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| TABLE OF CONTENTS |
| WELCOME TO EFFICOLOGY |
| INTRODUCTION |
| OVERALL APPRECIATION |
| THE GIFT OF NATURE |
| THE GIFT OF ENERGY |
| THE GIFT OF TIME |
| THE GIFT OF RELATIONSHIPS |
| CONCLUDING REMARKS |
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Janice Gross Stein, The Cult of Efficiency. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Limited, 2001. ISBN 0887846688. Pages 3-4 When we define efficiency as an end, divorced from its larger purpose, it becomes nothing less than a cult. A cult is a system of religious worship that engenders almost blind loyalty in its members. Its mystical rites and ceremonies foster in its devotees a sense of belonging and a reverence for core beliefs. Cult members reinforce these beliefs through the incantation of central dogmas. And as the ad for the wired kitchen demonstrates, the invocation of efficiency has approached cult status in our post-industrial age. Pages 67-8 The concept of efficiency has had widely different meanings in different historical periods. It has often been used in explicitly pursuit of political purposes: a technical discussion of efficiency and public goods – allegedly the concern of professional economists – is almost always embedded in a larger political agenda. Whether it was the pursuit of virtue in ancient times, or the creation of a merit-based administration at the turn of the past century, or a frontal attack on the bureaucratic state and a turn to markets, as it frequently is today, efficiency has served as a rallying cry for larger political purposes. The allegedly technical concept of efficiency has been politically charged in every age. Our age is no exception. Pages 149-50 When efficiency is a cult among political leaders, when cost-containment and cost cutting are political ends, it constrains the way public markets work. This is not what advocates of public markets expected. More to the point, health-care buyers and providers need to cooperate with one another as much as they need to compete. Competition, the bedrock of the argument for public markets, can take us only so far. In public education, the story is different. When structures were changed and public markets were created through school choice, charter schools were often not subject to the same rigorous standards as schools within the regular public system. Ironically, the public market in education has created a two-tier system of accountability. The problem goes even deeper. Even if competition could be heightened in public health-care markets, and even if all schools in the public system were tested in exactly the same way, citizens would still need to know what health-care providers and educators are accountable for. What is it that we expect from those who buy healthcare on our behalf, and from those who deliver it to us? What is it that we expect from those who provide education to our children? These are hard questions that go to our basic values, values that touch on how we think about ourselves and our societies. The what of accountability matters, and it is the first essential that must be in place before we can even begin to talk about how we wish to hold our governments, our buyers and our providers accountable in public markets. Page 157 “Efficiency Tests,” argued one specialist, “tend to drive out less efficient tests, leaving many important abilities untested – and untaught.” Page 168 Choosing the most easily graded test – the efficient test – is a concept of efficiency that badly diminishes the educational system. If we try in the name of efficiency, or even of accountability, to use just a single measure, we create an impoverished set of incentives in our public system of education, as system that is the outward manifestation of our deepest dreams of citizenship and society. Our values and our common sense tell us that a broad array of qualitative and quantitative measures will better capture whether students have the kinds of knowledge they will need to be engaged and committed citizens, as well as productive members of society. Page 192 We ignore efficiency at our peril. Efficiency, properly understood, is a means, not an end; a process, not a value. It is a vital tool to achieve other public goals and goods. If we are to provide the highest-quality public goods that reflect our civic values, we have no choice but to become efficient in the process. Public conversation about efficiency must move from cult to analysis, from end to means, from value to process. Beyond the cult is a legitimate and important discussion of efficiency as cost-effectiveness in the delivery of public goods. What distinguishes the legitimate conversation form the cult is a serious and deep discussion of purpose: at what do we want to be effective? Whether this purpose is itself a route to a larger end – whether a civic education is a step toward a civic democracy or universal health care is part of a society that values fairness – does not materially affect the argument. Without discussion of purpose, effectiveness makes no sense, and without discussion of effectiveness, efficiency is stripped of its analytic power and becomes a cult.
WNCS and The Point Monday March 8, 2004, George E. Longenecker, Assistant Professor Recently everyone at our college was asked how our departments have become more efficient. At the same time we were asked how we have become more effective. The questions are well intentioned, for nobody wants to waste time and money. Yet the juxtaposition of efficiency and effectiveness made me think. Does efficiency necessarily lead to effectiveness? In her 2001 book, The Cult of Efficiency, Janice Gross Stein looks at how efficiency has become an end rather than a means. If we are efficient in cranking out the end product, then we have done a great job, especially if we have produced at the lowest possible cost. However, in education and in medicine we are working with human minds and human bodies, where solutions are not always amenable to the lowest possible cost. I’m George Longenecker, and that’s the way I see it. Energy efficiency pays off for school, The Associated Press, October 12, 2003 The Lafayette Daily Advertiser HOUMA (AP) - Consistently closing blinds, changing lights and lowering thermostats have saved Terrebonne Parish schools even more than promised, says the contractor hired to cut energy costs. JOHN SCHWARTZ “The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide” September 28, 2003 New York Times Is there anything so deadening to the soul as a PowerPoint presentation? Critics have complained about the computerized slide shows, produced with the ubiquitous software from Microsoft, since the technology was first introduced 10 years ago. Last week, The New Yorker magazine included a cartoon showing a job interview in hell: "I need someone well versed in the art of torture," the interviewer says. "Do you know PowerPoint?" Once upon a time, a party host could send dread through the room by saying, "Let me show you the slides from our trip!" Now, that dread has spread to every corner of the culture, with schoolchildren using the program to write book reports, and corporate managers blinking mindlessly at PowerPoint charts and bullet lists projected onto giant screens as a disembodied voice reads • every When the bullets are flying, no one is safe. But there is a new crescendo of criticism that goes beyond the objection to PowerPoint's tendency to turn any information into a dull recitation of look-alike factoids. Based on nearly a decade of experience with the software and its effects, detractors argue that PowerPoint-muffled messages have real consequences, perhaps even of life or death. Before the fatal end of the shuttle Columbia's mission last January, with the craft still orbiting the earth, NASA engineers used a PowerPoint presentation to describe their investigation into whether a piece of foam that struck the shuttle's wing during launching had caused serious damage. Edward Tufte, a Yale professor who is an influential expert on the presentation of visual information, published a critique of that presentation on the World Wide Web last March. A key slide, he said, was "a PowerPoint festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism." Among other problems, Mr. Tufte said, a crucial piece of information — that the chunk of foam was hundreds of times larger than anything that had ever been tested — was relegated to the last point on the slide, squeezed into insignificance on a frame that suggested damage to the wing was minor. The independent board that investigated the Columbia disaster devoted an entire page of its final report last month to Mr. Tufte's analysis. The board wrote that "it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation." In fact, the board said: "During its investigation, the board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports. The board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA." The board echoed a message that Mr. Tufte and other critics have been trying to disseminate for years. "I would refer to it as a virus, rather than a narrative form," said Jamie McKenzie, an educational consultant. "It's done more damage to the culture." These are strong words for a program that traces its pedagogical heritage to the blackboard or overhead projector. But the relentless and, some critics would say, lazy use of the program as a replacement for real discourse — as with the NASA case — continues to inspire attacks. It has also become so much a part of our culture that, like Kleenex and Xerox, PowerPoint has become a generic term for any bullet-ridden presentation. Dan Leach, Microsoft's chief product manager for the Office software, which includes PowerPoint, said that the package had 400 million users around the world, and that his customers loved PowerPoint. When early "We're proud of it," he said, pointing out that the product is simply a tool — "a blank for you to fill in" with ideas and information. "I feel like the guy who makes canvas and the No. 2 green viridian paint," Mr. Leach said. "I'm being asked to comment on the art show." His point is shared by plenty of people who say the criticism of PowerPoint is misdirected. "The tool doesn't tell you how to write," said Bill Atkinson, the creator of HyperCard, an earlier program considered by many to be the precursor to PowerPoint. "It just helps you express yourself," he said. "The more tools people have to choose from the better off we are." It's likely, then, that PowerPoint is here to stay — everywhere. And not always for the worse. At the wedding reception of Lina Tilman and Anders Corr last year in New Haven, guests made two PowerPoint presentations. They were everything that slide shows usually are not: wry and heartfelt works that used the tired conventions of the form to poke fun at the world of presentations and celebrate the marriage. NASA apparently still lacks a similar sense of irony. Earlier this month, the space agency held a three-day workshop in Houston to give reporters a firsthand view of its return-to-flight plans. Included in the handouts were dozens of PowerPoint slides. Schools to undergo efficiency study, By Brandy Centolanza, The Virginia Gazette, July 28 2004 JAMES CITY—Just how well does WJC spend tax dollars” The question is timely, given the third high school referendum this fall.
All seven sectors are intertwined in the $44.2 million third high, almost $40 million of it covered by the referendum. Some critics complain that the school is too pricey and the epitome of chronic overspending by WJC. Proposals target more efficiency in schools Friday, May 21, 2004 By TOM VOGT, Columbian staff writer The Columbian Publishing Co. P.O. Box 180, Vancouver, WA 98666. The secret for getting into college: Pick rich parents. That approach might not work for everybody, so Washington’s higher-ed leaders are thinking about other ways to get more students into the state’s colleges. They met Thursday morning at Washington State University’s Vancouver campus in the first public hearing for the state’s new master plan for higher education. Malcolm Gladwell, “Making the Grade” on the Comment Page of The New Yorker, September 15, 2003, Pages 31-32 The most striking thing about the sweeping federal educational reforms debuting this fall is how much they resemble, in language and philosophy, the industrial-efficiency movement of the early twentieth century. In those years, engineers argued that efficiency and productivity were things that could be measured and managed, and, if you had the right inventory and manufacturing controls in place, no widget would be left behind. Now we have "No Child Left Behind," in which Congress has set up a complex apparatus of sanctions and standards designed to compel individual schools toward steady annual improvement, with the goal of making a hundred per cent of American schoolchildren proficient in math and reading by 2014. It is hard to look at the new legislation and not share in its Fordist vision of the classroom as a brightly lit assembly line, in which curriculum standards sail down from Washington through a chute, and fresh-scrubbed, defect-free students come bouncing out the other end. It is an extraordinary vision, particularly at a time when lawmakers seem mostly preoccupied with pointing out all the things that government cannot do. The only problem, of course-and it's not a trivial one-is that children aren't widgets. Suppose that you'd like to identify and reward those schools which do a good job of improving their students' performance. That's the kind of thing that the industrial-efficiency experts, with their emphasis on "best practices," always said was a sound procedure for companies looking to boost productivity - and the new school reformers have made this idea a centerpiece of their new regime. But how do you measure the performance of a school? It turns out to be surprisingly hard. North Carolina, for instance, instituted a program that every year recognizes the twenty-five schools in the state that record the greatest single-year jump in their students' test scores. As the educational researchers Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger have pointed out, that honor is nearly always won by the smaller schools in the state. In fact, the state's smallest schools are about twenty-three times as likely to win performance awards as its largest schools. But North Carolina also identifies its worst-performing schools, and almost all of them are small schools, too. Does that mean that small schools are better learning environments or worse ones? Neither. It means that a lot of the ups and downs in a school's test scores are due to chance factors, such as the presence of a few really good or really poor students in a class, or the fact that on test day a few students may guess right on a couple of hard questions - and the smaller the school, the larger the role played by chance. As it turns out, most elementary schools are small, so it's hard to know, most of the time, whether George Washington Elementary is actually better than Thomas Jefferson Elementary or just - in that year - luckier. California has a multimillion-dollar award system, in which schools win cash grants from the state based on their performance on a 1,000-point scale called the Academic Performance Index. Thousands of dollars in state aid can rest on a one- or two point swing on the A.M., and those scores are taken so seriously by parents that they can drive up local real-estate prices. But the average margin of error on the A-PI. is something like twenty points, and for a small school it can be as much as fifty points. In a recent investigation, the Orange County Register concluded that, as a result, about a third of the money given out by the state might have been awarded to schools that simply got lucky. Or take something as seemingly straightforward as the "proficiency" standard set by the No Child Left Behind legislation. States are asked to pick their own math and reading tests, and then define as "proficient" all the students who pass them. The bill provides for stringent sanctions against schools that don't meet proficiency standards. But what do you have to score on a given test to be labelled "proficient"? That's not an easy question. One option is to use what's called the "contrasting groups" method. With this system, a large pool of teachers are asked to identify students they believe are proficient in a given subject, those students are then tested, and their grades stand as the proficiency range. Another method, called bookmark, involves ranking test questions in order of difficulty and having an educator mark the question that could reasonably be expected to divide the proficient students from the non-proficient. Then, there's the Jaeger-Mills method, in which educators assign precise difficulty ratings to test questions. According to a recent article by Robert L. Linn, of the University of Colorado, the state of Kentucky gave its middle-school students a reading test and analyzed the results using all three methods. With bookmark, 61 per cent of the students were considered proficient, with the contrasting-groups method, the pass rate was 22.7 per cent, and with Jaeger-Mills 10.5 per cent were proficient. When we say that we want American schoolchildren to be proficient in reading, which standard are we referring to? One would think that a standard ought to be high enough so that every student has to try his or her best to reach it. By Missouri's standard, for example, just 8.3 per cent of that state's fourth graders are considered to be proficient in mathematics. But if schools are required, under threat of sanction, to raise their proficiency rates annually, it's fairly dear that they have a much greater incentive to switch to a more liberal interpretation of proficiency. Colorado uses a scoring interpretation that labels 79.5 per cent of its fourth graders proficient in math. It's possible, of course, that the children of Colorado are several orders of magnitude smarter than the children of Missouri. The more plausible explanation is that Colorado has found an easier way of leaving no child behind. If you want to develop a class of high jumpers, after all, you don't necessarily have to teach every student proper jumping technique. You can just lower the bar. This can hardly be what Congress intended. It believed, correctly, that progress is not possible without standards. The truth is, however, that standards are not possible without meaningful systems of measurement, and learning cannot be measured as neatly and easily as the devotees of educational productivity would like. If schools were factories, America would have solved the education problem a century ago.
From the introduction in the Announcement of Common Boundary’s 17th Annual Conference, November 6-7, Washington DC. In his February 1997 letter to members, Sierra Club president Adam Werbach related “a cautionary tale for our times.” Researchers, he reported, went to a preschool and asked the youngsters, “Who knows how to sing?” Everyone’s hand shot up. “who knows how to dance?” They all waved their hands enthusiastically.
Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis. New York: 1989. ISBN 0140097414, Page 4 The tendency of popular histories and of museum exhibits of technology uncritically to unfold a story of problem-free achievement unfortunately leaves readers and viewers naive about the nature of technological change. When more histories of technology that take the critical stance of the best histories of politics are written, Americans will realize that not only their remarkable achievements but many of their deep and persistent problems arise, in the name of order, system, and control, from the mechanization and systematization of life and from the sacrifice of the organic and the spontaneous.
Stephen L. Talbott, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending The Machines In Our Midst Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly and Associates; 1995 ISBN 1565920856, Page 278 Like the telescope, our instruments of communication only increase the distance. Our real need is to rediscover what it means to participate in each other’s lives and worlds. This requires attention to precisely those potentialities of human exchange our efficient technology is teaching us to ignore.
Garson, Barbara. The Electronic Sweatshop. New York: 1988. ISBN 0671530496 Page 125 What if I could learn geometry or a foreign language, than take the disk out of my brain and drop it into your brain? I wonder why humans don’t have slots in their heads for disks. As it stands now, each of us learns everything the slow, painful way. Little children practice hours a day for years before they can speak their native tongue. Why are we such inefficient learning machines? In order to learn, each human being goes through an active process that makes the material his own. Each person who learns a language changes it.
Robert Bly, “Where Have All The Grown-Ups Gone?” The Sibling Society, 1996 Page 9 People don’t bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults. The rule is: Where repression was before fantasy will now be; we human beings limp along, running after our own fantasy. We can never catch up, and so we defeat ourselves by the simplest possible means: speed. Everywhere we go there’s a crown, and the people all look alike. We begin to live a lateral life, catch glimpses out of the corners of our eyes, keep the TV set at eye level, watch the scores move horizontally across the screen. We see what’s coming out of the side-view mirror. It seems like intimacy; maybe not intimacy as much as proximity; maybe not proximity as much as sameness. Americans who are 20 years old see others who look like them in Czechoslovakia, Greece, China, France, Brazil, Germany, and Russia, wearing the same jeans, listening to the same music, speaking a universal language that computer literacy demands. Sometimes they feel more vitally connected to siblings elsewhere than to family members in the next room.
Science & Society -- Science News, VOL. 149, June 8, 1996 In the 12th issue of NSF’S biennial SCIENCE & ENGINEERING INDICATORS published last week, Jon D. Miller and Linda Pifer of the Chicago Academy of Sciences unveil their updated survey on science literacy in the United States. Fewer than 10 percent of adults can describe a molecule beyond noting that it’s small. Only 20 percent can even minimally define DNA, and slightly fewer than half know that Earth rotates around the sun once a year. Although almost one-quarter could explain correctly how chlorofluorocarbons were believed to contribute to the thinning of stratospheric ozone, only about half of these adults could describe reasonably well where in the atmosphere this thinning is taking place. Moreover, two-thirds were unable to explain the potential health risks of ozone thinning. Even fewer knew how acid rain forms (5 percent) and why it is of concern (2 percent), although most adults said they “oppose” acid rain.
Column by Crispin Sartwell, November 20, 1997, Philadelphia Inquirer These concepts—excellence, productivity, global economy of the 21st century -- are the guidelines by which I raise my children. We used to talk about nurturing, love, discipline. But these are quaint, outdated concepts from the 20th century. We need to get our kids up and running in the global economy of the 21st century. Every child, whether or not she can read or write, should have Internet access. Whenever my son Sam, who’s in kindergarten, wants to do something, whether it is watch Looney Tunes or ride his bike, I ask him: “How will this impact vis-a-vis the global economy?” Sam needs to realize that he is competing with kindergartners in Burundi, Qatar and Kazakhstan to see who is the most excellent kindergartner in the global economy of the 21st century. Kindergartners want to play, and yet play, like drugs and poverty and crime, reduces a kindergartner’s competitiveness. What we need is more standardized tests for kindergartners. In fact, kindergartners should themselves be standardized so that they can take their place among the reliable electronic components i n the competitive climate of the global economy of the 21st century. Whenever my kid wants to relax or play silly games, I get up in his face and scream: “Get competitive in the global marketplace of the 21st century, you less-than-productive brat!” This helps my child to achieve excellence, and every child must achieve excellence. We cannot afford to leave a single child behind in the 20th century as we enter the 21st century of tomorrow.
Oppenheimer, Todd. “The Computer Delusion.” Atlantic Monthly July 1997: 3. The Kittridge Street Elementary School, in Los Angeles, killed its music program last year to hire a technology coordinator; in Mansfield, Massachusetts, administrators dropped proposed teaching positions in art, music, and physical education, and then spent $333,000 on computers; in one Virginia school the art room was turned into a computer laboratory. (Ironically, a half dozen preliminary studies recently suggested that music and art classes may build the physical size of a child’s brain, and its powers for subjects such as language, math, science, and engineering—in one case far more than computer work did.)
Conger, Jay A. “How ‘Gen X’ Managers Manage.” ISSUE Pages 22 and 24 When the University of California at Los Angeles asked freshmen in 1993 whether “to be very well off financially” was an objective they considered essential or very important, 74.5 percent responded in the affirmative. The figure in 1971 was just 40.1 percent. When asked why it was very important to go to college, 75.1 percent of freshmen in 1993 said “to make more money.” Only 49.9 percent said so in 1971.... In 1890, for example, only 16 percent of parents believed that independence was an important quality; but by the end of the 1970’s, approximately 75 percent felt that independence was the most important character trait. As independence has grown in importance, its antithesis—obedience—has diminished steadily as a valued trait. For example, 64 percent of parents in 1890 cited obedience as one of the three most important characteristics in child-rearing. This fell to 17 percent by 1978. This gap between the two traits has only grown further with Generation X. The heightened importance of independence is, in part, related to the nation’s growing affluence. People have more money for the services and machinery needed to run a household. That has made them less dependent on family and
Raymond F. Callahan, Education And The Cult Of Efficiency, New York: 1990 ISBN080772985X Pages 18, 19, 113,114, 116,120 That business’s influence was more likely to be pernicious to schools than beneficial was actually framed within rather narrow chronological limits. Callahan’s claim is based upon events in business development between 1910 and 1930 and not in the era before or since. It was within that specific time frame that Taylorism, the cost accounting mentality, and “efficiency before all else” reached their zenith. Education and the Cult of Efficiency makes, I believe, a persuasive case that these ideas penetrated the fabric of American education and extracted a toll upon operations by reducing children to widgets and by converting the superintendent from an educational leader to a resource manager. Profound social change is often reflected in metaphor, and, indeed, the era that Raymond Callahan described was no exception. For education it meant the virtual abandonment of the romantic nineteenth century view of the school as a “garden.” The extended metaphor depicted the child as tender seedling, the teacher as a loving gardener, the curriculum as nutrient, and the final process as the transformation of the seedling into a blossoming, hardy plant. Henceforth, the school was a factory, the child was raw material, the teacher was assembly line worker, the curriculum was the production process, and the end result was a marketable product wanted by a consumer economy. To summarize, in Education and the Cult of Efficiency, Callahan presents a very practical model of the forces behind school reform in the early twentieth century. I includes (1) a new national technology; scientific management; (2) a highly visible and media-centered public criticism of the schools; (3) the business-oriented value system dominating American culture and controlling public education; (4) a response by professors and major programs which brought the “efficiency expert” ideal to the school superintendent; and (5) the vulnerability of the individual superintendent. The acceptance of the business manager model (as opposed to the scholar model of Horace Mann) was the best protection against that vulnerability. Callahan goes on to document the changes in the organization and administration of public education. specific changes at local district level include Returning to the five elements of natural public education reform set forth by Callahan, we can determine the extent to which the 1980s reform parallels the 1900 reform:
Hewlett, Sylvia Ann, When The Bough Breaks, U.S.A., 1991: ISBN 0465091652, Page 85
Mezzacappa, Dale. “Giving A’s to Students Who Just Aren’t Making the Grade.” The Philadelphia Inquirer August 31, 1997 Page A16 When the College Board released the most recent SAT scores this week, it contended that grade inflation has taken hold in high schools. As evidence, it pointed out that a decade ago, 28 percent of students taking the SATs reported they were A students. Today it’s 37 percent. Yet, the SAT scores of these students have declined a total of 14 points. While questioning whether the Scholastic Assessment Test should be held up a reliable gauge of student achievement, many educators do agree on one thing. They see growing evidence that the pursuit of grades has become more important in many high schools than the pursuit of learning. It’s education as a consumer good, say one expert.
Kohn, Alfie. Punished by Rewards. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. ISBN 0395650283 It is not by accident that pop behaviorism has come to suffuse our lives. There are identifiable reasons to account for its popularity, beginning with the belief systems already in place which it complements. One of these I mentioned earlier: our pragmatism, and specifically our tendency to favor practical techniques for getting the job done as opposed to getting bogged down with theories and reasons. A nation of busy pioneers and entrepreneurs has no time for figuring out the source of a problem; much more compatible with the American spirit is a simple declaration that would seem to assure results: "Do this and you'll get that." Ironically, rewards and punishments not only lie at the core of faith but are central to our idea of rationality as well, particularly as it makes its presence felt in economic choices. Rational decision-makers, by definition, are said to seek what is pleasurable and to avoid what is aversive or costly. Rationality, in turn, is central to what it means to be human, at least to many Western thinkers. A number of writers have recently challenged both steps of this argument, but pop behaviorism makes intuitive sense to us as a result of the assumptions built into our economic system. In fact, behavioral psychology and orthodox economic theory have established a sort of mutual admiration society that flatters both fields, but only by creating a truncated picture of the human being whose actions they seek to analyze. On the first pages of their textbooks, economists often nod in the direction of behaviorism to justify their fundamental assumptions about what motivates consumers or workers. Psychologists in turn assume that the process of weighing costs and benefits that describe how we go about purchasing an appliance is also what we are doing when talking with a lover. Page 27 Just as threats are simply a more blatant version of control than bribes are, so token economies merely exaggerate the manipulation that describes other, less systematic, applications of rewards. The point to be emphasized is that all rewards, by virtue of being rewards, are not attempts to influence or persuade or solve problems together, but simply to control. Page 52 That rewards punish is not due only to the fact that they are controlling. They also have that effect for a second, even more straightforward, reason: some people do not get the rewards they were hoping to get, and the effect of this is, in practice, indistinguishable from punishment. Many managers and teachers make a point of withholding or withdrawing a reward if their charges do not perform as instructed. The goody is dangled and then snatched away. In fact, this is precisely what many behaviorists recommend doing. While taking care to urge that children not be punished (by which is meant making something bad happen to them), they freely prescribe the use of "response costs" (by which is meant making something good not happen to them).* Unfortunately, those who haven't been trained to make such distinctions might fail to understand that when something desirable has been taken away they are not supposed to feel punished. A parent tells a child that continued good behavior will be rewarded with a visit to the circus on Sunday. On Saturday, the child does something that annoys the parent, which prompts a familiar warning: "Keep this up and you can forget the circus tomorrow." Can there be any doubt that this threat to remove a reward is functionally identical to a threat to employ a punishment? Page 53 A reward, by definition, is a desired object or event made conditional on having fulfilled some criterion: only if you do this will you get that. If I promise to give you a banana tomorrow, that is not a reward. If I promise to give you a banana tomorrow for helping me out today, that is a reward -- and if I don't give it to you, you will probably feel as if you are being punished. To avoid having this happen, I must avoid giving you things on a contingent basis. O. Domenico, 10/96 Journal of Family Life Volume 4, Number 1, 1998 Page 7 Free Period Here the desks are held prisoner. The papers strewn across my desk This brick shit barn, a poor container But stuck inside this hippo-hide rubber called school,
Orr, David W., “Speed” in Annals of Earth, Volume XV, Number 3, 1997, Pages 8 – 11 Several years ago the college where I teach created an electronic “quick mail” system to reduce paper use and to increase our “efficiency.” Electronic communication is now standard throughout most organizations. The results, however, are mixed at best. The most obvious is a large increase in the sheer volume of stuff communicated, much of which is utterly trivial. There is also a manifest decline in the grammar, literary style, and civility of communication. People stroll down the hall or across campus to converse less frequently than before. Students remain transfixed before computer screens for hours, often doing no more than playing computer games. Our conversations, thought patterns, and institutional clock speed are increasingly shaped to fit the imperatives of technology. Not surprisingly, more and more people feel overloaded by the demands of incessant “communication.” But to say so publicly is to run afoul of the technological fundamentalism now dominant virtually everywhere. By default and without much thought it has been decided (or decided for us) that communication ought to be cheap, easy, and quick. Accordingly, more and more of us are instantly wired to the global nervous system with cell phones, beepers, pagers, fax machines, and E-mail. If useful in real emergencies, the overall result is to homogenize the important with the trivial making everything an emergency and an already frenetic civilization even more frenetic. As a result we are drowning in unassimilated information, most of which fits no meaningful picture of the world. In our public affairs and in our private lives we are, I think, increasingly muddled-headed because we have mistaken volume and speed of information for substance and clarity. On my desk I have the three volumes of correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison written with quill pen by candlelight and delivered by horse. The style is mostly impeccable. Even when they wrote about mundane things, they did so with clarity and insight. Their disagreements were expressed with civility and felicity. The entire body of letters can be read for both pleasure and instruction Assuming people still read two centuries hence, will the) read the correspondence of, say, Newt Gingrich or Bill Clinton for either pleasure or instruction? |
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Lane, Robert E. “The Road Not Taken”. Maryland: Critical Review Volume 8, Number 4, Fall 1994. ISSN 08913811 from Institute for Philosophy on Public Policy, Page 544 The evidence on the rising incidence of depression in advanced economies seems to confirm the belief that market solutions to the deficit of companionship in modern society have failed. Economic growth is unlikely to be a solution, since precisely those countries that have experienced or are currently experiencing rapid economic growth have the highest incidence of depression.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society: an Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. United States: 1990. ISBN 0803990766, Pages 199 through 203 Avoid classes with short-answer tests graded by computer. If a computer-graded exam is unavoidable, make extraneous marks and curl the edges of the exam so that the computer cannot deal with it.
John Gall, Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How they Fail New York, Quadrangle Books, 1975, Page 71 Consider, for example, the System of the Family. The family has been around for a long time.... Clearly, this is a functioning family system. Its immense survival power is obvious. It has endured vicissitudes compared to which the stresses our own day puts on it are trivial. And what are the sources of its strength? They are extreme simplicity in structure; looseness in everyday functioning; “inefficiency” in the efficiency expert’s sense of the term; and a strong alignment with basic primate motivations.
Donald B. Kraybill, Amish Schools Are Simple - But They Work The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 1994 Amish teachers care as much if not more about character formation as they do about academic competence. Honesty, obedience, self-denial, hard work, persistence, patience, and responsibility are touted over scientific expertise.
Ayers, R.U., Ayres, L.W., and Warr, B. 2004. Is the U.S. Economy Dematerializing? Main Indicators and Drivers, pp. 57-93 in Bergh, CJM van den, and Janssen, M.S. 2004. Economics of Industrial Ecology: Materials, Structural Change, and Spatial Scales. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA “According to a recent study of 100 years of material use in the U.S. increased demand overcompensated for efficiency gains in every case we have investigated.”
Rizzo, Mario J. Time, Uncertainty, and Disequilibrium. New York: 1979. ISBN 0699026980 Put another way, action is a learning process. As the individual acts to achieve his ends, he learns and becomes more proficient about how to pursue them. But in that case, of course, his actions cannot have been efficient from the start—or even for the end—of his actions, since perfect knowledge is never achieved, and there is always more to learn.
Interview with Dr. Ellen Langer, Author of The Power of Mindful Learning DR. ELLEN LANGER: If an extraordinarily talented person is practicing mindlessly, then imagine what their performance would be like if they practiced mindfully! Most experts become experts because they don't take the basics for granted. Imagine what it means to take the basics for granted. You learn your task, whatever it is you're learning, when you're first learning it, and you don't want to freeze your understanding of it because you don't even know what it's going to entail later. The people who are most expert don't freeze their understanding, so then you can keep coming back and redoing and exploring the basics.
Michael Berube, “Why Inefficiency Is Good for Universities” March 27, 1998 The Chronicle of Higher Education,The Education Digest 9/1/98, Vol. 64, No. 1, Page 35. The problem is that the goals of the liberal arts -- "critical thinking," for example, and "intellectual cosmopolitanism" -- are usually intangible, whereas the costs of the liberal arts are all too tangible and (for efficiency-minded administrators) all too high. Therefore, we in the liberal arts have a special burden to bear whenever we insist that we are (or should be) a central part of the mission of higher education: We must convince administrators that a better university for students in the liberal arts is, above all, an inefficient university. It is a university where student writing is copious and carefully read, and where students themselves are names, faces, and advisees, not modular production units.
'Efficiency' isn't always best for education Commentary by TOM BOMAN, Duluth News Tribune, Parent participation drops in large schools when the school is not located in the neighborhood. Every so often, public education gets caught in the cross hairs of efficiency experts. It might be useful to examine who these efficiency experts are and how they operate. In the 1920s, in a golden age for the United States that came to a crashing halt in 1929 with the collapse of the stock market, there was an amazing love affair with the new American manufacturing system. One of the kinds of people who rode to prominence during that era was the efficiency expert. Efficiency experts, so they claimed, could make any system work more efficiently and thus make more money for an organization. It was inevitable that efficiency experts would eventually descend on the public schools. The early efficiency experts were into counting things that were simple to count and measuring how much those things cost. The efficiency experts were not often very sophisticated and tended to ignore the big picture or hard-to-grasp operations. But, nonetheless, they did seem to work wonders with simple systems like manufacturing washing machines and assembling cars. The first recorded use of efficiency experts in public education was in studying the efficiency of teaching foreign languages. These experts came to the conclusion that it was more efficient to teach Latin than Spanish or French since, according to their measurements, there were more individual student recitations in Latin per hour of instruction than in the other two languages. Never mind that Latin was a dead language and going the way of the blacksmith. Many public schools bought in to the efficiency results, and the teaching of Latin remained long beyond its usefulness to students. Efficiency experts also determined that a classroom with large windows on the left side of the room was more efficient than a classroom with large windows on the right side of the room. They reasoned that most students were right-handed, and a window on the left side would be less likely to cast a shadow on a student's handwriting. Almost all classrooms designed well into the 1950s followed that principle even though electric lighting made the whole issue moot. Another favorite idea of the efficiency expert was the use of the sliding blackboards in the front of science classrooms. Usually the blackboard went up, revealing another blackboard underneath and thus allowed a fast-writing science teacher to keep writing formulas without erasing by just raising the board that he or she had finished and keep on moving on the board underneath. Only science teachers had these unique blackboards, not mathematics or social science teachers who wrote as much as science teachers. The idea started in Denver with a new high school designed by a well-known team of architects from the East. To be more efficient in the use of space, the architects designed a fume hood (something like the exhaust hood over most kitchen ranges) for the science teachers to use that was behind the blackboard in the front of the room. When the fume hood was needed, the teacher raised the blackboard and there was a space about the size of the average kitchen counter with an exhaust hood. No other teachers ran demonstrations that created stuff that smelled, so they didn't get the movable blackboards. The demonstration fume hood idea didn't work out very well, but the idea of the movable blackboards in science classrooms remained so that even the University of Minnesota Duluth had them built into science classrooms in the 1960s. No one knew why -- it was just a tradition. So that brings us up to the present day with efficiency experts, often from industry, telling educators how they might do their job more efficiently. Another big idea from efficiency experts is that it makes sense to have large schools rather than small schools since a large school can more easily have the maximum number of students in every classroom. That results in less cost for instruction per student. It works for big-box stores like WalMart and Best Buy. But that analysis fails to take into account that many students get overwhelmed and lost in big schools. Parent participation drops in large schools when the school is not located in the neighborhood. One of the premier educational research and development organizations in the country, the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, now advocates that small schools do a better job of educating students when you factor in the cost of student dropouts, the loss of student motivation when feeling overwhelmed, and the drop in parent involvement. We will always have efficiency experts, and their siren song is intriguing. But educational policy makers need to look carefully at their recommendations and ask if these experts are counting what really counts. TOM BOMAN is a professor in the education department at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
David Dunham, from Internet site Quoteland.com Efficiency is intelligent laziness.
The Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club, New York: 1996 ISBN 0916366847, Page 15 There is an educational channel. It’s called “off.” Bromley, Daniel W. “The Ideology of Efficiency: Searching For a Theory of Policy Analysis” in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 1990, Pages 86-107 Page 90 In a simple world, where the distinction between means and ends may be though clear, it is necessary to regard the means as simply factors of production or commodities in which there is no intrinsic merit attached to the components of either. This distinction is meaningless, however, in the real world of policy analysis in which there are few— perhaps no—policies (institutional arrangements) that can be assumed to be neutral means without intrinsic value of their own. The essence of markets is efficiency, and therefore analysis that focuses on changes in economic efficiency is “objective science.” Since it was impossible, on utility grounds, to know what should be done, and since voting would produce inconsistent results, there was only the market to rely upon. Just short of two centuries after Adam Smith’s intuitive celebration of the invisible hand, his ideas were confirmed by the best minds in the profession. While no one could say that the market was the best of all possible worlds, future Nobel Prize winners were proving that it was at least as good as -- if not better than—meddling bureaucrats. Markets at least produced consistent and efficient results. |
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