*Triumph of the School as Factory

It has been well over a century since this nation, state by state, embarked on the breathtakingly ambitious venture of providing universal publicly funded schooling for every child in the nation. The costs of this endeavor quickly proved to be extraordinarily burdensome. So state after state and school district after school district decided to fulfill this dream in as cost effective a manner as possible. The consequence was a relentless push for efficiency. What resulted was public schools modeled on factories with an emphasis on mass production and cost-effectiveness.

Today’s public schools remain factories. In fact, the organization and management that typifies the most unenlightened factories is now so common as to go unrecognized. Management is top-down. The federal government sets basic rules. State government implements them while adding many more. School boards then make decisions based on these federal and state rules plus their fiscal and political realities. The superintendent executes the will of the board. Principals tell teachers what to do and when to do it; and they, in turn, direct the youngsters in similar manner.

Sometimes this industrial approach produces monstrous results. A past Superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, for example, boasted to the press that she knew what was happening in every classroom in the city at any given moment. That was her factory foreman's fantasy. What was actually happening was administratively induced milling-about because the standardized, teacher-proof factory style curriculum was incapable of accommodating vital individual and small group differences. 

For instance, second grade teachers were forbidden to use anything other than second grade readers and the canned lesson of the day even if some of those second grade kids still couldn’t read. Similarly, seventh grade math teachers were forced to ‘teach’ algebra to kids who couldn’t even do fractions or long division. None of this made sense at the classroom level. But at administrative level this ill-conceived standardization was the fulfillment of a factory manager's dream.

With such superintendents, classroom teacher autonomy, freedom and choice are non-existent,priorities. The education industry is focused on standardization, teacher proofing and measured outcomes. We should also remember that there is a powerful new restriction on autonomy, freedom, choice, and democracy in schooling. With its emphasis on measurable results, quality control, instrumental and extrinsic motivations, atomization and fragmentation of knowledge, No Child Left Behind represents the near total triumph of factory model schooling in contemporary America. In short, the whole weight of the federal government arc welds the school as factory in place as never before.

To examine these issues further, see articles at www.newfoundations.com