by David Safier
You know which people are conspicuously absent from the front lines of today's "educational reform movement"?
Educators.
In education today, data is king, and data crunchers, often economists and mathematicians, are telling us what we need to do to improve the way we teach our children. People from the business community are taking over more and more superintendent jobs, and gazillions of dollars are being poured into education by foundations run by business tycoons. The foundations aren't just putting in money; they're directing exactly how it should be spent, based on their business-based "expertise" in education.
Better Education, Brought to you by the People Who Brought You the
Housing Bubble and the Financial Meltdown!
What could go wrong?
Our current financial mess was created by "visionary" business leaders, aided and abetted by economists and math wizards. They took all the financial data they could find, then crunched and re-crunched the numbers until they came up with can't-miss schemes to make money.
"Wow!" everyone said, "This can't miss!" The profits went up and up, until they came tumbling down.
The people who formulated the schemes had their eyes set on one narrow prize: bringing in more money in the short term by any means necessary. Proof that it was working was that yearly profits were up. They lost sight of the larger financial picture — long term financial stability and growth — until it was too late.
We're in danger of creating the same situation in our schools.
The current educational reform movement is based on data from three forms of standardized tests: reading, writing and math. "Profit" is defined as higher test scores in those three areas.
How do you get those "profits" — those higher test scores? You focus all your energies on one task: raising scores. That means figuring out ways for students to get more right answers on tests. By any means necessary.
So you employ a simple two part strategy: (1) teach to the test; and (2) teach students how to be better test takers.
If that creates higher scores, you're a success! If it doesn't, you try to figure out better ways to teach to the test and make students better test takers.
Since you know what skills are going to be tested — reading, writing and math — you focus like a laser on those three skills. And since you know what parts of those skills are testable, those are the aspects you focus on. The aspects of reading, writing and math that can't be measured by fill-in-the-bubble tests or select-a-topic writing samples get far less attention than testable skills.
And what about parts of the curriculum that aren't tested at all, like history/social studies, science, art, music, etc.? They're only important insofar as they can help students perform better on tests.
An crazed obsession with quarterly and yearly profits in business distorts the marketplace and often leads to individual failures or, occasionally, huge financial disasters.
A business-model obsession with tests and data can distort schools into places where the larger picture — teaching students about the world, teaching them how to formulate ideas, find information, become thinking, questioning people and so on — is ignored.
Standardized testing and data mining are part of our educational world and forevermore shall be. But we make them the drivers of education at our children's peril. Education can't be boiled down to a few bits of test data. That kind of process may make sense in the business world where profit, not societal benefit, is the primary concern, but not in the world of education. Education has to think bigger than that.
Testing should be the servant of education. Education must not be the servant of testing.
For those of you who are amused by the intellectual frailty of number crunchers, you'll find a classic example below the fold.
In Diane Ravitch's much discussed recent book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," she discusses attempts to codify the impact teachers have on their students and finds the methodology sorely lacking. Here is one of her examples.
We all know good teachers teach their students more than poor teachers. We're reasonably sure good teachers have a lasting effect on students' future achievement. But can testing data be used to measure the lasting effects teachers have on their students?
Ravitch writes about attempts to measure the "value added" by certain teachers (It starts on page 186, for anyone with the book). Basically, you look at the students of, for example, a number of 4th grade teachers and see how they perform in their 5th grade classes. If, after you get rid of as many outside variables as you can, you find that Ms. Jones' 4th grade students outperform Mr. Smith's 4th grade students when they're in the same 5th grade class, you can conclude that Ms. Jones had a larger positive effect on her students than Mr. Smith.
Mathematicians and economists have created methodology to check exactly that, and the tests seem to do a good job measuring the effects certain teachers have on the future gains of their students.
But one economist decided to check the methodology by doing what Ravitch calls a "falsification test."
He began with a ridiculous hypothesis: that 5th grade teachers affect the performance of their students when the students were in the 4th grade.
Ridiculous, of course. How can a 5th grade teacher affect 4th grade test scores? It's impossible.
Yet, the economist "proved" that 5th grade teachers affect 4th grade performance using the same methodology used to "prove" the more believable notion that 4th grade teachers affect 5th grade performance.
In other words, the methodology is deeply flawed. Just as the economists and mathematicians gaming the financial markets are incapable of considering all the current and future variables in the market, educational number crunchers can only make crude judgments about teacher's long lasting effects on their students.
When it comes to studies, especially educational studies — even studies where you approve of the results — always approach them with a healthy dose of skepticism.