Efficiency vs effectiveness

Making efforts to achieve quantified targets is the zeitgeist of today's world. Our obsession with metrics, targets and standardised indicators creates an illusion of progress. The same mentality has crept into our complex and often chaotic educational ecosystem.

It is imperative to understand the difference between efficiency and effectiveness to learn the ropes of production systems. Peter Drucker, an Austrian-American educator and leader in management education, says in his famous dictum, "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things."

Efficiency in education is specifically related to inputs and outputs. Contrarily, effectiveness probes deeper. It underlines: What is the quality of student learning? Are they learning critical thinking, moral judgement, decision making, civic sense, or real-world problem solving?

Where efficiency requires teachers to follow run-of-the-mill pedagogy, effectiveness banks upon teachers' empowerment and ability to teach, inspire and guide. The difference is not merely theoretical. Their tangible consequences can be observed in that a school may efficiently register thousands of students, but their inability to read, write, or think independently after years of instruction falsifies the effectiveness of the pedagogical toil and moil. This parameter of efficiency and effectiveness can be employed to taxonomise the result-orientated and effect-based educational institutions.

The look-busy-do-nothing approach to teaching enhances the efficiency of the working units of a school. Loads of homework and tests are assigned to students to create a facade of efficient teaching and learning. Oblivious of the AI-generated writing tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, schools appreciate teachers who assign activities to foster creative writing, but students whose parents are not educated enough to help them in dealing with such creative tasks get the tasks done with the help of writing tools and hand them over to their teacher with aplomb. Efficiently done but devoid of all effectiveness.

Here, parents too share the blame for putting a premium on efficiency. Parents rate higher those schools whose students keep their nose to the grindstone of homework and assignments. Students who enjoy few moments of leisure time lag far behind in making the most of whatever is taught and learnt.

Our testing and examination systems, the most fossilised organs of the education system, happen to be the hatcheries of efficiency-based drills requiring the regurgitation of unassimilated information and facts that never go beyond the bounds of textbooks.

The rocketing changes in curriculum triggered by political upheavals focus primarily on the projection of political or individual identity rather than content relevance. Effectiveness demands a curriculum that cultivates critical thinking and social relevance. Instead, we have books advertising ideological posturing, outdated facts and mechanical exercises.

Moreover, a burgeoning chasm dominates between the teachers' expertise and the conceptual complexity of the books. This scenario is mostly prevalent in the low-cost English medium schools which select the books of foreign publishers. Here, effectiveness is the first thing to suffer.

Another inevitable fallout of promoting efficiency is the wilful neglect of the intelligence differences among students. Whereas efficiency owes to the one-size-fits-all pedagogical obsession, effectiveness prioritises individual physical and mental differences of students. Comparisons are blatantly made among students, apparently to promote competition which, when individual differences are ignored, turns into a rat race for grades.

Teachers might be "doing things right" without reflecting on whether they are "doing the right things". Teachers who join and continue the teaching profession without investing any passion in it always target achieving efficiency and amassing accolades from school administrations.

As the achievement of effective goals in education is a long, slow and steady process, efficiency capitalises on the currency of this fast-paced age – quick results. Efficiency is the hare of Aesop's fables, while effectiveness is the tortoise.