The Problem With Comparisons In Education
Which is the best movie: Ghostbusters, Singin' In The Rain, Casablanca, or Avengers: Endgame?
It depends, of course, on how we choose to compare them. Based on level of romance? On the happiest ending? Best dancing? Most money made? Best use of Sigourney Weaver? Criteria make all the difference. But it's not just the criteria; it's the problems with criteria that naturally emerge from the mandate to compare.
One of the driving features of modern education reform has been the mandate to compare. Fans of free market education want to be able to compare schools; several reform programs targeted schoolsthat ranked in the bottom five percent. The New Teacher Project (TNTP) made a huge splash in 2009 with "The Widget Effect" arguing that we should compare teachers and make staffing and pay decisions based on the results. Ranking schools is as important to U.S. News as swimsuits are to Sports Illustrated.
There are problems applying comparisons to education.
Comparisons are not measurements. Pat may be ranked the tallest or shortest student in class, but either way, knowing Pat's ranking does not tell me how tall Pat actually is. "Most improved" may make good advertising copy, but your enterprise can be "most improved" and still be terrible.
This problem only increases as we deal with more complex systems. The better a measure is for making comparisons, the worse it is for actually describing the thing being measured.
If we want to describe what makes a particular school great, or where it is falling short of CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The Problem With Comparisons In Education
