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Turning Children into Data: A Skeptic’s Guide to Assessment Programs
By Alfie Kohn
This article appeared in EDUCATION WEEK on August 25, 2010. Used by permission of the author.
If all the earnest talk about “data” (in the context of educating children) doesn’t make you at least a little bit uneasy, it’s time to recharge your crap detector. Most assessment systems are based on an outdated behaviorist model that assumes nearly everything can — and should — be quantified. But the more educators allow themselves to be turned into accountants, the more trivial their teaching becomes and the more their assessments miss.
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. ~ Albert Einstein
Programs with generic-sounding names that offer techniques for measuring (and raising) student achievement have been sprouting like fungi in a rainforest: “Learning Focused Schools,” “Curriculum Based Measurements,” “Professional Learning Communities,” and many others whose names include “data,” “progress,” or “RTI.” Perhaps you’ve seen their ads in education periodicals. Perhaps you’ve pondered the fact that they can afford these ads, presumably because of how much money they’ve already collected from struggling school districts.
When I’m asked about one of these programs, I have to confess that I just can’t keep up with every new stall that opens in this bazaar — and the same is true of the neighboring marketplace that’s packed with discipline and classroom management programs. (Hint: here, extreme skepticism is warranted whenever the name includes the word “behavior.”) Still, it is possible to sketch some criteria for judging any given program — preferably before someone requests a purchase order.
So let’s imagine that your community is buzzing about something called ABA: “Achievement-Based Assessment” — or, perhaps, “Assessment-Based Achievement” — whose website boasts of “monitoring and improving each student’s learning with proven data-focused strategies.”
Worth a try? Well, we certainly can’t decide on the basis of how ABA markets itself. Just about any descriptor that might seem appealing, even progressive, has been co-opted by now: Every outfit claims to help teachers “collaborate” in order to focus on the “learning” (rather than just the teaching) as they look at “authentic” outcomes and “differentiate” the instruction with a “developmental” approach that emphasizes “critical (or higher-order) thinking” skills — in order to prepare your students for — raise your hand if you saw this coming — the “21st century.”
Obviously we’re going to have to look a little deeper and ask a few pointed questions.
1. What is its basic conception of assessment? To get a sense of how well things are going and where help is needed, we ought to focus on the actual learning that students do over a period of time — ideally, deep learning that consists of more than practicing skills and memorizing facts. If you agree, then you’d be very skeptical about a program that relies on discrete, contrived, test-like assessments. You’d object to any procedure that seems mechanical, in which standardized protocols like rubrics supplant teachers’ professional judgments based on personal interaction with their students. And the only thing worse than “benchmark” tests (tests in between the tests) would be computerized monitoring tools, which reading expert Richard Allington has succinctly characterized as “idiotic.”
2. What is its goal? Ask not only what the program is but why it exists. Lots of talk about “student achievement” — as opposed to, say, “students’ achievements” — suggests that the program’s raison d’être is not to help kids understand ideas and become thoughtful questioners, but merely to raise their scores on standardized tests. (Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed evidence showing not only that these tests are completely inadequate for assessing important intellectual proficiencies but that high scores are actually correlated with a superficial approach to learning.) Obviously, anyone who harbors doubts about the validity or value of standardized tests wouldn’t want to have anything to do with a program that’s designed mostly with them in mind.
3. Does it reduce everything to numbers? If all the earnest talk about “data” (in the context of educating children) doesn’t make you at least a little bit uneasy, it’s time to recharge your crap detector. Most assessment systems are based on an outdated behaviorist model that assumes nearly everything can — and should — be quantified. But the more educators allow themselves to be turned into accountants, the more trivial their teaching becomes and the more their assessments miss.
That’s why I was heartened recently to receive a note describing how some teachers on a Midwestern high school’s improvement team took a long, hard look at the Professional Learning Communities model and said no thanks. They were put off by its designers’ frank admiration of for-profit corporations as well as its “misguided premise that every subject area can be broken down into core concepts which then
