The Atlantic has a new article by Nick Hanauer that challenges the notion that fixing education will fix other bigger issues like income inequality or the declining levels of social mobility in our society.
He calls this belief “educationism” and says that it is extremely attractive to the very rich because it suggests there is way to address these problems and let them keep all their money.
All told, I have devoted countless hours and millions of dollars to the simple idea that if we improved our schools—if we modernized our curricula and our teaching methods, substantially increased school funding, rooted out bad teachers, and opened enough charter schools—American children, especially those in low-income and working-class communities, would start learning again. Graduation rates and wages would increase, poverty and inequality would decrease, and public commitment to democracy would be restored.
What I’ve realized, decades late, is that educationism is tragically misguided. American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people like me. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.
Educationism appeals to the wealthy and powerful because it tells us what we want to hear: that we can help restore shared prosperity without sharing our wealth or power. As Anand Giridharadas explains in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, narratives like this one let the wealthy feel good about ourselves. By distracting from the true causes of economic inequality, they also defend America’s grossly unequal status quo.
What does this have to do with assessment? Assessment is one facet of this approach and in many ways more offensive than Hanauer’s now abandoned approach of giving money and time to try to “fix” education.
Assessment assumes that there is a problem in education and that it can be addressed through looking at outcomes not inputs like funding. At least the educationism people are also trying to increase the amount of money going to education.
As NILOA’s director Natasha Jankowski has conceded, twenty years of assessment has done nothing to improve higher education. Nonetheless operations like the Lumina Foundation continue to push this agenda. At this point we need to ask who is benefiting from this. It’s not students, it’s not faculty, and it’s not universities. Cui bono?
Hear, hear.
Money sounds nicer than assessment (because it is), but I doubt assessment would be a problem except for the money.
It looks to me like accreditation reports are an attempt to inject accountability into a subsidized industry selling a non-commodity product. And “assessment culture” is (as far as I know… which isn’t that far) is an outgrowth of that.
Here’s a hypothesis (please correct me where I’m wrong!): The GI Bill and HEA made accreditors the gatekeepers to federal money. As that pile of rents increased, the ranks of administration grew. Throw in gold old fashioned American Calvinism and you’ve got a bunch of well-meaning bureaucrats looking for something to do. Administrators see QA engineers doing a good job producing commodity goods and don’t quite realize that, despite their reports, education isn’t something that fits into neat little boxes. At this point, we know the problem at the macro-scale, but the micro-scale solution requires administrators to go out on a limb and risk looking like an idiot by breaking with the herd.