The Impossibles

Freud once stated that teaching is impossible.

I doubt he meant a harrumph at the indolence and irresponsibility of his students. Nor, I suppose, a lash out at the folly of standardized tests, outcome-based standards or any other idealized version of education as technical tinkering. To assume, further, that he thought as a small government, low-tax, anti-public spending libertarian would be make him too much contemporary. History still does not allow a revision of the past in the identities of the present.

So what then did Freud mean?

Let me explain this question another way. In the current model of accountability (courtesy of NCLB), our educational system uses standardized, quantitative scores on tests to determine student knowledge and skills, and growth in knowledge and skills over the course of a set period (a semester, a year, a unit). Merit or performance pay synthesizes the students' learning into their teachers' effectiveness; the so-called "value-added" model of teacher accountability. Through inferential and raw/direct statistics, a teacher can be evaluated by the result of her students' scores on such exams. This process uses a positive gain as a determination of a successful student/good teacher; a negative loss as a determination of an unsuccessful student/poor teacher.

The flaw in this system is exposed when considering the reasons for schooling. Put another way, the qualitative rationale for schooling can not be analyzed through the quantitative measures used in schooling. While we believe we can measure a student's learning of concepts and skills, we have no method for measuring the justifications for learning these concepts and skills. This lack does not mean a better instrument is needed to do so. Rather, such instruments are impossible to create. What does all this mean? It tells us that no matter how efficient and effective our teaching, no matter how documentable through quantitative data our students' learning, no matter how empirical and obvious our beautiful numbers, we can not analyze the effect of schooling in the same way. Our measurements of learning give no significant or even sensical information on what effect that learning has on the the student or society.

Now, for me, this is a huge, huge thing. If I am not able to apply the metrics used to determine whether a student has learned to determine any justification for their learning, then either

1. there is no justification for schooling, or
2. the metrics used to determine learning need to be radically transformed.

Common sense, perhaps, explains why we would want our children to learn to read and communicate, to understand and manipulate numbers, to hold a common core of truths regarding the physical and biological sciences, to have knowledge of the history of our kind and the art of our cultural heritages. Common sense, as well, explains why our democracy needs literate, rational thinkers; our economy needs effective, knowledgeable workers; our culture needs the values and capabilities of appreciation for the products of human artifice. But common sense has no purchase in the accountability we employ in the institution of education. Common sense represents something tacit, but felt and experienced to be obvious. It presents a taken-for-granted obviousness, something one need not spend time defending. To question common sense is to question rationality itself. Yet common sense prevails in schooling through the curriculum and skills expected in our students. In other words, there is no need to statistically warrant the course and scope of study (with some ding-a-ling culture wars on the margin; part of Freud labeled the "narcissism of small differences"), because the why is implied in all this common sense. This paradox, or double-consciousness, of quantitative measuring and qualitative common sense exposes the impossibility of ever getting schooling right. "Right" does not exist; only politics does.

Teaching is impossible, not because it is difficult. Nor because it is too open-ended, or even indeterminate. No, teaching is impossible because, by the laws presented as how to measure its effect, we will never know what effect its effect has on students. The outcome of teaching, like the outcome of the experience of schooling itself, is immeasurable. Literally. Both are acts, or participation of acts, that ultimate point beyond themselves. Nothing that we can determine about what is learned tells us anything about what that learning means. Teaching is therefore the investing in a purposeful act the mystification of what that act means. It is a myth, mythic; teaching is the religion of everyday life. That we have chosen to place this practice at the heart of our social order is the finest expression of the mystery to existence.

Teachers are not bankers?

Paul Krugman has a smart brief this morning on changing the way bankers are compensated. Right now, rewards are earned through short-term success, without consideration of longer term effects. As he writes, "In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses."

Many of the current ideas about 'merit pay' and/or 'value-added' models of teacher compensation take a strikingly similar approach. Teacher earn their bones, and its rewards, when their students demonstrate competency of standards-based outcomes. Sounds like a sane approach. Yet, as for the bankers, teachers in this system (just like right now) are not held responsible for a students' success or struggle in the future. After all, how could they? Rigorous research methodology would never warrant any conclusion that claimed such a longer-term effect; too much life intervenes, making any claim specious, more projection than evident.

As part of the accreditation of teacher ed programs (whether nationally, through NCATE, or state-based - in Oregon, Teacher Standards and Practices Commission/TSPC), documentation must be presented that shows the effect a program has on the success of its graduates. In other words, my school must present evidence on the effect our alumni have on their students. The evidence? Some qualitative artifacts, but mostly, k-12 student test scores.

Schools are already on that path. A 'traditional' approach to teacher pay took teachers as salaried employees of a large system, where the overall health of the community significantly effected the learning of the students. Teachers were never paid well, comfortably more in recent years, but never comparable to professionals. Implied, though, was the role teachers played in the bigger wheel of society. Their effects, in essence, were part of something bigger.

To put this all in perspective, then. Teachers are to be paid in relation to how their students demonstrate the objectives for the year. They are not held responsible, at least in terms of their pay, for a student's performance in subsequent year; that is another teacher's load. Schools of education, however, are held responsibly for how their graduates perform once they leave, regardless of the intervening factors and contingencies that occur. If Krugman is correct, and I for one agree with him, then any pay-for-performance system established for educators replicates the dysfunctional incentives that spurred the financial crisis.

Gross National Happiness

Reading Joseph Stiglitz makes me feel as if my inner-conscience has been draped over the world. He comes with all the laurels (Noble Prize, full Professorship, extensive publication via peer-review) and he invokes all the logic of doing things differently because what we are doing now blows. I often do not believe that he means what he writes, since his ideas make too much sense to me.

Take this latest essay. The challenge of measuring the most inscrutable - the quality of human experience - renders moot any attempt. As he writes, "What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things." Using GNP as a syllogism for the state of society, the micro world of individual lives suffers for the macro world of a big thing: economic growth. A rising tide may lift all boats, true; but not everyone in the world has a boat. Or can swim.

Of course, using Bhutan as a model of clarity might not win over the same-as-usual empiricists. And this topic is itself another version of the defense of liberal arts learning, more or less. Still. It encourages me to trust what I think I know, to realize that some of the important people also know what I think I know.