The weekly saturation of educational doom from David Coffey has
become so commonplace that I scarcely read them anymore. But alas, I just couldn’t
resist a title like “Searching for the Best.” Here is exactly what needs to happen
for me to take it seriously:
1. I need to ignore the frequent references to the
ACT. Feel free to look up the data yourself if you like, but the truth is that
historical ACT composite scores in the United States have moved less than ½ of
one point in thirty years. (They’ve moved up, not down despite one million additional
students thrown into the mix, which ought to provide more than enough evidence
of a bell curve, but whatever.)
2. I have to ignore the “No Dentist Left Behind” fallacy
of testing, which fails to acknowledge comorbidity factors in measuring
anything. The “No Dentist Left Behind” fallacy was a satirical piece where dentist
effectiveness is determined by the “absolute certain data measurements” of patient
cavities. The more cavities the dentist fixed, the worse the data said he was. It’s
absurd, but that’s what we do to teachers when we fail to acknowledge a myriad
of features contributing to any problem.
3. I have to accept that it is OK to teach to a
test and manipulate a better outcome (Hawthorne effect, he says), which we all
know is true. In fact, should the State determine that torture is an effective
means of producing a desired outcome, then this is a logic we’d need to accept regardless
of how we may feel about torture if we accept that “outcome” is the goal.
4. Coupled with the above, I would need to accept
that we’ve been given a test worthy of teaching to (which I don’t) and that
somehow my seventh grade daughter’s future success as a human being is directly
tied to her ability to use words like “feckless” or “sagacious” in a complete sentence.
While it’s nice to know that she is sagacious enough to avoid fecklessness, I
can promise you she’d be this way even if she had only an “amorphous” understanding
of what I am ranting about as she “meanders” her way through “litigious”
requirements to become proficient in the State’s “voracious pseudonyms” that replace
real communication and supposedly measure her worth as a productive human being.
5. I would need to ignore the basics of genomic
diversity (there’s a reason we don’t use dunking a basketball or playing the harp
as a litmus test for all humans) and further still, I would have to ignore the
reality that a standardized test is specifically designed to give the “same”
questions, in the “same” format, in the “same” amount of time to children who
are not and NOR WILL THEY EVER BE the “same.” Anyone with two children knows
you have change tactics to reach one or the other and that what worked for one,
seldom worked for the other. Standardized testing refuses to acknowledge this
basic reality of genetic diversity.
I could go on for hours, but I won’t. We could talk about
how it was not the herds of unwashed Americans who gave us Enron, the housing
bubble, or the big bank exploitation that nearly killed the world economy; rather
it was our Harvard educated, “college-ready” standardized test-takers who pulled
that number on us. Or we could talk about how JFK’s IQ was a solid 30 points
below Nixon’s and yet he still managed to be twice the leader Nixon was. On and
on and on, history screams at us. None of that matters much when there’s data
to worship.
The only reason I am even bothering to reply (yet again) is
because Coffey mentioned the Hawthorne effect. I am peculiar like that.
By mentioning it, he has opened up a real can of worms (that’s
a metaphor -- just in case you were one of the ACT test takers thirty years ago
scoring the same as the doomed and ignorant kids today are) … (PS: that’s
satire).
The Hawthorne effect is not always discussed in favorable
terms among data analysts. It is very often seen as a manipulation point that
interferes with gaining an objective view of what is really going on. So to put
it as simply as I possibly can, if measuring a student’s performance has a
direct correlation to increasing that performance (and it does to an extent)
then what we’ve measured is performance. We’ve not measured how well our kids
can think and that’s at least half the problem.
Beyond this, again as clearly as I can put it, if the
Hawthorne effect is to be taken as legitimate, then we could just as easily
apply it to the test-makers themselves and increase their test creation
performance by observing and measuring them. Until recently, that was not even an
option, meaning no one could measure the effectiveness of the test-maker (which
is criminal when you think tax payers fronted millions for a test we couldn’t
test for effectiveness).
Surely you see the problem now. By applying the Hawthorne effect
to the test-makers we’ve entered into “Achilles and the Tortoise” territory (if
you know Zeno and Lewis Carroll) where the rulers by which we measure
improvement can themselves be measured for improvement. This philosophically
begs the question about what we are measuring at all.
All of this is of course a ridiculous conversation when we
know outright that there have been numerous studies that reveal the opposite of
the Hawthorne effect: that in fact measuring a control group produced WORSE
results. One of them, quite disturbingly, involved surgeons who when measured
for skill and effectiveness had higher patient mortality rates than when they
were left alone.
Again, why does it matter? I guess it matters because we
keep getting fish-slapped every week with the same old “We’re getting closer”
nonsense, which incidentally, this week pointed us to a new product. And those
of us who have a genuine education (not a standardized one) know something all
too well: “Behind every measurement is a ruler for sale.” Clip that for your
Facebook page and just owe me one.
I guess I’m done responding to the saturation of columns for
a while. I don’t know why the Oak Ridger keeps giving space for the same shallow
material that is clearly agenda driven, but…
Here’s a final thought before I go: Anyone who has seen Schindler's List where the Nazi soldier stands over the
Jewish ammunition worker to measure productivity knows that the Hawthorne
effect is real. But is that really the kind of world we want? Do we want it for
our children?
Well, to use Mr.
Coffey’s words… “we’re almost there.”
