centralization in Massachusetts

licensed image via Wikimedia Commons, by Tom LemmensMassachusetts Governor Wants to Centralize Community Colleges | Inside Higher Ed:

"Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is proposing a centralization of community colleges in Massachusetts. His plan would give the state's Board of Higher Education authority over all funds for all community colleges, consolidating the 15 line items for the colleges in the budget today. Further, Patrick said that the board would focus on job preparation. “A central piece of our economic recovery strategy is ensuring that the skills of our workforce meet the evolving needs of our employers,” said Governor Patrick in a statement. “That’s why we are advancing a new and innovative mission for our community colleges, to train highly-qualified candidates for jobs in every corner of the commonwealth."

From the Governor's press release:

BOSTON – Monday, January 23, 2012 – In his annual State of the Commonwealth address tonight, Governor Deval Patrick will propose a set of reforms to help Massachusetts community colleges provide residents looking for work with the skills they need to help fill the estimated 120,000 current job openings in the state. The proposal calls for the fifteen individual community college campuses to come together as a unified, state-wide system offering a more streamlined curriculum as well as locally developed, regionally specific jobs and skills training.

The cost-saving appeal of centralization has been a constant in US education going back to the 1930s. The costs of centralization have been largely unexamined. And alternative structures or ways to rein in things like sky-high presidential salaries or administrative bloat are unknown.  Could there be a loss of differentiation? After all, the colleges of Oxford are still decentralized.

If you do not know how to connect institutions to the people they serve, then a centralized plan sounds better than letting institutions drift. But like any top-down plan, all the important information at the bottom will have to be transferred up which means a loss of information. This is one of the signal problems with great inequality: it reduces information exchange.

I see this in the political posturing as candidates begin electioneering. Not one wants to deeply discuss the problems of the poor: they want to talk about the middle class and global issues. It's like a corn farmer saying "I'm not focused on the soil, I know we have some issues there, but I want to focus on growing more ears of first-class corn."  The problems of the poor hold the keys to change that is wide and deep.

I do not know how Massachusetts can ensure that their community colleges provide taxpayers strong and worthwhile services. Massachusetts isn't all that big, it is one of the most well-run states in the US, and they will probably make a good go of this plan. Keeping people employed is important.

But this constant urge toward centralization is not the skill that democracies need: we need mechanisms and ways to tie government and institutions to the people they serve. In the case of the public schools, one mechanism I have identified is that of bringing the disenfranchised family into the institution in ways that will change the nature of that institution  by decentralizing power, moving more power downward to families, the most natural partners in that process of valuing the social lives of our children and ourselves.

background posts
what's wrong with the schools?

school centralization in China

SVG map of China, Jiangsu province in red; public domain image via Wikipedia

Rethink school closure plan|From Chinese Press|chinadaily.com.cn:

"The school bus accidents in Gansu and Jiangsu provinces have once again highlighted the social problem created by closures and mergers of rural schools. According to official data, from 1997 to 2009 the number of schools in China dropped to 278,836, that is, by almost half. The authorities should take note of the social problem, for it could mar family ties and result in loss of local identity, says an article in Xi'an Evening News. ..."

Deep centralization has indeed happened extremely fast in the Chinese system of mass coerced schooling, a process that the US also underwent (what's wrong with the schools?). It will lead to centralized control issues, as it has in the US, and that will mean issues of fairness, funding, and the development of tools to make this problem an industry. Right now the massive upgrade in literacy makes mass coerced schooling seem a good thing to many. But there are already problems:

China Seethes Over a Rash of Deadly School Bus Crashes (time.com)

But the country's concerned netizens are not convinced: "The problem is that they don't treat those children like human beings," wrote Wang Keqin, an investigative journalist with the Chinese newspaper Economic Observer, on Weibo. "[The Jiangsu accident] is the biggest mockery of the just-released safety guidelines."

and this:

"In general, the guidelines put more emphasis on the government's safety inspection duties, but not enough on the importance of government investments," wrote Xiong Bingqi, deputy director on the 21st Century Education Research Institute and a regular commenter on education issues, on his personal blog. "Because there is a shortage in fiscal investment in rural areas, the schools have to resort to substandard vehicles. That's what ultimately caused the school bus safety problem."

China has entered into mass schooling quite recently. From Wikipedia: 

The Law on Nine-Year Compulsory Education (中华人民共和国义务教育法), which took effect on July 1, 1986, established requirements and deadlines for attaining universal education tailored to local conditions and guaranteed school-age children the right to receive at least nine years of education (six year primary education and three years secondary education). People's congresses at various local levels were, within certain guidelines and according to local conditions, to decide the steps, methods, and deadlines for implementing nine-year compulsory education in accordance with the guidelines formulated by the central authorities. The program sought to bring rural areas, which had four to six years of compulsory schooling, into line with their urban counterparts. Education departments were exhorted to train millions of skilled workers for all trades and professions and to offer guidelines, curricula, and methods to comply with the reform program and modernization needs.

background posts
the compulsory attendance mindset
side effects of the literacy factory model
what's wrong with the schools?
amar bhide
zhao's mass localism: let's get really local

related articles

• 6 die in latest school bus accident in China (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

amar bhidé

Amar Bhide's emphasis on decentralization, case by case methodology, the critical value of dialogue and relationships, and the pathological centralization that prefers mechanistic and numerical models:  all of this applies to our mass coerced approach to schooling as well.

Massive school districts and the disenfranchisement of families from participation in schools have created the system we have today, a system that is highly centralized,  does not work on a child-by-child basis but prefers standardization (charters and public); and imagines that it can use numerical grades and tests to measure people instead of using dialogue and relationships to support learners.

Homeschooling has made relationships front and center in the child's world and that is a direct counter to the large, centralized system.  The mechanistic approach to schooling replaced the truly small and local one-room schoolhouses that were relationship-based and local.  Schools have grown large, impersonal and factory-like.  Changing this system means bringing back human relationships and dialogue and small-scale interactions that are humane and democratic.

BELOW:  INET's complete interview with Amar Bhidé, the author of the recent book "A Call for Judgment."

In Defense of Human Judgment: An Interview with Amar Bhidé

Amar Bhidé :: Next American Economy Breakfast Roundtable from Roosevelt Institute on Vimeo.

Ouchi on decentralization

A talk about decentralization of schools, by William Ouchi. US schools are highly centralized and Ouchi's ideas about a return to local control has merit and could be a first step toward a much larger decentralization.  He cites a stat about principals who control less than 6% of financial decisions at their school and that seems inefficient.   I remember voting for a site-based management plan in Los Angeles many years ago.

Surfing around, there have been a lot of studies on decentralization and a surprising number say something like no one knows what decentralization means exactly. Clearly, changing a power structure is difficult.  In addition, it would not seem to be something that could easily be done partially as the entire remote control apparatus of testing, standards and accreditation would all remain in place.  The fact is that this top-heavy administrative layer has grown very large and like the financial layer, it is causing problems by virtue of its size.

Ouchi discusses decentralization in the sense of enabling local school officials to make school decisions of consequence.  He wants to devolve more power down lower from above within a hierarchical administrative model. The base idea of Ouchi's has merit, but it is important to grasp that real change can only be had by decentralization that greatly broadens the base by bringing families and children into the administrative structure in the sense that they would be active rather than passive participants.

Rather than an administrative structure on top of a huge population of students, the students and their families would become partners in the work. This would stabilize and democratize the hierarchical structure and I think it would add unexpected depth to the structure (so we are adding two dimensions to a one-dimensional administrative model) by creating new social networks between students, families and schools that would be extensive and would entirely reshape the social experience of schools.

An efficient business model instead of a factory model for education is still not an adequate model for schools because schools are not businesses.  Children/students are not employees and it is mind-boggling to think that schools were supposed to replace child labor  and now we have administrators trying to run schools like businesses.   (Perhaps a transition business model would be one like Google: free high-quality food, massages, bikes, and every student gets 10-20% time for their choice of activities.)  Ouchi's ideas do not address the core issue of school change:  the dysfunctional, and militaristic, relationship between the school and the families and children it should serve.

This would be the most efficient, humane, and change-making way to improve this institution. Local schools and families taking real control of their learning would establish a healthy relationship between this currently mass institution and the family: it would anchor the institution locally and to the people involved.  And the users of this service would drive what was done.  This would mean greater efficiency and greater social networking and far more opportunities for conservation of resources and sharing. These stronger community relationships would create a soil from which we could grow many good things like real economies and happy lives.

Relationships are fundamental to education and, like all institutions in a democracy, good relationships at the lowest possible level are foundational and stabilizing.  Conversely, inequality is dangerous precisely because of this disconnection of top from bottom, like a plant fed synthetic fertilizer that is top heavy and malformed from growing too fast.  We have some overgrown institutions that have weak root structures and are tall but quite spindly. The strength of a structure is in its cohesion and relationship of parts. We must broaden and deepen the structure of the institution to make it sustainable.

related 

• Skillshare: Decentralized Education for All (brainpickings.org)
• Optical Illusion of the Week: "The Ouchi Illusion" (psychworld.com)

socol on schools

Ira Socol has written some great posts and I want to look at one called Counting the Origins of Failure.  I agree that real system change means understanding the roots of our educational institutions.

If education in the United States of the 21st Century is failing, that failure has been built over a very long time. And I do not think that it can be “fixed” in any meaningful way unless people understand that the failures we see today are our system working exactly as it was intended to. 

Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Our American public education system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It is separating “winners” from “losers” and it is reinforcing our economic gap. The system was designed in the 1840s and at the turn of the 20th Century to separate society into a vast majority of minimally trained industrial workers and a small, educated elite. ....

But if you want different results you will not get there through changing teachers, or changing managers, or expecting more from students. You can only change the results by changing the system itself. .... 

Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Our American public education system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It is separating “winners” from “losers” and it is reinforcing our economic gap. The system was designed in the 1840s and at the turn of the 20th Century to separate society into a vast majority of minimally trained industrial workers and a small, educated elite. .... 

But if you want different results you will not get there through changing teachers, or changing managers, or expecting more from students. You can only change the results by changing the system itself. .... 

Age-based grades were the perfect fit for the new industrial age. The raw material (students) would be pulled in at one end, and through repeated “stampings” would emerge eight years later as compliant workers and citizens. Quality checks at the end of each year would assess whether that raw material was defective or not. If detective, a stamping would be repeated, if that did not work, the student would be discarded. This filtered the population effectively for the employment needs of the 19th Century. Most never made it through the whole process, and very, very few would emerge at the end of eight years considered ready for further polishing (high school completion was rare well into the 20th Century). 

Socol aptly captures the industrialists elite attitude and the worship of the new industrial techniques. But, from the viewpoint of many Americans, it is worth noting that the bulk of jobs were not tied to this process of education. Most jobs were still agricultural and in truly small, local businesses. Whatever the challenges, and they were fierce, an overgrown education establishment wasn't one of them.  The schools often provided more resources for hard working families.

The Morrill Act and land-grant colleges were coming into being, providing new resources for citizens  After the Civil War, there would be an extension of the Morrill Act:

A second Morrill Act in 1890 was also aimed at the former Confederate states. This act required each state to show that race was not an admissions criterion, or else to designate a separate land-grant institution for persons of color.^[9] Among the seventy colleges and universities which eventually evolved from the Morrill Acts are several of today's historically Black colleges and universities. Though the 1890 Act granted cash instead of land, it granted colleges under that act the same legal standing as the 1862 Act colleges; hence the term "land-grant college" properly applies to both groups. 

Later on, other colleges such as the University of the District of Columbia and the "1994 land-grant colleges" for Native Americans were also awarded cash by Congress in lieu of land to achieve "land-grant" status. 

In imitation of the land-grant colleges' focus on agricultural and mechanical research, Congress later established programs of sea grant colleges (aquatic research, in 1966), urban grant colleges (urban research, in 1985), space grant colleges (space research, in 1988), and sun grant colleges (sustainable energy research, in 2003).

The culling of an elite was present but was not as big a factor in everyday life for the majority of people as it is now, when the entire framework of agricultural work is gone.  And the factory work that would replace agricultural work after WWII, was unionized and provided a living wage. And that is gone, too.  Schools, the places where the culling, ranking and sorting are the mechanisms of hierarchy and which relied on the fact that the excluded were able to get work and participate in society, now just drop whomever doesn't fit into prison, the debt of community college and low wages for life. 

Today, the underlying work that sustained most people is gone and only big institutions remain.  Now a citizen needs to spend far more time within an institution in order to get another job within a big institution and change is negotiated between these institutions as each guards its income stream.

• big school systems
• agribusiness 
• multinational corporations 
• prisons
• universities and medical centers
• hospital complexes
• chains and franchises
• government agencies
• permanent war

These large institutions are not democratic in design:  corporations are currently being looted by their own boards.  Huge bonuses are not just too much money for one person:  they also drain resources from the business itself.  There is no democracy within the schools or the corporations but we are all trying to live within these institutions now with fewer rights than ever and many old tyrannies replacing the opportunities we once had.  Prisons, for example, are the new Jim Crow institutions and the Pentagon engages in permanent war.

That is why fundamental change means opening ways out of large institutions to create more small and local work where citizens own the business and can make a living. Change also means democratizing institutions to work better internally. For schools, the homeschool movement has focused on changing compulsory attendance laws to enable families to educate their children outside the system. It's a start on moving toward voluntary, citizen-focused learning services that allow citizens to drive the design, from the bottom up, instead of top-down control.

This pattern of change is necessary across the board to decentralize, democratize and strengthen the control and input of citizens.  Our food depends on the smallest micro-organisms within healthy soil.  And our democracy and stability as a nation depends on the access, participation and effective control by citizens at the lowest levels.

open education links

Lots of links to free college software in a compilation at the NY Times today:

• An article An Open Mind about free, online courseware
• And another entitled How to Learn Something for Nothing
• Popular courses listed in What They're Watching
• Audit This or 12 Courses Worth a Click 

An Open Mind, discusses the large number of independent learners online as well as educators working outside the box:

P2PU’s mission isn’t to develop a model and stick with it. It is to “experiment and iterate,” says Ms. Paharia, the former executive director of Creative Commons. She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.

“We live in a new society,” Ms. Paharia says. “People are mobile. We have the Internet. We don’t necessarily need to work within the confines of what defines a traditional education.”

David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, is an adviser to P2PU. For the past several years, he has been referring to “the disaggregation of higher education,” the breaking apart of university functions.

decentralization article

An article about decentraliztion, about true decentralization, defined as a principal having real power over the staffing, curriculum and organization.  Though true decentralization will involve families and ultimately children who are the stockholders of schools, the article is correct in identifying the utter futility of any program that does not manage to increase democracy and lessen mass institutionalization.  Decentralization will come: the system cannot be sustained.  The growth of homeschooling is spontaneous decentralization, it is how families find ways to support their children, and in doing so, the homeschooling population, in all its diversity, is one population that has grown up outside of mass institutions.

The US public school system has grown immensely centralized over the course of the 20th century and is now a self-perpetuating organism that the majority of our citizenry have participated in and rarely question. The generations that could truly remember local schools and strong communities are deceased and those who have grown up within the system only know there is a problem. The loud corporate voices that trivialize issues into ideologies divide and conquer and only make real reform more obscure.

The homeschooling population, however, does know that education of children can be accomplished by families, by unskilled and untrained people, in many different ways.  Unafraid of learning to read, advanced high school mathematics, learning disabilities, diagnoses, and little money, homeschoolers repeatedly learn that education can be achieved by caring about kids and that living in community with children brings rich social rewards for all involved.

higher standards and lower classes

From the US Department of Education:


"Today's study confirms what we've known for a long time: States are setting the bar too low. In all but a few cases, states aren't expecting students to meet NAEP's standard of proficiency. Far too many states are telling students that they are proficient when they actually are performing below NAEP's basic level. At a time when we should be raising standards to compete in the global economy, more states are lowering the bar than raising it. We're lying to our children when we tell them they're proficient but they're not achieving at a level
that will prepare them for success once they graduate."

"I am grateful that leaders from 48 states are working together to set standards that will determine whether students are college- and career-ready. Their work will set a common standard that all states will be able to use to measure the success of their students."

"But it will take more than college- and career-ready standards to succeed in school reform. We'll need tests that fairly and accurately measure students' performance on those standards. We'll need data systems that help teachers know whether students are on track for success in college and the workplace. We'll need effective teachers in every classroom, especially in ones serving students that need the most help. We'll also need strategies to turn around our lowest-performing schools."

It's a shame that our kids aren't good enough for our businesses (our businesses are so smart, after all). Our businesses want smart kids like they have overseas (where they have more honors kids than we have people: try competing with that.) After all, it's a competition: the winner gets a good job and the loser gets a bad one, or prison, because they just weren't smart enough. We are trying hard to spread those good jobs around but our schools just can't produce the kind of smart kids we need for those jobs. 

Kids need to try harder.

It is unfortunate that so many families paid taxes for this chance to be mis-manufactured in a compulsory school system.  These families should turn off the TV more, then their kids would be smarter and get good jobs. It is sad but then, we wouldn't want dumb people who need training in our businesses, would we?

Fortunately, there are good jobs for a few highly-paid people who can figure how to get the assembly line moving again and start spitting out highly standardized students as proved by remote corporate testing. We need more tests and more data  to compete globally with everyone overseas where they do education right (but not healthcare).  

If schools were a common enterprise, funded by the citizens as a social service, they would be a voluntary community resource, serving our children and families. But our compulsory public education system has been in place long enough to make most citizens unable to understand the issue of education reform.   

Real reform means an end to compulsory education in large institutions and the beginning of community-oriented, decentralized local schools and cooperatives offering our children and their families educational options the families and communities decide on.