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.