This post contains a valuable interview with Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky is a philosopher, not a statistician or an economist. He looks behind the facade of data to ask “why are we doing this?” “What are the consequences?” “What is the value of collecting the data?” “Why?”
Statisticians and economists (fortunately, not all of them) tend to think that when they have collected enough data, they will reach conclusions about the data. They think the data is as solid as “how many cars of this model sold? what was the profit margin? how should we price next year’s model to maximize profit?” or “how high will corn grow with this amount of fertilizer? how many acres should be planted with this seed?”
The starry-eyed data-mongers believe that children can be measured like any agricultural or mechanical product.
But teachers know that children are not corn; they are not electrical appliances; they are not engineered; they are all different.
We need to listen to philosophers. We need to think about what we are doing to children and to teachers by treating them as products of a process that can be tightly controlled.
Chomsky says:
In recent years there’s a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers, so that you have to teach to the tests, and the test determines what happens to the child and what happens to the teacher. That’s guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process.
It means a teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students’ needs. The students can’t pursue things that – maybe some kid is interested in something, but you can’t do it because you need to memorize something for this test tomorrow. The teacher’s future depends on it as well as the student’s.
The people sitting in offices, the bureaucrats designing this, they’re not evil people, but they are working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they are doing into something extremely harmful.
By treating children and teachers as widgets, we destroy the meaning of education. The rankings derived from data, Chomsky says, are meaningless because the tests are artificial social constructs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Noam Chomsky is known to me as “the father of modern transformational grammar” from my linguistics courses. He has evolved into a creative thinker. Like Robert Reich he generally offers common sense insight into our problems. In this case, I think he is being far too kind to those that want to standardize education. There are evil forces behind this movement that come from big money. Destroying public education, one of the most democratic forces in our nation, is evil and short sighted. Firing middle class teachers and forcing them into poverty is evil as it contributes to more income inequality is evil. Monetizing our poor students in order to profit from them is evil. Purchasing governors to wield the ax to do the dirty deed is pure evil. Creating a tiered system of education that promotes more segregation on the taxpayers’ dime is evil, and it should be illegal. Creating rigged tests with rigged cut scores is evil. Privatization swims in the corrupt collusion of government and corporations with the evil goal of denying Americans the right to a free public education as they step on citizens’ democratic rights and try to make it appear like a “reformation.”
So TRUE.
Thanks retired teacher…excellent comment.
Teaching, Trades, and Professions
Ford Madox Brown, Work (1852–63).
Source: Scanned from the cover of the following book:
Herbert F. Tucker: A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Blackwell 1999, ISBN 0-631-20463-6
The difference between a tradesman and a professional is a tradesman is paid for what he accomplishes and a professional is paid for what he attempts. Some may find this distinction a bit facetious and I admit that it probably is, but as Sidney Smith said, “You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave.” Beneath the facetiousness I believe there is a useful grain of truth, especially as it applies to education.
When we hire a tradesman to do some work for us, say build and install some cabinets, we do not pay for the work, at least’s not in full, until the work is done according to pre-arranged specifications. When we seek the services of a professional, a doctor for example, we cannot know beforehand if these services will be rendered successfully, at least not in the sense of producing the outcome we desire. If I visit the doctor with a cold, or some other incurable disease, the doctor can give me advice but he cannot make me well.
In any occupation there are three necessities, the right skills, the right tools, and the right materials. The first two items are the same for a tradesman and a professional but the third is very different. Both the professional and the tradesman can acquire the training they need to do the work required by their occupation. Both the tradesman and the professional can acquire the best tools for that occupation. It is the materials that make the difference. A tradesman can select the materials he will use. If he is building my cabinets he can select the best woods and the best fittings for the project, or we can agree on materials of a lesser quality and agree to a finished product of a lesser quality. The materials of the professional, on the other hand, are his patience, his clients. They must be taken in the state that they present themselves and the degree of success that the professional can achieve will be determined by that state.
The question then becomes are teachers tradesmen or professionals? I think, for the most part, even those critical of the results that teachers produce in the classroom think of and refer to them as professionals. However, the attitude many of these critics take towards education suggests they see teaching as a trade and expect the outcomes of the classroom to resemble the outcomes of tradesmen and not professionals. Critics of classroom teachers seem, often, to operate from a premise that all students can achieve at the highest level and that teachers ought to be able to evoke that level of performance from all of their students.
If we assume for the moment that those who assert all students can achieve at the highest level are right, and I think that teachers ought to begin with this premise with each of their students in any case, a student, unlike a piece of lumber, can make choices and some students may not choose to work at the levels of which they are capable. If a student persists on pursuing unwise choices, the teacher is limited in what he can do. But I think the problem goes a bit deeper than this.
I think this can be seen most readily in the area of standardized testing. These test are premised on a belief that all students can perform competently on these tests. Assume for the moment that this is true, I am not sure it is, but that is a different argument. There is also the issue of the skills these tests measure. The impetus behind this testing is among other things the dissatisfaction those in the world of work have with the skills students bring to the workforce upon their graduation from high school. Employers have been concerned that our students enter the workforce unable to perform the tasks that are being asked of them and that these tasks require skills students should have received in school.
What is the purpose of education, to develop the mind and imagination of the student or to prepare the student to complete a task? We talk of making our students life long learners, but is that really what the work place wants from them. John Ruskin in his book The Stones of Venice writes about the craftsmen employed by architects in the Gothic Period of the late Middle Ages. He praises the architects of this age because of the opportunity they gave to craftsmen to develop and use their imaginations. This resulted imperfections in the workmanship, but those imperfections produced a building of greater beauty. He wrote:
You must either make a tool of the creature or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last – a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them.
Often what the workplace wants is a tool, an employee that will do the work they are given exactly as they were instructed to do it. Some students may be looking for this in an occupation. They may want a job that does not make too many demands upon them so that in their free time they can focus on other things that challenge their minds and imaginations but have little or no relationship to the work they do to pay the bills. This to me is why teaching is a profession. We cannot control, as much as we may want to, all the outcomes in our classrooms; all the choices our students make.
We can do our best to give our students the skills, knowledge, and insights they need to succeed in the world of work or the university; we can help them to realize their ambitions but we cannot make their choices for them. Nor ought we to prepare them to do little more than follow instructions. The measure of a teacher’s success is not in how well their students have mastered the alphabet or learned to manipulate numbers or to remember their grammar rules. The measure of success is in the students’ ability to do meaningful things (meaningful first for the student but hopefully for the larger society as well) with the skills and concepts they have been taught. We do not make tools of our students; if we are successful we help them to realize their humanity.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Thanks, J.D.!
Excellent explanation. As a master upholsterer, in other words a craftsman, your explanation makes a lot of sense. Part of being a craftsman involves taking less than perfect materials and attempting to make that perfect upholstered piece. And I never quite succeeded in my eyes, in the customer’s eyes yes because they didn’t know where that minute flaw that instantaneously drew my eye was.
Much in the same way as being a teacher as a professional makes sense. I try to reach all students every year, but I have never done so as there has always been some who, for reasons only they know, choose to not work, to not learn, to not participate (as much as I “force” them to participate) to decide that they aren’t going to learn any Spanish. I wish it were different but in 21 years I’ve never succeeded at my goal, much as I never made a perfect upholstered piece.
I think what you say illustrates why we as teachers are not tools. We reflect on what we do, we know where our work is wanting and it is often the failures that we remember and gauge our effectiveness by. I had a friend who was a carpenter and he was a very conscientious carpenter, but he said it could be difficult. He said when building a house the carpenters he worked with would say whenever they made a mistake, “Can’t see it from my house.” There are tradesmen and professionals who take this attitude towards what they do, that to is, suppose, part of what makes us human, we realize we are not perfect and I suppose the issue becomes what do we do about our imperfections. You are like most teachers I know, you begin with great hope and optimism and often end with regrets. You see what didn’t quite work and try to make it better next time. The ed-reformers want you and I to “game the system” and not concern ourselves with how our students grow as human beings and how they mature and develop their minds and imaginations, they only want us to do the superficial things that can be measured and quantified, what can be converted into “raw data.” A data point is euphemistic, like collateral damage, it sound innocuous and innocent, but in both cases we are in fact talking about wasted human lives. I think they think, sometimes, “can’t see the kids from my house.” They make their mistakes and then go about their business as if nothing has happened. Of course they never really saw the kids in the first place. We see them every day and as a result think and act differently. For us the “data points” have a face.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
I was fortunate to not have to ever view my students as data points as I taught HS Spanish, which here in the Show Me State will never be tested, although they are trying to get the teachers to hang themselves via SLO?SGP nonsense. That is part of the reason I retired this year, because I wouldn’t have done it and then been subjected to the ensuing reprimands, demands, etc. . . . Plus the district offered two years of full paid health insurance for those who retired, so I am taking that route. At the same time I plan to take the fight to different levels than just at school. I am in contact with UOO and hopefully will be working/volunteering with them in some capacity. I’m also writing on “Educational Malpractices”. Anything I can do to get the word out about the insanities public schools endure these days.
Your words are spoken only as a true teacher can! Thanks for sharing them!
I don’t see it here, but I received a link to your blog posting on industrialization in schools, the one where the reader has to guess when the article was written. I thought it captured what is happening to schools. It reminded me of a reprint I saw of the first issue of the New Republic (I think it was that, but memory can play tricks). It was from the early 1900’s (it commemorated their 75th anniversary). One of the articles was about public schools and if a few things were changed that dated the articles it could have been written about schools the day I read it (1989). This attack on education seems to be an old one. In some ways this is encouraging because it suggests that ultimately the reformers do not succeed. It reminds me, though, of why we have regulation, not just to stop the bad guys but to protect the innocent. It is often said that if the markets are manipulated they will, like an angry god, punish those that manipulated the market. As a result regulations are not necessary because markets self-correct. There may be truth to this but in the interim between the fraud and abuse and the self-correction a lot of innocent people get hurt (look at our recent “Great Recession” where many lost jobs, incomes, and all that a life was spent in building, while those that caused it pretty much carried on with business as useless, relatively unharmed. I believe this round of ed reform will eventually be seen for what it is, but in the interim a lot of innocent kids and innocent teachers are going to get hurt.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
I think that that market correction depends on a free market system, which is obviously not the case. Besides, people who talk about market corrections seem to be somewhat oblivious to the plight of the people most affected. When a little guy loses his shirt it is of no great consequence. Apparently, the little guy is never to big to fail even when millions are doing it.
Excellent commentary about the problems of allowing the “market to correct itself” and all the concurring harm that occurs before that supposed correction takes place (and I’m certain that those supposed corrections hardly ever take place without regulatory intervention, i.e., government intervention).
” in the interim a lot of innocent kids and innocent teachers are going to get hurt.”
And the denial by edudeformers and privateers and GAGA teachers and administrators that there are many being harmed by these educational malpractices perhaps can be explained by. . . . I’m not sure what-human willful ignorance???
Christophernorth,
Regulation is needed to detect, prevent, and punish fraud, corruption, and incompetence.
As you point out, the 2008 recession scarred the lives of millions, wiped out their savings and their homes, but those who caused the financial collapse were never held accountable. See the documentary “Inside Job” to see who got away Scot-free after dying other people’s lives.
Enron got away with massive fraud for years (read “The Smartest Guys in the Room”), but eventually it collapsed, gobbling up the pensions and savings of its employees. Most of the big fish swam away, unscathed.
A just society must protect the weak against the powerful.
There’s so much insight in this it’s hard to know where to begin. But one of the more sinister consequences of reform agendas this exposes is the way they erode students’ opportunities to exercise choice when it comes to pursuing their interests. The irony is that testing regimes peg accountability to results on assessments that–as Wilson points out–depend to some degree on whether students choose to buy into the system of standardized assessments. Should we be surprised when some students who are deprived of meaningful choices when it comes to developing their minds exercise the only option they have left to them by choosing not to try their best on bubble tests?
Story worth a retelling: Abraham Wald was shut out of university positions in his home during WWII due to religious persecution. In the U.S., he was asked to apply his statistical expertise towards improving armor on planes. Given mass amounts of data and analyzing the numbers, fellow statisticians concluded since damage was concentrated in the wings and tail, armor should be added to those areas. Wald, instead realized his colleagues were wrong. Armor should be added, not to wings and tails, but the cockpit and fuselage that lacked bullet holes as shown by data. Why? Because planes shot in those areas never made it back home.
Wald was that rare breed of statistician able to use common sense and critical thinking. Rather than a myopic view of the data, Wald stepped back and asked what was wrong with the overall approach. Too many Reformers, if they are not simply in it for profit, become isolated as their “accountability” methods diverge from reality. Parameters are added, formulas modified to adjust to inconsistencies, models grow more complex and incomprehensible. VAM becomes a meaningless exercise performed for VAM’s sake. The models can no longer answer questions relevant to teaching, but simply exist.
Reformers are most certainly destroying education. They ignore the voice from the classroom and fail to question the validity of their methods. Researchers can create the most precise tests in the history of humans, but if the tests are measuring the wrong things, they are worthless, even harmful. The VAM tests are even worse. Not only are they imprecise, they rank good teachers bad and bad teachers good. VAM is nearly random.
Thank you, MathVale. I have heard that story before, but it is particularly useful in this context.
Beautiful thank you.
“. . . but if the tests are measuring the wrong things, they are worthless, even harmful.”
Ah, MathVale, one has to take another Waldian step back from that statement to see where the fundamental problem is. And where might that problem lie?
In the fact that the tests aren’t measuring anything at all. The teaching and learning process cannot be “measured” as there are no legitimate standards (well obviously there are plenty of false standards masquerading as real standards, see CCSS for one or any of the state’s “standard”). There are no legitimate standards because none have ever been agreed upon by all those who would use those standards as delineated for the process of establishing working standards by the world’s premiere “standard” determining entity, the International Organization for Standardization (OSI). For something as complex as the teaching and learning process I can’t ever imagine that organization taking on the task of attempting to “set the standard” by which one could “measure” the teaching and learning process. To get a better idea about the protocols for establishing a standard and measuring explore the OSI site: http://www.iso.org/iso/home.html
Go Noam Chomsky! I do think he is too kind to the bureaucrats enforcing destructive policies when he says, “The people sitting in offices, the bureaucrats designing this, they’re not evil people, but they are working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they are doing into something extremely harmful…”
At a certain point following orders that are so entirely DESTRUCTIVE to the well being of our nation’s children indeed becomes evil. I think many good teachers are leaving the profession because they do not want to inflict this hideousness onto innocent students. Someone who is way too rich and uses wealth to inflict his/her will on an entire nation of people has a degree of selfishness bordering on evil … We live in a world of MANY people, animals and plant life and we have to act as if WE are all part of this earth. Chomsky’s words ring true but he is too nice when he addresses the bureaucrats. Mathvale… liked your commentary above.
““The people sitting in offices, the bureaucrats designing this, they’re not evil people, but they are working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they are doing into something extremely harmful…”
Would that not be almost an exact definition of the banality of evil (except to substitute deadly for harmful) as put forth by Arendt???
«Chomsky is a philosopher, not a statistician or an economist. He looks behind the facade of data to ask “why are we doing this?” “What are the consequences?” “What is the value of collecting the data?” “Why?”»
Paulo Freire was an educator who look behind the façade of data and asked, “Who makes the decisions?” “How are decisions made?” “Who benefits from the decisions that are made ?” “How is all this decided?”
I believe educators have a 50 year head start on fixing education, and it is policymakers and their funders who benefit from monetization of the processes that have obstructed real educational progress. What do you think?
There is no doubt that billionaires, economists and small minded politicians are on the wrong destructive path. They are clueless, blind and greedy. When billionaires can bust unions for a hobby, turn the world of the neediest students upside down, and put thousands of middle class people out of work, you know you have a problem. None of their privatization has been worth the price of enriching a few greedy, wealthy billionaires as there is no basis in fact that supports the need for charters. What they are doing is immoral. It is unfathomable that a government would attack its own employees, bypass its own requirements for teacher preparation and create its own rigged systems to destroy its own public education. This is “the twilight zone.”
indeed
“To serve the teachers” (after “to Serve man”</a.)
"To Serve Teachers"
"To serve the teachers"
What they're after
Hors-d'oeuvres and peaches
On a platter
Yes indeed.
Revered retired teacher…..please don’t paint all economists with the same brush. There are many like Stiglitz, Reich, Krugman, Black, Galbraith, etc. who get it right…they understand how a democratic republic should function, including free public schools, medical care for all, social security for all workers, a fair tax system leading to fair distribution of the Nation’s wealth, workers represented by unions, a socialized market system for more than just corporations, etc.
Unfortunately they rarely are chosen by our leaders, Repub or Dem, who prefer deregulators like Summers and Rubin and their ilk. Both Clinton and Obama chose the deconstruction crew of economists. Actually they might both fit in with those “small minded politicians” you mention…even though they are very intelligent and accomplished at getting the stock market to over 18K and other avenues lining the pockets of the 1%.
And I suppose there are even some okay billionaires…though being an educator I am not invited into their inner circle.
Excellent thought in your third paragraph Richard!!
“The Age that will Bury Us”
— by SomeDAM Poet (after The Age of Aquarius (5th Dimension) )
When the VAM is in the Random House
And stupid is as stupid does
Then tests will guide the teaching
And Gates will steer because
This is the dawning of the Age
of Economists, the Age of Economists
Economists, Economists
Ed and stats misunderstanding
Ignorance is just astounding
Tons more falsehoods and derisions
Chetty having dreams and visions
Cattle model mathturbation
And the mind’s tergiversation
Will Bury Us, Will Bury Us
When the VAM is in the Random House
And stupid is as stupid does
Then tests will guide the teaching
And Gates will steer because
This is the dawning of the Age
That will bury us, Age that will bury us
Will bury us
Let the sun shine, let the sun shine in
The sun shine in, na na na na na….
One of your best!
There might be some ‘starry-eyed data’ people out there, but I firmly believe that most of these people know exactly what they, and their backers, want, which is a trained, rather than actually educated, workforce of timid, beaten down drones.
We shouldn’t miss the point that Silicon Valley is filled with libertarians who don’t want to fund education or training.
Zuckerberg/Gates and Pearson back the for-profit Bridge International Academies. BIA operates in the poorest countries charging an estimated 30% of family income.
BIA has the World Bank helping with promotion and funding, to the exclusion of support for public education.
You are absolutely correct! I recently worked at a job where I was able to speak with people from all over the United States. Many of the people I spoke with briefly talked about how children are not being taught cursive writing. A person’s signature is a hallmark of their individuality. Yes they want a perpetual source of drones to feed the corporate machinery.
The Scantron God is a false god; that should be obvious to anyone with a mind and any sense of what culture and true education are.
If I were King I would banish them from the classroom under the penalty of life imprisonment.
Oh, I forgot teaching in schools in which the Bubble Test reigns supreme IS akin to torture and life imprisonment so we have that anyway.
If I were a student today I would drop out as soon as possible just to escape. Many young teachers are right to quit the profession. Get out before it is too late.
Schools should be a places of welcome and wonder and companionship not camps for mind-numbed Zekis.
I have always been drawn to philosophy majors like moth to a flame. (Both of my parents were, my husband was too). This post is refreshing to read (albeit frustrating because so few people do listen to philosophers).
Philosophy is one of those “F” words as far as most Americans are concerned!
Just sayin. . . .
Thanks to your comment, Involved Mom, I now have a more complete label to use:
“Free Thinking Philosopher.”
“Chomsky is a philosopher, not a statistician or an economist. He looks behind the facade of data to ask “why are we doing this?” “What are the consequences?” “What is the value of collecting the data?” “Why?””
As each and every teacher and administrator should be doing. Unfortunately the sad state of affairs is that the majority of educators do not have a very strong instinct to ask those questions. Most are GAGA*ers through and through with imperceptibly little cojones.
*Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution** upon their passing from this realm.
**Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
Reblogged this on Creative Delaware and commented:
I have read many articles written by Noam Chomsky. He is easy to read and will fill you with a-Hah! moments!
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
My community is going through a process of change i.e. gentrification. To make a long story short the local government has demanded that we citizens who live here have input in the process. One of the input sessions I attended was on education. i stressed the need for teaching mastery of skills as opposed to teaching to the test. What Chomsky says is true and furthermore in my observation the children I know who have been taught to the test over the years lack skills in writing reading comprehension multiplication skills and on and on. The purpose of education is for you to learn to think better. This will not occur if children are taught to the test.