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Today, scientific management remains the most dominant philosophy of business organization in every industrialized country.
links to developments of IQ, personality, interest-ability matching and counseling
question that transcends Taylorism: If you have a society predicated upon the separation of system-conforming workers from system-defining managers, how does society decide who gets to be a worker and who gets to be a manager?
bingo
FACTORIES OF EDUCATION
oh oh: I am a factory manager?
when it came time to establish a nationwide, compulsory high school system, the humanist model was passed over in favor of a very different vision of education—a Taylorist vision.
our "Taylor-made ed system"
They were opposed by a broad coalition of pragmatic industrialists and ambitious psychologists steeped in the values of standardization and hierarchical management.
brreeding ground for Peter Principle"
The educational Taylorists declared that the new mission of education should be to prepare mass numbers of students to work in the newly Taylorized economy. Following Taylor’s maxim that a system of average workers was more efficient than a system of geniuses, educational Taylorists argued that schools should provide a standard education for an average student instead of trying to foster greatness.
"educational Taylorism": mass education of the teeming masses... are foreign students with skill at an advantage of being virtually alone but with support to allow them to develop and shine?
“We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians . . . nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. . . .
Sputnik reduced but did not eliminate this (tracking, pre engineering programs)
community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
assumed generational employment determinism and dynasties
the “Gary Plan,” named after the industrialized Indiana city where it originated: students were divided into groups by age (not by performance, interest, or aptitude) and these groups of students rotated through different classes, each lasting a standardized period of time. School bells were introduced to emulate factory bells, in order to mentally prepare children for their future careers.
"THE GARY PLAN still rules
the curriculum planner.
why admins, publishers, bookstores assume no curricular change
management, these planners created a fixed, inviolable curriculum
ND Blue Book
school boards rapidly adopted a top-down hierarchical management that replicated the management structure of Taylorism,
encourage consolidation and developed problems Daniel Fader tried to reverse
In 1924, the American journalist H. L. Mencken summarized the state of the educational system: “The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.”
still true, although 60s 70s made them sites and sources of unrest
American schools, in other words, were staunchly Queteletian, their curriculum and classrooms designed to serve the Average Student and create Average Workers.
why stoicism, unconventionality, home schooling, independent study as teaching systems are
American schools, in other words, were staunchly Queteletian, their curriculum and classrooms designed to serve the Average Student and create Average Workers.
taght by those who impose STANDARDS... the basic training model (that ghettoed the disabled and ignored/bored the gifted and talented)
Edward Thorndike embraced Taylor’s ideas about standardization before refitting the elder American’s ideas so that Thorndike could use them to separate school’s superior students from its inferior ones.
Edward Thorndyke needs to be researched
Thorndike believed that schools should instead sort young people according to their ability so they could efficiently be appointed to their proper station in life, whether manager or worker, eminent leader or disposable outcast—and so that educational resources could be allocated accordingly. Thorndike’s guiding axiom was “Quality is more important than equality,” by which he meant that it was more important to identify superior students and shower them with support than it was to provide every student with the same educational opportunities.
ties to gifted and talented assumes ability to determine realized AND LATENT talents shades of Prof. X
Thorndike believed that schools should instead sort young people according to their ability so they could efficiently be appointed to their proper station in life, whether manager or worker, eminent leader or disposable outcast—and so that educational resources could be allocated accordingly. Thorndike’s guiding axiom was “Quality is more important than equality,” by which he meant that it was more important to identify superior students and shower them with support than it was to provide every student with the same educational opportunities.
TRACKING ~ English forms
rank, the theory that if a person was talented at one thing, he was likely to be talented at most other things, too.
flawed in so many ways: transfer of learning and savants each do not fit this
long.
quantification of processing speed rather than qualitative determination problems both with reliability and validity
possible.
geneticist
individuality according to the Galtonian definition: that a person’s uniqueness and value stemmed from his deviation from the average.
individuality
standardized tests for handwriting, spelling, arithmetic, English comprehension, drawing, and reading,
standardized testing
all standardized around the average student of a particular age, a practice still used in our school systems today.
reading level origin?
Thorndike’s ideas gave birth to the notion of gifted students, honors students, special needs students, and educational tracks. He supported the use of grades as a convenient metric for ranking students’ overall talent and believed that colleges should admit those students with the best GPAs and highest standardized test scores since (according to Galton’s idea of rank) he believed they were not only the most likely to succeed in college, but most likely to succeed in whatever profession they chose.
and here we are: ore inefficient than ever
It is deeply ironic that one of the most influential people in the history of education believed that education could do little to change a student’s abilities and was therefore limited to identifying those students born with a superior brain—and those born with an inferior one.
natire > nurture
these percentages, arranged in tidy columns, were endowed with the sober authority of mathematics:
tyranny of quantification
Thorndike’s rank-obsessed educational labyrinth traps everyone within its walls—and not just the students. Teachers are evaluated at the end of each school year by administrators, and the resulting rankings are used to determine promotions, penalties, and tenure. Schools and universities are themselves ranked by various publications, such as U.S. News and World Report, who give great weight to the average test scores and GPA of the students, and these rankings determine where potential students will apply and what they’re willing to pay. Businesses base their hiring decisions on applicants’
...more
judgment/gatekeeping > change/improvement
Thorndike’s rank-obsessed educational labyrinth traps everyone within its walls—and not just the students. Teachers are evaluated at the end of each school year by administrators, and the resulting rankings are used to determine promotions, penalties, and tenure. Schools and universities are themselves ranked by various publications, such as U.S. News and World Report, who give great weight to the average test scores and GPA of the students, and these rankings determine where potential students will apply and what they’re willing to pay. Businesses base their hiring decisions on applicants’
...more
Thorndike's Folly
our educational system is broken, when in reality the opposite is true. Over the past century, we have perfected our educational system so that it runs like a well-oiled Taylorist machine, squeezing out every possible drop of efficiency in the service of the goal its architecture was originally designed to fulfill: efficiently ranking students in order to assign them to their proper place in society.
IS this accurate? seems to me that error inefficiency waste > efficiency accuracy fit
During this transformative stretch, businesses, schools, and the government all gradually adopted the guiding conviction that the system was more important than the individual, offering opportunities to each of us according to our type or rank.
ex military and IQ
I’m not going to pretend that the Taylorization of our workplace and the implementation of standardization and rankings in our schools was some kind of disaster. It wasn’t.
businesses prospered
consumers got more affordabl...
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increased...
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lifted more people out ...
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nepotism and cronyism were reduced
students from less privileged backgrounds attained unprecedented access to opportunities to a better life.
helped establish a classroom environment that made Americans out of millions of immigrants and raised the number of Americans with a high school diploma from 6 percent to 81 percent.
contributed to a relatively stable and prosperous democracy.
compels each of us to conform to certain narrow expectations in order to succeed in school, our career, and in life.
everyone else—or, even more accurately, we all strive to be like everyone else, only better.
We live in a world where businesses, schools, and politicians all insist that individuals really do matter, when everything is quite clearly set up so the system always matters more than you.
hypocraccy of Taylorism
Excellence, too often, is not prioritized over conforming to the system.
priorities
Yet we want to be recognized for our individuality. We want to live in a society where we can truly be ourselves—where we can learn, develop, and pursue opportunities on our own terms according to our own nature, instead of needing to conform ourselves to an artificial norm.
DO WE?
the societal challenge
can a society predicated on the conviction that individuals can only be evaluated in reference to the average ever create the conditions for understanding and harnessing individuality? CHAPTER
Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores, authored by two psychometricians named Frederic Lord and Melvin Novick.
check out this...it may have been our individual appraisal course
rather than admit defeat, Lord and Novick proposed an alternate way to derive someone’s true score: instead of testing one person many times, they recommended testing many people one time.7 According to classical test theory, it was valid to substitute a group distribution of scores for an individual’s distribution of scores.
we argued the validity of this in Olson's class
In essence, both Quetelet and Lord and Novick assumed that measuring one person many times was interchangeable with measuring many people one time.
BIG problem
