proposal for an approach to improving higher education is missing. If the business model won’t work, what will? More of the same?

Jeremy, at 9:26 am EDT on April 5, 2007

Silliness

I can barely appreciate the comments of Daniel Chambliss as sidereal considerations in the education of 17-22 year-olds where there remains some predication for university acting in parentis locus. Even for this segment of the market, higher education is subset of the service economy, whether or not individual members of the pre-market Mandarin class like the idea.

However, some of Daniel’s remarks are patronizing for the other 40-50% of higher education’s customers (varying criteria produce different percentages): those who work, vote, own property, have families, and are already socially responsible adults. When working adults elect to return to complete a degree or earn a new one, they expect truth in advertising, clear and explicit educational goals, managed instructional processes, competent performance management, and defined outcomes. Sadly, their needs are not always met by professors who do not understand how different are the educational goals and capabilities of a 35 year-old mid-level manager at a technology-based company from those of a 17 year-old who, like the professor, has probably never managed anything.

It is downright silly for Mr. Chambliss to suggest that a service process should be centered on serendipity, propinquity, chance outcomes, and the like. Such outcomes are delightful when they occur – and they occur not necessarily in the classroom but in all facets of life – but they cannot constitute the objectives of a service process.

Mr. Chambliss sounds like so many professors I have heard over the years who exhort us to define higher education around the occasional outlier students we have all had the pleasure of teaching. What about the other 99% of the students who paid money to learn how accounting, or law enforcement, or instructional design takes place beyond the halls of ivy?

Robert Tucker, President at InterEd, Inc., at 10:51 am EDT on April 5, 2007

A Faulty Defense

Dr. Chambliss’ essay is a restatement of the traditional Higher Ed defense. Whenever the status quo is questioned, the rough magic that is said to happen in the typical Higher Ed classroom is restated in one form or another. Summit participants should not be faulted for asking why Higher Ed can not do things better. Higher Ed could do things better if it were not so defensive.

Without formal assessment we do not know if a student has learned what the student may have learned. A single faculty’s subjective “I know it when I see it” is insufficient. It is not coercion to demand a discernable return from the investment students, parents, philanthropy and government make in supporting the higher education industry.

It is time for Higher Ed to end the stonewalling and abandon its bunker mentality and offer constructive responses to external critics. If we do not do it, it will be done to us.

William Patrick Leonard, at 11:25 am EDT on April 5, 2007

One size does not fit all

One consideration overlooked so far in the article and subsequent discussion is that fact that no two human beings are alike. That human beings have the ability to make choices was alluded to, but the fact that each individual student brings to education a unique set of learning styles, abilities, motivations, needs, perceptions and responsibilities to things outside of their educational life. Forcing all of education, from preschool through post-doctorate, to conform to one way of education will not work. It real estate this is sometimes referred to as the “cookie cutter".

From what I can gather, K-12 has been struggling with this in its own way for some years now, putting so much emphasis on testing for reading and math skill that other dimensions of educating the whole student are lost in the fray.

More than 30 years ago when I was still in graduate school we were warned this great emphasis on measuring everything would become a reality in all of education. From the point of view of a non-Western scholar I know well, the over-emphasis on “objective” measurements in the Western world, what some refer to as left-brained thinking, deprives us. I take this to mean, among other things, the ability to think creatively, or as some in the business world are fond of saying “thinking outside the box".

“GE hires a lot of engineers. We want young people who can do more than add up a string of numbers and write a coherent sentence. They must be able to solve problems, communicate ideas and be sensitive to the world around them. Participation in the arts is one of the best ways to develop these abilities.” ~ CLIFFORD V. SMITH (President of the General Electric Foundation) ~ http://nhcs.k12.in.us/band/Boosters/musicvalue.doc

Yet, arts education is neglected in these business models, as is physical education, the lack of which is contributing to an epidemic of obesity and related diseases in this country.

Hernietta Carter, Chair, Visual and Performing Arts at Golden West College, at 12:10 pm EDT on April 5, 2007

Flawed Metaphor

Even if one grants the truth of Chambliss’ metaphor critique—although it a species of the usual academic arrogance of ignorance regarding teaching and learning—the comments that follow his piece make the more salient point. Quality of undergraduate learning is far below what is promised and what is needed and the Spellings Commission certainly articulated the evidence for that in its research summaries.

And let’s also grant that more and even great assessment would not be sufficient for improving quality if only because we do not know how to measure all that is worth learning. Does this really mean we should not engage in far more useful, authentic, and transparent learning assessment to inform both students and teachers in a timely and useful fashion? And is it not reasonable to think that it is both possible and useful to be able to determine whether or not attending one institution might result in superior learning compared to attendance at another similar or indeed different institution that makes the same claims for becoming “educated.?”

And let’s further grant that federal or state intervention into the workings of a university, is inherently bad and thus trying to avoid federal impositions ought to be resisted. Does this not put even greater need for colleges and universities to take responsibility for improving learning significantly and the need for the academy to devise learning assessment that fits that purpose and shared with the public eager to regain trust in the academic profession?

So, Mr. Chambliss, does your remedy to the quality problem really reside in status quo or do you think you and your colleagues are willing and able to take on this task without the fear imposed by the threat of government intrusion?

no nonsense, at 12:45 pm EDT on April 5, 2007

Corporate world accountable?

I’m not so sure this argument comes down to something as simplstic as whether or not higher ed should be accountable—I’ve yet to meet a teacher who didn’t take accountability quite seriously. The question this article raises, and in part answers, is whether the business/manufacturing model of accountability is the most appropriate one for educating sentient human beings with all their messy motivations and differing needs and abilities. At the end of the day, educators are not producing widgets from an assembly line, as I hope we can all agree.

But it’s also important to recognize the weaknesses of the corporate model in measuring even business outcomes. Enron was just the most egregious example of how far companies will go to meet or exceed “market expectations"; how many times since that scandal erupted have we seen one corporation after another have to answer for accounting “irregularities", and how many others have yet to be caught? How many times has the US government had to revise and readjust its own previously reported statistics? Giving someone numbers to shoot for—and monetary incentives for achieving them—also creates the temptation to “cook the books.” I would hope that most people (and companies) resist this temptation, but it’s clear that many do not. While we can’t, and shouldn’t, do away with numerical goals, we can, and should, find ways to ensure that the numbers actually stand for something of value. Recognizing what can and cannot be quantified is admittedly very difficult, but we cannot even begin to address this issue without first agreeing on what we can and should measure.

Georgia educator, at 1:45 pm EDT on April 5, 2007

Status Quo?

There is an assumption, among those tied to the Carnegie Plan of 1897 — including those favoring the Spellings Summit ideas (see Messers Tucker and Leonard above)- that those of us who reject the manufacturing model always favor the status quo. That is not true at all. Many of us favor significant reform and change, but believe in “Learner Generated Contexts” and the kind of post-secondary programming that moves education away from trivia and compliance and towards a new level of open thinking and lifetime learning.

One of the simple facts of life in the 21st Century missed by the “corporate types” in the US (see Ford, GM, etc), is that if you wait for institutional assessment programs to tell you what to do next you will always be planning for the last decade, and in education, you will be doing the equivalent of selling three ton SUVs in a market with $3.00/gallon gas. Our faculties do indeed need to change, our ideas of majors and required curricula need to change, the level of freedom for our students needs to change, and the flow of information in the classroom must change — from lecture to wide-ranging access and shared knowledge. But the way to get better is not through standardized testing and assessment, which only rewards mediocrity, servility, and knowledge of old solutions.

Ira Socol, Michigan State University, at 2:01 pm EDT on April 5, 2007

Grossly unfair characterization

Dear editors:

The recent “Test of Leadership” Summit on higher education convened in D.C. brought together leaders from education, business, philanthropy and the public policy communities. These leaders tend to speak in their own usual language, a practice which can be beneficial of all of those involved, especially if their comments are received in a collaborative manner.

However, the article “The Flawed Metaphor of the Spellings Summit” in today’s Inside Higher Education demonstrates the worst kind of response from certain members of the academy, focusing on the language used by some participants to severely criticize. Fortunately it was not a common response to a summit where many educators and others indicated they had the first opportunity in a lifetime to engage in an open, positive dialogue on a serious and difficult set of issues of great import to the country.

The summit was a unique effort to bring many varied viewpoints together. In that, it was highly successful. Members of the academy in attendance were actively engaged, strongly motivated and very positive and constructive in participating, as were others It should not be left to this referenced article to describe that event’s contribution to the national dialogue.

The article complains about common organizational language and universally accepted organizational principles used at the summit by highly successful and highly competent practitioners of good management as if to imply that those principles and that language couldn’t possibly apply to higher education institutions. What nonsense!

Snide remarks in this article about “setting goals” or “measurement” or “motivation” are made to imply that these ideas are somehow not as appropriate for colleges and universities as they are in most human endeavors.

Specifically, for example, “process redesign strategies", while cumbersome to say, comes from (an academic) describing a widely used organizational strategy which merits serious consideration by anyone trying to improve “productivity"—-and does not deserve a dismissive response because it might be derived from “business". That response belies the whole idea of a summit of this nature: listen and learn from others. And it demonstrates an inherent bias against business.

Efforts to diminish ideas and opinions from outside the academy, as if there is not another source of intelligence, is counterproductive. Worse, however, is the extrapolation of outside opinions, which might be arguable on the merits, into language such as “coercion” and “punished” or into conclusions such as “underlying everything is the belief that business does things right, higher education does things wrong".

This “Flawed Metaphor” article does not represent the constructive and collaborative interchange which occurred at the summit. It would be an unfair characterization of the fine contributions of those individuals participating in this event.

Charles Miller

Charles Miller, Chairman, Commission on the Future of Higher Education, at 2:55 pm EDT on April 5, 2007

Thank you Mr. Miller

Thanks to Charles Miller for so clearly confirming virtually everything in Dr. Chambliss’ column today.

“And it demonstrates an inherent bias against business.”

We don’t have anything against business. We have something against business taking over education. Surely business would have the same response if education tried to take it over.

“Efforts to diminish ideas and opinions from outside the academy, as if there is not another source of intelligence, is counterproductive.”

Here’s a thought. Instead of subsidizing the corporations of America by having others pay for the training of their workers (in “colleges", let’s have the other companies pay for the training of their own workers at their own training facilities. Then the rest of us, who would like to get an education (properly so-called) can go to an actual university.

“Worse, however, is the extrapolation of outside opinions, which might be arguable on the merits, into language such as ‘coercion’ and ‘punished’...”

You are of course free to indulge in whatever sort of doublespeak you would like. But when you force institutions and their members to do things in ways other than they would like to, and threaten to reduce resources unless they do so, that is punishment and coercion. Perhaps you have reasons to justify such punishment and coercion (at this point the beleaguered taxpayer is usually dragged out for display), but punishment and coercion it is nonetheless. First, we must speak plainly. Then, perhaps, we can get something done.

Cranky Old Prof, at 4:55 pm EDT on April 5, 2007

Assessing Success

I am confused — assessment of an educational system seems obvious. You know you are succeeding because your society, the life of your people, improve in demonstrable ways. The nation becomes more open, more democratic, more responsive to its economic and social needs, and manages change better. Your students stay in school, they maximize their own potential and the potential of those around them. They are prepared to handle their own futures.

Now, you cannot measure that with traditional statistical metrics over any short term. If you try, you still end up like Ford and GM, certain in 2000 that everything they were doing was perfect (record profits!). And you cannot do it with the kind of false summits and silly standards that have boiled up from Texas over the past six years — false graduation records, faked test scores, lies about school violence, all in pursuit of good looking annual reports.

Charles Miller does not even understand that “productivity” is an absurd term in the education of individuals. (More students to a class? More A’s? What is he talking about?) What chance does any commission he chairs have of really looking at human needs?

So let me just conclude on this note. In the 1850s the NYS Board of Regents did the first mass assessment of students in the US using standardized tests. 150 years and endless industrial models later the results — by the industrialists own measurements — are in. In the 1850s about 1/3 of students were “doing well” — Now about 1/3 of students are ‘proficient.” Give it up industrialists, let education stay a human art, not a bureaucratic system.

Ira Socol, Michigan State University, at 4:56 pm EDT on April 5, 2007

The more things change, the more they stay the same

When, 40+ years ago, Mario Savio made the statement below on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall it was putatively obvious, and required essentially no explanation, that a business model of education did not serve the needs of students OR faculty. Now, sadly, judging by these posts and my experience with students, both stakeholders largely embrace this dehumanizing view of education. What has remained the same in the intervening years would seem to be the interests of those who would frame higher education as mere production of human capital to be consumed by the labor market. I realize that it is hard to imagine in our corporatation- saturated existence that relationships other than those entailed in a business model can exist. But they can, and they yield outcomes of greater societal value and more difficult to measure than those being advocated by the Spellings Commission.

Savio’s famous statement in which he concretizes the elements of the business metaphor applied to higher education: ” We have an autocracy which runs this university. It’s managed. We asked the following: if President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, “Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?” That’s the answer! Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I’ll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw material[s] that don’t mean to have any process upon us, don’t mean to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!”

NV @ Berkeley, at 6:15 pm EDT on April 5, 2007

Absolutely Right

I was confusing the 1854 date of the Department of Public Instruction which authorized that test. But it wasn’t done until the 1860s, when the results were what I suggested. Thanks for proving the point. Meaningless minutiae is the heart of US education. Something the Spellings Summit wishes to strengthen.

Ira Socol, Michigan State University, at 5:11 am EDT on April 6, 2007

Decmber 1964

“Well I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees! And we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to have any process upon us, don’t mean to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!”

M. Savio, at 11:35 am EDT on April 6, 2007

Things fall apart?

With apologies to Keats, a paraphrase by memory:

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the earth, and what rough beast is this slouching towards Washington, D.C.waiting to be born?

Maybe the answer is not red or blue, but maroon? Perhaps some external evaluation (O.K. “outcomes assessment” for those of you who are particularlyaverse to the “evaluation” word) is needed?

but what will the Miller/Spellings system do when a well-placed government representative demands that a son or daughter receive a “C"instead of the “F” that s/he earned?

Higher Education — functioning like a military draft - ummmm smells like natural fertilizer from many barnyards, flowing downhll to Washington, D.C.waiting to be praised as high art.

Dr. F. Gump, at 2:45 pm EDT on April 6, 2007

Dr. Gump, while I’m no academic myself, it seems to me you owe more apology to William Yeats than to John Keats.

Jack Olson, at 4:05 pm EDT on April 7, 2007

Is education not a process?

This manufacturing model that creates such concern is a concept that was created by academics and is based on the observation that all work is a process and that any process can be described, measured, studied, and improved. Doesn’t matter whether the process is making widgets, providing health care, teaching someone, or creating opportunities for discovery. The learner’s motivation is certainly a factor in the analysis of the process, and there is nothing inherently de-humanizing in the efforts to improve a learning process so that more people are successful in learning a subject. And, let us not leap to the conclusion that improving student success automatically means lowering standards. Some in the higher education community seem to suggest that their work is not a process that can be studied and improved. I appreciate the work of everyone in the field of faculty development and those associated with the scholarship of teaching who are demonstrating how education is indeed a process and how we can improve our processes just as Toyota has improved theirs. Must sign off to go teach one of my classes, which I am continuously trying to improve.

John in Alabama, at 7:15 pm EDT on April 10, 2007