While sitting in a diner in Chelsea today, I overheard a couple at the next table who seemed to be in their 60’s. They were talking about current and former careers including high school guidance counselor. One of them said he got into the field because of his preference for one-to-one contact with students and was critical of all of the accountability required by the current system, which turns teachers into robots. He said the kids have multiple choice tests and have never been asked to think. When the city got millions of dollars for education from the state it was used to evaluate the evaluations.
She remembered when they were in school and there were three kinds of high school diplomas, general, commercial and academic. He said now everybody’s going to get a regents diploma. But, we need people to be plumbers. The kids have been sold a bill of goods. They are told “You can do better.” At the same time PhD’s can’t get jobs.
He has a point. Tracking fell out of favor because gifted and intelligent students of color were told they weren’t college material. People like me had no options but going to college and found out later that one of my favorite jobs ever was a deckhand with the engine room checks and safety drills and the diesel fuel scent anticipating getting under way.
In the 1980’s the media was all abuzz with admiration for the wonderful Japanese school system, but I worked as a clown in Japan, and I happen to know that most of the stage managers, and sound and light board operators I met there, had dropped out of high school as soon as they realized they did not want to become salarymen in suits which was the only occupation such an education was good for.
At this point we have no idea which middle school our daughter will attend next fall. There are some with science themes which we prefer. I have a daughter who self-identifies as a geek and who says she wants to be an engineer or a physicist and go to MIT. I don’t know if she really wants to do that or if she even knows what it means. Perhaps she just says it because it makes adults smile. But, wether or not that is what her future holds it damn well better still be an option when she comes out of middle school at the end of eighth grade.
Not that it was a life goal of mine, but by the end of eighth grade, I knew that the possibility of becoming a medical doctor was already off the table.
There are schools which encourage children towards academic excellence (which is not the same as test scores) through exploration and discovery. But they are few and far between. There are other school which focus on the metrics of test prep, standardization and scores. This is not what I want for my child.
In the looking for the correct spelling I googled “metrics” which, via Cathie Black, I understand is a business term. I came across this quote:
“Businesses that succeed and make money constantly assess themselves and improve in all dimensions of their business; metrics are the cornerstone of their assessment, the foundation for any business improvement.” –CFO Magazine via the Business Process Reengineering website.
This is the language of CEO Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CEO Schools Chancellor Cathie Black.
On the same page I also found this.
Developing effective metrics may appear easy at first glance, but many have fallen into common traps that you can avoid. Examples of common pitfalls are:
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Developing metrics for which you cannot collect accurate or complete data.
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Developing metrics that measure the right thing, but cause people to act in a way contrary to the best interest of the business to simply “make their numbers.”
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Developing so many metrics that you create excessive overhead and red tape.
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Developing metrics that are complex and difficult to explain to others.
IMHO the NYCDOE had stepped into each and every one of these traps in the effort to measure what the children are learning. (But that’s a whole ‘nother post.) Any parent will tell you, what we intend to teach our children is not the same thing as what they learn.
As it happens, over the holidays my husband taught my daughter to play blackjack with poker chips and she took to it like a fish to water, which I believe is a direct result of my child’s familiarity with the the crap-shoot middle school choice process and the lottery system used to place children in charter schools.