Clarification Via Parable

Imagine that you are an office manager in a financial firm. Your company has a few thousand employees, with roughly one hundred who report directly to you. Your superiors want to increase the productivity of your division and charge you with increasing profits for the coming fiscal year. As incentive, your own pay and performance will be determined by the productivity of those working under you. This seems fair, since your skills as a leader and motivator will directly influence the productivity of your team, so you agree to the terms. There is, of course, a catch: you can never fire an employee. No matter how infrequently they show up to work, no matter how little work they accomplish in any given day, no matter how undependable they may be, they’re still going to be on your team and their work will be used to evaluate your performance. You can’t even transfer them to another division unless they’re caught doing something criminal such as theft or threatening a colleague. Still undaunted, you begin working with your team.

It turns out most of your team is at least partly productive. A select few are real go-getters, routinely going above and beyond to complete tasks and move projects forward. The majority are somewhere in the middle, completing most of the work you assign to them but occasionally forgetting about individual tasks and often putting less than their best effort into their work despite your best efforts. But at least 15% of your employees are just completely undependable. You can’t count on them to show up, let alone accomplish any work. Furthermore, it becomes clear that they know precious little about how the firm works or even about finance and economics. You wonder how they got into the firm in the first place, but since you can’t fire them or transfer them you end up spending more and more of your time giving them pointers on the basics of simple things like compound interest and price to earnings ratios. You have less time to supervise the rest of the team, so the group’s performance as a whole suffers. As the year goes by and the approach of your evaluation looms, you worry that the least reliable workers in your division are going to be the focus of your superiors. After all, whenever you’ve gotten messages from the boss regarding your employees, it’s been about those underperforming ones and how he’d like to see them working as well as the rest of the team. They’re the ones he asks about in meetings. They’re the ones he usually meets with directly to alternately encourage or reprimand them.

Your evaluation is much as you anticipated. The successes of your productive team members are largely overlooked and your boss is adamant that your bottom 15% isn’t performing as well as it should. Even those employees who you’ve managed to improve significantly are less important than those who still languish at the bottom of the barrel. You try to explain that you’ve been working for months to try and get everyone at the same level, but with so many different abilities and levels of commitment among your employees, it’s impossible for everyone on your team to perform equally well. And with no recourse for removing the low performers, your profits suffered.

If this situation sounds normal to you, you must be a high school teacher in a public school. And some people may at this point out that comparing schools to businesses isn’t fair, since employees of companies are responsible adults and students in schools are children. The problem is, this comparison has become standard practice for state administrators and politicians, two groups with extensive classroom experience. As schools become more “results oriented,” they’ve taken on a more businesslike atmosphere. Productivity must always be rising, costs must be lowered, scores and student performance constantly improved. Anyone who reads the above story would agree: there’s little to be gained by trying to run a business like a school. I would argue that running a school like a business makes even less sense.

There are multiple reasons for this. Firstly, while profits can always be increased (ExxonMobil has basically proved that there is no upper limit on profits), test scores and class grades are capped at a stingy 100%. You just can’t get higher than that. And as the law of diminishing returns will tell you, it’s progressively harder to incrementally increase test averages. Going from a 62% to a 72% average is relatively simple compared with getting from an 88% to 98%, which, speaking as a former grade-grubber, is routinely hard to maintain even for just a single student. Actually, even that's simplifying it overmuch. I know students who couldn't get from a 62% to a 72% if their life depended on it.

That aside, there’s the uncanny ability of any profitable company to rid itself of unproductive employees. If your department's numbers aren’t up to par, you can always terminate your least productive employees. Entire divisions can be reshuffled if they’re not performing at the level that upper management has prescribed. Public schools are understandably discouraged from permanently removing students from the classroom, but one result of this policy is that there are large numbers of students who don’t want to be there, refuse to work while there or exhibit bad behavior as often as possible. Are we permitted to deal in any kind of permanent way with these students? Of course not. We can only suspend them, which really makes the whole getting-them-up-to-speed-with-the-rest-of-the-class thing kinda impossible.

Finally, to paraphrase a former Defense Secretary, you go to school with the students you have, not the students you want. While a supervisor or manager in the business world has the relative freedom to choose who gets hired and fired, teachers are just given a list of names. While potential employees are vetted and screened, public school students are mandated to represent all levels and abilities within their community. What's that? You're a sociopathic loner with a 75 IQ and a penchant for armed robbery? Why we've got plenty of room for you here in 10th grade! Wait, what's that? Your 24-year-old boyfriend knocked you up but you want to keep the baby because you'll "be 2getha 4evah?" Go for it! We'll be waiting for you to repeat the 9th grade when you get back. I'm sure your mother will provide adequate child care between her two jobs and your three younger siblings.

I'm not sure that people understand that we can't simply turn students away. These kids literally have no where else to go. That's why they hang around school for hours after classes are over. They'd rather not go back to their homes and deal with gangs, abusive parents and crime-ridden neighborhoods. Enlightened students aren’t widgets. We can’t just churn them out at an ever-increasing rate while lowering costs and increasing quality. Education takes time, effort, and a large amount of money to be effective. And the general public understands this at some level, or else no one would ever pay $130,000 to send their children to college. The frustration of every teacher boils down to being asked to do more with less: less time, less materials, less money, less individualized attention for each student in an over-stuffed classroom. So if you want to know why I’m pissed off when I get grief for my 89% passing rate*, there’s your answer.

*Why wasn’t it 95%? I have five students (out of 91) with more than 20 absences this semester alone. I’d have trouble passing a course if I only showed up three out of every five times. And I’m halfway intelligent.