The Finite Game of Economics In Education
Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world… If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. (Bell,1983)
The Education Secretary of the Reagan administration, Terrel H. Bell, wrote and released the Landmark report A Nation at Risk in 1983. From this point in history to the present the economic health of the United States has been tied to the successes and failures of the public school system. For the last 3 decades policy makers at the national and state level have stressed education reform due to the supposed causal relationship to the nation’s economic growth (Anyon, 2014).
For the last 37 years there have been several iterations of major education reform that center around the four original recommendations from Bell (2014). First being content and requiring specific courses to be taught and passed by students before receiving a high school diploma. Those required classes and the classes that preceded them needed to adopt more rigorous standards that could be measured through standardized assessment. Required courses and more rigor naturally demanded that school days be longer and more meaningful, and to make a longer school day more meaningful the quality of teachers needed to improve. So in summary the four recommendations were:
Require specific courses to be taken before graduating from K-12.
Standardize what is taught in the specific course and make sure those standards are rigorous and able to be measured.
Lengthen and Increase the efficacy of a school day.
Make sure teachers are higher quality.
Each of the 4 recommendations had more recommendations concerning how to execute them. Many were and continue to be benign because of implementation. According to the Koret Task Force in 2003, during the 20th anniversary of the release of A Nation at Risk, the report led to minimal academic gains. The improvement of education in America was the intent and it wildly fell short. Moreover, it pushed education into what Simon Sinek (2019) calls a finite game.
Sinek (2019) defines a finite game as “ [A game] played by known players. They have fixed rules. And there is an agreed-upon objective that, when reached, ends the game.” Bell used Economic growth as the sole metric or objective in education. This results in leaders using finite thinking, to participate in a finite game. This is in contrast to what Sinek (2019) calls infinite thinking or the infinite game. The infinite game’s primary objective is to remain in the game, adapt. To create an organization, or to pursue a just cause in a way that outlasts people.
Finite thinking within school districts and school buildings over the last 30 years looks like changes in curriculum every 2 to 3 years (see Shelby County Schools) in order to increase overall proficiency by a few percentage points on state standardized tests. It looks like deprofessionalizing teaching through 50 Teach Like a Champion moves, or credentialing teacher’s rapidly in alternative certification programs. It looks like administration looking for fidelity in scripted curriculum, instead of providing professional development around the theory behind curriculum and creating space for teachers to think how best to partner with curriculum. It looks like scattered, reactionary professional development sessions. It looks like engaging the community only when there is a behavior problem preventing a school or a teacher from reaching the desired objective of percentage points gained in proficiency.
The finite thinking that takes place in classrooms, buildings, and districts as a result of finite policy harms communities. It is not the recommendations found in the Nation at Risk that are problematic it is the epistemology it creates within districts and school buildings that is problematic. Khalifa (2018) coins the phrase school-centric epistemology and writes how it forces community based epistemologies to assimilate. School-centric epistemology is rooted in whiteness according to Khalifa. It seems that it is also rooted in the finite idea of winning. Equity in education, a well educated society, and empowered communities are not something that can be won. Society will not all of sudden arrive and say the game is over. Each of the criteria stated above require an infinite mindset that extends past a single metric such as economic growth or percentage point increases on a standardized test.
