Diane Ravitch posted two pieces so far today. One is on Ken Robinson’s book about the egregious consequences of high-stakes standardized testing. The other is about the Stalinesque way in which the “justice” system works in a small town in Georgia.
These two phenomena are related. I hope you will stick with me here, because I’m going to present an argument, and you will have to read fairly closely to follow it.
Ed Deformers based their “data driven accountability” systems on a key idea, which we might call the Fundamental Axiom of Ed Deform:
You get what you measure.
The unelected monarch of Ed Deform in the United States is Bill Gates. Find a shill organization or federal legislation promoting standardized testing, evaluating teachers and schools based on standardized tests, or promoting “common standards” to make testing easier, and the probability is quite high that the Gates Foundation will be its primary funder or, at least, one of them.
Gates is a computer guy. So, he is doubtless familiar with the triple bar symbol (≡) from symbolic logic, which means “if and only if.” What experience has shown is that foundational principle on which Ed Deform is based should be rewritten as Outcome ≡ measurement
In other words, in high-stakes, data-managed systems
You get what you measure AND ONLY WHAT YOU MEASURE.
The last part of this (“and only what you measure”) is REALLY important because IT CHANGES EVERYTHING.
The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] make lip service to students reading substantive works of literature. But the standards [sic] themselves consist entirely of statements of “skills,” and these AND ONLY THESE are what is measured on the high-stakes standardized tests. Furthermore, they are measured in a particular way: students are given a snippet of random text and are asked a question that requires them to “apply the standard” to the text. So, that’s what you get: you get the devolution of education in ELA into depersonalized learning software and textbooks and worksheets, print or online, that present students with random snippets of text and ask them to apply the skills standards to these. In other words, you get this vast distorting or devolution of ELA pedagogy and curricula.
In real life, when you read Orwell’s 1984 or the Constitution of the United States, you don’t read it primarily to apply a skill from Mr. Coleman’s list to it. You read it because the experience is moving and unforgettable and because you are interested in the important things that Orwell or the Founders had to say and want to join in the ongoing cultural discussion of these. So, the approach forced upon us is utterly unnatural. It leaves all that out. Here’s a little experiment you can try: read Melinda Gates’s new book, The Moment of Lift, and then write a review of it. However, limit your review to discussing how, in the book, Ms. Gates’s choice of particular words affected the tone and mood of her piece and to giving examples of this (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY-RI.8.4). Then see if you care at all to write such a piece or if anyone would care at all to read it.
In short, the Gates/Coleman approach, which I call New Criticism Lite, leads to completely unnatural InstaWriting and InstaThinking and reduces the process of reading and responding to literary and other written works to a Procrustean, highly constrained exercise IN TRIVIALITIES. The whole reason for reading and writing—the commerce in ideas and experiences–is devalued or lost. It’s not going to be on the test.
But there is another modification we need to make in the Fundamental Axiom of Ed Deform before it actually reflects how it plays out in practice. Data-based accountability, Ed Deform style, depends upon the high stakes. You don’t get what you measure and only what you measure in the absence of high stakes accorded that measurement. In other words, you need violence and the threat of violence: give me what I am measuring (and only what I am measuring), or you will be fired, your school will be closed and replaced by a charter or, and your student will not graduate or be advanced to the fourth grade. So, the fundamental tenet of Ed Deform, revised:
You get what you measure and only what you measure if not getting this is accompanied by state violence.
So, what does the Fundamental Axiom of Ed Deform have to do with justice as practiced in that small town in Georgia? Well, the same axiom is at work. Increasingly in the United States, the criminal justice system is data-driven, and what is measured are guilty pleas and convictions, not whether justice was served. And so, under threat of state violence, you get what you measure and only what you measure—more guilty pleas. That’s why the “land of liberty” now has a higher percentage of its citizens under penal supervision (in jail, in prison, or on parole) than does any other country in the world (almost 3 percent of the adult population). Think of the sickest, most repressive regime out there. We in “the land of liberty” imprison people at a rate greater than it does. There are, today, more black men under penal supervision in the US than there were black men who were slaves in 1858. We are becoming one nation, accountable to data, like something out of Orwell or Kafka.
So, what sounds on the surface of it like a good idea (“We need real data-based accountability!”) ends up having these horrific consequences in the lives of actual people. Little Yolanda hates reading because she thinks it’s a guessing game in which you find which of the four tortured sentences in the multiple-choice question about standard CCSS. ELA-LITERACY.RI.666 is “most correct,” and then she grows up to be unable to get a job when she’s 30 because she was caught when she was 18 with her boyfriend’s roach clip in her pocket. She’s held accountable, forever. When she was 18, she went to a party, and she met the wrong guy, and so, of course, her life should be ruined going forward.
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” George Orwell, 1984
These two phenomena are related. I hope you will stick with me here, because I’m going to present an argument, and you will have to read fairly closely to follow it.
Ed Deformers based their “data driven accountability” systems on a key idea, which we might call the Fundamental Axiom of Ed Deform:
Gates is a computer guy. So, he is doubtless familiar with the triple bar symbol (≡) from symbolic logic, which means “if and only if.” What experience has shown is that foundational principle on which Ed Deform is based should be rewritten as Outcome ≡ measurement
So, what sounds on the surface of it like a good idea (“We need real data-based accountability!”) ends up having these horrific consequences in the lives of actual people. Little Yolanda hates reading because she thinks it’s a guessing game in which you find which of the four tortured sentences in the multiple-choice question about standard CCSS. ELA-LITERACY.RI.666 is “most correct,” and then she grows up to be unable to get a job when she’s 30 because she was caught when she was 18 with her boyfriend’s roach clip in her pocket. She’s held accountable, forever. When she was 18, she went to a party, and she met the wrong guy, and so, of course, her life should be ruined going forward.