The Green Cup

My friend Hugo Kerr (link courtesy of the International Reading Association) posted a quote from social scientist Daniel Yankelovich to the reading teachers listserv recently describing the McNamara Fallacy.

Robert Strange McNamara (his middle name was his mother’s maiden name) was U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967 under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. And during the Vietnam War he is supposed to have become obsessed with data.

Here’s the Yankelovich quote on McNamara’s approach to (evidently) most things…

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.

Hugo (a Brit) posted it to the Reading Teachers listserv and commented that this “is precisely what is happening in literacy (and other) ‘education’ in the UK.” Of course, many Americans would say that it’s happening here, too…

One of those Americans is Al Franken. Franken is a comedian and political commentator who is currently running for the Senate in Minnesota. Franken says this: I believe that the No Child Left Behind law must be dramatically reformed or scrapped altogether. I’m for accountability, but I’m not for the deeply-flawed NCLB system.

The danger is that Franken and other opponents of No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on testing will probably win. That, by itself, would be okay. But it seems inevitable that tide of rebellion swelling up against NCLB will result in a move to the opposite extreme.

The problem is that there is nothing wrong with testing. We should keep right on testing. But how we interpret the results and what we do about those interpretations – that should change. The first step really is to measure what can be measured. It’s the rest of the process that’s a problem.

We need an amalgam of different forms of assessment – some sort of a fusion of the hard numbers we’re using now with more subjective factors. But more importantly, we need to decide how to balance an effort to provide fundamental educational services to the various communities represented in NCLB’s focus on disaggregating test data with the search for individual educational excellence and the effort to implement the new curriculum focus that is needed to cope with the 21st Century’s demands. Without that balance what we have is a stagnant curriculum designed to ensure generalized mediocrity.

Albert Einstein reportedly had a sign hanging in his Princeton office that read: “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts!” I think we could add to that and say that not everything that counts today will still count tomorrow. That truth makes the enactment of laws about student assessment problematic (which is a fancy word for silly)…