Triple Helix

Bureaucracy.  Its a nasty word that has moved to the center of political discourse.  We are always looking for ways to cut,circumvent, or reinvent the managerial apparatus that has come to define our interaction with government.  Stacks of confusing forms, hidden rules, and disinterested paper-pushers are the components of an imagined boogeyman that political candidates rail against. When it comes to schools, we talk about stubborn teachers’ unions, incompetent administrators, and out-of-touch school board members.  In times of economic strife the people who make up these institutions are the targets of fear and anger.  Its a particularly potent kind of anger, because these institutions are meant to disseminate the collective knowledge and information of our society.  When things go wrong, we turn to our schools for reassurance that they are giving our children the skills to out-maneuver such catastrophes.  The public’s relationship to its schools can range from constructive criticism, to physical violence, as the School Board in Panama City, Florida witnessed first-hand last month.

19th Century sociologist Max Weber noted that in economically advanced societies, bureaucracy is a necessary organizational tool that lends robustness to critical institutions.  We write down rules and regulations and assign certain people to execute them in such a way that we are not beholden to any one person’s expertise.  The system can carry on without any given individual because no one has proprietary knowledge.  It is all shared and accessible to those given certain responsibilities.

The bureaucracy of schools are a peculiar kind of problem.  Weber’s theory of bureaucracy (and America’s schools) are from a different time.  Maybe its time we rethink the hierarchy of our educational system.

Starting at the bottom, the organization of teachers and students seems outdated.  Most of our workplaces don’t operate on a rigid time frame coordinated by bells.  We solve open-ended problems using a multitude of skill sets organized by project.  We enter field sites and perform our craft.

Teachers’ efforts and students’ progress need to be organized to a certain degree.  Its important that the “big picture” is considered.  Currently, this task falls to administrators, deans, and counselors that perform a wide variety of oversight, from multiple points of view.  The principal is concerned with the overall operating efficiency, the deans are looking after the student’s behavior and safety, and the counselors monitor student achievement across classrooms.  Without getting too specific, I just want to offer the possibility that these functions need not be organized in this top-down manner.  Careers with the highest job-satisfaction ratings are often those that allow for flexibility and true creativity in everyday work.  Giving teachers more administrative power is a good way to foster such creativity.

Finally, at the very top of the food chain, are the superintendents and district school boards.  These are usually elected positions that set broad goals for many different schools.  Someone with a better political science background could provide a better alternative to the current schema, but I think reform needs to start with the scale of things.

We take the current form of bureaucracy for granted.  Nothing about education inherently demands school principals, or county school boards.  When we look at options for reform, consider simple (but fundamental) changes could be the answer.  Finland’s reform did not involve deep pedagogical debates about what it means to say 2+2=4.  They paid teachers well, gave them autonomy in the classroom, and respected their bosses because they had been teachers in the past.  Just remember to sharpen your Occam’s razor every once in a while.

The Albany School District requires all science students to take four interval tests over the course of the school year.  They are mostly multiple choice tests with a few short written response sections.  The tests are poor indicators of achievement in my opinion.  While there have been great pedagogical arguments against standardized testing, I think they all run past a simple, fundamental problem:

The tests look terrible.

Which is to say, they are designed very poorly.  The instructions are only written once, at the top of the test, and in the same font and size as the rest of the questions. The diagrams are very abstract, to the extent that the question becomes unnecessarily confusing.  They assume the best way to test knowledge is through a linear progression of a series of numbered questions that ask for recall of atomized pieces of knowledge.

First of all, it is considerably unfair that we inundate kids with hyperbolic, in-your-face advertising and media, and then wonder why they can’t sit down for a 30 question multiple-choice test that was written out in a word processing program, and not given the slightest attention to design.  Why aren’t we trying to get these kids attention when the future of their education is at stake?  But most importantly, rote memorization and recall is not how they learn, so this is not how they demonstrate what they’ve learned.

Students who have been flagged by teachers as “gifted” in elementary school, are often given an aptitude test that may involve moving around a series of vague images to tell a story of their choosing.  Demonstrating cell division can be done in a similar way.  I would suggest we provide much more open-ended, written responses, but writing skills are a whole other problem altogether– not to mention the extra resources it would take to grade free responses versus multiple choices.

What still doesn’t make sense, is why we still take tests on paper.  Computer interfaces can provide a much richer experience in which students could be engaged in an interactive learning assessment tool, rather than subjected to the test-anxiety of a cold room and a number 2 pencil.

Having looked at the graded interval tests, I think the data backs up my claims.  The questions most students got wrong, were ones that involved looking at a figure and explaining what they saw.  When they saw their tests, and the right answer explained, students often understood what they had done wrong.  Students were confused by the diagrams.  When they live in a world where movies are capable of rendering the impossible, picture-perfectly real, poorly designed diagrams don’t make sense.  Video clips make sense.  Manipulating images in a virtual 3D environment makes sense.  An abstract line diagram of a cross-section of a series of sediment layers and poorly photocopied pictures of fossils are arcane, confusing, and undecipherable.

We need to take the technology we’ve spent so much money on to make videogames, and start making learning assessment tools with them.  Or maybe we need to start making videogames that are learning assessment tools.