An industry it may be, but is it a 'business'? That certainly seems to be the assumption in much of the training of teachers.
Having recently undertaken teacher training after spending three decades as a business journalist (with a particular focus on management), it quickly became apparent to me that much of the language in both the teacher training courses, and the administration within schools, bears an eerie resemblance to the language of business management.
Phrases like 'intersections of pools of knowledge and expertise', 'distilling vision, strategies and solutions that can be shared/owned and driven by stakeholders' and 'ensuring quality assurance standards are maintained across the delivery spectrum' abound.
Allowing such a flimsy discipline as management to co-opt an area as important as education is as absurd as it is saddening. Education has been with us for thousands of years and encompasses some of the most profound thinking the civilisation has produced. Management thinking has been with us for a few decades and has accomplished next to nothing.
Indeed, the only distinct insight management thinkers have ever come up with that survives any reasonable scrutiny is Total Quality Management (TQM). This is an insight about randomness within any repetitive system (which most industrial systems and businesses are). It shows that if the potential for randomness is removed from the system, quality standards can be met without any additional cost.
TQM is excellent for producing cars. But it is almost entirely useless in education. Worse, TQM's spin-off, known as Quality Assurance (QA), the version that is heavily used in education administration, has been largely shown to be ineffective and more likely to increase costs and inefficiency.
Whereas TQM relies on workplace democracy — workers are encouraged to find ways of removing randomness from the system and acting early if there is a problem — QA is despotic, relying on increasing quality checks and treating workers as a problem to be solved.
The main reason business management methods will never properly work in education is that in marketplaces, quality is always decided by the consumer, the receiver. That, indeed, has proved to be the limitation of TQM in business. The producer may be able to create a low-cost quality product, but in the end it is the customer who decides whether it is worth buying or not.
In education, it is the reverse. The determination of quality necessarily resides with the producer, the teacher. The student, by definition, does not know. Thus education is in no meaningful sense like business, and the more a business-based logic is imposed — such as treating the student as a 'consumer' — the less it will be true education.
Using student (customer) surveys to determine a teacher's performance, for example, is, in educational terms, plainly ridiculous — a student may like a teacher for giving them a good mark that they did not deserve, for example. Yet that increasingly is what decides the fate of teachers at tertiary institutions.
The growing use of business logic and jargon in education is not just vaguely comic — many teachers I met were only too keen to ridicule it, and nearly all regarded the new management methods as being an impediment to their practice of teaching — it is deeply insidious.
The proliferation of MBA-trained managers in education is probably one reason for this state of affairs. Another is an academic commonality between management and education departments.
One of the curiosities about teacher training is that it is classified as a social science; that is where it sits in the Dewey Decimal System. Why, one asks, is an activity that precedes social science by thousands of years classified in this way? Why is it not considered part of philosophy, for example?
The reason is probably that John Dewey was himself a social scientist, at a time when the discipline seemed to hold out more hope than it does now. In any case, it has led to an unhappy co-existence between teacher training and management theory.
Management thinking has come up with very little that is distinct, but management schools have absorbed some of the methods and research of social science. Indeed, otherwise unemployable social scientists have often been able to get work in business schools.
For the most part, business people are unconvinced by these social science methods, because they do not consistently work in the market place. But the social science aspect of management thinking does segue neatly with the social science bias of education.
This does not bode well for teaching practice. The methods of TQM and elimination of randomness might usefully be applied to back office work and administration. But when used in the actual practice of teaching, the effects will be disastrous.