Accountability and Higher Education

An open letter to the Massachusetts Department of Education, regarding its "Vision Project" for higher education.

An attorney friend of mine used to work in real estate law, which she found unpleasant and unproductive because she had to account for every six minutes of her eight hour workday in such a way that it could be billed to one of the firm's accounts. This was accountability gone mad, since it made her work intensely stressful and time-conscious, and in so doing undermined both efficiency and creativity -- not to mention making her life miserable. She quit that hellish job many years ago to work for the EPA, helping to hold polluters accountable for their violations. Though the salary was exactly half of her old one, she was good at it, effective in research, legal writing, and litigation, and got considerable satisfaction from helping make the country a cleaner and safer place by enforcing the law.

The principal difference between those two jobs was the nature of her accountability. In the first, the mindless, mechanical notion of accountability that was operative systematically undermined both the quality of her work and her quality of her life. In the second, she was a member of a legal team that held itself internally accountable through its working relationships, and was effectively and respectfully overseen by professional administrators with well articulated expectations and a clearly shared purpose with the team.

'Accountability' is the buzzword of the hour in education, and it has the dangerous quality of being connotatively positive -- no one can be against it, any more than one can oppose 'improvement' or 'health.' As my lawyer friend's story demonstrates, however, not all regimes of accountability are healthy or improving. In particular, external oversight by those disconnected from the complex process of learning and teaching, especially when such oversight demands quantitative evidence of inherently qualitative pedagogical relationships, is a sure recipe for a destructive, unhealthy sort of accountability. We are witnessing such destructiveness in the demands for high-stakes testing in primary and secondary education, and I very much hope that the Vision Project envisions something radically distinct from that. If it does, it needs to articulate clearly and precisely in what its proposed regime of accountability consists.

Teaching/learning is not mechanical but organic, involving multiple complex interactive systems, and concretely respecting that fact is the first task of any organization concerned with education. Mechanical, reductively quantitative assessment might be appropriate for a machine, but it would be a very bad physician indeed who ignored the qualitative fact of a human patient's life and consciousness. I would humbly suggest that the orientation needs to be not "show us that you are doing a good job," but "help us understand what you are doing, and how we can support you in doing it better."

The Latest from Bill Moyers

http://www.truth-out.org/bill-moyers-facts-still-matter67571

Bureaucratic Threats to Higher Education

Simon Head here details the disaster wrought by an industrial-production mindset, imported from the U.S., on the system of higher education in the U.K., with some observations about analogous developments here at home.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/grim-threat-british-universities/

A Fool's Paradise

I just saw Helen Mirren in Shakespeare's The Tempest -- highly recommended -- and was reminded of a great line from the loutish Stephano. It makes a telling comment on the popular notion that thanks to the internet we no longer need to pay musicians:

STEPHANO: "This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing."

I can't say it worked out so well form him, either.

Interesting News Story

Professor Michael Taber and his class make the Post...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/23/AR2010122301922.html

More on testing

Here's Marion Brady on standardized tests:
http://www.truth-out.org/standardized-snake-oil66094
A telling excerpt:

Standardized, subject-matter tests are worse than a waste. We’re spending billions of dollars and instructional hours on a tool that measures one thought process to the neglect of all others, wreaks havoc on the minds and emotions of teachers and learners, and diverts attention from a fundamental, ignored problem.

That problem? Longshoreman and college professor Eric Hoffer summed it up a lifetime ago. Because the world is dynamic, the future belongs not to the learned but to learners.

Read that sentence again. Then read it again. Even if standardized tests didn’t cost billions, even if they yielded something that teachers didn’t already know, even if they hadn’t narrowed the curriculum down to joke level, even if they weren’t the main generators of educational drivel, even if they weren’t driving the best teachers out of the profession, they should be abandoned because they measure the wrong thing.

The Order of Things Pedagogical

Regarding the three terms of the course title, it occurs to me to wonder what ought to be their natural order. We would seem to need understanding before we could teach, but then again learning probably precedes understanding, if we take as paradigmatic the natural, playful, pre-linguistic learning of small children, their visceral absorption of the world. Likewise, the propensity of children for curiosity and active exploration long precedes teaching, both temporally, and as a fact about human nature that probably alone renders any sort of teaching a conceivable undertaking.

If this is right, then ‘Learning, Understanding, Teaching’ would be the right order of priority, as well as an order of importance. Early in the course we asked whether and how a teacher (or the architecture of a teaching context) might suborn curiosity. We still don’t know the answer in any detail, but we may have a sense of why the question remains important.