“Not everything that counts can
be counted. And not everything that can be counted counts.” Albert Einstein
A head teacher friend of mine has
a problem. The government in Wales has decided that the results of the Year 5
tests in mathematics, reasoning and reading for each child should be plotted on
a continuum and sent home to parents. The continuum has 100 in the middle – the
average child. Average apparently spans from 85-115, below 85 is below average
and it follows that above 115 is above average. Each parent gets the printout
with three crosses placed on the continuum to represent their child’s position
in relation to all the other children of their age in Wales. So now each parent
knows – their child is ‘above average’, ‘average’ or below average’ and by how
much. Where would you like your child to be placed? As you might expect a
number of parents are worried about the place on the continuum that their
child, on the basis of three tests, sits. Especially as these are high-stakes
tests, these numbers will be a major determiner of which set they are placed in
when they go to the secondary school and research tells us that once placed in
a set it is very hard to move out of it.
Numbers are not like words, which
require interpretation. Numbers are a source of authority that purports to
reveal truth. Never mind whether they actually
do so or not, the way they are presented gives them the status of certainty, of
factual information, of reliable evidence. And such ‘truth’ surely cannot be
disputed. Unsurprisingly the majority of parents think the numbers assigned to
their child tell them something factual about that child.
Stop for a moment and reflect –
do you believe that the most important things in life can be measured? How
about friendship? Could we assess our friends and assign them a number
according to how good a friend we thought they were? What about our parents?
Our closeness to our children or other loved ones? If we did decide to measure
such things against a set of criteria and come up with a number surely it would
make us feel uncomfortable. It would undermine the human feelings that are so
dear to us.
On the other hand the pursuit of
excellence does require some form of assessment of quality. It is true that if you can’t measure
something you can’t improve it and measuring is a fundamental component of
human life, to reject measurement would be impossible. So we need to measure –
but there are many things we refuse to measure and for good reasons. We would,
for example, find it odd to measure the beauty of the natural world and then
decide which is better by assigning them a numerical value – the Grand Canyon
or Victoria Falls, maybe the Lake District. Or using numbers to decide which
has more value, a painting by Picasso or a sculpture by Henry Moore. Such
measurement is nonsensical and we immediately see that.
Could it be that we are so
obsessed by measuring in education that we are confusing what we can measure with
what we cannot? Confusing what we truly
value about human beings with what we can measure? We need to sort that out.
Then, having decided what we can measure, it is only too easy to be seduced by
numbers and forget that there are good and bad numbers. Remember the saying,
‘There are lies, damned lies and statistics’? Numbers are influential; they
shut down arguments and stifle political and social discussion by claiming to
provide incontestable facts. We all trust people with numbers – even when we
recognize how easy it is to fudge data for all sorts of purposes, even though we
know numbers can be manipulated and misrepresent the world they seek to
describe, even though we know there is widespread cheating on the tests by
school leaders – numbers, simply because they are numbers, are taken to be
correct.
First, we need to sort out what
can and cannot be measured, and secondly we need to look carefully at what we
decide to measure and make sure the numbers we use are valid. Perhaps most
importantly we need to consider how the presence of numbers, good and bad,
influence how the stakeholders in schools – the pupils, parents and teachers –
behave and what they believe. Numbers have the power to affect how we carry out
education in our schools. In an era of data-driven decision making it is
important to question the data we are collecting and the status we give to it.
Let’s get back to my head teacher
friend. She has to deal with the parent who demanded to know why their child is
‘above average for mathematics and reasoning, but only average for reading’.
They want to know where the school has gone wrong – he is clearly a ‘bright’
boy, this result must be the fault of the school.
Unfortunately this illustrates
only too sadly that in education numbers influence everything we do and this can
negatively influence the educational lives of many pupils and their teachers. What
about the self-fulfilling prophesy of telling a child she is ‘below average’
and the impact this might have on her self-efficacy and self-esteem?
To help me think about this I
turned to Professor Lorenzo Firamonti, a leading political scientist whose
latest book, ‘”How Numbers Rule the World” draws our attention to the fact that
measurement, expressed as numbers have become the driving force behind our
social, economic and political decisions. Numbers, whether they are right or
wrong influence our behaviour and that of the people around us. If we apply his
arguments to education we can see how it has become dominated by the production
of numbers to assess the quality of our children, our teachers and our schools
and to guide the placement of children in ability groupings. Numbers drive
school policy-making and guide development plans. Numbers have increased
bureaucracy for everyone in schools. It’s time to unpick the impact of numbers
on our educational system and ask if it helps improve the quality of education
for all our children. At the moment it is numbers that decides what makes a
good school and activities designed to improve those numbers dominate the
thinking of all involved from the parent complaining, to the head teacher to
the Director of Education in the Local Authority.
No one can doubt that the numbers
we attach to students are powerful and exert enormous influence on the behaviour
of schools. Schools are rated on the basis of test and examination results; in
a market economy they have to compete with one another for pupils, it takes a
brave school not to focus on preparing children for the tests. Test results are
seen as key indicators for a ‘good school’. This has some predicted and unpredicted
side effects. Schools are expected to show progression for each child and in
primary school the magic number is Level 4B in English and Mathematics in year
6. These targets inevitably influence how teachers respond to the pupils in
front of them leading to extra focus on those children who are borderline in
the desired grades. A focus on some students inevitably means the neglect of
others as research on secondary schools has established.
Secondary schools are judged by
the percentage of GCSE A*-C grades, including mathematics and English, their
students obtain. In this context it is the C/D borderline students have more
money spent on them and their teachers spend more time planning interventions
to maximize the number of C grades. Teaching becomes strategic as teachers
teach to the test; learning becomes strategic as pupils are encouraged to only
do what is necessary to pass the test – what becomes of deep learning in this
scenario? What matters is passing those examinations, no matter if the knowledge
gained is short-term and surface learning, that students acquire information
rather than understanding.
When numerical reasoning is
systematically applied to the world of human interactions in this way it has
all sorts of unintended side effects. What about the impact on teachers whose
stress levels and unhappiness are linked to the loss of autonomy, social status
and professionalism? Many teachers are leaving as a result of the increased
monitoring, evaluation and sheer bureaucracy
Firamonti laments that, ”The
complexity of social relations is lost through the cracks of mathematical
algorithms.” My head teacher friend is not prepared to sacrifice her commitment
to social relations, to the quality of interaction between the children and
teachers in her school, to prioritizing the understanding of each child as a
unique human being with multiple interests and talents to the demands of
numbers. The children to her are not merely a set of crosses on a sheet. She
wants her school to be an ethical institution where the people in it listen to
each other, where relationships are nurtured, where differences are valued, creativity
is encouraged and thinking is promoted. And that means mixed ability teaching. This
is not an either/or – her results are also good, but I believe such results
arise from the creation of a happy, productive environment where children are
encouraged to think their own thoughts and come up with their own ideas and as
a result love learning and are not made to feel judged by a number.
When parents are sent the continuum
and see where their child has been placed it almost inevitably shapes their
perception of their child. They believe the number has something real to say
and they forget all the intangible capabilities their child is acquiring. The
presence of the numbers reduces debate – parents see them and think they say
something real.
It is time to ask ourselves what
we want for our children – do we want schools that put all their energies into
the micro-management of the production of measurable and uniform outcomes so we
can rank and categorise, compare and contrast, group and set the children in
our schools or, do we want schools like my friend’s that nurtures questioning,
dialogue, respect and responsibility and seeks to fully acknowledge each
child’s uniqueness and difference because that is what makes them human?
Numbers can’t do that.
