One item of discussion from class which I felt especially interesting was the effect that numbers have on the direction and magnitude of someone’s efforts. As simple and impersonal as numbers are, they are routinely able to profoundly push and pull our motives. The Apgar score, a way to quantify the health of a newborn baby, was able to bring about a push from doctors to strive for best practice when their effort could be quantified, maximized, and compared among others. There are other examples of “grades” or “scores” which have been effective in other areas as well, and some that are not (e.g. ICES results for full professors). But the question I want to bring up is something else.
Is there a danger to numbers? Can a counterexample be found in which the influence of objectivity in professions or social situations offered by numbers is negative? My answer is yes. One area where positive change can be at odds with numbers nowadays is the public school system. The increased emphasis of former President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program on standardized test scores has furthered a gap between what teachers want to teach and what teachers feel they need to teach. One the one hand, what teachers want to teach foundational material in ways that can be effective and stimulating to students. This includes activities beyond the textbook such as taking fieldtrips to art museums, making advertisement posters in Spanish, and building Rube Goldberg contraptions in physics classes. One the other hand, teachers in lower-performing classrooms of high-minority, underfunded public schools feel the need to teach material that will raise the class’s standardized test scores to secure their job and secure the school’s future funding. This includes cutting out peripheral activities that may be more interesting for kids, paring down class material to only that covered in standardized tests, and investing a certain amount of class time to specifically teach standardized test-taking skills and techniques.
What’s the effect? Well, if my actual objective for America’s future generation is to have them be taught to be creative thinkers with a broad knowledge base in a way that has made learning fun for them (thus encouraging further education), numbers can really get in the way. Teachers at poorer schools in inner city districts that are striving for acceptable test scores are hamstringed by fear of losing their job for bad (or stagnant) student performance, as administrators become keen on the new ties of public funding to standardized test performance. Even worse, some teachers are tempted to allow their students to cheat on these tests to help out the class’s results.
Thus, as mentioned in class, numbers can prove powerful agents for effective change as standards of measurement. Competition can drive men and women to achieve best practice, and numbers can provide the metric. However, numbers can also pull motivation away from the goal of overall excellence and push motivation toward a narrow, confined definition of achievement. When looking to bring about effective change, one must know if the difference between an “A” and an “F” is the difference between success and failure, or simply a matter of how much help you had taking the test.
I concur. In my view NCLB has had a pernicious effect on primary and secondary education. A few years ago at a national conference I frequent called ELI, I saw a presentation by Julie Evans, who leads an effort called Project Tomorrow. The talk was mostly about what they learned via extensive surveys of high school students regarding their perceptions of their own learning. In a nutshell the findings are that they feel stressed out by the need to perform on the tests but that there is not much sustenance in what they are supposedly being taught. It is not a comforting picture.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to me that the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, hasn't challenged the NCLB approach to measuring learning. If and when health care reform legislation gets passed in Congress, these educational issues will come front and center. My guess it that the majority of the people think testing is a good thing and that they don't see the negative consequences. If you haven't read anything by Jonathan Kozol, I'd encourage you to do so when you have the chance. He is a harsh critic of NCLB.
Hey Fred!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that numbers can sometimes lead to misleading results or a focus shifting in an unproductive way. Yet at the same time, of course high school students are going to claim that they don't enjoy only studying for the test. But think about it if we went through high school and college without tests, and our teachers and professors depended on us to learn for the sake of learning. I don't know about us in CHP, but I think the majority of my peers would take this as a free pass to party.
This also brings up what I am familiar with in terms of just reading Gawande's chapter called " Piecework". Doctors attempted to make their own sort of HMO in order to avoid insurance companies while also providing people in the community with more affordable healthcare. Yet as it grew, it feel apart because of people taking advantage of the fact they were paid by salary, and not on a service fee basis.
I do not mean to sound pessimistic, I only mean to say that like most things in life it is never black or white. It is only through trying different strategies can we see what really works - numbers included.
-Alessandra