The philosophical underpinnings of this new paradigm are deeply rooted in corporate thinking. Any educators reading this can understand the initial logic -- look at what works in other fields and then try to apply it to your field to replicate that success. Teachers do it all the time. If the math teacher is seeing more engagement using group projects centered on local issues, couldn't those kinds of projects make their way into the social studies classroom? If the second grade teacher used a reward system that happened to motivate this particular group of students who are all coming to your third grade classroom next year, wouldn't you consider using something similar?
The idea behind businesses informing educational policy, however, has one fatal flaw: schools have fundamental differences from for-profit organizations and have vastly different goals. The reason that transferring ideas and strategies works in the first place is that the goal is the same between all parties. The second and third grade teachers in the aforementioned example both want better behavior and more engagement from their students. Businesses and schools, however, have very little in common and do not want the same thing.
Let's examine an analogy. Now, it's far from perfect - so think of it as more of an intellectual exercise rather than a scientific study, and we'll be just fine.
You are a hospital administrator. Your hospital is in an urban setting where you see a variety of patients from all walks of life and treat just about every kind of injury and illness known to man. A recent national movement to reform healthcare has been shifting attention to hospitals and doctors, and a new federal mandate has just been handed down outlining the requirements that all facilities are expected to fulfill. Your new requirements are as follows:
- All subgroups of patients (traumatic injury, cancer, neurological disorders, obesity, mental health, etc.) must see improvement in scores on the brand new MED (Medical Examination Diagnostic) test, which is being used to assess all patients during their hospital visit. All patients are taking the exact same test and are expected to meet score benchmarks no matter what.
- Patient mortality will be reduced every year and will reach 0% by 2024.
- Hospitals not showing sufficient improvement will either be taken over by the state or shut down entirely.
- Doctors' job security will be tied to their patients' MED scores.
Two months after you begin collecting data to align your hospital with the new standards, you realize that you are not seeing improvement in MED scores or patient mortality. The highest fields of concern are the trauma center and the palliative care/terminal ward. If the hospital reduced the size of the terminal ward by 40%, the overall statistics of the hospital would improve dramatically. Given that the MED test and data collected by the overseeing agency don't distinguish between deaths that occur due to negligence or malpractice versus those that would have occurred with or without hospital intervention, any and all fatalities must be avoided in order to improve the data coming out of the hospital. It would be in your facility's best interests to stop admitting terminally-ill patients altogether, but that is not permitted by the medical board. Although it is against your morals to do so, you find several loopholes to allow your hospital to gradually reduce the number of hospice/terminal patients in order to improve your numbers. While some of these patients find care at other hospitals, some of them receive no care at all. You justify your decision and the suffering of those few by thinking of the thousands of patients you are still able to treat because your facility is allowed to remain open.
The ER is the other primary area of concern and is a much tougher fix. Nearly a third of the patients your hospital treats are seen first in the trauma center, and yours is the largest such facility within 100 miles. You can hardly shut down the ER or stop seeing patients, but many of the fatalities counted against you in the statistics stem from this wing of the building. A large percentage of these fatalities are victims of traumatic injury or sudden illness who would die no matter the medical interventions used. Given your location in an urban center, you see many victims of violence who perish long before they even reach an operating room. Your service area also has a much higher percentage of obese patients than the national average, and although you do your best to push preventative care and health initiatives, you still see many victims of heart attack and stroke (among many other diseases) who arrive in the ER too late to recover. Your hospital increases its efforts to encourage obese patients to lose weight, but with a fast food joint on every block and the price of healthy food at the grocery store more than double that of the less healthy alternatives, there are many outside factors working against you.
Your trauma center staff begin to feel the pressure of repeatedly failing to meet the benchmarks under the new system. The operators who communicate with ambulance companies and 911 have begun fibbing to them, rerouting serious trauma cases in which a fatality is likely to other local hospitals. The operators use excuses of full rooms, staff shortages, equipment failures, and anything else they can think of in order to avoid influxes of patients that will ruin their data. Someone finds out about this practice and leaks it to the media, at which point your hospital is embroiled in a huge scandal. You are forced to fire several staff members in the ER and retrain all staff in acceptable practices. Although you and your office were unaware of the actions of those individuals, you are suspected of ignoring or even encouraging the behavior, and you are in danger of being sanctioned by the medical board. You are now under even closer scrutiny than before.
After a six-month data review of your hospital, it is determined that several of the hospital wards are not meeting the expected numbers on the MED test. The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, the terminal/hospice ward, the trauma center, and the psychiatric ward are all holding relatively steady in their numbers or jumping all over the place, rather than improving steadily as mandated. As someone who interacts with these departments on a daily basis, you can understand why: the NICU uses a test on premature infants designed for adults, the hospice patients have a mortality rate of 100%, the trauma center hardly sees some of the patients long enough to get a full medical history much less run the MED test, and the psychiatric ward is one of many departments focused on on-going outpatient care where "holding steady" is often the best case scenario. The overseeing body, however, does not find your justifications convincing and points to other hospitals where improvements in similar departments have been seen. The federal government threatens to cut funding to your departments if they do not improve within six months.
Nearly a year into the new regulations, it becomes apparent that the hospital is running into several problems. The staff burnout rate is climbing at an alarming rate, and it has become very difficult to find qualified doctors and nurses to replace the ones who have quit. Many of your new residents are frankly less skilled than what you would like, and the doctors training them are limited to those who have not yet been defeated by the new reforms (rather than those who are passionate about teaching new doctors or those who are the best in their fields). On the national scale, college enrollment in the field of medicine has experienced a decrease, and the numbers of students entering the fields of cardiology, oncology, and trauma are all reducing drastically. Many more medical students are choosing "safer" areas like pediatrics, general medicine, dermatology, and physical therapy. In a few years, you fear, the pool of candidates for jobs in the highest-need, highest-mortality areas will be too small to even run the hospital, while there will be a glut of applicants for jobs to remove moles and diagnose the flu. You have absolutely zero control over this and can only watch the ripples propagate.
In another city, a hospital similar in size and patient demographics to yours gets shut down due to poor performance on the MED test and noncompliance with expected patient mortality rates. Many of their existing patients are transferred to hospitals much further from home, where it is much harder for loved ones to visit patients regularly. Patients not considered "high-risk" are sent home with instructions to make appointments at their primary care doctors' offices. Because the hospital also housed a general medicine/ENT department, several of the patients no longer have a primary care doctor to visit. Much of the laid-off staff move to areas of the medical field not affected by the new regulations, while some are hired at hospitals experiencing staffing shortages due to high turnover. This hospital's numbers were only slightly worse than yours, and you can feel the overseeing body breathing down your neck.
In an effort to improve doctor and nurse quality, and to keep hospitals accountable for hiring competent staff, the overseeing body introduces new staff evaluations to be conducted at each hospital every year. All staff, from sanitation workers to you, the chief administrator, must comply with these evaluations. Although it is touted as a self-improvement tool, the vast majority of the hospital staff view it as a way to use data to fire people. The burden of paperwork on every single staff person ranges from 30 minutes to 3 hours each week, on top of keeping up with patient visits, updating charts, staying current with the latest medical literature, taking a class to hone skills, attending endless staff meetings, and collecting/analyzing data from the MED tests. After the first round of staff evaluations, many staff members quit in protest. You struggle to replace them, as the pool of applicants has been shrinking for months.
An outbreak of measles temporarily overwhelms your hospital for several weeks. Your area is one of several in which so many parents are refusing to vaccinate their children that diseases once considered to be in the past are reemerging. A staggering 65 children get sick, an unheard-of number since vaccination began 50 years ago, and 9 of them die from encephalitis or other complications. Although it becomes clear that the mortality rate of these patients is related to their living conditions, as nearly all of them were also malnourished or had severe vitamin deficiencies, the overseeing body sends a representative to examine practices at your hospital and conduct an investigation. Once the measles outbreak is over, your mortality rates return to normal, but the representative stays. Your staff secretly refer to him as "the spy" and practice passive noncompliance with his requests. The representative believes you have encouraged this behavior and puts you under further scrutiny.
After two years of the new system and several threats from the overseeing body to take over or close your hospital, a new president is elected. He says he will drastically modify the system that was put into place two years ago. In reality, he changes several of the exact figures and statistics (easing the burden somewhat) while keeping the regulations and punitive measures associated with failing to make adequate improvements in your data. The MED test stays, but now hospitals are offered significant budget increases and no-cost staff trainings if benchmarks are met or exceeded. The threat of closings and takeovers remains the same. Although you felt initial relief at the change in policy, it becomes immediately apparent that the day-to-day functioning of your hospital will not change very much. The emphasis on data is the same, and the reliance on assessments like the MED test hasn't changed.
You start looking at hospital administrator jobs elsewhere, particularly in areas that have seen improvement under the new system, but all the vacancies are in hospitals exactly like yours, or worse. You decide to stick with it and do your best under the regulations. Your staff has come to resent you, as you represent the authority handing down these regulations, and the overseeing body still doesn't trust you after the ER operator scandal, the measles outbreak, and the subsequent staff noncompliance with "the spy". All of the ideas you come up with to improve the hospital and raise your numbers are subversive at best, and some of them are outright rebellious. Given your tenuous position, you acknowledge that now is not the time to innovate yourself right out of a job. You follow the prescriptive doctrine to the letter, and watch your hospital deteriorate over another year before you are unceremoniously fired and the hospital is shuttered for good.
Hopefully this scenario sounds ridiculous. I mean, who would expect patient mortality to drop to 0% ever? Who would administer the same exact test to every patient, and then punish the doctors and hospitals who have lower scores? Who would structure a system that so clearly discourages talented individuals from taking on the toughest cases and working in the hardest fields? Except these are exactly the things that have happened in American education, starting with No Child Left Behind and continuing today with Race to the Top and psychotic implementation of the otherwise-pretty-reasonable Common Core standards.
The problem with how America is approaching education right now is that it is applying business practices where they don't belong. While it may make sense to close branches with the lowest sales numbers or pay salesmen salaries based on their numbers, those concepts don't work in education. If my success is determined by my students' scores on a given exam, I have two very practical options: teach them exactly what they need for the test or work somewhere that the kids will automatically do well. Neither of those are great options (even though both of them happen all the time). Who would choose to work with special education children, students from low-income minority neighborhoods, or kids who don't speak English? All of them are less likely to perform well on a test than their white, middle- and upper-income, without-disabilities native English speaking peers.
The goal of a business is to make money. That is its whole purpose. It identifies an area in the market ripe for tapping, offers a product or service at a price that the market will pay, and then tweaks the business over time to maximize profits. This is not the goal of schools and it is not how they function. Schools do not have customers - the entire nation is the only customer. You may disagree, but seeing students or parents as customers is a flawed comparison. Students often do not want the product that schools are "selling" which is why schooling is compulsory. This compulsory schooling is also part of why parents are not the customers. Although parents may see themselves this way, ultimately teachers and schools answer to the district and state, who often work with parents on school boards, but who do not defer to parents for any major decisions. While education does improve individuals and serve them in a very real way, compulsory schooling was designed to and still serves to improve the entire country. The real customer is the greater good of society.
Also, obviously, schools do not make a profit - the mark of a successful school is not a single number but rather a complex matrix of graduation rates, long-term student outcomes, test scores, enrollment in post-secondary education, and the general improvement/support of the socioeconomic status in the neighborhood where the school is located. If a business found that their flagship product had declining sales over the past year but that the customers were really, really happy with the product, the happiness of the customers wouldn't mean anything. Sales are the bottom line. With schools, however, a drop in test scores and four-year graduation rates might be caused by increased enrollment of at-risk and previously dropped-out youth who are trying to reengage with the system and get back on track. Serving more students and helping them stick with their education is a wonderful thing for a school, but the numbers don't make it seem that great.
The point of all of this is to draw attention to false correlations and misguided comparisons between education and corporations. Cities and states would never dream of running hospitals, police and fire departments, or government offices the way that schools are currently being run. Although there is a larger movement to corporatize essentially all fields and services because America is entirely run by its richest citizens, who want everything to work like the businesses they've run for decades, this movement has made its greatest strides in education, perhaps the only public service constantly looking to reinvent itself and reform everything (although, to be fair, not everyone in education likes the idea of reform). The constant shifting between policies, guiding principles, and requirements has also degraded the quality of education across the country by keep the ground beneath educators' feet ever-moving. The only thing worse than sticking with a terrible set of policies is rapidly switching from one terrible set to another and another, and so on.
Before you dismiss the concerns of teachers (or, far more easily, the concerns of the teachers' unions), examine what the real effects are of any educational policies and reforms. What will these look like in the classroom? What will students' experiences be like? Will this improve learning? And once you've answered these questions yourself, ask someone who is actually in the field of education. I assure you, they'll have an opinion to share with you.
