Author: Greg

During his years teaching poetry at Amherst, Robert Frost came to understand an important feature of ‘slow learning’ that is often overlooked by proponents of ‘virtual’ education. It is that in a classroom, students often show their nearness to or achievement of understanding by a look that is fugitive but unmistakable when it appears. Experienced teachers recognize this look and use it, as did Frost, to check understanding. At one point in his ‘meditative monologue’ on “Education by Poetry’ Frost correctly asserts that sometimes the look is the only thing we have to go on for judging successful understanding and for marking.

These postings have argued that assessments that are close to the course being taught are likelier to capture fugitive elements of a course than are ‘distant’ assessments like standardized tests. William James argued that consciousness includes an item on which we focus and a ‘fringe’ of material that is tentatively present to us, to which we may immediately turn at need. On line education rids the ‘classroom’ of this fringe and proceeds, as if blinkered, through its syllabus. How many of us have had a teacher like Mr. Ciriello, who used to scan the faces of his students for comprehension during lectures and discussions? When I realized what he was doing, I could knit my brow and count on an explanation without the embarrassment of having to raise my hand and admit that I did not understand what he was talking about. And how many of us have had teachers like Professor Sareil, who probed and crumbled caked wisdom thoroughly and relentlessly at his colloquium table? It was scary, but it worked; and by being a bit scary he helped teach me how not to crumple under forensic pressure[1].

One of Frost’s students reports that after his classmate had done a particularly splendid reading of a poem, Frost told him, “You get an A forever.” What a wonderful reward and motivation to continue as he had done! Education on a human basis allows all these possibilities. Education by machine does not.

* * *

My summer trip continues, during which I heard two stories about excellent teachers of long standing who were maltreated by capricious administrators. One of them was a gifted math teacher who after twenty years of successful teaching[2] was hounded out of his school by a vindictive principal. Another, a successful English teacher of thirty years’ standing, suddenly started receiving negative reviews. It turned out that the reviewer’s administrative colleague, whose son she had taught, had given him false reports of her methods. This kind of whispering campaign is not always detected and eliminated, as my friend’s fortunately was. More often it results in wreckage such as happened to the math teacher.

(The ghastliest story of capricious bullying by an administrator involves a former colleague who became a target of our principal’s tender attentions. She was gradually beaten down, but the last straw came when her husband, a distinguished physicist, received news that he had been elected to the Royal Society. She asked the principal’s permission to attend his investiture; he rejected her request. She came to school but announced her resignation. I saw her a year after she left, her health entirely restored.)

Evidence shows that American teachers are dead last among jobholders in the quality of relationships with their supervisors. One reason, but only one, is this kind of treatment by bad administrators. Why is no one investigating this deadly impediment to good teaching and learning?

My summer holiday took me this week into some terrain containing oblique lessons in education. While on the remote and mountainous Big Sur coast of California I stayed in a monastic ‘cell’ at a monastery whose monks are largely silent except during sung and spoken prayers. (The discipline is relaxed at the midday meal.) Like the cells of the Grand Charterhouse in Grenoble, the cells of this monastery are designed for silent reading and other contemplative activities by their tenants when they are not at work or prayer. Each one has a little garden with a wall around it. After evening prayers the cloister becomes utterly silent and dark. No TV, screens, or gadgets.

These conditions, it turns out, may conduce to good and healthful sleep of the kind that students (and their teachers) are, more and more, giving up. It is not just that they are staying up longer: it is that when they finally drop off, the sleep they get is less in quantity and quality.  The reason lies to a great extent in the kind of light they experience in the hours before their bedtime. Light with an abundance of its constituent wavelengths at the blue end of the spectrum acts on our bodies as a signal that undercuts the impulse to sleep, even to the point of disrupting circadian rhythms. This is precisely the kind of light emitted by the gadgets one does not use at the monastery.

Though most of us would prefer a bit of sleep deprivation to a very ascetic life, there is a big difference between a bit and a lot. Sleep is supposed to “knit up the ravell’d sleeve of care,” but no knitting gets done when students are murdering sleep in how they conduct their waking lives.

* * *

Today I visited a small but excellent bookstore that deals in new and used books. The shop assistant was helpful but distant until I took out my fountain pen to sign the credit card slip. She complimented the pen and asked if she might try it. She took it in a practiced grip and with confident speed executed a line of beautiful calligraphy. It turns out that she had studied calligraphy under Corita Kent. As the fountain pen goes the way of the abacus (except at the marvelous Hop Cheong Pen Shop in Hong Kong and other outposts), we are not just giving up a bit of the modest artistry that a full life should afford. We are handicapping the young people who miss the formative and even therapeutic effects that handwriting can have, for it turns out that learning to write and then taking notes in cursive letters rather than typing them aids in the handling of the material noted.

Such experiences and arguments would not impress Idaho’s unfortunate Governor Otter, who said of one of Idaho’s gifted but gadget-free teachers that if she has “only an abacus in her hand, she is missing the boat.” He and others like him, who keep catching futile boat rides to successive futures of the month, will eventually be forced to see what they and their students miss and what remains unraveled in their education.

Hong Kong’s schools start their summer holidays in mid-July. (Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, for we return at the beginning of September.) At my school year-end report cards are distributed to students on Parents’ Day, the second-to-last school day. Each student and his parents meet with his ‘academic advisor’, a teacher who minds his progress during the year, flagging trouble if need be.

I was in the office this morning (Saturday) because I needed to meet with a student and his parents: the father would be unable to attend on Parents’ Day. We had a productive meeting at which (again) I marveled silently at how non-adversarial the relationship between parents and teachers tends to be here. There are exceptions, but they are notable, not run of the mill.

Before that meeting I was reviewing the report card, which is actually a seven-page document that includes, besides grades, comments by each teacher, explanations of grades, and a compendium of Creativity, Activity, and Service. Academic advisors usually check with teachers who write severe or non-laudatory comments to try and find out what lies behind them. There were none of this kind of comment on the report I was about to hand out. The student’s grades were very good, though not quite what he would like; but he has been deeply involved in a number of extracurricular activities, particularly drama.

While I was looking, a familiar voice called to me on the intercom at the door that allows students (politely) to summon teachers from the office for meetings. Whom should I find at the door but two graduates to see me! One of them, who graduated a year ago, is ‘reading’ (studying) law at the London School of Economics. The other, who graduated two years ago, is in the Philosophy Politics and Economics program at Oxford.

Both graduates had been in the school choir, but the LSE student has turned to writing in his spare time, while the Oxford student joined the choir of his college, where he now regularly sings at the college’s services. (It is Oriel College, where the Oxford Movement started).

This evening I’ll be attending a ‘Homecoming Concert’ in the school’s auditorium. There are four in July to mark the end of the school year.  All charge rather stiff prices for seats, and all the seats are sold out. I am looking forward to hearing the Senior Choir, the Orchestra, the String Orchestra, and other groups play.

These are not just elitist frills, or shouldn’t be. My own public high school in California used to field award-winning bands and orchestras, and wherever they are found, secondary-school arts and music programs bring something essential to a curriculum and a school. Some students like my Oxonian continue their musical activities past graduation. Most have fond memories of them.

But there is more. They bring something essential to the mind, something that Charles Darwin regretfully recognized in his middle age. He said that he regretted giving up listening to music, reading poems, and looking at pictures, and was sure that he had lost something essential in this lack. In touting the STEM we should not forget the roots and trunk and crown.

Sometimes a single statistic tells a whole story. That is the case with a statistic taken from a report I recently read. Pages 3 and 4 of the report say that California now spends nearly twice as much on its prisons as it does on its universities. Thirty-five years ago it spent more than three times as much on its universities as on its prisons.

Among the many plaudits that came to Louis Menand after the publication of The Metaphysical Club was the Pulitzer Prize for history. He deserved them all: this history of American philosophy is engaged, witty, knowledgeable and thorough. One example of its excellence is a two-paragraph character sketch[1] of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the distinguished polymath and father of the Supreme Court justice. The sketch is vivid and pointed, though perhaps its judgment of its subject’s sense of self-esteem is a bit hard on Holmes. The way to judge, of course, would be to compare it with other material at hand about Holmes and his world. Menand is harder on William James—too hard, I think, in light of my other reading about him. That should not affect my admiration of the work as a whole, provided that I take his assessment of persons with a bit of caution.

I would certainly not want to say that Menand and other writers of history should be bound by rules of writing, or that our judgment of them should be governed by simplistic rubrics. How, for example, should Menand’s writing about James be compared with Jacques Barzun’s? No rubric will say, for judgment is an art, or at least a matter of finesse, as Pascal put it.

Finesse works better when the mass of little details that surround a piece of work are known to the one making the judgment of it. And who will know this mass of details in a student’s writing better than a teacher? This is the finding of research showing that tests produced close to home and assessed by a student’s teachers were more sensitive to the details and subtleties of students’ knowledge than are tests produced by state and national organizations and graded by strangers or machines. My posting linked above mentions this research in connection with rating teachers, but it is obviously important in rating the students themselves.

How important may be inferred from an article in The New York Times about students’ essays being graded by (mostly) non-teachers in the employ of an “education” company.  They are paid less for their work than McDonald’s employees in Los Angeles will soon be paid for cooking hamburgers: perhaps the company applies stringent quality control standards to separate the sheep from the goats in this field of talent.

The question they will grade requires students to “[r]ead a passage from a novel written in the first person, and a poem written in the third person, and describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person.” Now, one reason not to centralize testing[2] is to prevent thousands or millions of students from having to answer one of the most inane exam questions I have ever seen. At least an isolated teacher coming up with this question will bewilder or frustrate only a roomful of students.

What can the examiners be getting at? I am afraid that the only answer is to buy the textbooks helpfully made by the same “education” company, and try to figure out what they mean.

Going to the Common Core for guidance will not help. It has a standard requiring that students in Grade 5 be able to “[d]escribe how a narrator’s or speaker’s point of view influences how events are described.” Aside from its avoidable ugliness, the standard is off base in what intellectual powers it requires of the poor students. Surely what they need to do here is not to describe but to analyze?

The task is made not just inane but complex because the two extracts chosen are from different genres, a novel and a poem. Thus, a ten-year-old student is required to examine point of view cross-generically and abstract principles about its possible effects from two given extracts, presumably fortifying his assertions with examples.

Allow me to present a miniature illustration. For the sake of brevity, I will use a stanza of a poem and a paragraph from a short story rather than anything longer, but they should serve to make my point. To simplify further, both passages have snakes as their subjects. The first is from ‘A narrow fellow in the grass’ by Emily Dickinson; the second, from “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

“A narrow fellow in the grass / Occasionally rides; / You may have met him—did you not / His notice sudden is, / The grass divides as with a comb, / A spotted shaft is seen, / And then it closes at your feet, / And opens further on.”[3]

“Round his brow he had a peculiar yellow band, with brownish speckles, which seemed to be bound tightly round his head. As we entered he made neither sound nor motion…. I took a step forward. In an instant his strange headgear began to move, and there reared itself from among his hair the squat diamond-shaped head and puffed neck of a loathsome serpent.”[4]

Your task if you are ten years old is, by reading both extracts, to “describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person.” The question is unanswerable, for nothing in these two extracts, or indeed any two extracts, implies hard and fast rules about the uses of point of view; and ten-year-olds can’t be expected to address this question any other way. I would be willing to bet good money that the company’s textbook has somewhere a list of unwarranted generalizations, perhaps two columns of bulleted points, contrasting first and third persons. Further, I bet the extracts conform to the expectations the list engenders—not because the expectations are generally true but because the examples have been chosen to fit them. It gives me a headache thinking about Dickinson’s poem being cross-personified in this bizarre way. The same with Menand. Never mind: somehow somewhere someone decided this “method” would do.[5]

Though this activity is questionable, at least a lesson in a classroom, followed by a home-made test asking students to apply the lesson, is an understandable and perhaps valid way to judge what the student has learned. The point that the critics of standardized tests make is that they are likely to miss what those students have learned. The only way to be sure of securing good marks is to pay more money for the book in which the “education” company “interprets” the standard.

But home-grown testing and grading have another advantage. All that perpetual discretion that teachers have been using for weeks or months in teaching and sizing up their students can be brought to bear in assessing them. That is a good thing.

She only said, “This reading is dreary,

It pleaseth not,” she said.

She said, “This reading makes me weary,

I wish that I were dead!”

—refrain from “Mariana Meets the Common Core” (with apologies to Tennyson)

One of my earliest postings condemned the topsy-turvy notion that in English classes a book of literature is “intended to fill out lesson plans” and “supplement textbooks.” Using examples of poetry I tried to show that literature can have an artistic integrity and appeal to interests and tastes worth cultivating for their own sake. Students caught up in a good poem could then come to an understanding of it using their powers of thought and feeling. Eventually those powers, strengthened by encounters with those appealing works, could be applied to the study of non-literary works if needed.

This does not mean that I disapprove of reading work not traditionally thought of as literature. Excellent writers of prose non-fiction abound and may be used with profit by English teachers. In my IB English classes I have taught essays by George Orwell and James Baldwin. For years before that I used The Norton Reader and the Introduction to Great Books series, which I also use in my Theory of Knowledge classes. In ToK we sometimes use articles from The New Yorker and The New York Review as well as work by Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist whose writing is on the IB Prescribed Literature list[1]. Last year the IB English A Literature exam had as one of its ‘unseen passages’ for commentary in Paper 1 an extract from Sir John Keegan’s history of The First World War.

What all these writings have in common is that they are well written. Most of them also share what Barzun calls a “thickness” that allows us to draw on them for more than we might find in thinner stuff. But the final thing is that many of them have an artistic integrity and appeal to which the good reader will respond. Take for example Keegan’s history. The extract on the exam was so good that I immediately ordered and read the whole book. While some of it was not up to the standard of the exam extract, I thought it on the whole a very good book worth reading in its entirety, not just that little snippet, however good it was.

The point worth remembering about such works in light of this posting’s subject is that they are both “informational” (i.e., informative) and “literary.” It turns out that many teachers and “curriculum specialists” rolling out the Common Core think writing must be one or the other. That error may be due to generalizing about “informational” (i.e. informative) writing from what they read in education school, but what is worse is that some of them are “pairing” gobbets of literature with non-fiction reading in order to make them more “relevant”. Hence the pairing of extracts from The Odyssey and sections of the GI Bill in order to ‘connect the story of Odysseus to the challenges of modern-day veterans’.

This is either profoundly goofy or profoundly stupid. The first thing I thought of was how to ‘connect’ Athena to the Veterans’ Administration. A compare-contrast essay? Columns of bulleted points? FAQs? Role play between Athena and a VA bureaucrat? The second thing I thought of was ‘connecting’ the writing of Homer to that of Congressional lawmakers. After the section in which Odysseus puts out the Cyclops’ eye, try giving your own 10^th-graders a taste of the law. Where do you begin if you don’t want your students to run away screaming from careers as lawyers—or from the classroom?

But the worst part of this ‘movement’ is the reductionist smoke and mirrors by which “teaching literature” is equated with “teaching particular concepts and skills.” Once you have made that category error, the next step follows inevitably: “we maybe aren’t teaching an entire novel, but we’re ensuring that we’re teaching the concepts that that novel would have gotten across.” Thus is art erased from life, just as it is being erased from school.

I just finished reading Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. Are the proponents of this approach going to claim that instead of reading the entire book, I should read just one of the passages in which Rasheed beats his wives, with a gloss explaining that Hosseini explores “lives imprisoned by patriarchy”? How explanatory! But what happened to Laila and Mariam? For that matter, what happened to Afghanistan?  When you teach art as something with its own integrity, these things do not vanish. When you “teach” it as an exercise in second-rate concept-work, they do.

If I had “learned” “literature” this way, I think I would have felt like “Mariana on the moated grange.”

failure (n): a key to success. ‘The idea of building grit and building self-control … you get … through failure, and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.’—Dominic Randolph, Headmaster, Riverdale Country School, New York. ‘Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential’—J. K. Rowling in her commencement address at Harvard.

—from the Didact’s Dictionary

Educators, popular writers, psychologists, and twelve-step programs: all these say that we must work through our rock bottoms, our nadirs, and our difficulties. Yeats adds his poetic testimony in the lines “Nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.” In the face of what Richard Hofstadter called “the collective experience of the human race,” many schools in the US, and perhaps some universities, are offering the infantilizing alternative that “failure is not an option” and replacing “the fascination of what’s difficult” (Yeats again) with “the menace of what’s difficult.”

From this premise some people question the sense in allowing accomplishment that might entail challenge or danger. I do not mean unreasonable danger; I mean any danger at all. Take as a first example physical danger. An old headmaster of my acquaintance, teaching in the Pre-Cambrian Era, allowed at the school he headed a number of tree houses in the schoolyard. I asked him once whether he was worried what would happen if a student fell out and broke an arm. He said, “No, we would get them a cast and in a few weeks everything would be fine.” Any child allowed in a tree house is enchanted by them, hence their (former) popularity. Any child with a memory of tree houses who reads in The Lord of the Rings about Lórien finds the land’s first enchantment is that its inhabitants live in tree houses.

By contrast I have in mind a friend’s young daughter, who decided she wanted to learn to roller-skate. The poor thing was swathed in shin guards and pads and lumps and braces till she looked like a mini-Michelin Man as she tottered down the 2% grade in front of her parents’ flat. She never scraped a knee, but what else did she never do because abrasions were not an option?

The second kind of example is academic danger. Here we enter the realm of institutional make-believe, but also a world in which students are warned off intellectual challenges or padded against them. I have written about one American school, which hedged its own IB program with such off-putting warnings as “demanding,” “challenging,” “strict” and “stringent”. But there are programs out there that don’t even offer challenges with the hedging. Hence Poor Vanessa, who aced her high-school math tests without study but found herself foundering in college. And hence university students who read at the 7^th-grade level. Failure has not been an option for them either.

Or has it? The New York Times reports a third danger in an upturn in cases of anxiety reported at US universities. One of the main causes is evidently that students who were swathed in protection for twelve years don’t know what to do when the prospect of real, authentic failure appears before them. Sometimes it is not failure: sometimes it is just getting the C that will “shatter” the fantasy prospect of medical school for a student who starts to crumple when assigned five hours of homework a week—not just per course, but in its entirety.

One wise teacher of my acquaintance used to tell his students, “You can pay now, or you can pay later.”  The thing about failure suffered early on in relatively supportive conditions is that “paying now,” even when somewhat painful, becomes a part of an education that insures against the worst effects of “paying later”. Students who have been given sixteen years of magic shows instead of education are unlikely to be accepted at medical school, but if they were, what would they do when faced with the Anatomy Lab (to take an early challenge) or their Internship-Residency (to take a later one)? What will flowers raised in a hot house do when the weather gets a bit nippy?

Today I attended a meeting of teachers from the Anglican schools of Hong Kong and Macau (there were thousands of us from over a hundred schools). It is worth remembering while reading what follows that Hong Kong’s students are highly successful on the PISA and OECD tests of educational attainment.

The speaker from the Hong Kong Education Bureau opened by criticizing the idea that teachers are “providers” and that education is not a “product” or a “service.” (Hong Kong’s teacher-training programmes are rated among the world’s best.)

The keynote speaker, the vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, might have been expected to quote modern academic educationists—but no, he quoted Confucius and Jesus. At one point he discussed his early teaching career and summarized it by saying that he realized, “I was not a very effective teacher because all I was doing was transmitting knowledge.”  With such thinking we are in an alternative universe to the world of pink slime education and teachers who ‘deliver instruction’..

The high point of the meeting came when the Archbishop of Hong Kong presented a gold medal to a man who is now completing his fiftieth year of teaching. Hong Kong has the world’s highest life expectancy (the US’s is nestled in the high thirties between Costa Rica and Cuba), but Hong Kong’s ‘elders’, as senior citizens are called here, are both long-lived and sturdy. So our long-serving teacher seemed as he walked out with a spring in his step to greet the Archbishop.

He was cheered to the echo.

It’s certain there is no fine thing

Since Adam’s fall but needs much laboring.

—W. B. Yeats

This being Labor Day Weekend in most of the world, I was thinking about labor in connection with teaching and learning. The first thing to be said is that education is one of those fine things Yeats was talking about, or should be. Of course there are Potemkin schools, in which movie-set schoolhouses and universities offer movie-set degrees, but a serious inspection of them would show how little work is really going on.

I mean work by students, though some teachers are not above reproach. It pains me to point the finger at such teachers, given that most of them—us—work our butts off; nonetheless, there is a real problem. A more serious problem is that they or their schools’ administrators have often replaced the assignment of solid work with idiot work[1]. Educational solids include setting and thoroughly grading student essays, conducting Socratic discussions, and preparing good lectures when lecturing is what is needed. Idiot work includes preparing for and taking multiple-choice tests, and the assignment of free-form “creative” “compositions” that are really only a cover for the flight from discipline and thinking. George Orwell thought that the “test preparation course” offered by his prep school was a “preparation for a confidence trick“, a judgment thought to be true of “test prep” at least till 1975, when Donald Campbell formulated Campbell’s Law of the corruption of “quantitative social indicator[s].”

The flight from thinking by students is a serious problem. If a student collapses under one or two Socratic questions, there is trouble; but the problem begins before the stage of accountability. What can we say of the staying-power of individual thinkers when a Harvard study reports that spending fifteen minutes of quiet time is so aversive to Americans that a majority of its male subjects would prefer receiving electric shocks to enduring that trial? It is not helped by schools where “failure is not an option”—schools in which rubbish can receive passing marks. So thoroughly has “failure” been banished that for a while it was even possible to “pass” New York State promotion tests with random guessing.

It is possible that students do poorly because they suffer from mental impairments like ADHD, but even that claim needs careful inspection. While the ADHD rate in the US approaches ten percent of students, in France it is half a percent. This difference is not due to the native psychic toughness of Frenchmen but to differences in child-rearing and educational practices in the two countries. French parents tend to set firm limits on children’s behavior and not to shrink from punishing transgressions. They also frown more on debilitating junk food and incontinent snacking. When an intervention is necessary, a French psychologist tends to analyze what in the afflicted young person’s family and environment needs addressing rather than prescribe drugs. The parents are in charge of the students rather than the other way around.

Of the latter way a friend gives an appalling example. At a conference with a low-scoring student and his father, my friend, the boy’s teacher, said that the boy would do better if he studied properly and did his homework. The father said, “I think you had better stay home two nights a week in order to study.” Junior replied, “Fuck no! I’ll go out if I feel like it” (with the car Dad provides him). The father acquiesced, and the student continued to do poorly. (Such a well-trained father may be abdicating his responsibility to bring up his child properly, but when the VAM scores come back, the teacher will be blamed.)

Education is not or should not be a magician’s trick. No spells and charms gain their users anything. The only thing that seems to work is work itself.

[1] The extent of the replacement is exemplified by the blurb one American school of my acquaintance has for its International Baccalaureate program, which is described as “demanding,” “challenging,” “strict,” and “stringent.” Students are reassured that they do not need to take the full diploma program. My readers should know that in Hong Kong the IB program is widely seen as easier than the Education Bureau’s curriculum, though that perception may be erroneous. My own students, every one of whom is in the full diploma program, think it is.

The conviction of teachers and administrators in Atlanta of racketeering should caution us all about the dangers of value-added metrics and high-stakes testing. There is no reason to think that the convicts were uniquely depraved. There is, however, abundant evidence to show that they worked within a misguided and poisonous institutional culture that was both depraved and stupid. Many succumbed to the poison.

The depravity is exemplified by an administrator who wore gloves while changing students’ answers at her school, though I don’t mean to say she would have been ‘less’ guilty if she had not worn gloves.

But the stupidity! An abundance of testimony confirms that the attention of the district was morbidly fixed on test results, which common sense and research could have told them was counterproductive. These results give a skewed picture of what students know, and their use in making consequential decisions was an invitation to corrupting pressures, which, sure enough, came to be exerted and felt.

The New York Times has almost figured this out—but not quite. It took an economics reporter to sniff out the problem, for the Times’s education reporters, since the removal of the much-missed Michael Winerip from the education beat, have as usual failed to get the story. The discovery of the problem in its economic and sociological aspects goes back to the academic ‘lawgivers’ of the mid-1970s who gave us Goodhart’s Law (economics) and Campbell’s Law (sociology). The problem is that when a measurement is used not just to measure but also to make consequential decisions, the users exert a corrupting pressure on the process of measurement. The Times reporter amusingly but incorrectly says that Goodhart’s Law means that “a performance metric is useful as a performance metric so long as it isn’t used as a performance metric.” Actually, it means that performance metrics are useful when they are not tied to consequential decisions. To put the seeming paradox correctly we should say, “a performance metric is useful only so long as no one uses it to reward or punish people.”

A performance metric should be reliable, which VAMs are not; but the main issue of this posting is not the inherent unreliability of standardized testing to determine what students know; it is that misconceived and misused evaluations of students’ performance can lead to corruption. The Atlanta verdict shows that this corruption can be criminal.

And the alternative to corrupt and worthless ‘metrics’? 1) Suck it up and turn down the RAT[1] grants. 2) Return from evaluations of teachers based on ‘metrics’ to evaluations based on discernment. 3) Dust off your Deming:

•     Drive out fear

•     Eliminate slogans, exhortations, targets.

•    Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.