Fordism by Fiat

Fordism by Fiat

(on the disorganisation of effective schooling)[1]

David Hamilton

Department of Education

University of Liverpool

Liverpool L69 3BX

United Kingdom

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web site:

'The principle object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employé (sic)'

(F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911, p. 9)

fiat

(Latin: let it be done)

'The greatest happiness of the greatest possible number’ introduces a distributive principle: each person is to count for one, and nobody for more than one. And questions of right and wrong turn upon the distribution, as well as the amount, of the pleasure to be produced.

(K. Britton, John Stuart Mill: Life and Philosophy, 1969, p.55)

This paper is a just-in-time coda to an essay review published earlier this year (Hamilton, 1996). My review focused on Key Characteristics of Effective Schools, an OFSTED-funded digest of school effectiveness research prepared at the London University Institute of Education (Sammons, Hillman & Mortimore, 1995). On that occasion, I concentrated on shortcomings in the reviewers' logic and argumentation; and my overall judgment was expressed in the title of my review: 'Peddling feel-good fictions'. On this occasion, I would like to widen my view and consider the recent upsurge of interest in 'effective schooling' as a managerialist, social engineering or fordist solution to a technical problem socially created by recent legislation.

Revised thinking about the economics of schooling prefigured this new interest. Schooling was not longer to be validly theorised as a site of public investment. Instead, a powerful political lobby proposed that it should be organised, managed and administered as a locus of private consumption. By such means, schooling would be exposed to the freedom of the market place and the discipline of performance indicators. Research on effective schooling - of the kind summarised in the original OFSTED review and, more recently, in Worlds Apart? (Reynolds & Farrell, 1996), an OFSTED review of international surveys of educational achievement - has become part of the same reform initiative. The political intention is to create new drive systems that will enhance the productivity of national school systems as well as more local units of production.

Historically, the notion of a drive system stems from the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, a time-served mechanical engineer. While working for the Midvale and Bethlehem Steel Companies in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Taylor devised new systems of industrial production that, in their turn, influenced the re-tooling of the Ford Motor Company just before the First World War (see, for example, Taylor, 1911, Callahan, 1961, Braverman, 1974). Taylor's premise, as subsequently expressed in the introduction to The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) was that what 'Mr Roosevelt refers to as a lack of "national efficiency"' arises, among other things, from 'wastes (sic) of human effort' (p. 5). Taylor’s ideas about drive systems and scientific management found their expression in many forms, from the redesign of workshops and factories to the promulgation of piece rates and new contracts of employment.

More than 60 year later, these Taylorist positions are revisited by Reynolds and Farrell. The inefficiency of English schooling arises, they suggest, from its 'complex pedagogy', the associated 'lack of goal clarity' and the resultant 'dissipation of teacher effort' (p. 58). The English classroom has 'the "constant" of the teacher for perhaps only 20% of lesson time'. As a result children are 'thrown back', for much of their lesson time, onto 'their own internal resources' or those of their 'achievement differentiated group' (p. 57). The net result is that English schooling is diagnosed as suffering from 'schools of clearly heterogeneous quality' (p. 57). In other words, it does not conform to the commodification, centralisation and intensification of production supposedly found among the UK's economic competitors.

Recent school effectiveness research, therefore, comes as part of a national efficiency (even eugenic) package. It is bundled with national and institutional league tables of performance, MBAs in education, the establishment of a centrally-funded, Centre for Research in Educational Marketing (Southampton University), the centralisation of teacher training (e.g. at the Open University), and the related development of segregated, management training of promoted teachers. All of these are part of a government-inspired and centrally-funded exercise to transfer by fiat drive systems from one sector of the economy to another.

In general, I have no objection to the free circulation or cross-fertilisation of production processes. Likewise, I have few problems with the notion that schools are centres of production. But I become a little hesitant when such circulation is constrained by the utilitarian - or greatest happiness of the greatest number - philosophy of recent school effectiveness thinking. School effectiveness research is utilitarian because it builds upon aggregate measures ( e.g. 'GCSE results, class sizes, attendance figures, costs per pupil'). These, in turn, become become surrogates - or 'proxy' (DES, 1991, p. 23) - for the greater (national) good.

This approach to school performance and national efficincy, however, suffers from at least two chronic deficiencies. First, it is open to manipulation - as when John Gray suggested, in a session at BERA95, that the easiest way for a school to boost its ratings is to poach high scorers from its competitors. Local productivity is boosted without, logically, having any impact on national productivity. Secondly, resort to aggregates makes school effectiveness research vulnerable to the so-called 'ecological fallacy' (Robinson, 1950); that is, where correlations between aggregate measures are extrapolated to the performance of individuals. The claim, for instance, that high-rated schools are attended by high-scoring individuals is undermined not only by variations in the distribution of individual scores (the ecological fallacy) but also by the fact that outlier scores, by design or default, may not have been entered into the calculation. Either way, illegitimate inferences may be made about the performance of individual pupils and teachers.

Put another way, school effectiveness research privileges the productivity of institutions over the performance (or change scores) of individuals. Accordingly, the promotion of school effectiveness thinking may be counterproductive within a school. Tension may arise, for instance, between institutional managers (and governors) - newly inducted into the mysteries of institutional performance indicators - and teachers (and parents) whose attention - for example, in respect of learners with special needs (see Lloyd, 1996, p. vii) - may fall preferentially upon criteria for individual performance that are not part of the 'long-term vision' and 'agenda for action' of that institution's 'School Development Plan' (DES, 1989, p. 4). What, then, might this within-school tension mean for the 'shared vision and goals' and its subcategories (viz.'unity of purpose', 'consistency of practice' and 'collegiality and collaboration') - one the key characteristics identified in the OFSTED/London Institute review (p. 8)?

To conclude: at the outset, I suggested that, like most conference presentations, this is a just in time paper. But a more profound sense of 'just in time' has also animated its preparation. I believe there are signs - e.g. the rapprochement symbolised in the co-authorship of a paper by Harvey Goldstein and Kate Myers (1996) - that OFSTED- and OECD-sponsored school effectiveness research is approaching its epistemological sell-by date. How much longer, I wonder, will its current rationale remain on the programme of academic conferences? And how long will it take before educationists return to the issues, raised nearly 80 years ago by John Adams, one time Director of the London University Institute of Education?

John Adams discussed F.W. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1911) shortly after its original appearance. He recognised its challenge. 'We have before us, at a somewhat higher stage', he wrote in 1912, 'the science of pig-iron handling'. But, unlike Taylor, Adams was also aware of the distributative complications associated with the utilitarian ethic. 'Perhaps the most important problem (he wrote) in the education theory of the future is the place the teacher is to occupy' (1912, p. 379).

References

Adams, J. (1912) The evolution of educational theory. London:

Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and monopoly capitalism: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Britton, K. (1969) John Stuart Mill: Life and Philosophy (2nd ed.), Nw York: Dover.

Callahan, R. (1962) Education and the cult of efficiency. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

DES (Department of Education and Science).(1989) Planning for school development (advice to Governors, Headteachers and Teachers). London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

DES (Department of Education and Science).(1991) Development Planning: A practical guide (advice to Governors, Headteachers and Teachers). London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

Goldstein, H. & Myers, K. (1996) Freedom of information: Towards a code of ethics for performance indicators. Research Intelligence (BERA Newsletter), No. 57 (July), 12-16.

Hamilton, D. (1996) 'Peddling feel-good fictions', Forum, 38 (2), 54-56.

Lloyd, G. (ed), "Knitting progress unsatisfactory": Gender and special issues in education. Edinburgh: Moray House Institute of Education, 1996.

Reynolds, D. & Farrell, S. (1996) Worlds Apart?: a review of international surveys of educational achievement involving England. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

Robinson, W.S. (1950) Ecological correlation and the behavior of individuals. American Sociological Review, 15, 351-7.

Sammons, P., Hillman, J., & Mortimore, P. (1995) Key characteristics of effective schools: A review of school effectiveness research. London: OFSTED.

Taylor, F.W. (1911) The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper.

(the end)

[1] Paper presented at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association, Lancaster,