Dangerous efficiency.

The risk of efficiency obsession in education.

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake - Bertrand Russell

Photo by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash

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Recently, I’ve been working through my thinking in relation to the way that notions of effectiveness and efficiency have come to dominate educational discourse, policy and practice in Australia and beyond.

I feel uncomfortable about it all, and so this post is an attempt to express in words where this feeling comes from and why it is something I believe everyone should be wary of.

Throughout this post references will be made to the terms effectiveness and efficiency, which in the past I have often used synonymously. In this post, I do want to distinguish between the two, keeping in mind that both effectiveness and efficiency are deeply connected concepts.

Effectiveness is measured in the ability for something to achieve or bring about a particular desired outcome or result. Efficiency on the other hand, is about reducing the effort, time and energy to produce said desired outcome or result.

In other words, effectiveness is about finding the path to get somewhere, whereas efficiency is about taking this path and getting to the destination as quickly (cheaply, effortlessly, etc.) as possible.

It’s about reducing time wastage.

“Stop all the time wasting.”

In October of 2024, the Australian supermarket superpower Woolworths came under heat with the release of a new efficiency framework, which claimed to bring about a more consistent approach in identifying, coaching and managing staff whose performance did not meet expectations.

The Coaching and Productivity Framework (the Framework), which was introduced without consultation with workers or their union:

“utilises engineered standards to enforce a universal and highly standardised measurement of worker movement and speed. Engineered standards assumes that every task of a warehouse worker can be pre-determined, categorised, and assigned a time limit. Should a worker fail to meet the designated speed of work at 100% capacity of every measured minute of their shift, they are placed on a twelve week ‘coaching’ program.”

Lauren Kelly, PhD candidate at RMIT University and researcher for the United Worker’s Union, contexualises the Framework within the broader movement of scientific management:

“Developed in the early 20th century by US management consultants, engineered standards follow the stopwatch studies and time-and-motion methodologies of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the pioneer of ‘scientific management’.”

The rollout of the Framework has resulted in unsafe work practices in response to unreasonable demands set by the engineered standards, along with growing psychological concerns of staff under the weight of constant surveillance.

This has led to heated disputes between workers and the company, including strikes costing the company millions (allegedly leading to the sacking of two workers and investigations into at least a dozen others) and a submission to the Fair Work Commission, which seems yet to have been resolved.

The desire to enact engineered standards in the Framework reflects an inclination towards universal standards in a bid to improve worker efficiency. Within this ideological framework, such standards are assumed to improve quality and can be applied unproblematically across a diverse range of workers and contexts.

One might, and should, ask why Woolworths might feel the need to enact such approaches, considering their reporting of record profits.

The problem with ideologies of efficiency is that a laser focus on outputs forgets to consider whether the overarching goals of the system are desirable.

In the case of businesses such as Woolworths, core ideological goals of increased profits and productivity risk eroding trust in its workers, diverting attention away from structural problems, marginalising difference and ultimately frames workers as objects to be manipulated for the sake of achieving narrowly defined goals.

Is this the kind of world we want?

The risk.

This, I would argue, is the risk we collectively face in the context of an ever-growing obsession with efficiency in education.

Not only does what we see happening with Woolworths reflect the current educational landscape in Australia, it also provides an example of the kind of world we can expect to dominate where efficiency becomes a core driving principle in determining the work of schools, teachers and students.

In our current time, the solutions to educational problems seem to be limited to analysing where teachers are being inefficient in relation to narrow perspectives of education.

The teacher becomes framed as entirely responsible for educational success, leaving the policies, cultures, structures and practices that constrain a teacher’s work left unexamined.

Every minute counts.

But for what ends?

As education systems become focused on increasing efficiencies, we risk leaving the ideological frameworks grounding such practices unquestioned.

Without taking the time to critically reflect on the way that ideological purposes impact upon students, teachers and schools, we risk undermining the very project of education that we wish to achieve.

Efficiency obsession in education.

One of the problems we currently face in education is that narrow ideological perspectives are driving an impoverished understanding of teacher effectiveness, subsequently leading to policy and practice that favour efficiencies in bringing about these narrow aims.

As the project of education and the work of the teacher becomes ideologically framed as bringing about a change in long-term memory, the work of teachers and schools is naturally following a narrowing process in order to effectively meet this ideological aim.

When the purpose of schooling and education becomes singular, effective teaching (in terms of the narrow view of education) becomes tangible, controllable and predictable. Things are now moving beyond the unquestioned assumptions of what effective teaching is to a focus on efficiencies in disseminating and enacting this narrowed practice.

Effective practice has been determined once and for all—we are told—therefore, it is deemed that the most efficient way to have such practice across the system is to mandate and monitor it through acts of control through policy, discourse and the media.

The poster child of narrowly defined effective practice, explicit teaching, has become the approach to teaching across all contexts.

Period.

The most efficient way to enact this practice is to control and standardise the structure and experience of young people’s schooling into a set of predictable and measurable practices.

Therefore, as schools become increasingly influenced by efficiencies, teacher practice becomes homogenised. Standardised PowerPoints from educational resource providers become commonplace, which confuse the dominant narrow ideological perspective of education as being the purpose, marginalising children and deprofessionalising teachers along the way.

A core requirement for effective explicit teaching is maintaining the attention of students. The most efficient way to do so is through exerting ever-increasing control over student’s bodies through practices that stress compliance (such as SLANT).

These practices may be efficient in the sense that they support development of students’ long-term memory.

But for so many, the goal of education to stimulate a change in long-term memory simply does not cut it, isolates their experiences and disregards the broader ways that education can function.

The problem with efficiency, is that when applied across a system it assumes conformity of ideological purpose, which—let’s face it—is not the reality of Australian schools.

An efficient (but heartless) world.

As with the story of Woolworths’ efficiency framework, narrow ideological goals can lead to policy and practice that alienates, disrespects and hurts people.

When the ideological goal of business becomes solely tied to increasing profits and productivity, policies to increase efficiency in achieving this aim turn workers into widgets under the control of time and management.

In a similar way, when the project of education becomes limited to learning—and more specifically, to a change in long-term memory—concerning efficiencies emerge that seek to gain control over the minds, lives and bodies of school communities.

The problem is that if we don’t stop to consider the desirability of our ideological frameworks and practice, we may either become blind to the possible injustices that we are inflicting upon others or validate them as justifiable means to reach such pre-determined ends.

We may find ourselves so obsessed with achieving efficiencies in education that we forget to consider the importance of joy, happiness or play.

All of which may be inefficient in achieving the narrow ideological goal of improving retention of information in long-term memory, but nevertheless valuable and important.

Maybe even more important.

Till next time,