Lessons Learned
Ughhhhh
Stop With The Obsessive Metrics Gathering Already!
In
education today, as well as in most other areas, it all comes down to this;
numbers. Scores. Metrics. Performance Data. These numbers drive funding, define
success, delineate projections, and determine accountability for students,
teachers, school districts, and states. As numbers are crunched, compared, and
evaluated on flow charts and bar graphs presented in large beige-colored
conference rooms to suit-clad metrics philosophers, perhaps it is easy to
forget that these numbers represent precious, unique children filled with
brilliant dreams, gifts, and wonder, anxious to explore the world and imagine
and discover answers to challenging questions. States, districts, teachers, and
students are staggering under the inscrutable weight of cold, hard, continuous
metric achievement, which unquestionably demands the classroom focus to be
statistical. The highly-pressured demands of this have been known to result in unethical choices made in
survival-type desperation. Unfortunately, although true learning cannot be
quantified as such nor contained in neat statistical, numerical boxes, it seems
it has become reduced to this very thing. Teaching to the test leads not to
true learning. Teaching to the test inspires no imaginative and
possibility-filled divergent thinking, clever invention, or mind wandering
creativity. Teaching to the test opens no new windows of discovery, but rather
denotes a more “shoveling in of information” style of fact dissemination. As
there must be some sort of balance in all things in life, there appears to be
no balance in this now. The metrics pendulum has swung to an unhealthy,
inappropriate extreme with respect to educating our children and is in dire
need of honest, immediate scrutiny and re-prioritization if we are to truly
nurture and nourish tomorrow’s hope.
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