John Dewey and the Cult of Efficiency

• In Event: Deweyan Perspectives on Standardization, Accountability, and Assessment in Contemporary Education

Abstract

At the core of standardization and accountability is what, after Callahan, I call the cult of efficiency. Those familiar with the history of American education know the conflict that developed between efficiency and a scientific approach to measurement of student achievement, and some of the core beliefs of progressive education, relying on Pestalozzian and Froehbelian views of the importance of student interests and paying attention to the whole child’s education. I show that efficiency, standardization, and accountability have been part of mass public education’s design since the early 1900s and have stayed with us. Dewey noted that the durability of these ideas are related to the dominance of science as a crowning achievement. One might ask, since science has led to so many improvements in daily lives through technological developments, why wouldn’t we be intent on applying scientific methods to educating our youth? Science helps us to become efficient by focusing on what is essential and finding ways to abet growth along essential lines. But for Dewey and others, efficiency and understanding how things work well and together come after attending to the spark of innovation, creativity, and innovation in schools by the teacher and child.
Simply put for Dewey, efficiency and standardization have a place when we are looking at the mechanics of administering schools. The old cliché that administrators deal with “busses, beans, and budgets” is apt, as schools need to have transportation, food, and the finances to support the enterprise of learning in schools. Abraham Maslow understood that a roof over one’s head is prior and necessary to learning algebra or certainly for “self-actualization.” Dewey noted what prompted the genesis for this panel, namely, that a zeal for mechanical elements of schooling seeps over into halting or damaging the creative elements. Again, Maslow may be instructive analogously in that the provision of shelter and food requires skills that do not translate well into intellectual pursuits.
Dewey points to a different form of evaluation, based on what he saw as the free and creative acts and the responses to the needs of individual students that are at the core of good teaching. This type of evaluation is formative and qualitative, rather than summative and quantitative, and is employed by teachers as they evaluate student performance. This performance is variable and expressive of individual students, and teachers, by their association with others also involved in such discernments about students, form a “community of practice” where shared observations give structure to this kind of evaluation. Yet Dewey goes beyond contemporary accounts of expertise and mastery by linking accountability to “moral responsibility in a community.” This is a non-hierarchical communal set of ties a professional community has that call members to their best and most responsible actions. Here responsibility is suffused throughout an organization, so that each teacher feels responsible to uphold excellence in instruction for the benefit of the whole. The motivation comes from within, not imposed by external administrative or “blue-ribbon” commission standards.

Author

• Leonard J. Waks, Temple University