Déjà Vu All Over Again: A Lesson from the History of School Reform

This was posted on Valerie Strauss's "The Answer Sheet" in The Washington Post on March 27, 2011. I repost it here.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana

In the early decades of the twentieth century, public schools came under severe attack, with magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal leading the way. Schools were assailed as being antiquated and inefficient. “[T]he American public-school system…,” wrote one critic, “is an absolute and total failure.”

Modern business was in ascendance, and this was the era of scientific management and the efficiency expert. The nation was abuzz with talk of economizing and making more efficient everything from factory work to running a household to the practice of the ministry. So it was the notion of efficiency that shaped both the direction and language of the school reform of the time.

School administrators began to see themselves as “school executives.” There was a call for “‘educational engineers’ to study this huge business of preparing youth for life.” Precise standards and metrics were developed to help teachers determine their efficiency: “Having these definite tasks laid upon her, [the teacher] can know at all times whether she is accomplishing the things expected of her or not.” Anyone falling short would be “unmistakably shown to be a weak teacher.” There were further suggestions to cut costs by cutting salaries while increasing class size and teaching load. The principles of efficiency were brought to the curriculum itself. An influential superintendant devised a system to calculate the dollar value of different subjects: for example 5.9 pupil-recitations in Greek are of the same value as 23.8 recitations in French. Since Greek recitations are so much more costly than French, “the price must go down, or we shall invest in something else.”

I remember being flabbergasted when, as a graduate student, I read all this in historian Raymond Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency. Many of these reform recommendations got pretty absurd – and I only gave you a taste of the absurdity with that Greek recitation business – before they collapsed under their own weight. (Though, sadly, the ethos of administrative pseudo-science would stay with us for a long time.) But what was sobering was the fact that many of these efficiency advocates were leaders in education, high-profile smart people caught up in what seemed like the best new managerial science of the time. Counting, measuring, quantifying – no matter how intricate the phenomenon – would provide the answer to the previous era’s vexing problems.

Fast forward to our time.

Once again, there is a powerful and concerted attempt assisted by mass media to portray public education as a catastrophic failure. Once again the business framework and business people play a huge role in contemporary school reform – actually, more so today. Once again reformers are equipped with what seems like the best new science – the economist’s way of framing problems, cutting-edge statistical models – and a technocratic language that sounds precise, definitive, and action-oriented. We will “incentivize”, “scale up”, “move the needle.” Since teachers are – when it comes down to it – the problem, we are busy devising systems and techniques to direct them. And we believe we have objective statistical procedures to measure their effectiveness.

This managerial approach to education took another step forward last November when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, “The New Normal: Doing More with Less,” in which he encouraged educators to “improve the productivity of our education system.” What was remarkable about the speech was that the Secretary was not only talking about productivity in administration and maintenance – which makes sense – but productivity inside the classroom as well. In one of many moments of doublespeak, he decried the “century-old, industrial-age factory model of education” while calling for the application of a management science mindset to teaching and learning.

It would be a healthy thing for current reformers to look back at their early twentieth century predecessors. That is a history we don’t need to repeat. Unfortunately, it is a characteristic of reform movements – especially with the kind of momentum this one has – for its participants to feel they are on the edge of history, solving with new ideas and new tools the problems that flummoxed everyone before. Rather than the philosopher Santayana, the reformers more likely align with industrialist Henry Ford: “History is…bunk…the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we made today.” And someday another historian like the author of Education and the Cult of Efficiency will write that history.

Portraits of Thinking: An Account of a Common Laborer

For the sixth story about cognition in action, I want to go back into history and reflect on the infamous description of a man named Schmidt, a common laborer in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor’s portrayal of Schmidt reveals an undemocratic and contradictory American attitude toward physical work, one that carries with it strong biases about intelligence. For those of you who missed the previous entries where I discuss the purpose of these portraits of thinking, I’ll repeat two introductory paragraphs now. If you did read the earlier entries, you can skip right to the reflection on Schmidt, which is drawn from The Mind at Work.

As I’ve been arguing during the year of this blog’s existence—and for some time before—we tend to think too narrowly about intelligence, and that narrow thinking has affected the way we judge each other, organize work, and define ability and achievement in school. We miss so much.

I hope that the portraits I offer over the next few months illustrate the majesty and surprise of intelligence, its varied manifestations, its subtlety and nuance. The play of mind around us.

***

Following is one of the most reproduced depictions of a laborer in Western occupational literature, drawn from Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management. It captures American industry’s traditional separation of managerial intelligence from worker production.

Taylor was a fierce systematizer and a tireless promoter of time study and industrial efficiency. He uses an immigrant laborer named Schmidt to illustrate how even the most basic of tasks—in this case, the loading of pig iron—could be analytically broken down by the scientific manager into a series of maximally effective movements, with a resulting bonus in wages and a boom in productivity. Schmidt, Taylor claimed, jumped his rate from twelve-and-a-half tons of pig iron per day—each "pig" an oblong casting of iron weighing close to one-hundred pounds—to an astonishing tonnage of forty-seven.

Before he introduces Schmidt, Taylor sets the scene with a dispassionate analysis of the loading of pig iron at Bethlehem Steel, Schmidt's place of employment. Enter Schmidt, "a little Pennsylvania Dutchman," seemingly inexhaustible (he "trots" to and from work), frugal, in the process of building "a little house for himself." Then comes this interaction between Taylor and Schmidt:

'Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?'
Vell, I don't know vat you mean.'
'Oh, yes, you do. What I want to know is whether you are a high-priced man or not.'
'Vell, I don't know vat you mean.'
'Oh, come now, you answer my questions. What I want to find out is whether you are a high-priced man or one of these cheap fellows here.
What I want to find out is whether you want to earn $1.85 a day or whether you are satisfied with $1.15, just the same as all those cheap fellows are getting.'
'Did I vant $1.85 a day? Vas dot a high-priced man? Vell, yes, I vas a high-priced man.'
'Oh, you're aggravating me. Of course you want $1.85 a day—every one wants it!…For goodness' sake answer my questions, and don't waste any more of my time. Now come over here. You see that pile of pig iron?'…

Taylor badgers Schmidt for a little while longer—one wonders what Schmidt thinks of all this—and then introduces him to the supervisor who will direct his scientifically calibrated labor:

Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will do exactly as this man tells you to-morrow, from morning till night. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk, you pick it up and you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that right straight through the day. And what's more, no back talk. Now a high-priced man does just what he's told to do, and no back talk. Do you understand that? When this man tells you to walk, you walk; when he tells you to sit down, you sit down, and you don't talk back at him.

"This seems to be rather rough talk," Taylor admits, but "[w]ith a man of the mentally sluggish type of Schmidt it is appropriate and not unkind." Later, Taylor observes that Schmidt "happened to be a man of the type of an ox…a man so stupid that he was unfitted to do most kinds of laboring work, even."

There's much to say about this depiction, and a number of critics, beginning with Upton Sinclair, have collectively said it: the insidious mix of scientific pretension, class and ethnic bias, and paternalism; the antagonistic management stance, the kind of authoritarian control that would lead to industrial inflexibility; the absolute gulf between managerial brains and worker brawn; the ruthlessness of full-blown industrial capitalism. All true.

In addition, though, I keep thinking of Schmidt himself, rereading Taylor's rendering, trying to imagine him beyond the borders of Taylor's page. Let us follow him through the plant, out into his world, down the road home. Though Taylor claims that a man like Schmidt "is so stupid that the word 'percentage' has no meaning to him," Taylor also tells us that Schmidt is building a house from his meager earnings. So, Schmidt had to calculate and budget, and even if he could not do formal arithmetic—we don’t know if he could or couldn't—he would have to be competent in the mathematics necessary for carpentry. And for him to plan and execute even a simple structure, use hand tools effectively, solicit and coordinate aid—all this requires way more intelligence than Taylor grants him.

Taylor does not tell us if Schmidt is literate, but does note that many of the laborers "were foreigners and unable to read and write." If Schmidt were illiterate, did he develop informal literate networks to take care of personal and civic needs? We know that ethnic communities were rich in fraternal organizations that served as places of entertainment, but also as sites of political discussion and the exchange of news about the old country. Literate members would write letters, read newspapers aloud, both in their native language and English, and act as linguistic and culture brokers with mainstream institutions. The parish church or synagogue was another source of exposure to literate practices and social exchange, and, for some, a place of reflection.

Though Bethlehem Steel was not yet a site of significant union activity, labor unrest had already erupted in some sectors of steel, and discussions about safety, work conditions, and the length of the work day were in the air. Schmidt might well have heard the early rumblings about these issues and might have talked about them to others in the yard, the saloon, the neighborhood.

The point is that one cannot assume—as so many have—that the men looking back at us impassively from those photographs of the open ditch or the pouring of fiery steel, faded, blurring to silver, had no mental life, were sluggish, dull, like oxen.