My brother reads but he doesn't think he is a reader

If you were to ask my brother Jeff if he reads, he would tell you that he doesn't.

But this is a lie. However, it's not my brother that is lying -- it's school that has lied to him.

School has beaten my brother down into believing that reading means novels. My brother hated school and he hates novels. But he voraciously reads online about politics. My brother is a reader, but school's narrow definition of reading has convinced him that he is not.

How is this a good thing?

We spend far too much time narrowing our definition for what children can read when really it doesn't matter what kids read, just so long as they read.

One average to rule them all

Sketch by Jeff Bower

Imagine if your vehicle's instrument panel took all of your gauges including your engine's temperature, tachometer, odometer, speedometer and fuel gauge and reduced all that data into one convenient number.

As silly and potentially dangerous as this sounds, this is precisely what school does when we try and reduce what matters most (creativity, imagination, literacy, numeracy, responsibility, democratic citizenry, empathy and collaboration) to a spreadsheet friendly average.

Authentic accountability is about transparency. That is, the public should have access to the information they need about the schools they pay for.

There's nothing transparent about reducing something as magnificently messy as real learning to numbers. To reduce learning to numbers is to conceal far more than it reveals.

Consider this the next time you see a student's learning reported as a single piece of data.