Who wants to make education more efficient at being ineffective? Although I sincerely believe that no one does, many education leaders on America’s local, state and national levels are establishing policies that are walking our schools down a path of efficient ineffectiveness. A central reason we are on such a path is that policymakers seem to be following the misguided belief that efficiency and effectiveness inevitably go hand-in-hand. I wish they always did go hand-in-hand but while authoritarian dictatorships may be politically efficient, for instance, I certainly wouldn’t call them effective. Enron was efficient at making money but how effective would you rate it? Efficiency and effectiveness do not always go together and sometimes we tip the scale toward one at the cost of the other. We are tipping the scale toward efficiency at the cost of effectiveness in American education.
If we should err in education, and to err is human, we should always err on the side of effectiveness rather than efficiency. However, possibly because of confusion over what the two words mean, we have Mayors and Boards of Finance in cities and towns throughout this country so focused on efficiency that they are making our schools less effective. They think that they can find effectiveness through efficiency in education and “the cart before the horse” analogy doesn’t even begin to describe the problem with that type of thinking.
Effectiveness is about achieving the desired result and efficiency is about the process of doing things in an optimal way such as doing it the fastest or in the least expensive way. Effectiveness is about achieving the right goals (i.e., learning) and efficiency is about doing something optimally (i.e., standardized tests), which can be right or wrong. If you do something wrong but you do it optimally, you still are efficient—just efficiently wrong. A real world example of this on the local level is when a policymaker argues that a city or town can be more efficient in technology by combining the job of the information technology (IT) officer at city/town hall with the IT officer for the school district, thereby converting two jobs into one (efficient). The problem is that the city/town software expertise is very different than what is needed and required for having an effective education technology officer. It is the same faulty logic for arguing that a patent attorney will be just as effective as a criminal defense attorney in defending you at a criminal trial because they are both lawyers.
We have international test scores (i.e., Program for International Student Assessment) for over 10 years that demonstrate a problem with our education system’s effectiveness but our policymakers are seeking to make it more efficient rather than effective. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four,” according to President Abraham Lincoln, “sharpening the axe.” We have yet to sharpen the axe of education but policymakers want us (teachers at every level of schooling) to start swinging away with less resources and more standardized tests.
While I believe that the Common Core will make our education system more effective (see my previous blog titled “How I Learned to Eat the Core”), I think the emphasis on standardized testing will weaken it. The quest for efficiency has led to the implementation of annual standardized tests but do standardized test results provide an indication of effective education? The research literature on the science of learning (which education should be all about) has a clear and definitive answer: NO. Standardized tests may be an efficient way of measuring education levels but it is definitely not the most effective means of learning. Recent books on learning (i.e., Brown, Roediger and McDaniel’s Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning as well as Carey’s How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens) clearly show that the problem with standardized testing is that there is too much information being tested too infrequently for learning to “stick” in the brain. The most effective way of making information “stick” in a student’s mind, according to neuroscience research, is to institute a “regimen of regular low- or no-stakes” testing (a.k.a. quizzing) timely spaced so that students begin to forget—it is the counterintuitive notion of forgetting to learn and it is called spaced learning.
Arne Duncan (United States Secretary of Education), however, made headlines a few days ago by stating that the “Administration is Committed to Testing” (interesting note: the headline was changed three days later to “White House Still Backs Annual Testing in Schools”). No matter the headline, shouldn’t we be committed to learning rather than testing? We have created a very efficient form of education via standardized tests but the literature on the science of learning shows that they are the least effective means of educating students. The imbalance of efficiency over effectiveness in education is reflected in the overemphasis on words such as standardization and accountability in political speeches. As Jonathan Zimmerman wrote in the December 4, 2014 New York Review of Books article titled “Why is American Teaching So Bad?”:
“No Child Left Behind and its spin-offs are premised on the grim notion that teachers will work harder—and better—if we can somehow pinpoint their performance and connect it to rewards and punishments. But the fact is that the new measures adopted under Race to the Top—measures purporting to identify the effectiveness of each teacher based on students’ test scores—are notoriously imprecise…According to the logic of those at the top, these people just need a good kick in the pants and everything else will take care of itself…But ‘accountability’ makes our best teachers do their job worse, which is the ultimate indictment of contemporary education reform. The endless battery of standardized tests takes many weeks away from real instruction. So do the long cycles of preparing for the exams, during which thoughtful American teachers are forced to tailor their practice to the mindless demands of the system.”
Albert Einstein’s 1929 words on standardization are as true now as when he wrote them: “I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
The efficiency obsession in education is an offshoot from the business world where problems with an imbalance favoring efficiency over effectiveness have not only been experienced but researched and documented. As Stefanos Mouzas, a professor at Lancaster University’s School of Management, wrote in the conclusion of his article “Efficiency v. Effectiveness in Business Networks”: “Efficiency and effectiveness are central terms in assessing and measuring the performance of organisations or inter-organisational arrangements. It seems, however, that managers rarely understand the difference between efficiency and effectiveness and the exact meaning of these terms. The present article indicates that currently, in many companies, managers are obsessed with efficiency gains and that this propensity to efficiency is preventing them from achieving differentiation and sustainable growth of their business.” The efficiency versus effectiveness problems are much more acute in education than in business because we are working with human beings, not widgets.
While we all want an education that is efficient and effective, recent education policies and priorities are creating a system of educating that seeks efficiency at the cost of effectiveness. An emphasis on efficiency over effectiveness has taken root in the United States education system to such an extent that it is making the American way of educating become more efficient at being ineffective. An effective education, one resulting in learning, is not always efficient. It takes time to sharpen the axe of education. Shouldn’t every student be afforded the time to sharpen the axe before making their own path in the world?
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens (New York: Random House, 2014).
Stefanos, Mouzas, “Efficiency v. Effectiveness in Business Networks,” Journal of Business Research, vol. 59, no 10-11 (2006).
Motoko Rich, “White House Still Backs Annual Testing in Schools,” The New York Times (January 12, 2015).
Jonathan Zimmerman, “Why is American Teaching so Bad?” The New York Review of Books (December 4, 2014).
Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
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