Holt Think: Ed, Creativity, Tech, Administration

How our love for numbers warps school reform

This is nothing new for any teacher in United States of America. Our session with collecting data on students, collecting information about test scores, and all other forms of data mining have pretty much rendered creativity teaching out-of-the-box and passion for learning as moot points. This is an interesting essay by Alfie Kohen, he’s always an interesting read and whether you agree with him or not he always makes an interesting argument enjoy.

From the essay: 

“In education, the question “How do we assess (kids, teachers, schools)?” has morphed over the years into “How do we measure…?” We’ve forgotten that assessment doesn’t require measurement — and, moreover, that the most valuable forms of assessment are often qualitative (say, a narrative account of a child’s progress by an observant teacher who knows the child well) rather than quantitative (a standardized test score). Yet the former may well be brushed aside in favor of the latter — by people who don’t even bother to ask what was on the test. It’s a number, so we sit up and pay attention. Over time, the more data we accumulate, the less we really know.

You’ve heard it said that tests and other measures are, like technology, merely neutral tools, and all that matters is what we do with the information? Baloney. The measure affects that which is measured. Indeed, the fact that we chose to measure in the first place carries causal weight. His speechwriters had President George W. Bush proclaim, “Measurement is the cornerstone of learning.” What they should have written was, “Measurement is the cornerstone of the kind of learning that lends itself to being measured.”