Hands Off Please, Mr. Minister

After following @USEdGov for a while, I noticed that Mr. Duncan and his colleagues travel a lot, as much as their counterparts in China, I would say. You can check here to see all the visits of federal edu administrators national trips and their agenda.

Now let us do a little mind work, imagine the settings below for a new trip Mr. Duncan has to do:

1. The US Ed Min decided to do a national evaluation of all higher ed institutions' qualities (on teaching, researching, internal management, services, etc.). All institutions, private or public, 2 year or 4 year, on/offline, all mandated to participate in this campaign and the funding and federal aid their students can get depends on their final rankings.

2. Given the funding incentive above, all institutions are "forced" to respond to this upcoming check.

3. A committee is formed at the federal level with "experts" on educational assessment, they will be traveling around and check out each institute's status.

Now, assume there is a university X, they have 3 different dining halls on campus, all outsourced to professional catering services, all priced their average meal at $5. This is what is gonna happen when a ranking-related "national check" is coming:

1. Someone heard that the baseline score on "services to students/ dining" is $3/meal available on campus, the more expensive the meal, the less score you get.

2. After learning about the above "insider information" about the benchmark for ranking, University X decided to end the contract with one of the three catering companies, so that they take one dining hall back for the university to run on their own. They hired staff, purchased equipment, assigned accounting/cleaning/security services. --> all action is to CREATE a "$3/meal" dining hall available on campus.

3. But the $3/meal dining hall's capacity is limited, it can't host every student. So the university assigned that only Class 2008 and 2009 with their ID could dine there, other students have to go to the other two $5/meal dining places.

4. As every student might respond, they will sneak into the cheap dining hall with borrowing a friend's ID, or "bribe" the security guy "Sam" who checks IDs. As long as Sam accepts bribes less than $2, students will be motivated to do so.
--> After a month, this dining hall is over-crowded.

5. So the university decided to add one more security guy to work with Sam together, to double check each other's performances. Gradually, they became friends, and students bribe them together.... Then, the 3rd, the 4th, 5th..... security personnels.

6. Eventually, this dining hall is providing meals with a very bad quality that is less than $3 value, and the university is paying a very high operational cost on it, and no student is happy with it about its restrictions on fair access, its quality, etc.


Now, imagine that all academics respond in the same way. Faculty members abandoned their own syllabus, but have to teach according to a "national curriculum" accurately, even about which questions to ask in a mid-term...

No academic freedom.
No innovation.
No ideas' exchanges.
All started from a bad decision the Ed Min made at the Federal Gov, which they believe comes from a good intention that to make sure of the quality of education nationwide.

Luckily, all the above stories are hypothetical, Mr. Duncan and his team works with one of the most decentralized school system in the world and they are not able, constitutionally, to carry out such "mandatory evaluations" and link its results with federal funding to institutions that "obey" the federal curriculum.

But unfortunately, all the above story happened in China. The more national money available to the ed min, the more frequent such policies are carried out. I borrowed the story on Price Regulations and Its Consequences from here, to discuss how disastrous a bad government policy on education could be.