"There is a crack,
A crack, in everything,
That's how the light gets in..."
Leonard Cohen
I believe that we are currently experiencing an historic peak in the government's effort to create and exploit efficiencies in education. Money is tight. Why not strive to achieve desired outputs with minimum inputs? Why not economize? None of us would settle for leaky plumbing, so why should we settle for inefficiencies in our education pipeline?
And while we're on the subject, what does a good plumbing system look like? How do we judge it? Well, I suppose we'd start with no leaks. All of the water should be contained. When we turn on a fawcet, we want the water to be hot or cold, depending on our purposes, and we want it to be clean. We want it to be at a constant, reliable pressure. We want the system to be functionally invisible, really, and to provide us fresh, running water at our convenience with little or no upkeep. We don't care about (or even distinguish among) separate drops of water, the flow is the thing. O.K., bad analogy. Children can't be the indistinguishable drops of water...that's just silly. Clearly, the plumbing analogy won't hold water. We need a new analogy. Can they be shoes? Automobiles? Electrons? Dollars? Services? In the efficiency model, what exactly are the kids?
Or maybe it's not the kids that are the product. Maybe we're producing knowledge. Units of education, so to speak. Bits of ability to come to terms with the world. Test scores? Each point on a test would have to represent a single, unique, identical unit of education. (Otherwise running statistical analysis is just numerology and not mathematics). Not only that, but the test scores as we move from grade to grade would have to be perfectly aligned, which we know is not the case.
Neither educated children as a 'product' nor education conceived of as identical, consumable units provides a remotely satisfactory description of the work of schools. Neither our children nor their individual achievements can be standardized, and without standardization of both inputs and outputs there is no way to calculate efficiency. And yet the government, undaunted by the realities on the ground, extends its reach ever further into the classroom and compulsively measures everything that can be weighed, plumbed or counted.
But like leaky plumbing or bad wiring, government efforts at steering the course and managing the flow of our children's learning fail constantly and create a perennial nuisance for those of us who live and work in the school house. This is particularly true in that the state's obsession with measurement robs us of valuable classroom time and diverts our focus from learning. It also commits thousands of dollars to technology that exists primarily for the administration of tests.
What is the silver lining in all of this? It is that the accountability system leaks like a sieve. It is perhaps the least efficient aspect of the state government's involvement in education, and one simply must sit for a moment and enjoy the irony of the 'inefficient efficiency expert.' Chaplin would have had a field day filming the bumbling Sargent tripping over his own boot strings while attempting to form up his squad! And we are thankful for their inefficiency. Because while they roam about like the Tin Man trying to learn ballet, there is room inside the leaky, creaky system for really good schools to operate. And while filling out the latest PE report (how many P.E. facilities do you have, are they gymnasiums or play sheds, who teaches P.E. to whom, by grade level, and for how many minutes a week) wastes considerable time, it doesn't have to interfere with the work of teachers and students and only detracts modestly from the support that we are able to afford them. And the testing system, while it is expensive, intrusive, and counter-productive, offers the state the 'sense' of accountability and keeps the funding (which our constituents provide!) flowing back to the district.
So let us resist the temptation to improve state oversight of schools. They are good people doing their best. Embrace them as they are. Because where education is concerned, the inefficiencies, the cracks in the system, are where the light gets in.
