The
Rise of Numbers, the Demise of Spirit, the Death of Learning
Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 6/24/18
What
did Tina Turner, Robert McNamara, and No Child Left Behind have in common? For
starters they all advanced the notion that if you can’t measure it, you can’t
manage it.
In one of her classic
songs, Turner raised the question, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” As Secretary of Defense, McNamara ran the
Vietnam War like a general manager, sounding forth on the Sunday television
news shows as though he were still running Ford Corporation. The No Child Left Behind law set in motion
the great folly of trying to measure the immeasurable.
Let’s begin with No
Child Left Behind (NCLB), while granting pure motives to its originators. Let’s view it for what it was: an educational
reform centered on “measurable goals” as a way to improve schools and heighten
student performance. Its catchy, humane
title implied that great efforts would be made to close the achievement gap. In 2015 President Obama signed a new version
of this law which was called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA was an acknowledgement that after 14
years, NCLB had brought only slight improvement. No wonder.
Both bills tried to make education a managerial science.
The centerpiece of
NCLB, inaugurated by President G.W. Bush in 2002, was annual testing. Specifically, NCLB required any public school
receiving federal funds to administer the annual tests to ensure that levels of
proficiency would rise in math, reading, and science between grades three and
eight. The federal government mandated
various penalties for schools that couldn’t show yearly improvement through
standardized tests. One penalty was the
dismissal of underperforming teachers and principals. Measure and punish, in other words.
Unintended consequences
abound in far too much legislation. The punitive nature of NCLB/ESSA led to
such consequences. One was the
inordinate amount of time spent preparing for and giving the tests. Another was the predictable practice of
“teaching to the test,” a spirit-killing practice if there ever was one.
The prissy word for all
of this business is “metrics.” Boiled
down, metrics is the placing of numbers above people. For decades we’ve known that the mindset of
bureaucrats and managers is to measure all things quantitatively, to examine
success rates, to look at the bottom line.
We can understand this.
We should also
understand, however, that children and teenagers are neither salesmen, machines,
nor responsible adults for that matter.
They are growing, developing minors whose learning can’t always be
“measured” by quantitative methods. Pity
the teacher who is the hottest teacher on the planet, has been teacher of the
year three times, has received national acclaim, but one year gets classes that
possess no intellectual curiosity and are chiefly from dysfunctional families. Don’t tell him or her that it’s the teacher’s
responsibility to get the weak classes up to par on standardized tests unless
you yourself have taught at least one year, in which case you would never
expect such a miracle from any teacher.
The metrics craze
ignored the fact that there are other methods besides tests to measure
achievement such as grades, student work, attendance, and teachers’
evaluations.
Equally misguided, the
military is often touched by the bad philosophy of “metrics.” Defense Secretary McNamara was dubbed a
managerial extremist for arguing that military commanders should be good at
determining costs and profit margin.
Like the classroom, like the battlefield. Education and war simply lie outside the
realm of managerial principles, yet the managerial ethos is the heart of NCLB/ESSA. War seems to defy neatly held ideas about
numbers and how they should look. So
does a dynamic classroom filled with young human beings with as many different
needs as there are children in the room.
Turner’s song asks,
“What’s love but a second-hand emotion?”
Her lyrics were actually sarcastic, pointing to our contemporary disdain
for emotion or spirit and for things that cannot be quantified.
“Metrics” kills
spirit. Spirit is needed for athletic
teams, the battlefield, and for children and teens in school. In sales and in corporate land, maybe not,
but in many of life’s endeavors, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth
life.” Much of teaching is to get
students to dream, aspire, and reach higher, better things. Measure that.
Things that matter most – beauty, spirit, and
the joy of living – cannot be measured.
The managerial mind has its place, but not in the classroom. Knowledge must be tested, but tinkering with
numbers and placing students into “cohorts” or “supersubgroups” to “measure”
their progress is an abysmal practice.
Please call your
senators, representatives, principals, and superintendents and tell them so.
Roger Hines
6/20/18
