In 1965 after graduating from high school I decided to take a job working on an assembly line in a small factory. The job paid more money than mowing lawns in my neighborhood and offered me the chance to work predictable hours indoors. Five of us worked on the small assembly line filling aerosol cans with various viscous products ranging from DW 30 oil to pancake batter. Because we had a small workforce, our jobs were not limited to a single task. We swept the floors, washed the windows, loaded the “product” into the vats on the assembly line that in turn filled the aerosol cans; we manually placed the small red tips on the aerosol cans and secured the plastic caps over the tops of the cans.
When I took this summer job I had no idea how relevant it would be for my first cooperative work-study assignment a year later at the Rouge Engine Plant at Ford Motor Co., in Dearborn, Mich., or my future career as a school administrator. My job at Ford as an industrial engineer trainee was to observe and analyze the tasks each employee performed assembling engines for various Ford products. I did this by observing the succession of manual tasks performed by the workers and scrupulously timing them to ensure that each employee’s work was optimized. It was quite a leap from the small factory in my hometown to the largest assembly line in the world. The Rouge Engine plant not only housed hundreds of workers on multiple assembly lines on three shifts, they employed scores of engineers who designed and managed the workflow, monitored the quality of the process, and constantly reviewed the process to make it more efficient.
Eight years later, as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, I read Education and the Cult of Efficiency, a thought-provoking book on the history of public education by Raymond Callahan. First published in 1962 following years of research, Callahan’s work described the period from 1900 through 1930 when school administrators began to think of themselves “as ‘school executives’ rather than scholars and educational philosophers.” The book described the consequences in this shift in thinking, which led administrators to conceive of schools as factories, teachers as assembly line workers, and students as “products.” With this framework in place, “school executives” developed “work standards,” “quality control metrics,” and work-flow requirements. As administrators replaced the language of academia with the language of business they began the relentless focus on fiscal efficiencies which, in turn, led to the creation of ever-larger consolidated school districts, the construction of ever-larger school buildings, and the movement to uniformity in schooling across the country. This obsession with efficiency subtly but consistently reinforced the notion that “schools are factories” and the notion that through the application of business principles it would be possible to provide a cost-effective means of teaching all children.
Callahan’s book predated the “accountability movement” that swept the nation’s public schools in the late 1970s when I was in graduate school, a movement that used standardized test scores as the primary “quality metric.” Following passage of No Child Left Behind legislation at the turn of the 21st century, every state in the union adopted test scores as a proxy for school quality and states passed laws requiring schools to achieve minimum test scores or face closure. Two decades later, despite no evidence that these laws have improved schools, they remain in place and serve as de facto state level curricula.
Callahan’s book also predated the late 21st century compulsion to measure “productivity” and “quality” through the collection of data in all phases of work. Technology makes it possible for the employers to account for every second of an employee’s time. While this close monitoring leads to fewer employee bathroom breaks and less time spent “off-task,” as a recent New York Times article by Jody Kanter and Arya Sundaram reports, this time tracking is often flawed and the micro-management that accompanies it corrodes the morale in organizations, particularly when it is applied to human services, caregiving and counseling. As one social worker supervisor lamented: “I found myself really struggling to explain to all my team members, master’s-level clinicians, why we were counting their keystrokes.”
Finally, Callahan’s book predated Big Data’s obsessive collection of information on how we spend our time, a key element of the “Quantify Everything Economy” described in a recent Times article by Shira Ovide. Presumably by limiting the time one “wastes” in idle thought, doing crossword puzzles or binging on Netflix, we will all be able to optimize our lives, for we all presumably view busy-ness and activity as the hallmarks of efficiency and a life well-led.
Neither of the Times’ articles mentioned the role computer-aided instruction (CAI) could play in the future of public education. CAI, which was becoming increasingly prevalent in schools before the pandemic, has emerged as a serious replacement for schooling. The town of Croydon recently adopted a budget based on the assumption that CAI would replace their K-4 school and CAI is the mainstay of many homeschooling programs that New Hampshire is willing to subsidize in lieu of “government schools.”
Were Callahan revisiting his thesis about the efficient operation of public schools today, he would see CAI as the ultimate endgame for the factory school. It tracks and monitors the time students spend on their work and provides customized lessons to match the student’s skills and interests with minimal overhead.
The cult of efficiency has not disappeared, But, as noted throughout this essay, efficiency in schools and human services can only be achieved though metrics that are objective, relatively easy and inexpensive to administer, and therefore require less manpower.
It is far easier, faster, and cheaper to measure the keystrokes in a counseling session than to determine the long term effectiveness of multiple counseling sessions.
As applied to schools and any job that requires a human touch, the cult of efficiency has taken much of the creativity and joy out of work with its coldly objective focus on standardized test results or time-on-task. The obsession with efficiency and technology is corroding work culture and contributing to the Great Resignation.
If we hope to change the work culture in the future we will need to re-think our obsession with efficiency, for efficiency is the enemy of joy.
Wayne Gersen lives in Etna.