Subject: K12 student academic progress

Posted by Philip Abode on 1/8/2010
In Reply To:K12 student academic progress Posted by Richard Turnock on 1/8/2010

Message:

I know it’s Friday and folks want to wind down for the weekend! But the K-12 thread is rather engaging and I want to add my two cents. I can see how difficult is appears to be for discussants to get away from the old educational performance paradigm first initiated by Coleman et al. (1966) that placed the burden of performance on the students, their families and social background. The alternative, that is organizational perspective on educational performance has been slow in evolving despite more than 15 years of its initiation under Clinton’s Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) of 1994. Good news is that now we talk about school performance, and the bad news is that we are not sure what we mean by it. Talk of district performance is rare.

Education philosophers, scientists, analysts, etc. seem to employ different mental models in discussing/debating public education. Various aspects of the “system” are conceptualized differently. As an example, we cannot even agree how to relate students to the system. Are they “customers,” “consumers,” or “workers?” What about teachers, “workers,” “supervisors,” or “professionals?” It would seem that how we define the different elements of a system determine the roles we ascribe to them and the value of our model in explicating how the system works and should work. Further, as I follow our exchanges regarding the K-12 public education, I noticed that the models do not seem to identify what variables are exogenous to the system, a critical factor in identify the system’s boundary.

It would seem that one needs a theoretical justification for whatever definition one uses to define elements of a system. I can accept that students are not strictly speaking “customers” because they do not pay cash. But what is wrong when a school or district decides to related to students as if they are customers? Would that not impact the strategic orientation of the organization (school or district)? What about students as consumers? Of course, they are the primary consumer of what the school or district exists to produce. However, their consumption has a catch to it! It is not like me consuming a can of coke, just for the pleasure of it (economic utility). Rather, educational consumption is expected to be productive after some time delay and as such it is productive consumption such that when the successful student becomes Homo Oeconomicus, he would be adding value to his/her family, extended family, community, state, nation, etc. Student as a worker is a stretch for they get no pay check for the work they supposedly perform.

Like I said, just my two cents…..

Philip