More data needed for hard-to-measure student learning and teacher quality

04-27-2011

Guest blog by Stephen Lane/Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom practice

We are living in an age of the quants. In the social sciences, sports, and of course education, the number-crunchers rule. Information that can’t be reduced to a numerical essence is suspect, whether the subject is basketball or economics. In education, quantifiable data can be useful, but the current infatuation with numbers betrays muddled thinking, misallocates teaching resources, and rewards behavior we probably don’t want to see rewarded in teaching. Now that I’m done preaching to the choir, I’d like to think about how to reverse this trend. Railing against the misapplication of numbers (in particular, standardized test results, and misguided comparisons of American students to their foreign counterparts) is important, but we also ought marshal the tools of the quants themselves – data – to support a more nuanced look at student achievement and quality teaching. (more...)

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