The Education-Industrial Complex
19th December 2013
Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we ought to be talking about real management. Unfortunately, the education industry approaches aerospace-sized projects with more starry-eyed optimism than is prudent for a bake sale, much less a war.
Whenever ‘educators’ (most of whom aren’t, really, just administrators of educational programs and institutions, which isn’t the same thing) run up against the inconvenient fact that American education sucks compared to ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, they reflexively shout “More cowbell money!”, as if money were some sort of tidal force that will eventually carry all before it. Tain’t necessarily so.
In an age when Silicon Valley trumpets “disruptive technologies,” it’s hardly surprising that the education reform establishment is addicted to the concept of magic bullets that will finally Fix the Schools. Who doesn’t love the allure of a revolutionary technological, doctrinal, or organizational fix for all that ails us?
Well, the good news is, we have that disruptive technology available. The bad news (for ‘educators’) is that it necessarily involves fewer jobs for ‘educators’, just as robotics means higher quality vehicles but fewer UAW members. Increased automation will not only break us free from the assembly-line batch-processed factory model school that has been in place since the middle ages, saving money in the process, but it will also allow us to tailor instruction to each individual’s interests and capabilities, just as modern CAD-CAM systems allow us to do ‘custom mass production’.
The junkyard of school solutions includes the 2002 No Child Left Behind act that mandated that every student in America be above average by next May.
The ‘Lake Woebegone’ fallacy. It’s no coincidence that Garrison Keillor is a raving ‘progressive’.
Lately, 45 states have signed on to junk their current curricula and tests in favor of the “Common Core,” a series of guidelines concocted by a former McKinsey consultant named David Coleman, whose only teaching experience is some tutoring of New Haven urban youth while he was buffing his Rhodes Scholarship application.
And such one-size-fits-all programs are going squarely in the wrong direction.
The education business has a short memory that keeps it from getting discouraged but also prevents it from learning from its mistakes. One reason fads are so common in public schools is that the incentive structure pays more to administrators with Ph.D.’s. A doctorate in education means you came up with some gimmick and then spent a few years documenting it. Education schools are thus novelty generation machines. Nobody gets to call himself “Doctor” for being good at making old ideas work together.