I'm well
aware of my tendency as I grow older to look upon the past as a time when all
was good and to worry about the present and despair of the future, and I do my
best to control it. I try to remember that the idyllic small-town youth I
remember was obtained only by a tacit agreement to ignore institutionalized
poverty, racism, homophobia, gender bias, and all the rest of the ignored
factors that made the 1950's a fool's paradise for the white, male-dominated,
heterosexual middle and upper classes.
Notwithstanding
those very real flaws, the bitter fruits of which we are harvesting to this day
and likely will continue to harvest for years to come, there were some things
we did right. Even in the backwater upstate New York town where I grew up,
everyone got a solid educational grounding for adult life. To be sure, there
were two tracks, one for those destined for college and the other for those
whose education would end at High School, but care was taken that both groups
got an education that did more than merely pander to their transitory teen-age
tastes or prepare them only to pass tests, and too much of today's education
seems to be about those two dubious goals. In this the educational
establishment is showing itself to be decades behind the business world.
In the
latter stages of the manufacturing economy, roughly from 1850 to 1950, American
business measured its success by the numbers - units produced, revenue in,
profits out, etc. Peter Drucker, a leading management thinker for much of the
20th Century was famous for the dictum that "if you can't measure it, you
can't manage it," and American industry took this to heart. Measurement
and its cousin statistics became the supreme power worshipped at the altar of
American business.
With the
transition to a new age of business - call it the Information Economy or the
Interaction Economy, or the Experience Economy - there probably won't be an
"official" name until after the next transition - the primacy of
"the numbers" began to be challenged. Not that numbers and
measurement won't always have a place, but the importance of Drucker's other
maxim, "you don't measure what you get, you get what you measure"
began to become clear. If you measure salespeople's activity (e.g. number of
sales calls) you will get a lot of activity; if you measure their productivity
(e.g. number of sales closed), you will get a lot of productivity, and so
qualitative factors, considered "soft and fluffy" in the
Manufacturing Economy came into increasing prominence.
Our
education system seems to be going the other way. Under the banner of
"performance-based" education, what is being emphasized is test
scores, and just as when you measure salespeople's activity you get more sales
calls but not necessarily more sales closed, when you measure test scores you
get higher test scores but not necessarily more education. In other words we
are in danger of turning out skilled test-takers rather than educated people.
One
unintended consequence of the emphasis on test scores is a dumbing-down of the
education system. Makes sense doesn't it? If you want higher test scores, teach
easier material! So increasingly we find the "harder" subjects being
dropped or made optional. For example, in more and more school districts, the
classics are no longer required or in some cases even taught. The classics of
world literature, music, philosophy, as well as the forms of mathematics that
taught us to think - algebra, geometry, trigonometry, are going by the wayside
in favor of whatever is currently trendy in too many schools.
The
culprits in this unfortunate trend are not the teachers. I’ve yet to meet a teacher who is happy with "teaching
to the test." Rather it is the educational administration, beginning with
the Federal Government that seem to be looking for a simple way to measure and
have neglected to pay attention to Drucker's second principle. If you measure
test scores, you will raise a generation of good test-takers, not educated
citizens. Secretary Duncan should take a leaf from Business's book, see what is
at the source of real learning, and measure that, messy as it may be.
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