Defining Productivity Down
By Martin Harris 

Because "School Planning & Management" is a trade publication widely read throughout the public education system, you should be able to find the May issue at your nearby friendly Principal’s office. In it (the magazine, not the office) you’ll find an article entitled "Classroom Technology Enhances Productivity", which describes at length the Information Technology investments being made at the Don Estridge High Tech Middle School in Boca Raton, FL. in pursuit of that noble goal; it talks about IP telephony and LCD ceiling-mounted projectors, sound-field saturation systems and biometric systems. You can get some sense of the focus of the article from this little quote: "one productivity tool is our locking system. Doors lock and unlock at class changes for security," says Assistant Principal Michael McCurdy. He continues with an assertion about "having a world-class faculty with high standards, and having the expectation and belief that students can meet and even exceed those standards", but he doesn’t say anything about how the students’ achievements with respect to those standards are measured, or how educational productivity (beyond hands-off door-locking) is measured and how standards have been met or exceeded. 

In that respect it reminded me of an educational meeting I attended back in the early ‘80’s, deep in the basement of the Middlebury Inn, where the subject was "measuring educational productivity, performance, and quality standards in the classroom." It turned out that such quantitative criteria as the number of student seats in the room, the lineal feet of chalkboard, and the lighting level in foot-candles at desk level were the standards of productivity, performance, and quality, and mention of student achievement was distinctly absent. 

SP&M writer Ellen Kollie gets off to a poor start by describing this High Tech Middle School building as the original "skunk works", confusing the building, which was originally an IBM computer design facility, with an aerospace research facility in Burbank California. While the term "skunk works" has slowly come to mean cutting-edge research of any type anywhere, it originally defined not the Palm Beach County birthplace of the IBM personal computer in the late ‘70’s, but rather the Los Angeles County birthplace of the XP-80, a then highly-advanced jet plane being designed for the Air Force by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation starting in 1943. More importantly, her article carefully avoids (as did Principal McCurdy) the basic question: how do schools define productivity? 

For the last quarter century or more, two answers have been floated. One has been the "school solution" (forgive the pun) a.k.a. the official definition, such as I saw first hand back then and still see today in such articles as "Classroom Technology Enhances Productivity" and isn’t quantified in any measure of cost and inputs on the school side against achievement and proficiency on the student side. The other has been a more traditional measure of productivity: what outputs (student learning) have been accomplished against what inputs in terms of staff per pupil or cost per pupil or test scores versus spending levels or even total cost per successful proficient graduate. The school solution measures lineal feet of chalkboard as a quality standard, while others --Caroline Hoxby, Harvard education researcher, for example-- measure units of achievement output against units of cost input, and how these have changed over time. 

Ms. Hoxby’s conclusion is that "educational productivity fell by approximately 42 percent between 1970-71 and 1998-99" when measured by spending (input) vs NAEP reading test scores (output). You can read her comments for yourself on the website of School Reform News, a monthly publication of the Heartland Institute. Note that such quantitative productivity measures aren’t based on the presence or absence of electronic door locks, as in Boca Raton, or the presence or absence of generous amounts of chalkboard, as I heard some Vermont educators declaim, in the Middlebury Inn basement, many years ago, when test scores were somewhat  higher and annual per pupil costs a whole lot lower than they are today.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights