On several occasions, I have heard high-level education officials defend standardized testing with the phrase “we measure what we treasure.”
I heard it first from an Assistant Secretary of Education who worked for Arne Duncan. Just recently, Texas State Commissioner of Education Michael Williams said it. Williams, it should be noted, is not an educator; before Governor Perry named him to his post, he was in charge of regulating the very lightly regulated energy industry in Texas.
But is it true that we measure what we treasure?
No. Absolutely no.
What do most people treasure? Family. Friends. Home. Pets.
How do you measure your love for your spouse or your children? Do you give your children standardized tests to measure their value as human beings? Do you give them a score? Do you do that to your friends?
Do you love art? Travel?
I suspect that our society’s current obsession with test scores represents the (momentary) ascendancy of people who got high test scores and think that entitles them to rank and privilege. We can never measure what we treasure.
Anyone who uses that phrase “we measure what we treasure” should immediately agree to take the high school graduation test in his state and publish his scores.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have a friend who used to characterize moments like these with: Ignorance must be excused, but where is is, it must be used! So many ignoramuses in our midst who judge and dictate to others. His high school graduation scores ought to go through the roof, or NOT!
We can’t measure what we treasure, but we can control and manage what we measure (as Peter Drucker famously said), and so-called ed reform is mostly about power and control (and profits).
Peter Drucker also said, “There is nothing so useless as doing very efficiently that which should not be done at all.” I read that shortly before I left the private sector to become a teacher and it has guided my practice ever since.
I think about many of the things we are being asked to do with new methods and technologies that should not be done at all and I wonder where these management experts that are driving our policies learned to manage.
I never saw that quote of Drucker’s before: excellent.
It also reminds me of a quote I read recently, whose author I don’t recall, who said something along the lines of, “That which needn’t be done, needn’t be done well.”
Keep that in mind next time a school administrator demands some new, inane, data-driven busywork at your school.
Michael Fiorillo and daveeckstrom: well chosen comments from Peter Drucker! I will add them to my list of favorites.
🙂
I also found the following online, which seems to describe perfectly how the edubullies conceive of managing/leading/supervising:
“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” [Peter Drucker]
Peter Drucker: “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”
Peter Drucker: “Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the ‘naturals,’ the ones who somehow know how to teach.”
Also systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes it as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Exactly!!! I love my job, but I am not defined by it. Why should our kids be defined by a test!!! We are all NOT going into STEM careers!! I also think they forget that people that are musically talented, tend to be really good in math!!! We need balance, variety!!! We need good family time… We don’t need to waste our time with prepping and taking tests that narrowly measure who we are and what we are capable of.
“I suspect that our society’s current obsession with test scores represents the (momentary) ascendancy of people who got high test scores and think that entitles them to rank and privilege.”
Our society’s current obsession with test scores represents the maniac, criminal Wall Street element whose “business model” is to manufacture short term “data” to get rich quickly, beyond all imagination. They have manufactured bogus corporate business statements, pump and dump, and THEY get out with miullions in profits and bonuses, while the reat lose everything. They have raped and pillaged the world over the last 20 years due to deregulation (thanks Bill Clinton, etc. al) and are now using this data accumulation to reap BILLIONS in profits with low wages in the public ed. sector.
Wall St., and the central banks are our main enemies, bouyed by their lackeys, the corporate media.
If we dont all unite to fight them, they will have all of our heads on a stick.
“If we dont all unite to fight them. . .” May they all end up as Mussolini did.
Well, yes the edudeformers can measure what they treasure as they treasure money above all else.
There was a bumper sticker in the early eighties that signalled the coming era of me, my, me, more me and my: He who dies with the most toys WINS!!!
Thought it was sad then and still do.
Today:
He who dies with the most charter schools wins?
He who dies with the least public schools in his state/district wins?
He who dies with the least state protections for teachers wins?
He who closes the most public schools wins?
The late Gerald Bracey made a list in 1987 of “many of the qualities we value most” that are “extremely difficult to assess” and notes how we “measure what we can and come to value what is measured over what is not.” He then made a list “hardly exhaustive, of personal qualities that we either don’t use tests to measure or that, for the most part, we can’t use tests to measure.” [the preceding and following are from his last book, EDUCATION HELL, 2009, p.4]
I will list just a few of the 21 he listed [which he himself noted didn’t include others like “Daring”]: creativity, critical thinking, inquisitiveness, civic-mindedness, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, self-awareness, empathy, courage, imagination, resourcefulness, and humility.
Consider just the extremely high profile Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan: who could accuse the former of curiosity, self-awareness and humility or the latter of critical thinking, inquisitiveness and civic-mindedness?
Why would leading charterites/privatizers/testing zealots value in others what they themselves don’t have and don’t want for themselves?
😦
What? Does no one highly value statistics?? 😉
Fortunately yes, there are those who “highly value statistics” and enlist numbers in the pursuit of ethical goals. They play an invaluable role in fending off those who engage in “mathematical intimidation” and “numerical obfuscation.”
Thank you, KrazyMathLady, for using your powers for good.
🙂
“I suspect that our society’s current obsession with test scores represents the (momentary) ascendancy of people who got high test scores and think that entitles them to rank and privilege.”
I don’t think this is true. First of all, for pretty much as long as there have been test scores, positions with power an influence have tended to go to people who got high scores, so that in itself can’t account for the change. This isn’t some revenge-of-the test-weenies conspiracy.
Rather, the testing and “accountability” movement, is part of a broader managerial fad for metrics that took off about a decade ago. A big part of this is technology — twenty years ago, it was very difficult to analyze millions of statistical observations. Only people trained in the use of fairly complicated software, with access to high end computers, and with fairly advanced quantitative skills could do “analytics. ” But that has radically changed, with cheap, powerful data manipulation tools landing on more and more people’s desktops beginning in the early 2000s. In the right hands, the new tools (e.g., various database technologies, OLAP, “Business Analytics” packages, even Excel, which can now do what only mainframes could do 20 years ago), can be tremendously valuable decision-support resources. However, there is also the huge downside of people with limited subject-matter expertise and grasp of what constitutes valid quantitative reasoning easily manipulating vast amounts of data to validate preconceptions, for very small investments in technology and time.
This is happening all over government and business, along with closely aligned management fads built on ostensibly rigorous quantitative methods, but which are mostly misapplied by people who basically don’t know what they’re doing. There is also the matter of a corps of very capable true believers in technology and management by metrics (especially Mike Bloomberg, whose entire business and political career is built on analytics) who have wildly disproportionate wealth and influence over policy, and who have very severe cases of to-a-man-with-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-nail syndrome.
As an alternative to privatization, how have teachers’ unions helped promote the wisdom of Ackoff, Drucker, and Deming.
Or have the unions dismissed these potential allies as the “business model?”
Well, I don’t know if the teacher’s unions have put the wisdom of Peter Drucker into effect, but I do know that the ONLY thing limiting class size in NYC is the big, bad 10,000 page union contract.
The mayor of NYC has publicly stated that he’d be happy with public school class sizes of fifty or more, so long as there’s an “excellent” (read young, white, inexpensive, compliant) teacher.
In an imperfect world, I’ll fight to defend the union and the public schools, and worry about management gurus later.
“Well, I don’t know if the teacher’s unions have put the wisdom of Peter Drucker into effect, but I do know that the ONLY thing limiting class size in NYC is the big, bad 10,000 page union contract.”
That’s true, and consequently, I’d like to see the contractual caps reduced. Is there a snowball’s chance in hell that’ll be a serious negotiation point for the next contract? Or do you think the UFT leadership (and/or the rank-and-file) share management’s view that it’s not realistic to demand that class sizes go down?
The other thing that could limit class size in NYC is the possibility that parents would move children out of schools with large classes into schools with small classes. Another way that choice can substitute for regulation.
TE – I’m not entirely following. Who’s opening the schools with small classes, and, assuming they’re not charging tuition, who’s paying the operating expenses?
I am just making the broad point that class size might be regulated through parental decisions about which school to attend. If parents have no ability to choose, other methods must be used.
But if ALL the classes are enormous, you have no choice. Welcome to my life out in Utah.
It sounds like Utah students would be better off if some new schools opened there.
But again, with whose money?
Nope, TE, even our charters are huge. No one will pay for smaller classes. Since I was a student (and probably before) the philosophy has been: “Stack ’em deep and teach ’em cheap.”
Even with all of the “choice” around here, it has not brought innovation or lower class sizes or anything else but segregation.
That must be the choice of parents. I teach large classes because it is a way to teach the classes inexpensively, not because anyone thinks it results in the best possible education. If a strong student comes to my university, tuition for an out of state student will be a total of $42,000 for the four years. At a top liberal arts college with small classes, it will be about four times as much. The world is filled with trade offs.
I should add that those figures are for upper middle class families. If a student comes from a low income family, elite liberal arts colleges and universities are much less expensive than state schools.
I treasure all you mentioned before, truth, ,fresh air, and the participants of this blog and it’s creator Diane for letting freedom ring..
It is true that the Chinese government does not seem to be able measure fresh air, but the US embassy seems to do a good job.
“Anyone who uses that phrase ‘we measure what we treasure’ should immediately agree to take the high school graduation test in his state and publish his scores.”
Love it, love it!
This parable popped into my head when I read this post.
http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1968dec21-00060
I don’t like the phrase “measure what we treasure,” but I think you’ve totally misinterpreted the intent of the statement. I’m pretty sure the folks that said that weren’t referring to overall life treasures, but things valued in education. I agree that yearly tests can’t comprehensively measure a child’s academic progress, but I do agree with the idea that we should attempt to focus our tests on academic content that we value, as opposed to fluff.
Again, I’d say this is propaganda that just sounds trivial and unprofessional to anyone other than loyal supporters and readers.
Eded, sorry you are wrong.
The phrase used again and again is “you measure what you treasure.”
I cannot think of anything measured by a standardized test that I treasure. There are so any things about my children and grandchildren that I treasure. Pearson and CTB cannot measure them. Ever.
If you can let’s just agree to disagree.
I think the main point here is the meaning of “treasure.” I think the original authors probably intended it to refer to something “of value” in the educational sphere, rather than things like family.
Given that (likely) use of the word, there are many things that a test can measure that are “of value,” from reading comprehension to geometry.
From the Texas Tribune: “We measure what we treasure,” Williams said. But he added that changes could be made in how tests count toward final grades or graduation requirements.
When Dr. Ravitch worked in US Ed, they didn’t understand the difference between Kearns and Tribus. (Credit Deming’s acolyte, Myron Tribus, with safer air travel.)
The “measure what we treasure” crowd apparently doesn’t understand the difference between Deming and MBO.
Teachers appear willing to overlook the lack of systems competence among union staffers as long as their labor relations consultants help negotiate higher salaries and better working conditions.
Any attempt to bring reason to this conflict meets resistance as battle lines are drawn and each sides spins the conflict as us versus them, heroes versus villains. (“Trivial and unprofessional” propaganda is no substitute for accurate analysis–except in PR wars.)
Meanwhile, the public education doomsday clock advances toward midnight.