DennisSzilak
Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 3
Location: Toledo, OH USA
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 Posted: Wed Jun 27, 2007 11:46 am Post subject: Control out of Control |
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When heart rhythm is somewhat chaotic, and it dances between different rhythmic states, this is an indication of health, but when it becomes consistent, its an indicator of impending death. The same is true of the brain; when its impulses become totally regular, this is known as an epileptic seizure.
The emphasis and weight given to exams at basic levels of language instruction are an obstacle to instruction. All forms of quality control or assessment rubrics necessarily damage instruction by taking time away from class preparation and the production of instructional resources. Some forms of control do incidental damage, many of them do much more. The assessment controls for many writing exams are an example. One exam paper takes a handful of entries. A set of 50 exam papers may take over 1,000 entries, none of which contribute to instructional development. Multiplication of controls are, to put it politely, organizational auto-stimulation, which exists only to serve controllers. Authority corrupts, we must always remember, regardless of its reach and it does not take as much as absolute authority to corrupt absolutely. A little goes a long way.
The proliferation of educational assessments and evaluations belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing, he explains,
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| ... the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. |
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of testing and valuation policies that waste resources to do the wrong things right.
Instructional central planning doesn't - can't � work because delivery of instruction is primarily local and contingent upon factors of place and personality, which are too numerous and too changeable to be systematized. But, that never stops people trying. The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally.
In educational administration, expectation is, if not everything, an amplifier for both good and ill. Inherent in command and control is the assumption that human beings can't be trusted on their own to do what's needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists - and the robotic overtone is I told you so. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized testing, less emphasis on evaluation and less administrative interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all. |
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