Angela Duckworth is at the center of the movement to teach and grade “grit,” by which she means character, self-control, persistence, and similar behaviors. Today in the New York Times, she expresses her opposition to assessing “grit” on standardized tests and holding teachers and schools accountable for their students’ character development.
I am glad to see her speaking out against this effort to quantify character, but can’t help wishing she had closed the barn door before the horse got out. As reported earlier, both the National Assessment of Educational Progess and the international test PISA are incorporating measures of this amorphous quality into their crucial tests. Soon we will be comparing states and nations on their students’ character or “grit.” And perhaps firing teachers and closing schools for their “grit” scores.
No one questions the importance of character. But trying to quantify it and holding teachers and schools accountable for it is a goofy idea. In the current climate, Big Data has become a near-religion. Social scientists must exert whatever influence they have to stop the misuse of their ideas, sooner rather than later.
This kerfuffle makes me think of the report cards I brought home in the 1940s. On the left side were my grades for subjects like reading, writing, arithmetic, science, and social studies. On the right side were the teacher’s judgments about my behavior. There was a list of behaviors that referred to conduct and responsibility. The teacher checked off either unsatisfactory, satisfactory, or excellent. She was acknowledging my behavior, judging me. I was responsible for my conduct, not the teacher or the school. It was up to me to try harder next time.
Everything old is new again, but in our age, it gets quantified and misused. The urge to quantify the unmeasurable must be recognized for what it is: stupid; arrogant; harmful; foolish, yet another way to standardize our beings..
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, what else do you want her to do?
Should they stop researching character education altogether? Should they research in secret? Surely both are antithetical to the entire western world’s search for knowledge based on the scientific method.
If any research could ever be used to objectively measure the effectiveness of a teacher, is it evil on its face?
Virginia,
You as a parent shape your daughter’s character far more than her teachers. Should her teacher be fired if you are a bad parent? Is no one responsible for anything but teachers?
That’s a big if in this instance. How could there be an objective measurement of a teacher’s effectiveness in teaching perseverance and self-responsibility? We must find a way to be satisfied with subjective measurements, because these are subjective qualities. A better “measure” would be for someone knowledgeable about the students and their challenges to go and observe the teacher’s classroom and watch how students behave. Is this objective? No. Is it invalid? No, it is more valid than testing, because it does not have a false veneer of objectivity. It would be a form of qualitative research, which is also part of the Western tradition’s search for truth.
Virginia, if you read her article, you will see that you are contradicting her. She says don’t use grit measures for accountability.
“What else”? Perhaps recant fully and admit her and her colleagues role in providing assistance to those that torture http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2015/07/kipp-psychology-guru-inspired-cia.html?showComment=1436633718658#c8293996324179020635
The fact that these same methods are used to subject children in poverty to unspeakable treatment is beyond despicable. Please feel free to keep advocating for evil though virginiasgp. You’re quite adept at it.
Exactly what Diane said/asked, Virginia.
Are there incompetent teachers? Yes. Just like there are incompetent doctors and lawyers and waiters and managers.
But majority of the professionals work very hard and go above and beyond their call of duty.
The child sees no value of grit at school when at home it is too much effort for the parents to even listen to the child’s concerns, fears, anxieties.
We are dealing with a generation that hasn’t been patented at all. At all. Regardless of the socio-economic factor.
Teachers can’t be held accountable for something that is taught and reinforced at home.
*Now* she’s speaking out? I mean, better late than never, I suppose. But she couldn’t see this coming at least 5 years ago? At least since Paul Tough made her idea into pop psychology.
My husband and I have similar report cards from when we were children in the 1960s and 1970s. You hit it here when you say these are teacher’s descriptions of *behaviors* that can be observed and reported. Schools, teachers, parents, and students should all be concerned with behaviors that students exhibit during the school day. But the idea of measuring and quantifying a quality or trait — using a test divorced from real, everyday behaviors and interactions — and potentially holding teachers accountable for the test results! — seems open to the worst effects of Campbell’s Law. Instead of directing our concern toward how children demonstrate responsibility and self-control in their real lives, in action, we would spend time coaching them on how to take a test….
More history on the hoof.
In the 1940s, my elementary school report cards had grades in various subjects on the left-hand side and a space on the right-hand side titled: “Comportment.” That space was about 1 inch in depth, 2.5 inches wide. Teachers could put in a grade. Most routinely added a short comment. There was almost always a brief note if you did something wonderful or if there was a chronic problem.
I don’t remember if we still had character marks when I was in eighth grade, but I do know my first semester grades would have been awful. My teacher thought I was a malingerer and did not discover that I had been seriously ill for a long period of time until she had a conference with my parents where she shared her perception of my “character.” The nurse’s office had failed to pass on the information and she had not thought to check. As a retired special education teacher I would hesitate to include “marks” for perceived character traits. Children have too many struggles to face without someone questioning their character as well. There are ways to pass on concerns without labeling a child on a report card.
Parents job to develop character. Teachers job to reinforce it.
There’s also a difference between “behavior” which is an action, and “attitude” or “mindset” which is not an action.
If my son doesn’t have a “growth mindset” (as narrowly defined by the ed reform movement) but works hard and seems to be fairly happy can he skip negative the analysis by the technocrats?
Teachers were evaluating children based on observed behavior. They weren’t polling them based on having the correct beliefs about what’s important and valuable.
It’s just intrusive as hell. He can’t hold thoughts that are contrary to a “success mindset” and be left alone? What if he doesn’t believe any of this? He has to internally adopt it or his teacher or school is not meeting this metric?
He switched from trumpet to baritone in the school band. I don’t know why he switched. Which metric should I use? That he lacks persistence (bad!) or is flexible and open to change (good!). So much of this is judgment calls and guessing at motive.
I understand the need to evaluate data to determine the effectiveness of something. However, I agree that it is ridiculous to measure someone’s character in a scale. I think of a student I had that demonstrated terrible work ethic and behavior in my 12th grade English classroom but would then turn around and take care of my grandfather in a loving and sincere way at the nursing home he worked at. Which example of his character would I “measure”? And who is to say that I, as his teacher, had anything to do with that building character?
They don’t teach grit in ruling class schools.
Grit is the virtue of the slave—
Grit your teeth and bear the yoke —
Pick and grin, the butt of every joke.
Pick and grin and jump when they poke.
You nailed it, Jon!
Measuring what behaviors? For whom? Why? One can observe the real behavior motivator: legions of gritty docile students, soon to be fleeced by student loans, issued by the 1% who dominate their lives through students’ sacrificing their time and energy “behaving” for a worthless diploma that promises a better future, all through measuring things like one’s grit? Our education system sucks! And, yes, I’m a retired teacher sickened by the school to prison for profit pipeline and the judicial nightmare that condones it.
I agree, but would argue they do teach grit in upper class schools as a way to keep the status quo.
How do they teach grit? Did you know before the teach grit fad there was the teach self esteem fad? America is the land of magic bullets with one fad after another on how we can all become successful and happy but the more people chase these fads, the more unhappy they become.
Duckworth is a co-founder of Character Lab. She is a behavioral psychologist who believes it is possible to reprogram people’s brains. She is currently running a pilot program in the schools in Upper Darby, PA. She believes it is possible deprogram students from the harmful “brain” impact of poverty. When she is finished, these students will be ready to tackle the demands of “no excuses” charters like Kipp. It all sounds too neat, smug and improbable to me. It also seems a weird and, it might be more colonialism from the pro-charter camp as it may teach students to reject their families. It will probably turn out to be about as effective as “praying away the gay.” Here is an interesting link. http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2016/03/poverty-solutions-psychological.html
Thanks for reminding people that Duckworth seems to speaking with two voices. She argues against testing for grit in peer reviewed journals and in the press. Concurrently she runs the ” Duckworth character lab” complete with a product line for teaching and assessing character traits, and does in schools experiments.
She is knee deep in other initiatives that are pressing forward measurement of grit, viewed as a more enduring trait than context specific self-management, self-discipline, self-control.
In the meantime, there is new market for measurements of grit and related traits, attributes, behaviors, skill sets. These attributes are rarely identified as character traits except in charter school networks and parochial schools.
In public schools, the approach to measurement is via student self reports, surveys of teachers and parents/caregivers, with questions about “school climate” seamlessly merged with personal questions about social-emotional well-being.
In California, Panorama Education has piloted questions that are scheduled to be part of the accountability system in ten CORE Districts serving one million students. Panorama Education is a relatively new vendor expecting to cash in on the multifaceted and international push to measure specific traits. Early investors in Panorama Education include Google Ventures, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.
In California CORE Districts, researchers at Stanford are determining the weighting of the school scores derived from student, staff, and parent/caregiver surveyS. The threshold for survey response rates is appalling low, as little as 25% for parents/caregivers. Never mind that issue, the current system of aggregating responses will give equal weight to scores from all three groups, then combine those scores with data on suspensions, expulsions, then transform all of those numbers into a 10 level index for rating schools. I see lots of mathematical leaps and thin reasoning in these ratings.
Even so, for grades 5 to. 12, student surveys of social/emotional well-being were field-tested in the Spring of 2015. The survey has 29 questions organized around these constructs: self-management (a proxy for grit), growth mindset (a concept from psychologist Carol Dweck), self efficacy (confidence about learning in specific school subjects), and social awareness (awareness of own and others feelings, empathy, management of conflicts).
All of these constructs and the items associated with them are called “competencies” and if the scores go in the right direction, then the promoters will claim that students are on their way to readiness for college, career, and civic life.
These surveys, and most others in the works (including Harvard, MIT, Teachscape) are delivered on line. They are marketed as one aspect of ” deeper learning,” also dubbed soft-skills, and conflated with “whole child” education.
The language of skills and competencies means that promoters are saying you can and should do explicit teaching and testing in schools and hold all staff in a school responsible for continuous improvement.
More than you wanted to know. I have eferences if you want them, but not on my iPad.
Its a flashback for me, too, Diane. We had reportcards similar to yours in parochial schoool in the 1950s. My sister, a year older than I am, came back with her first first-grade report card. A super smart person (had a doctorate in Psychology by the time she finished university), she had great grades in spelling, reading, arithmetic, science, social studies — all the subjects we studied those days — mostly As and a couple of Bs. On the characher side of the report card she had a check mark, marking a deficiency, in the box “exercises self control”. My Mother was puzzled, “what does that mean? Did she wet her pants?” Turned out the first grade nun, a legendary tyrant who smacked, knuckle punched, shouted at and humiliated all her students, felt my sister talked too much. Thank heaven my Mother loved us, loved art, theater and music and was not herself a tyrant. She called us her “Little Sara Bernharts”.
Success Academy’s methods, as described in yours and other colums as well as the video of the teacher humiliating the student, remind me of those Catholic school days. Marching from church to school to lunch, back to class, to the school bus at the end of the day in absolute silence in perfect lines in fear of humiliation and corporal punishment, it taught us a kind of grit — grit known as fear, anger and defiance. When my sister and I were sent to public high school because my parents were poor and had no money for Catholic high school tuition (Catholic parish grade school was tuition free then), it was liberation day. No one hit us and few teachers saw humiliation as an effective learning tool. We could chat in the halls in between class and on the way to the bus. We learned art, music, drama, shop, writing, civics, science. it was a pretty conservative, no nonesense, strict public school, yet it was an affirming and learning environment. The contemporary “Reform” movement is a throwback to those bad old mean days. It will teach kids about survival under dictatorship and label children who are just being children — high energy, creative, fun loving, eager to please, some poor, some with family and mental and physical challenges — as misfits, malcontents, with with poor self control. Now with big data following each of us from birth to grave, the labels assigned to students by weak educators and weak, mean educational systems, mostly designed to make kids into submissive, rote-reciting robots, will follow each person throughout her entire life. Imagine at age 30, doctorate in hand, at a job interview, with an interviewer asking “Well what about your challenges exercisinng self control?”
Diane, thank you and thank all your guest columnists, thanks to all the educators, teachers, administrators, parents, children and even some good politicians, for fighting privatization of public, secular education and their cruel and ineffective methods. You give me hope and inspiration and ideas for how I can help us win this crucial fight. The future of our entire country is at stake because that future is built on the foundation of our public schools. May the force be with you!
And that Catholic crap (as I like to call those destructive teaching, oops I mean control, methods) went through the 60s. I have a fairly large cadre of grade school chums with whom I get together fairly often even though almost all of us have moved away from where we grew up and I contend the reason we are still friends is that we had to band together in grade school to be able to tolerate the nonsense that we were put through.
Now not all of my Catholic education was that way, especially high school (it was the late 60s and early 70s and things in society were a bit more “liberal”) but grade school was quite obnoxious. I was talking with a group of our parents once when I was in my thirties explaining to them what happened at school. They were quite taken aback and asked why we didn’t tell them about the nuns’ shenanigans. My response was that “you would have backed the nuns and we would have gotten more punishment at home.” So we kept it to ourselves to work out what any grade schooler could do to rebel, live crawdads put in teacher desks, mocking games during recess, shooting spitballs at the nuns’ back-white shows quite well on black, being facetiously polite, etc. . . .
“at the age of seven, he entered public school at the Peterschule in Munich where his family now lived. There he was considered a rather average student. He always required much time to think before giving his answers, so the teachers were not aware that any special scientific skills were in the making. In fact, they would lose patience with him and whack him over the hands with a stick if he didn’t answer right away, a practice that was common in German schools [and American charter and other reform schools] in even more modern times. Strangely, this kind of force was considered to be one of the best ways to teach a child to think quickly. ” (from “Dear Professor Einstein”)
*and, of course, tearing up a child’s homework when she can not explain how she got an answer.
Some might claim that “answering quickly” is a desirable character trait (especially for taking tests, which are often used to gauge academic ‘success”)
Haha, your sister’s report card, just like mine from the ’50’s. I also used to get ‘irresponsible’. Always did my homework– it meant ‘messy desk’.
If we quantify EVERYTHING we might as well be robots. And there will be no need for compassion, empathy, forgiveness or trust. We will live for a mechanized system and not for humanity. no need for storytelling, poetry, art … or wonder…
“Facility in comprehension…,a willingness to concentrate on all that is presented, a love of order in order to take written notes on that which is offered in the lectures and then to elaborate on them in a conscientious manner. As I was forced [by Angela Duckworth] to acknowledge, all these traits were thoroughly absent in my case.” — Albert Einstein
It reminds me of “The New Soviet Man”.
It is contradictory and maybe sickly ironic to attempt to reward the development intrinsic character traits through extrinsic rewards. The class bias in these measures is revealed by its arising in the context of the education of poor and minority students, defining poverty as the product of behavior rather than socio-economic structures.
http://www.arthurcamins.com
You got it right! It is another quick “fix” to put the onus on the shoulders of the child living in poverty.
I agree, and the usual foundations are pushing this agenda.
And thank you, Diane Bratcher, for that wonderful trip down memory lane. Humans seem not to learn from experience, at least not the reformers. One good thing: comedians make those old nuns the butt of jokes and maybe one day the reformers will be the butt of jokes, too. “Did you hear the one about the reformer who thought he was a nun?”
Old habits die hard.
Some of them just end up in the closet at the church rectory where reformers find and don them.
Funny, but didn’t Danielson say something similar about not using her rubric to evaluate teachers as she was running to the bank to check her royalties?
Before I retired, report cards in my district included a grade for parents carrying out responsibilities. I always made it a point to include on the cumulative record card the date and subject of any scheduled parent conference. But I would also record the date with “parent did not keep scheduled appointment”. I also spent many conference days writing plans because very few parents showed up. I would include “parent did not attend Fall/Spring PTC”. It’s important that these conferences or lack of be part of the record.
I do believe teachers have an impact on character development, especially when we have support from the parent. But no way should it be quantified against the school or teacher. It is reflected in the report card and cumulative record. I have had students go from “U” to “S”. Some stay the same. That’s on the student. I always reviewed the report card form with my students and asked them who has power over these grades. They usually said I did until I go over each category and they realize they are driving that wheel. In the area of academics I would emphasize improvement over great scores…realistic goals instead of one high-stakes test. If a struggling student can gain a year or more growth, even if they are still below grade level, that’s a positive development politicians and Reformers refuse to acknowledge. But for the teacher it’s what keeps us going. We know the student will catch up because a student’s brain is not connected to the academic calendar, but to his or her unique brain pattern and personal circumstances. And when that improves, the path gets easier. Let teachers do their job without using invalid statistical metrics like VAM to judge them. Instead use methods like PAR which has been successful in Montgomery County, Md.
didn’t Danielson say something similar about not using her rubric to evaluate teachers ”
The same pattern keeps repeating.
Those who developed Student Growth Percentiles” (SGP’s) indicated that SGP’s were not designed/intended for evaluating teachers and schools. See Bruce Baker’s On The Mythologies of Student Growth Percentiles and Teacher Evaluation
But that did/does not stop the mathturbating data monkeys and other quackpots from doing just that.
We seem to forget that every “assessment” or “measurement” (Yes, Duane, I KNOW!) of students by grading is done by a grading system WE have set up (or has been foisted upon us) and “agree” on (example: 100% scale). It’s not like this has been handed down to us by a divine being or is in any way “scientific.” It’s the same with rubrics, etc. WE (or some “expert” or testing company or “department”) decide the parameters. Once again, with “grit,” is the whole idea that we can measure this in a scientific way. It can’t be measured in this way! Every human situation (including the teaching and learning PROCESS) is different and must be taken in its own context. It can be rated on some bizarre scale that WE make up, but that scale is only our INVENTION. The deeper question is WHY we would want to attempt to evaluate people in this way. Why do we want to fool ourselves into believing that this kind of “measurement” is valid and tells us anything about the complexity of a human being? There are many economic factors to be sure. Someone will definitely profit financially! The deeper problem, I think, is the extreme mistrust we have of validating and trusting our EXPERIENCE over DATA. We seem to think the analysis of data is a panacea.
“The deeper question is WHY we would want to attempt to evaluate people in this way. Why do we want to fool ourselves into believing that this kind of “measurement” is valid and tells us anything about the complexity of a human being?”
Excellent questions Mamie!!
And those questions bring to light the heart of the matter that much of what we do in education (not always necessarily the teaching and learning process that occurs in individual classrooms where many teachers manage to avoid those intellectual/pedagogical traps) is based upon errors, falsehoods and faulty epistemological and ontological assumptions. When one starts with a falsehood, one inevitably ends up with error filled, false and therefore harmful to the students practices. Until we address and correct these fundamental falsehoods the carnage of student abuse and violation will continue.
I am reminded of SEER training in the Army. They pushed each person to their breaking point, and acknowledged that everyone was different. Their point was so that each one of us would know our own breaking points, not to attempt to quantify our “grit” on any scale, but rather to help us protect ourselves should we ever become prisoners. Why quantify indeed, unless there is a greater agenda to control and regulate people. Also, “grit” is extremely variable by situation….once more, it can’t really be measured.
My apologies – this is my 3rd time trying to post this:
I can’t help but question Dr. Duckworth’s change of heart. Her research is ethically questionable. Parents are given the opportunity to opt their children into the research, but teachers who are also subjects, are not – they are forced. I know this first hand because my district almost participated. Check out the list of schools involved below:
https://sites.sas.upenn.edu/?q=duckworth/pages/past-and-present-school-partners
Past and Present School Partners
Below is a list of our past and present school partners (alphabetical). We are grateful for our relationship with them and their participation in our research.
Ardmore Avenue Elementary School
Beck Middle School
Beth Hillel Day School
Breakthrough Collaborative
Breakthrough Greater Boston
Breakthrough Greater Philadelphia
Boston Latin Academy
Cameron Elementary School
Carusi Middle School
Cecelia Snyder Middle School
Charterhouse School
Cherry Hill High School- East
Cherry Hill High School- West
Community College of Philadelphia
Community School
Dawes Middle School
Discovery Elementary School
Drexel Hill Middle School
Evanston/Skokie School District 65
Francis Scott Key Elementary/Middle School
Geneva City Schools
Gesu School
Harrington Park School
Henderson-Hopkins
The Hill School
The Independence School
Indian Valley Middle School
Indian Crest Middle School
International School
Jeremiah E. Burke High School
Julia R. Masterman School
KIPP Academy New York
KIPP AMP Academy
KIPP Bayview Academy
KIPP Blytheville College Preparatory
KIPP Infinity Middle School
KIPP Intrepid Preparatory School
KIPP Philadelphia Charter School
KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy
KIPP South Fulton Academy
KIPP Washington Heights Middle School
KIPP West Philadelphia Preparatory Charter School
The Lawrenceville School
Mastery Charter Schools
Milton Hershey School
Morristown High School
Mullica Township Middle School
Nathan Hale Middle School
Northeast Middle School
Northeast High School
Norwalk High School
The Peninsula Bridge Program
The Philadelphia School
Ponus Ridge Middle School
Revere High School
Ripon College
Riverdale Country School
Robert K. Shafer Middle School
Rosa International Middle School
Roton Middle School
Russell Byers Charter School
SEED
Shafer Middle School
Springside Chestnut Hill Academy
Synder Middle School
St. Anne’s School of Annapolis
Upper Darby Beverly Hills
Upper Darby Drexel Hill
Upper Darby High School
Upper Township Middle School
West Rocks Middle School
YES Prep Southeast
YES Prep Southwest
Young Scholars Charter School
Most of the schools listed are charter schools, private schools or struggling pubic schools where teachers have no union or no voice.
Duckworth’s remarks remind me of when Charlotte Danielson objected to the use of her teacher evaluation framework combined with standardized test scores to evaluate teachers.
Danielson stated, “ ‘Using standardized test scores to assess teachers is indefensible.’ Very strong words, considering her audience included members of the
NJDOE. Danielson went on to say: ‘What counts as evidence? How will
we use it? People are calling me for information on this; I don’t
know; NO ONE KNOWS! Rather than standardized tests, we need to look
at classroom/teacher’s learning evidence.’”
Note to well-intended academics: If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas.
Danielle: with all due respect for the two academics you reference, I can’t help but note that when judging both words AND deeds…
They want to have it both ways. When it comes to running with the big money crowd so as to swell one’s bank account and ego, they’re all in. When it comes to protecting their reputations and professional integrity (both present and future), they’re all in.
Unfortunately for them, it is not difficult to note that the first activity occurs in the real world whilst the second occurs on a plane of existence whose inhabitants are severely traumatized by self-inflicted Rheeality Distortion Fields.
Inevitably the “implementation” defense arises. ¿? You know, everything they said and did was fine and dandy, but unfortunately some not-so-clever (and even a few ill-minded) folks in charge of this and that misused and abused their wonderful ideas and prescriptions.
Of course, this realization took years and years and years to sink in but it should not obscure their undying admiration for this pithy observation attributed to Dorothy Parker:
“The two most beautiful words in the English language are ‘cheque enclosed’.”
😎
Before the “grit” movement, there was the “self esteem” movement.
Over the last few decades, there always seems to be a movement based around a word or two that promised to change the world for the better, but history shows us that these movements have always ended up making the world a worse place.
We can not artificially change individual to become better people or more successful in life through a movement based on a word or phrase.
Good parenting and skilled teachers work best to raise generations that treat others with respect, cares about the real quality of life—not about how much money can be deposited into fat bank accounts—and practice empathy for others that are less fortunate in life.
The “self-esteem” and “grit” movements are complete polar opposites. Grit is about wearing away self-esteem (wearing away is what grit does best) until you have no self left to have esteem with.
And both grit and self-esteem end up being destructive in the end.
I think the nature versus nurture argument comes into play. People are inclined to act like their genetic makeup makes them act. I’m not so sure I can teach a student to be mentally tough if they go home and their parents and siblings are acting naturally.
I think you are correct. Even if all this brain training were to help students short term, what happens to the children when they live in a dysfunctional. impoverished world twenty-four, seven over many years? Do we really think “brain training” will prevail?
“. . . and their parents and siblings are acting naturally.”
Michael, I don’t understand what you are trying to say. Can you please expound and explain further, please? TIA, Duane
I’ll second Duane’s request. I hope I’m misunderstanding you but you seem perilously close to gross racism.
No No No. It isn’t a racist rant. Have we come to this that we hang on every word. My point was, I only see my students for six to seven hours a day. I cannot account for them when they go home. How I can I be responsible and expect my students to be gritty when I only see them for such a short period of time.
As I recall, from a “professional development” presentation on grit a few years ago, Duckworth likes to quote Sir Francis Galton, the father of modern eugenics. That did not exactly win me over to gritology.
Alan, Galton was also the founder of Phrenology, making character inferences from skull measurements, pure unadulterated bovine excrement of the finest order that got him laughed out of the Science Academy.
I am still waiting for a non- tautoligical definition of grit. How can it be precisely measured without a precise definition?
Eric, you have hinted at one of the fundamental problems of supposedly “measuring” what occurs in the teaching and learning process, a lack of meaningful, usable definition of many terms needed to be able to truly use that concept. But then again we will never have those definitions as they are ontologically and epistemologically impossible.
But, hey let’s keep pounding our heads with a ball-peen* hammer to cure our headaches.
*for those not familiar, a ball-peen hammer is one that is significantly harder than a regular nailing type hammer, usually used to strike hardened steel tools like chisels and punches.
I am afraid that this crosses the line of religious freedom. We are qualifying people based on their belief system and then quantifying how well they follow the state’s idea of virtue. This is tyranny.
“This is tyranny.”
I found that much that we do in public education can fall under that concept. Having grown up in a Catholic K-12 system I understand how education can have a tyrannical effect on students, but then again that is okay as no one is forced to participate in that system. All are forced (tyranny?) to attend schools with the out of “home schooling” which I wouldn’t consider “schooling” (and that is not meant to denigrate home schooling).
“Quantifying Quality”
Lots of counts
But no accounts
For quality that’s real
Because, you see,
The quality
Is quantity, they feel.
My report card in the 50s & 60s looked like Diane’s. My parents (as well as my grandparents and great aunts) always looked at the “right side” (Behavior) first. They said it was even more important that what was on the Academic side. While I never probed why, it may have been because they thought it reflected on them as parents as much as me and it might explain deficiencies on the academic side. For all their 9 nine children who experienced a range of success in the classroom, the Academic side was always about doing your best and getting better each quarter. A simpler time.
To Virginiasgp or Brian:
To answer your question to Dr. Ravitch, please be honest to yourself and ask yourself a very simple question that “” Would I want to follow Jesus, King of Jews? It is admirable, but can I do it?”” In other word, can you, virginiasgp, consider to be an object in this measurement of your grit?
Could Dr. Duckworth follow or deprogram her brain to become Buddha, the world greatest philosopher and scientist? What kind of GRIT can she have?
In short, why would technocrat billionaires be interested in measuring or deprogramming young generation to become “GRIT” robot servants? Speechless!
Please leave Public Education system and teachers alone to help all children to learn and to practice their human rights and their RESPONSIBILITIES of being humanity towards the world. NO NEED for BEING GRIT, for SELF-ESTEEM in order to follow LAW and ORDER from the control of the billionaire club. Back2basic
“GRITtery” (My apology to Lars Ulrich & James Hetfield of Metallica)
Lashing out disruption, turning into corruption
Children are fixed and thrown away
Testing student brainpower, creating money makers
GRITtery is here to stay
Smashing accountability
There’s no sanity
Cannot stop the GRITtery
Unbinding test aggression
Falling into regression
Cannot kill the GRITtery
Cannot kill the VAMity
GRITtery is found in me
GRITtery
GRITtery
Crushing public schoolers, mashing test opt-outers
Running into insanity
Hungry testing makers, feeding charter chambers
Obscene profitability
Smashing accountability
There’s no sanity
Cannot stop the GRITtery
Unbinding test aggression
Falling into regression
Cannot kill the GRITtery
Cannot kill the VAMity
GRITtery is found in me
GRITtery
GRITtery
Circle of ed deformers, billionaires and lawmakers
Buying out the BOEs
Stripping local autonomy, crippling democracy
They create the GRITtery
Smashing accountability
There’s no sanity
Cannot stop the GRITtery
Unbinding test aggression
Falling into regression
Cannot kill the GRITtery
Cannot kill the VAMity
GRITtery is found in me
GRITtery
GRITtery
GRITtery
GRITtery
GRITtery
GRITtery