Competition vs. Collaboration

Public Education Matters

2.23.02

Competition vs Collaboration in Education.

This afternoon I re-tweeted a link to an article “Competition Can’t Beat Collaboration” http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2010/02/competition_cant_beat_collabor.html I hope you’ll click on the link and read it for yourself, but if you don’t, I am going to share part of it with you below.

I believe this is an important topic right now as our educational “leaders” are pinning so much of their reform hopes on the motivation of competition. We have Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” and we have various people touting the merits of merit pay, vouchers, and charter schools, among other things. We have public denouncements of tenure for teachers and teachers’ unions who are blamed for much including the keeping of “deadbeats” or “laggard instructors” as someone who re-tweeted my earlier tweet commented.

And to all these people- I want to say “STOP!” “Please stop and think this through before you start jumping on bandwagons and picking up torches!” I want to tell them “All that glitters is NOT gold.”

So today, I’ll begin by I want telling you an amusing little story about being a parent. Perhaps every parent in our country has “suffered” through “the Science Fair project.” So have I. One year my son was at a loss for an idea for a project, but he was very interested in sports. It was the height of the Michael Jordan era and “we” were all about “being the best” and winning. Me, personally, I am all about the study of people or psychology, so I combined those interests and asked my son if he’d like to do an experiment on the effects of competition. The question being “Does the striving to be better than you were before, or better than others, and the best you can be actually cause you to be better?” And we set up a little experiment to find out.

Now I will admit that I am no scientist. But I do understand the principle of trying to control variables so as not to cast doubt on your results and we did the best we could to make the experiment as “pure” as possible to test our hypothesis. Our hypothesis was “Competition will make you perform better.”

And well, when things were all said and done and the data was examined and charted and tabled on the old poster board, my son was quite a disappointed little scientist. In fact he thought he was a failure as a scientist because our hypothesis wasn’t proven. It was discounted by our data. Our subjects did not get better in the competitive trials, they got WORSE. All of our subjects got worse. Our hypothesis seemed to be 100% wrong.

And I can’t really say that if the little homespun experiment were repeated that the results would be the same. We never followed up. We just took our project to the Fair (where we didn’t win) and then forgot about it. I hope that someone out there has or is or will pick up this research. However, even IF our results prove to be a fluke and IF it is actually true that competition begets improvement (which I truly doubt) there is another aspect to competition, as it would apply to education, that bothers me. It’s that in any competition- there are winners and there are losers. And in education, I’m afraid that actually planning for some children to be losers is just unacceptable to me. And I think it should be unacceptable to everyone, including politicians and legislators and our president and our education secretary and the business people who seem to be driving this competitive movement.

I think all children should be able to win “gold medals” when it comes to education. To me that’s what public education should be about. ALL CHILDREN WINNING.

So let’s talk about vouchers and charter schools. Seriously, do the math, there aren’t enough charter schools or vouchers for every child, so what becomes of the children left behind, the losers? Even if the theory that competition will drive improvement in the public schools, or if it were actually true that charter schools or voucher placements were better; (and I dare you to actually find unbiased research that proves this true over time when achievement is compared fairly) to wait for the public schools with “diminished” dollars to get up to speed would “lose” at least a generation of children. This is not acceptable to me and I believe there is a better way that we could put into effect right now if we weren’t all too busy trying to jump through hoops and race each other for educational dollars. A few blogs back, I cited an article “Scholars Identify 5 Keys to Urban Success” regarding what things have been proven to affect achievement for students. (I hope you’ll go back and read it. http://publiceducationmatters.blogspot.com/2010/01/studying-school-improvement.html)
Competition for pay or for resources was not at all involved. Collaboration and cooperation was.

Now I’d like to touch on the issues of merit pay and competition between educators more directly. Here is where I’m going to paste from the article in the link that is at the beginning of this post, because while I was trying to put together my thoughts on this, I happened to read the article cited above. And while I am maybe not as charitable in my thoughts towards business leaders, I do believe the author Anthony Cody says it all much better than I could. The central metaphor he is speaking about is the nation’s current attempt at educational reform, “Race to the Top.”

“So why is it that the central metaphor for education reform has become a competitive race?

Race to the Top has been defined as a competition - starting with its name, and in the means by which states "win" the rivalry for the best and most innovative grant proposals.

The most trendy innovations focus on strategies that reward individual teachers for their performance - or punish them for their students' low scores. Once again, competition is supposed to drive reform.

Charter schools, which offer educators a worthwhile opportunity to innovate, have been touted as forcing public schools to compete for students and tax dollars. Unfortunately, although some are outstanding, they have not yielded the results that were predicted, and recent reports indicate there are huge obstacles that are likely to prevent them from scaling up to meet the promises that are being made for them.

The central innovation of which the Duncan administration is most proud is that it has replaced the clumsy stick wielded by the Bush administration with the clever carrot of one-time funding.

Teachers may be disinclined to compete with one another, but leaders at the state departments of education have had no qualms about doing whatever it takes to please the master dangling the carrot.

It is probably not a coincidence that this overwhelming drive to compete comes at a time when corporations have assumed a huge influence over education policy. This influence comes in three forms. First of all, corporations control large parts of the public discourse through ownership and editorial control of the media. This could be seen rather clumsily last week when Dean Millot was censored for raising questions about the integrity of the Race to the Top process. It is also seen in the general slant of most coverage of education issues, which widely embraces the condemnation of public schools as abject failures. Secondly, corporations have greatly disproportionate influence over our elected officials, through the legalized bribery system of campaign donations. This has been expanded recently by the Supreme Court decision rendering free speech rights to corporations. Lastly, corporate philanthropists such as Bill Gates have figured out that strategic investments of millions of dollars can powerfully swing public policies, redirecting billions of public dollars in the desired direction.

I am not one who believes this is all about corporations trying to make money off the public schools. I think Bill Gates and many of the others supporting these efforts genuinely believe their outlook will result in better outcomes for students. Most of these guys have tons of money and they do not need to make a buck this way.

But that doesn't mean their perspective is going to work in our schools.

Corporations are driven by the need to compete for profit. Success is achieved when we outsmart our rivals in the marketplace, when we work harder, innovate, and compete to win. It is not surprising that when people successful in this field turn their minds over to the task of improving schools, they apply the lessons they have learned in their work.

They accuse teachers of resisting their solutions because we are selfish and lazy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The solutions we seek are not selfish, but are based in our ethics of cooperation and mutual benefit. We want to expand learning for all of our students, by working to support one another through collaboration, not competition. We are not seeking to prove that we are better than our rival teachers, to eke out an extra thousand dollar bonus for better test scores. We do not want to set up selective schools that take the academic cream off the top of the public schools. We are choosing to work in these public schools not because it is an easy road. Anyone who walks in a teacher's shoes will know this profession is not for slackers.
Rather than fighting against this deep-seated ethical grain, education reformers must learn to work with it. We need reforms that expand the time teachers have to collaborate, to compare student work, to share lessons and reflect on how well they worked. Our schools are often compared unfavorably to those in Finland and elsewhere. But those schools do not rely on merit pay to motivate teacher performance. They DO give teachers significantly more time to collaborate and learn together.

The spirit of innovation and creativity inspired by the desire to compete and excel is a productive part of our culture. Good teachers tap into these impulses to build motivation among their students. There should be ways that great teachers are recognized and rewarded - this mustn't be an all or nothing battle. But we need a greater balance in the direction we pursue, and the desire among teachers to learn together should be recognized as the powerful force for improvement that it is. “

I hope that this excerpt provides you with some food for thought. I sure would hope that Bill Gates, and Arne Duncan, and my state’s school superintendent, Tony Bennett would race to read it and then stop and give it all some thought as well.