Texas schools are like Enron

From the Houston Chronicle:

Enron and Texas schools both structured a system of rewards and punishment for executives and staff based on "a single indicator of success."

For Enron, it was the price of stock.

Stock price was so important that more fundamental values were sacrificed to it. Such as actually making money.

The pressure to "do deals" so as to book optimistic future profits led to doing bad deals.

The pressure to get good publicity so as to boost stock prices led to vastly exaggerating the prospects of new operations, such as "broadband marketing."

The pressure to hide losses and loans led to the establishment of off-the-books entities.

All the above led to the collapse of the company and, in some cases, to prison.

McNeil makes a strong case that Texas schools, like Enron, subvert their basic mission to score well on the only measure that counts: the TAKS test.

Click here for the rest.

No surprise here.

This analysis really just serves as yet more proof that the entire educational system is simply a system. That is to say, the goal, which ostensibly is to educate children, is far less important than than the overall structure of the institution known as public education. As I have pointed out before, that structure is historically militaristic in nature: both teachers and students are steeped in a socially constructed culture of obedience and authority. From that point of view, the high stakes TAKS test amounts to nothing more than the proverbial drill sergeant's order to dig a hole and then fill it up again. Everybody in the system is so focused on passing the test, in other words, following orders, that learning becomes an utterly secondary concern.

One might even go so far as to say that learning is of no concern at all.

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