In many ways, school is about measuring things. We measure how many questions you get right. We measure how your grades have risen or dropped. We measure how much faster you are at running 60 yards than you were last year. We measure, measure, measure; we count, count, count. We try to turn everything into a number that we can then compile with other numbers and run some analysis on (standard deviation anyone?) and pass those numbers on to people higher up than us, people with six-figure salaries who haven’t been in a classroom for ages yet who take those numbers and make some prescriptive pronunciations from them and tell us how we can make our numbers better. Numbers, numbers, numbers, even if the subject we teach is a million miles from numbers.
That is the reality of education in 2023. Where did this come from? How did we get so consumed with the idea of data? (Never mind the fact that much of that data is of s[urious quality—numbers are numbers.) Why weren’t we so data-obsessed when I was in school? When I was student teaching? When I first began teaching in the States? Simple: we didn’t have a way to produce all those numbers on a regular basis because it was all pencil and paper. Now that we have computers and websites that can collate and count and assess and analyze numbers, numbers, numbers, we seem to think those numbers are the most important thing about education. We have meetings almost every week in which we’re supposed to discuss our numbers and how to improve our numbers and how to prepare our students better for the next measure that will produce more numbers that we can then dump into the computer and crunch and analyze some more. Numbers, numbers, numbers. It’s all we do anymore.
But I didn’t get into education to crunch numbers. I didn’t become a teacher to make spreadsheets and analyze them. I didn’t become a teacher to spend all my time thinking about numbers connected to arbitrary measures that are often inaccurate and misleading.
I didn’t become a teacher to do data.