.6 Efficiency and Effectiveness


I often talk about communities not having the right to a bad education. There are communities that deliberately have bad special education programs so as to discourage parents with special education kids from coming to those schools. There are retirement communities that have bad schools so that they will have very few students come to their community to live. And there are those who just want to have lower taxes. I would argue that no community has the right to a bad education, they don't only suffer the consequences themselves, but they inflict that consequence on all the school districts where their kids move, and families and kids move a lot. A student may move to a community as a junior in high school - then when she graduates from that high school, that community is either praised or blamed for the performance of that student when that community only educated that student for 2 out of 12 years. Mobility is also one of the biggest reasons why no community has a right to bad education. We'll talk about that more
when we talk about mobility as one of the barriers to effective education.


The final thing that I want to talk about in accountability is the confusion of efficiency and effectiveness. Because I think this fouls up accountability. These are not independent concepts. There are people who really believe that you can be efficient without being
effective.

Wrong.

You have to be effective first before you can be efficient. Referring to the diagram, efficiency is the smaller circle and effectiveness becomes the big circle. We can say that efficiency is a subset within effectiveness. In other words you can be effective without being efficient but if you are efficient you already have been effective. This is the relationship between the two. Some people get confused and think for example that large group instruction is efficient but is not effective. Well, large group instruction is efficient at teaching in large groups, and it's also effective at teaching in large groups. Large group instruction may not be effective in terms of what people learn, but then it is not efficient in what they learn either. The confusion comes from a change in reference points. You say it's efficient on one dimension and not effective on another, that's just a confusion.

To really understand the relationship between efficiency and effectiveness, you have to understand that to be effective is the prerequisite to being efficient. That you cannot be efficient without being effective first. This is a very important concept to understand, because as a teacher, I would argue that you want kids to be efficient in their learning as well as effective. You want them to learn as easily as possible. I think accountability should be for efficiency as well as for effectiveness. This is one of the problems of current educational systems.

I would argue that you want kids to be efficient, this is where I come with wanting kids to study the least amount. I want kids to get an A if they can do so reasonably and it makes sense to them and they feel empowered by it. Otherwise let them get a B and let the B stand as both the effective level that they want and then they figure out how efficiently they must study in order to get the results that they want. To be efficient you must first be effective at the same goal and efficiency is a proper goal only after effectiveness is achieved. So this is the take on efficiency and effectiveness. We've covered an awful lot of territory today. And I wanted to go back and kind of review some of the major concepts. Now the major concepts are professionalism in terms of grading practices, professionalism in terms of decision making, excepting responsibility for the grades that you give and the procedures you come up with. And I just can't underline that enough that professional accountability is what is needed and what is lacking.



Is it possible to be efficient without being effective?

If Mr. Parker is teaching an eleventh-grade English class that has 40 students in it, how can he effectively and efficiently discuss a book that is required reading to the entire group?