Fear of measurement

There are few themes in the endless educational debate more insistent than hostility to standardized tests.  This Atlantic story showcases the upscale version: your bright, high-achieving child may have traded her innate love of learning for a joyless scramble after grades.  The flip-side version is the underperforming student's family's ceaseless search for a kinder, gentler school environment that either measures an unmeasurable cognitive quality that's untethered from all those heartless plebeian facts, or fantasizes about a worthwhile degree free of all objective measurement.

I'm grateful that my father, a teacher himself, never bogged down in any of this.  He admired academic success and took occasional pleasure in mine, when he noticed it.  He never obsessed over it.  He had a casual working assumption that grades had something to do with achievement. On the other hand, if he'd gotten the least whiff of suspicion that the two had diverged, he wouldn't have wasted two seconds deciding which one had value.  Nor was he in any doubt about how to make the judgment after conversing with a student, including his own child.  A third person's measurement might be more or less reliable, but the education was the real thing.

I would come home sometimes to ask about something I'd heard in a chemistry class about electrons orbiting a nucleus like planets around a sun, which didn't sound like what I'd heard from him.  He'd say, well, they're probably required to teach it that way, and you don't have to argue about it, but that's not really our best knowledge of the peculiar truth these days--which he'd then do his best to explain.  The message was that someone's ability to judge your grasp of a subject is limited by his own, and it's always going to be up to you to find out best how to learn by your independent efforts and judgment. Tests were an unavoidable part of the process, not wrong often enough to worry about, but also never the point.

It goes without saying that it never would have occurred to him to bribe or cheat my way into a posh school.

10 comments:

MikeD said...

On the whole bribing scandal. I literally cannot fathom the idea of cheating the system to get my (hypothetical) kid into a school the kid could not earn their way into. I mean, one assumes that if the child can't earn a spot there, they're certainly not going to be able to perform at a level where they'll be able to earn a degree. All you're doing at that point is setting the kid up for failure.

But my gut tells me it was never about making sure the child had a degree from a "good school" so much as it was about stroking the parent's own ego by saying "my child got into " to anyone who will stand still long enough to be told that.

Texan99 said...

I don't know. Do the parents who would cheat their kids into a school also assume they can bully the school into letting the kid skate to a Potemkin degree? Particularly if the school buys into grading on the curve and degrees in Diversity Studies. A school that would take bribes to grease the admissions process probably isn't going to balk at much.

MikeD said...

Ah, but you see there's the rub. The parents were not bribing the schools. In some cases they were bribing coaches to say the kid was on a sports team, but in most cases they hired a "fixer" to get the kid to have all the answers for the SAT, or they even had someone take the test for their kid. And one of the reasons the schools were all in on getting rid of folks connected with this is because the school never got a cut. So lesson learned kids, if you want to bribe your way into a school, make sure everyone in the administration gets a cut, otherwise they'll throw you under the bus.

E Hines said...

Do the parents who would cheat their kids into a school also assume they can bully the school into letting the kid skate to a Potemkin degree?

That's just intermediary, though. Even were the pseudo-parents (they can't possibly be real parents, except in the narrowest, merely biological sense of sire and dam) able to bribe or bully the school into a degree for their get, they're still only setting those offspring up for ultimate failure, now in the real world, where there are real consequences and second chances much reduced in scope.

Eric Hines

Gringo said...

Do the parents who would cheat their kids into a school also assume they can bully the school into letting the kid skate to a Potemkin degree?

No need to bully the school.It is a lot harder to get admitted to an Ivy League school than flunk out. Just stay away from STEM courses. Parrot the profs' lines. No problem.

David Foster said...

The recent scandal is (hopefully) an extreme case, but a LOT of parents are very concerned about making sure their kids get the credentials, contacts, and "skills" that they think are needed for success---while ignoring the meta-skills, or what used to be called "character."

A Russian general (Suvorov, I think) had a saying: "Easy training, hard combat. Hard training, easy combat."

Excessively greasing the path for the kids will in many cases ensure a hard and frustrating life.

Grim said...

I think Gringo is right -- the filter is the admissions process, not the academic process. Harvard has a six year graduation rate of 84.6%; the University of Georgia, 58.4%; Georgia Tech, about 33%.

If you get in to the Ivy Leagues, you'll get through. Georgia Tech makes a point of warning freshmen to "Look to your left, look to your right -- only one of you will finish."

james said...

I've heard things like Grim's statement before.

And perhaps the parents bought into the notion that IQ et al are socially constructed, and if their kids just find themselves in the right society, they'll become geniuses too.

douglas said...

" Even were the pseudo-parents (they can't possibly be real parents, except in the narrowest, merely biological sense of sire and dam) able to bribe or bully the school into a degree for their get, they're still only setting those offspring up for ultimate failure, now in the real world, where there are real consequences and second chances much reduced in scope."

Is that necessarily true for people in say, Hollywood? Or todays media? You don't really need to be any kind of genius to do any of that. You do need to know the right people, be gregarious, and know how to work someone to get what you want. I'd say they were teaching their kids what they themselves know and have operated under. Of course, there's always the chance that the kids get found out as pretenders, and then what?

The rest of us operate under the model you describe, for good reason.

E Hines said...

Hollywood and today's media illustrate the narrowness of scope. What will these folks do outside those arenas? There are very few of them who find success in endeavors that don't involve personal attention associated with cameras and fans.

They're often quite financially successful within their milieu, but they wind up ill-equipped to do anything else, even if they try to do something else in less than a lifetime of specializing. Their ability to seem gregarious and to schmooze doesn't work outside that small colosseum.

Eric Hines