WHERE WE ARE: SUBPRIME EDUCATION
Education as a whole is extraordinarily unproductive. The larger problem, unfortunately, is that cause of the waste is generally misunderstood. That means that most reform efforts, including increasing funding at every level, are going to fund a mirage.
The crisis in education is similar in many ways to the crisis in the economy caused by failures in the banking system. So let's call what we have "subprime education."
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experience he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school.
John Dewey, The School and Society and the Child and the Curriculum (p.46)
The issue can be examined in terms of the difference between apparent and authentic productivity. By authentic productivity we mean that services and products do what they purport to do. By apparent productivity we mean that the indicators of performance are substituted for the performance itself.
In the financial crisis, the profitability of many banks, insurance companies and others, touted as indicators of success, turns out to have been largely apparent but unreal. They were profitable for some time, but it is now clear that much of that profit was an illusion. Many of the underlying products and processes were deeply flawed. Securities were not secure, and financial advice varied from being wrong to being fraudulent. And so an apparently successful and flourishing system lacked authentic productivity. And the results have been calamitous.
The situation in education is somewhat similar. Society focuses on test scores as indicators of success. And Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been rightly emphatic about being data driven. Unfortunately, many assume that a program or investment in education is successful if it simply meets some target increase in test scores and so that becomes the goal. That is incorrect. Test scores are indicators of apparent productivity. Authentic productivity is revealed in increases in human capacity, and that depends on getting the fundamentals right.
