Accountability鈥攚ho could be against that? Basing policy on real data鈥攊sn鈥檛 that crucial? Evaluating government programs and private initiatives by their results鈥攈ow else? Teaching students to draw conclusions from facts, figures, and research鈥攖hat鈥檚 part of our job as educators, isn鈥檛 it?
I want to know if my school is doing its job, the shape the economy and my finances are in, how humans are affecting the environment, if I鈥檓 doing what I should to maintain my health. I depend on test scores, sales figures, lab reports. Data guide my decisions, and I hope that they guide the agencies and organizations around me. And yet, the appeal of numbers can also be a trap. Numbers inform; they also distort. They鈥檙e not the whole picture.
We think a lot about that at the organization where I work, the Center for Ecoliteracy. That鈥檚 probably because we鈥檙e committed to helping students understand the implications of the connections between individual 鈥渢hings鈥� (plants, people, schools, watersheds, economies) and the larger systems in which they exist.
We talk about the shifts in perspective that 鈥渟ystems thinking鈥� requires. One of these shifts is from emphasis on quantity to quality as a standard for evaluating ideas, decisions, and actions. That can feel like an academic abstraction. Its consequences, though, are concrete and profound. We need to ask what gets left out when we look for the magic numbers that will decide complex matters for us.
Recent writing by thinkers in very different arenas reminds me what鈥檚 at stake. In her recent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Diane Ravitch documents the cascading effects of measuring the effectiveness of teachers and schools by scores on narrowly focused tests. Meanwhile, the latest book by the poet, philosopher, essayist, and farmer Wendell Berry, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, examines the fallout from single solutions and simple quantitative assessments in areas ranging from agriculture to economics to the environment.
Numbers inform; they also distort. They鈥檙e not the whole picture.
Ravitch reminds us that she began as an 鈥渆xcited and optimistic鈥� advocate of the federal No Child Left Behind Act: 鈥淐ould there be a more fundamental responsibility of schools than to teach everyone basic skills?鈥� she asks. 鈥淚 was not sympathetic to the anti-testing movement. I didn鈥檛 see why anyone would object to an annual test of reading and mathematics.鈥�
Over the course of a half-dozen years, she reversed her position after concluding that the program鈥檚 prescriptions for fixing low-performing schools weren鈥檛 working. Moreover, she adds: 鈥淏y holding teachers accountable only for test scores in reading and mathematics, 鈥� schools pay less attention to students鈥� health, physical education, civic knowledge, the arts, and enrichment activities. When faced with demands to satisfy a single measure, people strive to satisfy that measure but neglect the other, perhaps more important goals of the organization.鈥�
Ravitch argues that concentrating on simple numerical scores encourages states to game the system by lowering the bar for satisfactory progress, reclassifying students as 鈥渄isabled,鈥� restricting the admission of low-performing students, or counseling them to transfer or drop out. Millions of dollars and hours are invested in drilling students in test-taking strategies, while skills and knowledge needed for further education and the workplace are neglected. Ravitch compares the actions of some schools to those of New York cardiologists who stopped performing surgery on critically ill patients after the state began issuing report cards on mortality rates. Her word for all this is 鈥渇raud.鈥�
In What Matters?, Wendell Berry gathers new essays along with writings spanning the last quarter-century. 鈥淭he 鈥榚nvironmental crisis,鈥欌�夆�� he says, 鈥渉as happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last 500 years that nature is merely a supply of 鈥榬aw materials,鈥� and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill.鈥�
This 鈥済ross oversimplification鈥� is in part the product of the limitations of our ways for assigning value:
We need to ask what gets left out when we look for the magic numbers that will decide complex matters for us.
鈥淚f, in the human economy, a squash on the table is worth more than a squash in the field, and a squash in the field is worth more than a bushel of soil, that does not mean that food is more valuable than soil; it means simply that we do not know how to value the soil. In its complexity and its potential longevity, the soil exceeds our comprehension; we do not know how to place a just market value on it, and we will never learn how. Its value is inestimable; we must value it, beyond whatever price we put on it, by respecting 颈迟.鈥�
Berry criticizes the absolute distinction made 鈥渂etween raw materials, to which, as such, we accord no respect at all, and finished products, which we respect only to the extent of their market value. 鈥� [V]alue in the form of respect is withheld from the source, and value in the form of price is always determined by reference to a future usability鈥攏othing is valued for what it is. But when nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted.鈥�
鈥淔ar from assigning an absolute value to those things we absolutely need,鈥� writes Berry, 鈥渢he financial system puts a price, though a highly variable price, on everything. We know from much experience that everything that is priced will sooner or later be sold. 鈥� When everything has a price, and price is made endlessly variable by an economy without a stable relation to necessity or to real goods, then everything is disconnected from history, knowledge, respect, and affection鈥攆rom anything at all that might preserve it鈥攁nd so is implicitly eligible to be ruined.鈥�
Neither Diane Ravitch nor Wendell Berry argues that we should not make decisions based on valuations. We ought, though, to strive to be the masters rather than the subjects of our assessment tools, to require that our instruments measure what matters most rather than what is most easily counted, and to remember that less easily quantifiable qualities鈥攃ommunity, reverence, respect, health, and affection, among them鈥攎ay be those most critical to our lives and futures.
