Mr. Hillel Rapp
Director of Education
The Morning Star Tomato Company, founded in the early 1990s, has grown into the largest tomato processor in the world, processing over 40% of California’s tomato crop each year. It has shown rapid increase in profits, low employee turnover, and consistent innovation. And it has no management, no bosses, and no chief executive. There are no titles and no promotions. Matt Ridley describes this in his book The Evolution of Everything:
“The biologists who select new varieties of tomato, the farmhands who pick them, the factory workers who process them, and the accountants in the office are all equally responsible. Expenditures are negotiated among colleagues and decisions are made collectively by those closest to the place where it will have most impact. Each employee has a colleague letter of understanding instead of a contract or letter of employment. This sets out not just their responsibilities but also performance indicators. They write this letter themselves, negotiating its content and their pay with their peers based on past performance. The highest paid employee receives only six times more than the lowest… [The result is] people feel far more committed to their peers than they ever would to their bosses.”
Other than a few business school case studies, Morning Star has been largely ignored by the media and even academia. Ridley attributes this to the low-tech and modest nature of tomato processing. Yet Morning Star’s remarkable accomplishments, with 400 full time and 3000 part time employees, is built on three basic and profound ideas:
- People are happiest when they have personal control over their lives.
- People are thinking, creative, energetic and caring.
- The most effective organizations are volunteer organizations where people are not managed and instead coordinate activities amongst themselves.
What I would like to lay out here is a basic outline of what a self-managed educational program could look like in a Jewish high school, and how it could be designed to produce better outcomes at about half the cost. There has already been a lot of space devoted to making Jewish education more affordable. These efforts generally divide along three lines: increase philanthropic giving, lobby governments to offset costs through the tax code, and finally, to lower costs, largely through increasing class sizes using a blended learning model.
Outside of the Jewish education world, there is another movement afoot to expand opportunities in blended learning as a means to improve educational outcomes and to create a disintermediating force in the classical classroom model of educational delivery. The argument, summed up by Sal Khan in this TED Talk, is that with the seemingly endless volume of educational content available online, we no longer need to accept the classical grading scale that passes students on to the next level with only a fraction of the knowledge they set out to learn. In what world, asks Khan, would a surveyor declare a building foundation 70% complete and yet allow the construction to move on? Yet in education this is standard operating procedure. The frontal teaching model and the classical grading scale that we have inherited are relics of an era where it was economically impossible to deliver education in a way that could allow for differentiated pacing of instruction and demand student mastery. However, a new model built on harnessing and cultivating digital educational content into discrete skill sets, and educating toward mastery of those skills at an individuated pace is not only possible, it has the potential to produce educational results far superior to the current model.
I think marrying the desire for lowering costs in Jewish education with the possibility of creating a superior educational product through blended learning is undoubtedly appealing. I am not the first to suggest blended learning as a foundation for lowering costs. Yeshivat He’atid in New Jersey has built itself on this goal. What I would like to add is some nuance to this idea, specifically as it applies to high school, where the content is more voluminous, the learning process more rigorous, and the need for teacher specialization is more apparent.
Harnessing online resources holds promise, but great education is about much more than efficient content delivery. Any expectation that we can place a class of 50 high school students in front of computers with some standard digital content via a single mode of delivery with a teacher tracking progress on a screen is likely to fail in comparison with the classical model. No matter how you slice it, great education will always come down to great teachers. Great teachers start by observing the processes of learning in each student and then attempting to communicate content in order to maximize the learning each student experiences. What I envision in a blended learning environment is an active teacher who constantly assesses students and works on both the design and curation of digital materials to optimize learning for different subsets of students based on their particular learning profiles. It is a process that unfolds in real time with ongoing creativity in content creation and adjustment by the teacher.
By contrast, our current model cannot deliver authentic differentiated instruction for two important reasons. First, it’s just not viable in the current market for a teacher to create this type of content for a typical full time load of 120-140 students. Second, the grading scale we use is built on the premise of equally distributed material and metrics. How else does a university, academic scholarship, or special program select for achievement if that achievement is not accurate in relative measure to the broader pool of applicants? How can a teacher feel comfortable issuing a mark of achievement if the metric is not consistently applied for all students in a defined time frame? And yet, very detailed and specific knowledge of just how differently human beings learn, how our brains can process information in widely diverse ways and at different speeds, is growing all the time. How can we possibly measure learning along a single standardized scale if there is not a single standard mode of learning?
Professional education has known about the need for differentiated learning for some time but insists on remaining in a model built on standardized curricula and grading. Instead of differentiating, our education system chooses to issue a series of accommodations and directives at schools and teachers in a top-down structure that is tantamount to plugging the Titanic with chewing gum. The teacher still exists in the old model, teaching a fixed curriculum at the front of a classroom and creating standardized assessments for the class. To support our increasing awareness of learning differences among students, schools build academic support teams to plan, coordinate, and facilitate individual learning within the standardized classroom system. And then it’s only natural to need a robust administration to insure that all these trains run on time and that this integration occurs in a seamless organizational operation.
But what if there was no student support and no administration? Facilitating learning is not primarily about implementing a list of accommodations, grading to a scale, or standardized assessments. Learning happens all the time in all of us. A good facilitator for learning is the person who can observe how learning takes place in another and design a mode of communication that most naturally accesses that particular learning process for a given content set. Why not make that the sole responsibility of the teacher? The teacher is tasked to discover and design effective and measurable means of communication so that effective learning takes place in each student.
To make this a bit more tangible, I would like to outline how this could look in a Jewish high school setting:
- Each “school” is a cohort of 60 students who completed a primary school education.
- Five educators serve 60 students with each teacher specializing in a single broad discipline such as Judaic Studies, Math, Science, English / Arts, and History / Social Sciences.
- There are no age and grade divisions within the cohort. Instead, students move at their own paces through a series of skill sets that build upon the knowledge gained in the prior sets.
- Teachers are tasked to curate, design and facilitate learning in discrete skill packages and students are expected to achieve mastery in each (say the equivalent of a 90+ score).
- Teachers earn $140,000 per year with the following expectations:
- Teachers in the cohort work through the summer to assess incoming and returning students, collaborate on curricular design and implementation, and to prepare a wide range of differentiated instructional models using online and locally developed digital content.
- Teachers will divide basic administrative duties among the cohort for scheduling, maintaining faculty, and enforcing communal expectations.
- Teachers remain active learners, advancing in their own fields and learning new areas based on specific educational plans for each student.
- The cohort has no professional administration, student support, or student activities.
Advantages
A basic budget covering salaries with an additional $50,000 for facilities and other expenses yields a cost per student in a cohort of $12,500 per year. The learning environment for a cohort will make more efficient use of a space in an industrial design layout looking more like Facebook and Google offices than a classical school with a lunchroom, gym, and individual classrooms. The combination of differentiated instruction and the expectation of mastery should allow students to progress at their own pace, accumulating specific skills and building their knowledge on solid academic foundations. On the slower end of the learning spectrum, we can imagine a minimum number of skills to master in order to graduate, and on the quicker end of the spectrum, an ever growing set of skills that can be added to enrich and advance the educational experience of each student. From a teacher perspective, the challenge in preparation is focused primarily on making the right observation, designing the best customized communication, and applying it to the most appropriate subset of students in the cohort.
This is, to a large extent, a back of the envelope sketch of how something like this could work. There is much to fill in on the design details of this educational program, like how this structure could work with Ontario Ministry of Education requirements, and how to assure quality control for a broad mandate on teacher creativity in instruction, design, and assessment. It’s also worth noting that this model will not serve as a panacea for all educational challenges. For example, students that require significant amounts of individualized attention, specifically in task completion and self regulation, may still require outside assistance. But none of these obstacles strike me as close to insurmountable, and in this structure we have increased individuated instruction, lowered costs, and set a higher expectation of knowledge acquisition than we currently have.
Let’s take a moment to address some questions about the obvious trade-offs in this model.
Can a Jewish high school really exist without student activities and informal educational programming?
To my mind, the answer to this is yes. In fact, it successfully removes one of the greatest challenges for administrators in the classical education model. That is, the seemingly endless push and pull between the formal educational requirements and the value of informal educational experiences. Educational moments in leadership, collaboration, improvisation, creativity, self expression, and Jewish identity are just a few of the opportunities informal education can provide. These are critical to educating the whole Jewish child. However, these opportunities already exist in community youth groups and shul-based programming. And if school is no longer providing an additional layer of informal programming, opportunities outside school will only increase. In my experience, adding more informal elements into the educational program of a school has resulted in less efficiency and diseconomies of scale, requiring increased administration and diluting the educational product. A shorter school day, with more self-paced time, should allow parents and children to define a secondary informal educational program that suits the talents and desires of each student and family.
Why not pay teachers even less, say $100,000 per year? That will still be top rate for teachers and will lower costs even further.
The truth is that there is probably some market testing to arrive at the right salary number. But I would caution that for this version of a reimagined teacher to be successful with an expectation of student mastery, it will require an exceptionally innovative skill set. A salary of $140,000 signals clearly that this market is not just open for existing teachers but can be competitive to draw upon some of the most talented observers, communicators and creative thinkers available in a wide range of fields. The success or failure of this endeavor rests, as it should, on the shoulders of the educators responsible for its implementation.
Tomato processing is a long way from Jewish education, but perhaps an obscure company in California’s central valley has something to teach us about bottom-up design in education. Imagine a community of Jewish educational cohorts, perhaps with a loose affiliation and opportunities for collaboration, but existing largely as independent entities, catering to different hashkafot, tinkering and competing with the model and cost structure, and allowing meaningful innovation in education to run concurrently with broad price reduction in Jewish private schools. Like others who have contributed to this conversation, I hope this essay moves us closer to a sustainable innovation.
