Gospriyomka and NCATE

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, one of the first things he did was establishing a highly centralized federal quality police. It was given an unpronounceable Russian abbreviation name Gospriyomka, which means simply “state inspection.” Its officers had the authority to inspect quality of any merchandise on the premised of any production unit, and deny its release. The Soviet economy had a horrendous production quality problem, and a significant portion of goods were shipped across the huge country only to be discarded as defective by on the receiving end. So, his idea was to stop the waste and at least save on shipping. Of course, it did not work, and could not work. Production stalled, because producers had to fix a lot of defective goods; consumers quickly realized that having bad quality goods was better than having no goods at all. This was one of the last convulsions of the planned economy. It became clear to most that the state has to abandon price control, privatize most of industries, and allow enterprises to compete, so the inefficient ones will go bankrupt and stop producing junk altogether. Of course, it is easier said than done. In the next fifteen years, the Russian economy experienced a tremendous collapse about twice as bad as the American Great Depression (in terms of real GDP contraction). Many of the problems still persists, although high oil prices bailed out the country out of the immediate danger of total economic collapse.

I remembered the Gospriyomka story as our NCATE and CRD (Colorado Reading Directorate) stories unfold. These are local skirmishes of the much larger accountability campaign raging across the educational field, and several other industries. No Child Left Behind is the major battle; ours are much smaller. I hope the analogy makes sense. First, both are well-intended at some level seem very reasonable. Indeed, who would be against improving quality of goods and services? Who would object the need for educational institutions to measure how well they teach and to be held accountable? The Soviet economy was in such an apparent trouble that any means of improvement were welcome. The same could be said about American education: its cost has been rising significantly over the last fifty years, while outcomes remain flat and lag behind other countries. Education is a sick man of American economy, so let’s do something, right? On a smaller scale, Colorado kids do not do that well on reading tests, so introducing some minimal standards to literacy instruction in teacher education cannot really hurt, can it? Considering it does not cost very much to the taxpayers, well the State should do something, or so the logic goes.

Gospriyomka failed not because it was a bad idea. It failed because it was a good idea within a bad economy. It’s like when your car is stuck in a deep mud, at some point it starts digging itself deeper and deeper. Ironically, the more powerful is your car, the deeper hole it digs for itself. If you’re traveling off-road, at some point you realize a simple boat is better than the most powerful 4-weel drive. This is exactly what happened to the Soviet economy: it did OK for a while, but it was simply not suited for consumer economy rigors. It can never produce good quality consumer goods (although it could produce a lot of tanks and missiles, some were not bad). The same thing is happening with American education: it was just fine when it was selective, and most people never graduated from high school. However, it is stuck deep in the mud when most of people now need to be at least somewhat educated. By the way, American education loses the global race not because it is exceptionally inept, but simply because it reached the mud pit first. Everyone else in the world is cheerfully speeding towards the same pit; they just don’t realize it yet.

I have thought long and hard about why NCATE reporting is such an arduous, elusive task. I considered my own ineptitude, other people’s ineptitude, and other theories; they all play small roles. However, there are deeper problems. Again, NCATE reporting is very reasonable in its intent. We do need to collect data and use it to improve our programs. NCATE have come a long way simplifying, streamlining, and making the process user-friendly. It’s the motivation that is all wrong. Our motivation is to comply and to be accredited, so we can accumulate kudos. In order to be effective, the culture of assessment should come from within, from genuine interest in improving the quality of our service. Two people may do exactly the same thing, but one does it much better than the other, because they operate in two different economies and hence have different motivation. Motivation is not a psychological phenomenon, not a personality trait; it is a function of the system.

If you are producing coffeemakers in America, you would be ultimately concerned with people buying or not buying them. From that act of consumption, the motivation to improve and innovate would percolate up to the production process. In the Soviet economy, the act of purchase had no bearings of your production; you were forced to improve and innovate by purely administrative measures: your boss would tell you to do so; yelling was the most common form of motivation. Your immediate concern would be to please the boss, not to sell the coffeemaker. No matter how good your workers and your bosses are, a Soviet coffeemaker would always be inferior to the Japanese or American, or Turkish one. Gorbachev introduced Gospriyomka, which meant that the bosses would apply even more administrative pressures, because they were pressured themselves. So you increase the overall administrative stress, but guess what? Your coffeemakers still suck AND there are fewer of them.

So, at UNC, the President and the Provost both believe NCATE looks good on our list of accrediting agencies. In other states it is not an option at all, and you do not get state accreditation unless NCATE accredits you. Carter Hall applies pressure to the Dean, who in turns applies pressure to me, who in turn will cajole, threaten, bribe, and shame people into doing their assessment bits. Paradoxically, because of all of this flurry of activity, we do not really have the time or the reason to actually sit down, and talk about how we are doing and what data we really need to do a good job. We also don’t really know how good a job we are doing, because we don’t really believe in our own NCATE reports. We produce them to get accredited.

Of course, it is not NCATE’s fault entirely. There is also no meaningful market or informed consumers to apply different kinds of pressure. This is where governments should really step in and create an infrastructure for educational markets. All they need to do is two things:
1. Make it illegal to ask which college you went to in all job applications, so colleges stop selling their brand names, and will start selling actual quality of service.
2. Force all colleges to disclose publicly the educational value added, using the same simple formula (pre-test/post-test ratio by major and licensure area). This could be tricky, but doable, and this is where specialized professional organizations could come up with measurement tools.

If that happens, consumers will quickly figure out what quality they want for what amount of money, and education will cease to be a positional good.