DISENCHANTED TEACHERS
Rochester is the Model, And Results Are Dismal
Wednesday, July 28, 1993
By Robert Holland
Proponents concede that Outcome-Based Education is industry’s Total Quality
Management extended to the schools.
Everyday working stiffs and parents ought to fend off the sleepiness the mere
mention of TQM tends to induce and try to understand this philosophy being
pushed down from the high councils of government, industry, and education.
The true believers’ faith in the philosophy’s curative powers is absolute.
Enthusiasts like TQM consultant Henry Taylor, whose article appears on
this page today, make a case for motivation more than they do for method.
Those considering a radical change, whoever, must look at the larger
picture – to wit, the full-blown experiment with TQM/OBE school reform that has
been underway in Rochester, New York since 1988.
Marc Tucker, director of the Rochester-based National Center on Education
and the Economy, has called Rochester’s 32,000-student school system “a
restructuring laboratory for the state and the nation.”
That’s wonderful! Lab data ought to
be welcomed before Virginia buys irrevocably into OBE as the instrument of World
Class Education. Let’s look at
some:
*In 1987, Rochester spent $4,253 per pupil in local tax dollars.
By 1991, that had risen to $5,501 per pupil, and tens of millions more
was being pumped in by the state (Governor Mario Cuomo is a big supporter),
private corporations (Xerox and Eastman Kodak), and foundations.
*In 1987, 23 percent of Rochester’s pupils earned the New York state Regents’
Diploma, the most rigorous offered.
By 1991, only 18 percent did.
*In 1991 more than 70 percent of the freshmen at Wilson Magnet School, generally
considered the city’s best, flunked the state’s basic math test.
*The percentage of third-graders passing the state reading exam fell from 81 to
79 during the reform’s first four years.
The goal had been a 90 percent passing rate by 1991. (U.S.
News & world Report, May 25, 1992).
In summary, costs have soared while academic results have plummeted.
Furthermore, several newspapers have reported disenchantment among
teachers, even though they were given a 40 percent raise over a three-year
period as an incentive for swallowing TQM whole.
Their complaint? The system
is turning them into “social workers,” with little time to teach.
In his 1992 book, Thinking for a
Living, (co-authored with former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall), Marc
Tucker acknowledged that, “the Rochester experience demonstrates some of the
complexity of the restructuring agenda in practice as well as some sense of the
time it will take to implement that agenda.” To say nothing of
the money.
And that’s what OBE proponents like to say about money—nothing.
Yet Tucker hasn’t slowed in his efforts to market the agenda.
The University of Rochester education professor is co-director of the
University of Pittsburgh-based New Standards Project (NSP), which seeks to
implant OBE into curricula nationally through so-called “authentic”
(essentially, no-fail) tests.
Ability-grouping must be banished, because it is incompatible with the TQM ideal
of happy drones working in teams.
Virginia taxpayers will be subsidizing NSP to the tune of $300,000 a year
through 1995-96, if the State Department of education has its way.
Tucker’s National Center coordinated the 1990 report of the Commission on the
Skills of the American Workforce, chaired by current Clinton advisor Ira
Magaziner. That commission did the
spadework for Clinton’s Goals 2000 legislation, which seeks to yoke education to
national industrial policy through Robert Reich’s Labor Department.
Personal Agendas come into play with TQM’s metastasizing into spheres far
removed from the production line.
In the July 19 & 26 issue of the New
Republic, a liberal journal, Leon Wieseltier explores in depth what he
terms “Total Quality Meaning” --- a spooky blending of Hillary Clinton’s quest
of the “politics of meaning” (see Michael Lerner’s article on today’s page),
communitarianism, and TQM as “zen for CEOs.”
Wieseltier plumbs the thinking of that guru of all TQM gurus, nonagenarian W.
Edwards Deming. In
The New Economics, Deming
espouses a utopian vision of a cooperative “way of life” in which all
competition and merit systems will be abolished:
“In place of competition for high rating, high grades, to be Number One, there
will be cooperation on problems of common interest between people, divisions,
companies, competitors, government, countries….There will be joy in work, joy in
learning….Everyone will win; no losers.”
While TQM ideas and idealists may have something to offer businesses, the
broader concept is taking on heavy baggage.
Americans are supposed to shed their individualism and become
well-socialized cogs in someone’s big machine.
And the indoctrination begins in school.
OBE’S FLOW
“The faculty and administration at School 6 have totally restructured the
school’s instructional program to use ‘the world as a classroom.’
The entire K-6 curriculum centers around the Genesee River.
“School 6’s educational program is based on field study and is historically
organized. It employs a thematic
approach designed around a set of staff-developed ‘interesting questions such as
Was there a beginning of the world?,
What is a city?,
Who is in charge of the city?,
Why is the river water brown?, and
How will the river valley look in a
hundred years?”
--From The Rocky Road to Reform in Rochester, presented to the
American Educational Research
Association, April, 1992.