I'm still not following. In a world where public institutions are under deep fiscal stress, the kinds of efficiency being demanded by those pushing for accountability and testing does two things... it provides metrics for the explicitly anti-quasi-socialist people running such institutions to measure who is most efficient, discipline those who are less efficient and intensify and speed-up the demands made on employees.
The problem as every critique of progressive scientism has pointed out is that the definition of efficiency is fundamentally flawed. The kinds of programs you are accepting define efficiency in short-term fiscal and financial terms and measure them by deeply flawed metrics.
If what is desired is an educational system that is efficient in the long run, it is going to cost a great deal more in the short run. If we are actually about teaching not only data and understanding but application, evaluation, synthesis, and creativity in critical, value-embedded and embodied ways then we do not need assessment tools that, in the most vulgar and quantitative ways, evaluate teacher effectiveness and student learning after each 14 week segment of discrete learning, we need more time, better resources and collegial training and we need students with more time, better resources and commitments to collaborative learning.
In the present environment, greater efficiency and productivity simply raises the bar, defines more colleagues as inefficient and substandard and contributes to the corporatization of schools, colleges and universities... processes that work exactly against the general and reproduction of the kinds of public space, public discourses and public values that undergird the kinds of genuinely quasi-socialist public institutions you value.
And, again, this is not to argue that teacher effectiveness, student learning and fiscal responsibility isn't important. It is to argue that what those things mean to almost all administrators, representatives and pundits is utterly wrongheaded and completely contradictory.
Alan
On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 2:17 PM, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> Max,
>
> I'm still not following. I understand that corporations strive for
> efficiencies to maximize profit. However, if we do things more efficiently
> in a public organization, it allows us to more prudently use public
> resources to contribute to the public good. I don't see the problem here as
> "efficiency"; the problem here is dismantling public organizations and
> privatizing them. Making public organizations more efficient does not help
> accomplish that right-wing political goal. In fact, if we make public
> organizations more effective and efficient, we demonstrate the benefits of
> production for the public good, and we can undermine political efforts of
> those who want to privatize our public organizations.
>
> What am I missing here? Shouldn't quasi-socialist public organizations
> like community colleges effectively and efficiently use resources?
>
> Miles
>
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>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319