The irrational phenomena

A frazzled schools sytem

Education, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz tells us, “is the passport to the future.” In the cinema, his character spoke of having the best organization his people had ever had. Incompetents – (put kindly) – destroyed it. It is a pity that so much of organizational failure is tied up in nonsense. Nonsense, that makes for all too hilarious tales from the classroom.

But first, a better understanding of the school system’s structure is needed. The basics: the 49 million children, 105,105 schools, and nearly fifteen thousand districts are well understood.[1] What is not is how organizational structure and management more often than not work against its interest. The school as an institution finds itself in an interesting predicament. It is not dictated by free markets and it has no direct, active investors, so there is no existence or necessity for the organization’s evolution. Decay is inevitable. But it is not the school’s nature to compete – after all, equality is the ultimate aim sought. Competition in the school’s current form puts much smaller, newly established alternatives against the far more prevalent established system. Schools, in this manner, are no different from the cable company that cares not if you leave.

Kansas argues that competition between organizational systems works against the public interest by the very nature of its limited scope. Full autonomy, centered on ideas, but united in ultimate aims, is much more approachable: all schools should reach proficiency (the equality sought) – they compete on how best to reach it for each student. With this belief, comes the essence that most philosophies of a student’s education are effective – separately and only for relevant students. Yet, it is too often the hodgepodge of policies and philosophies that work against a school’s interests.

The school system, as with any institution, has a tendency to sever itself from its responsibilities through decay due to inefficient, inappropriate, or nonexistent responses to the environment in which the institution is operating in. The most common presence of such severance is through dilution of power downwards from where the policy originated, and a dilution of information clarity as it moves up the hierarchy, each prompting a delayed, incomplete, and often ineffective response to developments. It is only too fitting that management expert, Jim Collins, began his book Good to Great by stating “We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools.”

External developments are key causes for an institution severing itself from its responsibilities. Companies that fail to account for emerging developments in their fields fall victim to “disruptive” innovation. Instead of adopting a mindset of pursuing innovation and the renewed efficiencies it brings, as Clayton Christensen lays out in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, an organization stalls against the short-term cost and reduction of industrial clout for scale to its ultimate demise. Where the capital markets find such demise in corporate failure, public institutions, such as schools, find their end in increasing ineffectiveness.

Politicizing an institution's systems can be equally problematic. The fickle avoidance of tax, poor allocation of resources, and the distractions of partisanship and compromise muddle action. This results in an institution no longer capable of effectively fulfilling its responsibilities, the effectiveness of its actions eroded through bureaucratic inundation.

The tendency of all politically centered organizations to focus on proximate responses instead of ultimate factors plays a key part in these disjointed operations. Such excesses of murky thought include the misguided measurement of performance by race – the ultimate factor is poverty. Much the same, the brouhaha over smaller class sizes without a sufficient stopgap against unqualified teachers serves to do more harm than good.

It is by no means an exaggeration to suggest that schools are thrust on the troubling spectrum of an extreme polarity. The theme is undeniably broad – enough so to provoke the ire of an English teacher, but truth be told, it is broad not because of a lack of focus, but because of its unfortunate indication that all is not well. The polarities between facilities and of resources are disconcerting, known, yet unprovoked. That it extends even to the performance within a class where half exceed without effort and half fail without attempt, all bored, is a scandalous, unknowing affair. Sputter on this frayed, stifling machine will, but only for so long, and not without cost.

Progress
The problems need not ceaselessly compound. The degree of executive power held by upper tiers of management must be reduced to the level of those closest to executing its responsibility. Management must reduce its role to guidance, preservation, and correction. As for the politicization of systems, it is necessary that manual interference with essential components be substantially reduced. Taxation – and the funding for schools – must not be held captive to the whims of politics, crippling the institution for political gain.

The stubbornness to upgrade facilities in spite of overcrowding and decay speaks to the necessity of binding obligations to maintain optimum performance. No one denies that managing organizations is grim business; what is deplored is the petty, “timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”[2]After all, there are only so many slips in the cracks to fill.

[1] United States Public Schools & Districts. School Matters. 2004. http://tinyurl.com/35rfmc. [2] The Economist.