In Education, Make Peace With Uncertainty

by David Safier

This is a longer follow-up to yesterday’s short, “I needed to get this off my chest,” post, For the Record. That whole post read: 1.Teaching is tough; 2.Teaching children who grow up in poverty is tougher; 3.Test scores are not a reliable indicator of whether a teacher or a school is effective; 4.Anyone who claims to know the “answers” to our school’s problems is a damn liar or a damn fool.

I had spent that morning looking over studies about state takeovers of school districts (I’ll report on my findings later), wading through scholars’ attempts to decide whether the takeovers helped or hurt student achievement. The only indicator used was scores on standardized tests. And the reason they used that indicator was, they had no other number-based indicators to rely on.

I’m going to wander into two seemingly unrelated incidents, then come back to my point, which is: We really can’t measure educational success in any reliable way. When we think we can, we cheapen the very nature of education, and very possibly harm what goes on in schools. We have to accept that education is an amorphous thing, and we will never be able to gauge our success of failure in any clear, numerical way.

The first incident. You may have read recently that the anti-cholesterol drug, Vytorin, is under fire. It lowers cholesterol levels, all right, but it has little value in fighting cardiovascular disease. Since high cholesterol is used as an indicator of health problems, doctors kept prescribing Vytorin, and when people saw their cholesterol levels dropping, they thought they were healthier. They weren’t.

The second incident. Someone I know who teaches middle school math always gets very high scores from his students on state math tests. He’s a good teacher, and his students are genuinely learning math. But he uses a little trick on test day that gives his students’ scores an extra boost. Just before his students are ready to turn in their tests, he writes a homework assignment on the board. The students groan on cue. He says, “I’ll tell you what. If I see all of you checking over your tests for errors for the next ten minutes, I’ll cancel your homework.” When his students hand in their tests, lots of them say they found 2 or 3 errors, which they corrected.

Standardized tests are like educational Vytorin. We look at the scores and use that to judge our students’ academic health. If scores go up, that means students are learning more. But the lone indicator — a rise or fall in a number on a test — is not necessarily a reflection of students’ educational attainment.

Tests can be dumbed down, as AIMS tests have been over the years (or so I’ve heard), which raises scores. Teachers become more adept at teaching to the test, as well as teaching students how to take tests, which raises scores. And some clever teachers, like the math teacher in the example, figure out a perfectly legitimate way to get students to check their work, and the two or three extra right answers give a big bump to their scores.

None of these ways of increasing scores are indications of better educated students, yet when they result in better numbers, we tell ourselves our schools are improving. Meanwhile, field trips are dropped, especially for students in poor schools who need the exposure to the world outside their communities. Other forms of enrichment that don’t have a direct impact on math and reading scores are slighted in the curriculum. Even recesses are shortened because they’re seen as a waste of valuable time that can be spent drilling students in math and reading.

Education is part craft and part art. Scholarly studies can help us move in a direction that can improve our teaching strategies, and tests can indicate a possible move in the right direction. But we will never, never come up with “answers” about what makes for good education.

The best teachers I’ve known are always insecure about their teaching. They walk into their classrooms with butterflies in their stomachs, and they constantly ask themselves, “Am I getting the ideas across? Are the students paying attention? Are they getting it?” They’re like good actors who know what they’re supposed to do when they walk on stage, but they get butterflies before their entrance, because they don’t know if they’ll be able to deliver that something extra that separates an adequate performance from a great performance. They don’t know what that something extra is, but they know they have to dig down and find it.

We are better off when we make peace with uncertainty in our schools, because it means we aren’t pretending we know “the answer.” We are worse off when we give education over to the absolutists, the number crunchers, who believe they can measure educational success and failure by plugging test scores into a computer.