I've recently read an auricle by Tracey Kolenchuk about the way bureaucratic ideas control modern medicine.
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I thought it might be fun to try and play with a parallel comparison about how bureaucracy impacts on our modern education system following the model proposed by Kolenchuk.
Kolenchuk defines bureaucracy as a process that administers humans as if they were things that can be managed in quantitative ways, relying on statistics and rules to make decisions.
In that sense, medicine deals in disease not health, and diseases are subject to treatments.
Treatments often address the symptoms of an illness rather than the cause.
We take cold and flu tablets to help us manage the congestion, aches and pains associated with a cold or flu but these do not address the cause of our symptoms so we may get a lot sicker (despite managing the symptoms), even fatally ill in the case of some influenzas.
Kolenchuk calls this symptomicine work - we focus on managing the symptoms and lose sight of the cause, whereas a focus on the cause may lessen the risk of serious outcomes.
It seems to me there is a clear parallel in education: we focus on the achievement gaps between different children and fail to invest in programmes that might eliminate the causes of these gaps.
We spend money on remedial work in schools, we focus on keeping children in school till they complete Year 12, and we focus on training teachers (pre-service and in-service) to teach children in ways that enable children to "catch up".
We focus on the achievement gaps between different children and fail to invest in programmes that might eliminate the causes of these gaps.
We put much less effort into looking at our society and figuring out what causes these gaps in achievement so that we can work to prevent them.
In recent years there has been some effort put into early childhood and family support initiatives (Closing the Gap for Indigenous children for example) but much of this is tokenistic.
We still expect families to provide an appropriate home learning environment for their young children in the years before school, and we label parents who struggle to do that as inadequate.
The alternative is to create a system of parental supports that ensure every child lives in a supportive learning environment in their homes.
We might do that through much more effective parental leave provisions, family support programmes, income support programmes and make resources available to enable our communities to be much more family friendly.
Kolenchuk talks about the way bureaucracy makes it impossible to share stories of cures: cures in medicine are individual case studies of something that worked for a particular patient.
In the bureaucratic world where numbers are so important, one cured patient is simply anecdotal evidence and therefore totally unimportant.
Medical journals are now much less likely to publish these case studies so stories of cures are not shared.
What is shared in great detail are treatments offered to large numbers of patients, and the percentage of symptom remissions, none of which helps an individual doctor talking to individual patients about their illness and potential prognoses.
The parallel in bureaucratic education seems to me to be that quality teaching and student learning is increasingly being defined as that which is identified by accrediting bodies (or others) and delivered in a standardised manner. Innovative teaching, if it is not prescribed and described, defined and counted, cannot by definition, be quality, even if it results in amazing student learning.
In recent times quality teaching in higher education, even online, has been defined by bureaucrats (many without any educational qualifications) as synchronous small group interactions.
In other words even when students chose to study online (usually because they cannot make the commitment to attend a class at the same time every week) they are expected to attend a live-time small group tutorial throughout the trimester.
Any other delivery model is no longer considered quality teaching despite large amounts of evidence of the efficacy of other methods of creating online learning communities.
Standardisation rules, which means learners not able to benefit from a one-size-fits-all approach are disadvantaged and the achievement gap widens, creating more space for those who offer pre-packaged, standardised interventions (at a cost of course).