Our love affair with numbers

I've spent a considerable amount of time and effort thinking about assessment. I've come to see our needless obsession with measurement and quantifiable data as the monster that ate education. I believe we are living in the data-driven dark ages. 

Alfie Kohn explains:

Too much is lost to us -- or warped -- as a result of our love affair with numbers. And there are other casualties as well: 

1. We miss the forest while counting the trees: Rigorous ratings of how well something is being done tend to distract us from asking whether what that activity is sensible or ethical. Dubious cultural values and belief systems are often camouflaged by numerical precision, sometimes out to several decimal places. Stephen Jay Gould, in his book The Mismeasure of Man, provided ample evidence that meretricious findings are often produced by impressively meticulous quantifiers. 

2. We become obsessed with winning: An infatuation with numbers not only emerges from but also exacerbates our cultural addiction to competition. It’s easier to know how many others we’ve beaten, and by how much, if achievements have been quantified. But once they’re quantified, it’s tempting for us to spend our time comparing and ranking -- trying to triumph over one another rather than cooperating. 

3. We deny our subjectivity. Sometimes the exclusion of what’s hard to quantify is rationalized on the grounds that it’s “merely subjective.” But subjectivity isn’t purged by relying on numbers; it’s just driven underground, yielding theappearance of objectivity. An “86” at the top of a paper is steeped in the teacher’s subjective criteria just as much as his comments about that paper. Even a score on a math quiz isn’t “objective”: It reflects the teacher’s choices about how many and what type of questions to include, how difficult they should be, how much each answer will count, and so on. Ditto for standardized tests -- except the people making those choices are distant and invisible. 

Subjectivity isn’t a bad thing; it’s about judgment, which is a marvelous human capacity that, in the plural, supplies the lifeblood of a democratic society. What’s bad is the use of numbers to pretend that we’ve eliminated it.

This is precisely why I believe assessment is not a spreadsheet -- it's a conversation. 

Faulty Reform

I often think about how education 'reformers' continue to push their tougher standards, raise achievement mantra. Of course, when they say tougher standards, they mean standards that not all children can achieve, and when they say raise achievement they mean higher test scores.

I'm disheartened daily by these 'reformers' obsessive need to reduce something as messy and beautiful as learning to a standard and a test. Does anyone in their right mind actually believe that if all teachers simply taught common standards and achieved high scores on a standardized tests that the challenges our schools face everyday would simply evaporate?

What's more, 'reformers' tend to scoff at anything that can't be 'properly' reduced to a number.

When I show people some of the projects my students do through out the year or even as a substitute for a multiple choice final exam, I often get suspicious looks. Responses sound something like this: that's all well and good that the kids are doing this, but how do you grade it?

This response frustrates me because it fully acknowledges the real learning that occurs during such projects but a knee-jerk obsession with measurement seems to entirely trump this acknowledgment. 

I find this excerpt from Alfie Kohn's Schools Our Children Deserve aptly explains why real learning is so often trumped by numbers:

Anyone trying to account for the popularity of standardized tests may also want to consider our cultural penchant for attaching numbers to things. One write has called it a "prosaic mentality": a preoccupation with that which can be seen and measured. Any aspect of learning (or life) that resists being reduced to numbers is regarded as vaguely suspicious. By contrast, anything that appears in numerical form seems reassuringly scientific; if the numbers are getting larger over time, we must be making progress. Concepts like intrinsic motivation and intellectual exploration are hard for the prosaic mind to grasp, whereas test scores, like sales figures or votes, can be calculated and charted, and used to define success and failure. The more tests we make kids take, the more precise our knowledge about who has learned well, who has taught well, which districts are in trouble, and even which schools (in this brave new world of for-profit education) will survive another day.

Until we demand policy makers be actual educators - professionals who actually work in the field they are suppose to be running - education reform will be plagued by outsiders who at best can make uneducated guesses at applying solutions from the business world for classroom problems.

conceal vs reveal

There are many many things wrong with today's form of educational accountability, but today I want to focus on the numbers. Too often these data-driven decisions are being driven by numbers.

Now, I'm not saying all stats or numbers are born equally. It would be foolish to write-off all research as being invalid and unreliable; it's important to maintain a healthy scepticism so that we can identify the good research from the bad.

With that in mind, it is important to remember that sometimes the most important things in life are almost impossible to measure, and so when we reduce something as complicated as learning to a number, it is important to remember numbers might impress, but they also tend to conceal more than they reveal.