The Modern Cult of Efficiency: Intermediary Organizations and the New Scientific Management. (March 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Trujillo, Tina
• Other Names: Lubienski Christopher guest-editor.; Scott Janelle guest-editor.; DeBray Elizabeth guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Educational policy. Volume 28:Number 2(2014:Mar.)
• Page Start: 207
• Page End: 232
• Publication Date: 2014-03
• Subjects: history/philosophy of education -- educational equity -- educational reform -- educational policy -- high-stakes accountability -- leadership -- urban schools -- politics of education -- standards reform -- standardized testing; Education and state -- United States -- Periodicals; Education -- Periodicals; 379.2
• DOI: 10.1177/0895904813513148
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0895-9048

Abstract

This article analyzes one intermediary organization. It draws on critical policy studies to frame the agency's behaviors amid a discourse of managerialism in the public sector, and critical studies of education markets to explain the relationships between its reforms and education policy. Findings illustrate how the intermediary enacted managerial data monitoring systems as the core drivers of its reforms; how it framed leadership and teaching as reductive, managerialist pursuits; and why its reliance on business-inspired logics, roles, and language enabled it to compete in a marketplace and preserve its industry niche. In this way, its behaviors resembled those of the "efficiency experts" during the industrial revolution. The result was an intermediary that erroneously equated data with professional judgment, and that guided decisions based not on a century's worth of evidence about the limitations of purely managerial reforms, but on an enduring ideological faith in technocratic solutions to complex social problems.