Using the Factory Model to Educate the Miller’s Kids
Anyone who has ever stood in front of a high school class to teach can attest to socio-political structure of that micro-cosmic entity, the classroom. In college, and indeed through most of my professional teaching career, I labored under the assumption that a high school classes were “hierarchical structures controlled from the top by rational procedures, oriented towards precise goals, bound together by a network of comprehensive rules, with everything focused on achieving maximum efficiency” (Hanson, 43). I always believed that a classroom should be directed by a teacher, who was directed by a principal who was directed by a superintendent, etc. The teacher should tell the students which tasks to work on, which rules should be employ, which learning objectives should be mastered. If everyone just did what he or she was told, then every student should process through the educational production line, popping out at the end of 12-13, a graduate who should have mastered a great deal of academic content and cognitive skills to work with that content. Upon landing my first teaching position in rural Maine, I was rudely awakened to the reality that what should be in fact did not look or feel as I expected. My students did NOT obey rules set up for maximum learning. They did NOT perform their assigned tasks regularly nor with any kind of mastery. For many of my students, it was NOT that they would NOT perform expected student tasks such as learning new material, practicing new skills, doing homework, sitting in a chair. They had arrived to high school NOT able to perform basic student classroom procedures. For many students, they did not read, had never done homework, and were deeply saturated in a culture which discouraged conformity to the hierarchical system into which I had been trained. For many years I judged my teaching performance against that mis-guided paradigm. I judged myself and believed that I was being judged by my superiors to perform in a model that I could never make into reality. Setting myself up to standards that I could never achieve, year after year I struggled with my own inadequacy in the teaching profession.
Anyone who has ever stood in front of high school class to teach KNOWS that a classroom isn’t a factory, right? Well, I didn’t. My ideas of what SHOULD BE did not align with the world that WAS. I taught a class named “Spanish Level 1”. I had a textbook named “Level 1 Spanish”. I saw content and skill objectives nicely grouped into units called chapters. If a student was in Spanish Level 1 then shouldn’t he or she able to complete most of the vocabulary and grammar units with mastery from the textbook named “Level 1 Spanish”? But my students and I could not. I discovered that pushing some students lead them to act out, to fail, to drop my class. And I discovered that slowing down caused others students to act out, fall asleep, or drop out of my class. I put the expectation on myself that students would reach certain learning objectives and discovered that frequently students were able to control the pacing of assignments through their individual or group actions. Recently, I have discovered the obvious. Classroom are composed of people with different goals and expectations. I have my goals. The class, groups, and individuals within the class have their goals. As a teacher, I am the bureaucrat delegated with the responsibility to be in charge of groups of students named classes. But being in charge doesn’t always equal being in control.
What leadership lessons can I gain from the Classical Bureaucratic Theory?
LD#1
The classical bureaucratic framework has several advantages to the public education of everyone’s children. I see all of these advantages fitting under the umbrella of “efficiency”. Hierarchical administrative structure; division of labor; centralized power; and codified systems of procedures, rules, and assessments are efficient, and efficiency keeps the production process of training students cost effective, measurable, and accountable.
It’s helpful when evaluating the effectiveness of the classical bureaucratic model to briefly step back in time to understand how the model embedded itself so deeply into the institution we call American Education. The movement springing out of the Industrial Revolution of the 1800’s to educate everyone’s child needed a workable, understandable framework in the face of pressures against public education. During the 19th century, our country experienced phenomenal economic growth fueled by the factory model. The socio-demographic landscape of the U.S.A changed from largely farmers to factory workers (or the small businesses which supported those workers and their communities), from descendants of 17th century European immigrants to the children of current immigrants, from mostly white, English-speaking Protestants to other ethic, religious, and language groups. Educational reformers pushed to include ALL these children into their classrooms. Teaching everyone’s child to read, write, and do arithemetic at public expense became the Industrial Revolution’s first “Department of Training and Development”, as employers saw the taxes they spent on education transformed after a decade or so into more productive workers. Children were cut, dyed, pressed, and popped out after 8 years of processing ready to join the community labor force. Even the children of immigrants were “forged” into English-speaking, American-acting workers in the great “Melting Pot”. The industrial model destiny of educating everyone’s children provided an understandable structure that these children would be socialized into during their entire lifetimes.
Not only was the classical bureaucratic theory practical and understandable, but it was cost effective. Before the 19th century, education was the realm of the wealthy. It was the great “unequalizer” of society. People with the economic resources and willingness paid for their children’s education out of personal incomes. Those who could afford the best schools, assured that their children were properly trained and socialized to labor at the top of the bureaucratic heirarchy. Their children were exposed to skills and ideas that would keep the family “business” at the top. Their children met the indispensable children of other wealthy bureaucrats. They partnered in business or married with one another. Education turned wealthy children into wealthy adults. None of these extravagances were necessary in the education of everyone’s children. Working class parents paid for a portion of their child’s education through the increasing development of public taxation. No matter a person’s economic status, his or her children would attend school and, in part, other people and businesses would pay for it. It became important to deliver education economically.
The classical bureaucratic model with its emphases on investigation and engineering of the processes involved in production, provided a usable metaphor for public education. Every element of the American school system was fair research fodder for ferreting out efficiency and accountability. One room school houses which dotted the agricultural landscapes of the 19th century were composed of various ages and ability levels who could attend when their families did not need them for work in the family business. The school was staffed by what could be termed as an educational generalist, a teacher graduated from a normal school. The teacher taught the children, attended to the community’s educational directives, maintained discipline, and even provided janitorial services. This is all the more amazing when considering that many normal school graduates were still in their teen years. It was a given that women graduates accepting positions in schools would relinquish their posts upon marriage. While normal school education seemed to stress general academics, it was impossible for a teacher to master all the content and pedagogy necessary to instruct children from 6 to 15 years old. And for at least the female educator, her career typically didn’t last long enough to gain mastery through professional development. Nevertheless, the one room school house as portrayed in television series such as Little House in the Prairie provided communities with cost effective learning centers where children could receive basic literacy and math skills.
As the century turned, a careful observer could notice how the effects of the Industrial Revolution had changed the face of the American landscape. Inventions and the ability to mass produce them through the factory system brought workers to urban centers to find employment. Technology had created great changes in transportation, power, and management. The need for workers to improve and maintain that technology also spurred changes in public education. It was no longer productive or cost effective to produce children with only basic literacy and math skills. In the same manner that the factory model provided solutions to the new demands of modernization, the factory model also provided solutions to the education of everyone’s child. Suddenly the one room school house staffed by an educational generalist was not adequate. Educational research began re-engineering the face of the American classroom. Teachers received more specialized and longer training. Students became grouped through grades. One room buildings changed to multi classroom buildings. To keep the new paradigm running smoothly, managers were needed. Systems were developed to transport everyone to a centralized location in the community for learning. Systems were developed for recording and reporting how well students learned, what they learned, and when they were ready to advance to the next level. Cleaning and maintenance of the building were given to other workers. And surrounding the entire plant, the educational researcher scrutinized every aspect in order to quantify, codify, and catalog its efficiency. Schools were factories, of a sort. So while an enlightened citizen could decry the injustice against sending children to work in factories, it was much more humane to send those children to educational “factories” in order to prepare them for a lifetime of work in industry and business.
After 100 years, the observer can still find elements of American education that grew from the changes in the last century. This is a testament to the effectiveness of the classical bureaucratic model in producing a system able to mass produce educated children to meet the demands of American industry. Today communities are still mandated to provide everyone’s child with an education. Communities demand the highest quality education at the lowest cost. Through hierarchical administrative structure; division of labor; centralized power; and codified systems of procedures, rules, and assessments, communities have achieved effective, measurable, and accountable methods for meeting their commitments.
LD#2 How might it help me as a leader to make my school effective for students?
Except for a few weeks in the 1980’s when I tried sewing in a shoe factory, I have never worked in a factory. I must confess that what goes on behind the plant walls of the paper mills in Millinocket and Lincoln all seems very mysterious to me. My husband was an independent woodsman who supplied lumber to those factories, but I never visited them. I do understand the importance of routinizing tasks in order to cut costs. I understand market economics of supply and demand. I understand hierarchical administration in order to deliver the best product at the lower cost. But I’m not sure that these are the best models for producing educated children. As a school leader, it is important that I understand the reality of how communities attempt to govern schools, even if something tells me that the system is counterproductive.
As a school leader, it is vital to understand how to use the classical bureaucratic model to benefit one’s students. It is equally important to understand its limitations. The first important concept a leader needs to understand is cognitive, ie, the way in which the model provides the paradigm for how things will work in one’s school system. Because the factory model is so prevalent in our culture, it seems like a natural and correct way to do things. Eg., everyone who works understands the concept of a boss as leader. A school is comprised of many bosses. Children understand from Day 1 that the teacher is the “boss” of the classroom. Teachers understand that the principal is the “boss” of the school. Principals understand that the “Superintendent and School Board” are the bosses of the school system. And school systems understand that state and federal legislation are the “bosses” of the American educational system. Furthermore, there are even more hierarchical levels, even among sub-groups. Just within the teacher stratification, one find there are those in authority over credentialing and licensing; over academic content; over departments; etc. In a capitalistic culture such as ours, the concept of authority plays a strong metaphor in society. A school leader will capitalize on that metaphor in order to be effective. But what if there is a flaw in the hierarchical metaphor when it comes to school leadership? What if the concept “boss” we derive from industry is upside down? What if Superintendents and School Boards were the “bosses” of state and federal legislation? What if the principals were the “bosses” of their school systems? What if the teachers were the “bosses” of their principals? What if the students were the “bosses” of their teachers? As a teacher, I frequently find myself listening to the demands of my students. I am not always able to comply with their requests and sometimes students just don’t know or care about what they need to learn. But whether verbally or through their behaviors, students have a way of telling me what is important to them. And when I listen, I discover myself becoming a better teacher.
So as a principal, what if I learn to listen to the teachers through their words and behaviors? As a culture, we’ve learned not to trust the expertise of teachers. Teachers have to be guided into their performance duties. Unfortunately, our system has so ingrained this mentality into professional educators, that I have to admit it would be nearly impossible to ever break free from. In many ways, we still operate under the “school ma’rm” metaphor which has established a “Pauper Class” of the profession of educators. With no hope of ever earning much more than what socio-demographics might term upper poverty level wages, most talented young people do not aspire to become teachers. College departments of education are comprised of students with lower academic and achievement test scores than other university departments. Graduates who enter the teaching profession frequently leave when they realize that they can not earn enough to support themselves of their families. Many teachers who stay in the classroom are not lovers of learning. I almost feel that I should apologize when I tell my colleagues that I am taking graduate courses even though I don’t want to be an administrator and I already have a master’s degree so my salary isn’t going to increase. So as a principal, shouldn’t I mistrust what teachers want?
I often imagine that being a principal, eg., would be particularly difficult for me. I can trace certain elements of my personality which probably make me seem unconfident at times when it comes to “leading” others. So I have a difficult time crossing some imaginary line that divides me as “not the boss” from the me as “is the boss”. Is it like one day someone says, “You’re hired to be our principal,” and then some magic fairy dust falls on my shoulders and voila, I’m the boss? No, I guess not. The imaginary dividing line is nothing more than affect, becoming what the school board hires me to do, lead. Of course, underneath affect is years of classroom experience, semesters of leadership education, days and days of networking with colleagues and/or community members on both official and non-official projects. Underneath affect is what got me the job as principal. But on the first day of the job, what everyone else is looking at is what kind of a boss am I. They are expecting me to “look” like a boss, “act” like a boss, and “be” a boss. It will important for me to know the community in which I’m going to be the boss of a public school. Different communities have different notions as to what a boss is that will be a strength for me if I understand. I teach now in 2 mill towns which means the communities I work in have a strong “management” vs. “labor” mentality. I live in another town which traditionally cut, harvested, and trucked the lumber to the mills. The community I live in was historically independent contractor, or their own bosses, but inter-dependent on other contractors.
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