The Seduction of Measurement

For as long as I can remember I’ve been part of a growing crusade of scholars gnashing their intellectual teeth on the accountability movement. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve quoted Eisner saying, “What gets measured is what matters”. . . . well, let’s just say my house would not need a new paint job and I’d not be the one scraping old wallpaper off the downstairs half-bath. I am a huge fan of Alfie Kohn, Deborah Meier, and Susan Ohanian. I’ve played the Harry Chapin “Not on the Test” song over and over again. In other words, I despise the testing culture of schools and all it represents.

Well, hardly two weeks into the school year have passed, and we got Niamh’s first DIBELS standardized test score. There it was, all nicely plotted on a spreadsheet: our daughter’s scores in both initial sound fluency and letter naming fluency. We saw the difference between the actual score and the “August goal,” and smiled. Yikes! We weren’t supposed to do that. Tests can’t measure the degree to which our daughter loves to read, where her mind travels as she reads, and the ideas that burst forth afterwards. This is just some simple instrument administered to every child in kindergarten. Surely the thought that she was “better” than some didn’t make us happy. That would be horrible to celebrate the lack of literary skills among her classmates if such existed. So why did we smile?

The power of certainty in a number is quite seductive. Right there in black and white we can SEE clear evidence of our daughter’s brilliance. It is instant affirmation of all our glowing adoration. Who wouldn’t be happy to see that? Of course, we make the numbers “say” whatever we want or need them to say. Is one score necessarily indicative of high achievement? Brilliance? Being better than others? Soon after we smiled, of course, we returned to our critically transitive postures (or at least some approximation thereof). No, it doesn’t really mean much. So many things mean far more. However, that moment of weakness – that smile – made me far less accusatory to all the parents out there. For years I’ve lamented that parents just don’t “get it.” They don’t see the need to fight back against all the accountability culture that is ruining our schools. Now, I have to see that we are all susceptible to the seduction of those test scores. I just hope I can fight the good fight along with as many parents as possible in spite of whatever seductive reports may come our way.

My Plea for Niamh

It has been a very long time since I've written a post. Since the early postings we’ve moved to Kentucky. The girls are now in public school in Bellevue, and the long afternoons together seem like ages ago. I wouldn’t trade the year for anything. It did teach me that “home schooling” – even part time – is incredibly taxing. I also learned that good intentions aren’t enough. So many times other agendas controlled the order of the day.

So now we are facing the long road ahead known as “public education” and how our girls will fare within it. It’s that thing we’ve written about for years. We’ve studied it and theorized about it. Now it is upon us in the form of Grandview Elementary.

When Rick and I started looking in the area, trying to decide where to live, we visited a lot of schools. There were a few that seemed fairly impressive. Some of them, however, were in communities that came with a great deal of baggage. “Oh, they don’t respond well to outsiders there,” or “It really matters there whether you live on the north or south side of town.” These were phrases that pushed us away from some communities and their schools – however progressive the schools may have seemed. Then we walked into Grandview. It was vibrant. The principal was incredibly energetic. They seemed to work really hard to support all students and to ensure that “haves” and “have nots” were not easy to discern. Lots of parents were there when we visited. Everyone seemed incredibly happy to be there. We were hooked. We told the realtor to only show us homes in Bellevue.

Now we are in the second week of school. We are both still very happy with the school. I think for public school you really cannot get much better than Grandview. Nevertheless, we are still confronted with all that is “public school,” and what that may ultimately mean for our girls. Granted, part of my angst may come from reading Ken Robinson at the same time school is beginning. In his book, Out of Our Minds, he challenges the ways schools have killed creativity in many ways. He doesn’t lay the complete burden of this problem on the schools. Society has certainly demonstrated a very narrow view of intelligence and achievement. He does note, and I agree, that schools are the primary instrument we use to kill creativity in youth.

As I read and as I think about the very real changes in our family as we enter the public education phase of our children’s lives, I can’t help but wonder about how my girls will change over the next 12 years and how much of that will be shaped by their schools. The reality really hits when I stop and watch Niamh. She is a bundle of creative energy. For years now she has tried to stay awake at night by creating her own dramas. Sometimes I walk by her room at night and see her using her dolls (or her hands on the nights when we take the dolls away) to enact dramatic skits with different characters all exhibiting different voices, moods, etc. Other nights I hear what appear to be full-blown operas with protagonists, antagonists, vibrant lyrics, and a variety of plot twists. When she and her sister play make-believe, Niamh is typically the one who sets up the storyline. When she is coloring, the characters on the page take on life-like qualities. It’s not just a two-dimensional form on a page to fill-in. It’s a princess calling out to her “honey” about some exciting event.

In addition to her drama, Niamh SEES things. She notices all sorts of nuances in the world and she makes connections between things that would seem so idiosyncratic to the average person. She connects things in nature to movies, songs, things she may have experienced a long time ago. Not only that, but seeing things gets her so excited. When one thing reminds her of another she gets her wonderfully big grin and looks like she is about to burst unless she shares what she has seen.

Rick and I have often wondered what Niamh’s bundle of imaginative energy looks like in the classroom. We’ve always gotten wonderful reports about her behavior, so we have to assume that the temperamental outbursts that sometimes come with this imaginative spirit are reigned in while in formal institutions of learning. While we appreciate this, we can’t help but wonder whether the creative energy itself isn’t likewise reigned in, and if so, what does that mean if she feels she has to turn off her creative spirit – that spirit that defines her – in order to do well in school.

We’ve seen an unsettling example of this during homework this week. For the past two nights Niamh has had a worksheet where she has to practice her letters. For the record, I don’t object to handwriting practice, and I know that she needs to review her letters for the sake of what is expected in kindergarten and first grade. Niamh was particularly frustrated the first night because she felt she was being forced to write big letters. The paper had the very wide lines with the dotted lines in the center – designed to be more developmentally appropriate for kindergarten students. But Niamh loves to write her letters with a very small font. She was initially rebellious and protested, “My teacher wants me to write big!” However, by the second day her protests subsided and she had accepted the required font size. Much of this, I am sure, is a direct result of her adoration of her teacher, Mrs. Skirvin. She wanted to please her. If that meant writing her letters bigger than she otherwise preferred, then so be it. While she was practicing her B’s, Niamh danced, laughed, and imagined the bumps of the B’s as bellies. At one point, however, she made a B almost identical to the B on the worksheet. She stopped, grew excited, and declared, “I made a REAL one. I made a real B.” She then ran into the next room with the paper to show Rick.

I was left quite unsettled at the kitchen table as she ran into the other room. What are we doing if we teach her that there is such a thing as a “real B” versus the creative bellied B’s (some of which she’d given accessories) on her page? I know she wasn’t directly “taught” that there is such a thing as a real B in her kindergarten class, but after only five days in a public school she had somehow managed to learn that there are right ways to do things and being creative doesn’t have anything to do with being right. In fact, it could very well prevent you from being right. While a “real B” isn’t necessarily an educational tragedy in and of itself, I still worry about all the other lessons both she and Audrey will hear about what is “right” and what is “real,” and how that will shape their views of themselves and their world.

So, I guess my plea to Mrs. Skirvin , Niamh’s wonderful kindergarten teacher, and Mrs. Simpkins, the wonderful principal of Grandview, is that in spite of all the powers that are trying to destroy creativity and enforce a culture of compliance, please save spaces in your school for the amazing potential of imaginative spirits. Honor SEEING and animated BEING along with the standards. I know this is a lot to ask, but when I think about what is at risk - both in my own home and in society itself – how can I/we not ask?

The Lived Experience

When pressed for my own definition of curriculum in curriculum classes, I often resort to “the shared lived experience” and then go into animated elaborations from Dewey, Van Manen, etc.  I argue that we need to see curriculum as something much bigger and much more complex than what a teacher has officially written down in a lesson plan book or what a company has outlined within a reform model.  In many ways, this “definition” is a default response to something exciting and complex – something that should, by its very nature, defy simple defining. 

 

This week I encountered a very real lived experience with Audrey that brought this image home.  I had to go to campus to sign a letter.  Audrey and I took the train with the intention of running in, taking care of the task, and then quickly returning home.  It was one of those days when the “to do” list would win out over more deliberate learning opportunities – or at least that is what I thought at the time. 

 

On the way home on the train a gentleman stood near us.  By the nature of his smell and appearance, it was pretty clear that he was homeless.  As soon as the train left the Five Points platform, the man walked to the center of the aisle right in front of us and began his speech:  “I was just released from Grady.  Somebody hit me over the head last night.  I was at Grady and somebody stole all my money.  They took my wallet and my money.  I’m not asking for money.  I just need food.  Does anyone have anything I could eat?”  After a brief silence a woman sitting near us held out the take-out container that held the remains of her lunch.  “Here.  You can have this,”  She said.  Sincerely grateful, the man took the container, walked back to the corner, and quickly ate its contents. 

 

Audrey was wide-eyed throughout the experience.  Then the questions followed.  “What happened to that man?”  “Why is he homeless?”  “Why did someone hit him?”  For the remainder of the trip home we talked about people who are homeless, hungry, and hurting.  I reminded her that the nights her dad leaves to go to the freeze shelter at church he is going to help people like that man – people who need a place to sleep when it gets so cold.  We talked about how the food we sometimes bring to church goes to help feed others who are hungry.  We also talked about how sad we were that we weren’t prepared to help this man on the train.  As we continued our way home from the train, we talked about putting together bags of food or food coupons to help others when we travel on the train or walk downtown.

 

Throughout the experience I was kicking myself.  I have planned for some time to have those “bags” of crackers, coupons, or something to give out when I encounter homeless around campus.  Here was a chance to “show” Audrey a way to be compassionate to the marginalized, and I was unprepared.  I felt as if I’d let her down.  Since that experience I’ve shifted my focus from the “experience” to consider the other part of that default definition I often give: lived.  Together Audrey and I experienced a lived moment of disappointment in ourselves- of recognition that there was more that we could do, and a feeling of sadness that we weren’t prepared to help someone in need.  We ended the experience with a new determination to be prepared next time.  Since then she has recalled the experience a number of times – telling her dad and her sister about it, considering levels of poverty and what it means to not have a home.  She has since learned through discussion that not all homeless are men and not all homeless are old – even children can be hungry and homeless.  She has also stopped asking to go and get “treats” every time we go out.  Granted, this hasn’t’ stopped completely, but I think she stops and thinks about that man and how he needed basic food – not treats. 

 

So, perhaps that brief encounter on the train did not instantly turn into an educative experience as I had always imagined.  It wasn’t an opportunity for me to whip out some pre-determined homeless support packet to demonstrate what a socially concerned person SHOULD do.  Instead, I think it was a chance for Audrey and I to live together in our wishes and our fallibility – to encounter an opportunity where we saw ways in which we could be better for others.  After all, if curriculum is the “shared lived experience,” then we need to be as mindful of the living as we are of the experience itself.