Education-as-Factory

Having come from industry, my eyes have been opened now that I have moved into education. In industry, we rigorously measured our product at every step of the manufacturing process — and we reworked any work-in-progress that was found to be nonconforming. If one or two reworks did not correct the problem, we scrapped the material. That's a great way to run a manufacturing operation — stop spending good money on work-in-progress that will not yield a good final product.

It's a horrible way to run an educational operation.

We rigorously measure our students at every step of the educational process, and we find nonconforming work-in-progress. We put modest effort into remediation and special accommodations, and it works beautifully sometimes. But when these efforts do not correct the problem, a student is not a commodity that can be sent to the scrap heap and the cost written off — human beings stick around whether they get educated or not, and the costs expand and accrue over a lifetime. The only reasonable thing to do is to keep working with a student until she can rejoin the main educational flow, or, failing that, to customize her education and impart as much ability into her as she has the capacity for.

But this is expensive.

In our education-as-factory model we send her on down a pipeline flowing too fast for her to keep up with, perhaps with some limited tracking. We keep her in the main pipeline long enough to convince her that she is a failure by routinely administering standardized tests that she can't possibly pass, because the educational system has disengaged her and pushed her forward to challenges she is not ready for. On the other end of the scale, students who could move faster than the pipeline meet resistance when they try a faster pace. As a result, our education-as-factory model guarantees less-than-mediocre outcomes for most students.

We use the education-as-factory model for the same reason Henry Ford invented the assembly line — it dramatically reduces cost. Ergo, an education-as-customization model will dramatically increase cost. We need to decide as a nation that our values lie further toward the education-as-customization end of the spectrum than we are now.

This post was inspired by Whose children have been left behind? by Diane Ravith.