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IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE--FOR ORDINARY PEOPLE

Reform is the big pendulum swing in education in the mid-80s. At last count, there were more than 30
books, studies, and commission reports, as well as 175 task groups spread throughout the nation, all devoted to
improving the quality of education. In all of these commentaries, there really isn’t much agreement on whether

_ American education has a cold, the flu, or is about to die of pneumonia. However, I am sure that many of the
symptoms are real, and I want to attempt a diagnosis that I think fits our current condition best.
Creating Winners

Peters and Waterman, in In Search of Excellence, describe the most successful corporations in America and
how they got that way. Their criteria for excellence do not reside in the prestige of the product (remember that
both MacDonald's and IBM are on their list) but rather in the attitude and enthusiasm of the workers. That con-
clusion doesn’t surprise me much. But when they identify one characteristic of corporate excellence as “unusual
effort on the part of apparently ordinary employees,” I realize that we have a lot to think about in the community
college situation--so many of our students fit into the category of ordinary people.

These authors suggest that excellent companies “turn the average Joe and the average Jane into winners,”
which, we well know, is much more difficult than just recognizing winners. We are good at identifying winning
students. In fact, much of the educational reform movement currently underway is based upon selecting
winners rather than upon creating them. Colleges that are able to select winners for their entering classes are
perceived as quality institutions. Judging quality on the selectivity of the admissions process, rather than on
“value added” to a person while he is in the institution, has created, in my opinion, an upside-down ranking of
our higher education institutions with respect to excellence. Unfortunately, making winners out of ordinary
students--one of our major functions in the open-door community college--is easily the toughest problem we
have.

Peters and Waterman insist that most excellent companies build systems to reinforce degrees of winning rath-
er than degrees of losing. The less-than-excellent organizations take a negative view of their workers. “They
verbally berate participants for poor performance .... They design systems that seem calculated to tear down
their workers’ self-image.” Pat Cross reminds us that of all the data she has collected on open-admissions stu-
dents in community colleges, “none were more distressing than those showing students’ perceptions of them-
selves as losers in the educational race.” ‘If we perceive that a large part of our job in community colleges is
turning losers into winners, then some things seem imperative.

Recognizing Differences

We know it does no good to tell students that they are doing fine if they are not--and there is plenty of evi-
dence that ordinary students are not doing well. In my more than three decades of trying to find realistic ways
to provide education for all people, I have reached the same conclusion as Pat Cross: it is our commitment to
the lock-step, time-defined structures of education that keeps so many ordinary students from becoming
winners. Our traditional delivery system works well enough for those who are already winners, but it is simply
unrealistic to expect all students to learn the same material, to the same standards of performance, in the same
amount of time, taught by the same method. Despite our knowledge of the importance of individual differ-
ences, we still fail to provide the service that will substantially reduce high attrition. 1 strongly suspect that this
is because it is beyond the energy level of most teachers to truly individualize instruction in addition to handling
the required tasks of the traditional group instruction process. So, it seems, we continue to ignore the individu-
al differences that do not fit into the time-bound, group instruction mold and try instead to reduce the
diversity--as Pat Cross notes--“through selection, through narrowing curricular choices, and through proclaiming
that we expect too much of our schools and that they must be allowed to get back to basics.”

De-Massifying Education

If we choose to improve our institutions by getting rid of problem learners, it will be at the expense of so-
ciety. The superficially excellent institution is something we simply can’t afford. I propose instead that we max-
imize the performance of all of our “ordinary people by seriously addressing their individual differences and

 

Oy Program in Community College Education, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712