Gene V. Glass is one of our most distinguished education researchers. Fortunately for the rest of us, he blogs from time to time about the lunacy of our era of education “reform.”
In this post, he explains what he calls “management by pinheads.” Quite simply, it is the effort to improve education by setting numerical goals. Such a strategy invites data manipulation, gaming the system, and cheating. He notes that Beverly Hall recently died of breast cancer. She had an illustrious career, but it all came crashing down because of a massive cheating scandal in Atlanta, where she was superintendent. She prided herself on being a “Dara driven decision-maker,” but it was this approach that created a climate where subordinates–administrators and teachers–cheated to produce the data she wanted.
Now Glass notes that the Scottsdale, Arizona, school board has set a menu of numerical targets for its superintendent. It is an invitation to game the system, he says. Campbell’s Law rules.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Found this in a story about the rip-off for profit college the federal government recently bailed out:
“But when Sutherland took them up on the relentless sales pitches, it turned out his community college credits didn’t quite transfer in the way he’d been lead to believe. “They said they weren’t exact classes that matched up with what I had to take at Everest,” he said. The online college accepted Sutherland’s total credit hours but said they didn’t qualify him to skip Everest’s own pre-requisite courses, sending him back to the beginning. “I had to re-do English 111, even though my transcript from the community college showed a perfect A,” he said, and Everest’s classwork was so basic and inane that he never had to crack a textbook “unless a question was specifically based off one of their books.”
How reliable is college reporting on what students have to take and why they have to take courses over?
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/02/28/3628028/whats-the-deal-with-government-helping-corinthian/
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Preceding the more fleshed out formulation known as Campbell’s Law (1975), we have the following very succinct observation by Charles Goodhart:
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
And leaving aside such examples as the Potemkin Villages of the non-vanished Soviet Union, we have the following recent exemplar from the Los Angeles PD:
[start article]
An Inspector General’s report released Friday confirmed what many Los Angeles Police Department insiders have been complaining about for months: Officers have routinely falsified records to make it appear that they were patrolling the streets, when in fact they were doing paperwork, working desk jobs or handling other duties at stations.
The investigation found false reports of patrols — so-called “ghost cars” — in at least five of the department’s 21 geographic areas. The falsifications were carried out over multiple shifts by officers of various ranks, but the sole purpose was to make it appear that station commanders were meeting staffing levels set by a computer program and rigidly watched by department brass. As Alex Bustamante, the LAPD’s inspector general, wrote, commanding officers are responsible for 100% compliance with daily patrol staffing levels, and when they fail (or are unable) to meet that goal, they must answer to top leaders of the department. Union officials said captains are under “intense pressure” to hit their patrol numbers, and that urgency trickles down to lower-level supervisors who order officers to fill out logs showing they are on patrol when they are not.
The Inspector General’s revelation is troubling for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s dishonest. False data lead city leaders and the public to believe the streets are more heavily patrolled than they really are. That undermines our sense of how safe we are, and also influences policy decisions on, for example, whether the city should hire more civilians for administrative tasks or keep hiring officers. And if supervisors can justify lying about staffing levels in order to keep the bosses happy, what other transgressions or omissions will they allow?
Most worrisome is that this is the second report in recent months to conclude that the LAPD has been relying on bad data and inaccurate reporting. A Times investigation in August found that the department understated violent crime in the city by misclassifying nearly 1,200 violent crimes as minor offenses during a one-year period. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck chalked that up to human error, although department insiders said deliberate miscoding had become common as captains and other supervisors were — again — under intense pressure to meet crime-reduction targets set by the brass.
Together, these investigations suggest that Chief Beck and his administration are so focused on maintaining good metrics that they’re ignoring what’s happening on the ground. Or worse, that they’ve created a culture in which officers and supervisors feel they have to cook the books to succeed. Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Police Commission must hold the LAPD responsible for these specific lapses, but they also must determine whether there are deeper problems within the department.
[end article]
Link: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-lapd-ghost-cars-20141014-story.html
Literally just change the terminology and context to that of education and “education reformers” and…
You get my drift.
😎
P.S. With all due respect, I hope that Mr Glass is more careful with his language next time. I just received emails from some group with the initials PUSH [PinheadsUnitedStopHate]-BACKOFF demanding that I do something about the unfair comparison made between pinheads and “education reformers.” Apparently even pinheads know that management by the numbers/management by objective [as W. Edwards Deming put it] is a bad idea.
Just sayin’…
P.P.S. You’d think that the LATIMES—just based on its own article on ‘ghost cars’—would understand their folly when swallowing whole the metrics of their [until quite recently] Man of the Decade, John Deasy, former LAUSD Supt., but no—
Apparently they don’t read their own articles.
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On NPR’s Brian Lehrer show today there was an interview with NYC schools Chancellor, Carmen Farina. Ms. Farina supports teacher evaluations that are 30% based on VAM exams. She also supports Common Core.
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If you think Scottsdale is bad, you should hear what has happened to the school budgets in all of Arizona.
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