More Data Needed for Hard-To-Measure Student Learning and Teacher Quality (Guest blogger Stephen Lane)
Stephen Lane is a high school teacher with 10 years’ experience at a suburban high school outside of Boston, MA. He teaches history and economics and also coaches cross-country and track & field.
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