The Educational System’s Romance with Numbers: Why All the Statistics and Percentages?

In the decades-long and endless debate about grading and assessing, the conversation inevitably cycles around to the observation that evaluation systems are increasingly numerical. Current teachers, students, and parents are surprised to learn that only a few decades ago, a teacher’s gradebook might have far fewer numbers in it.

A century or two ago, a teacher’s gradebook might even have no numbers whatsoever: merely rows of letter grades.

Conversely, teachers and parents from a few decades ago would be surprised to see the massive spreadsheets which are contemporary grading programs, with grades calculated to two decimal places and weighted averaging of different categories.

How did this obsession with numbers arise?

There are multiple reasons.

One reason is a desire to be, or to at least seem, more scientific and objective. But here the appearance is stronger than the reality: while endless spreadsheets might give the perception of neutral analysis, critics have noted for decades that a great deal of subjectivity can lurk behind the outwardly sterile numbers.

A second reason is that teachers in recent decades have increasingly been placed in the position of having to defend grades. While this has always been the case to some extent, it is perhaps now more so than in the past. Spreadsheets and averages provide supporting evidence for the teacher who’s been asked to defend a grade.

An entire industry of gradebook software now exists to package the basic software engine of a spreadsheet into a larger framework of education-related terminology. A large number of online or downloadable grading programs are, at their cores, simply variations on a spreadsheet.

A great deal of time and effort is spent to create complex and sometimes confusing systems of grades, largely to generate a defensible grade in case a parent militantly objects.

Perhaps a more efficient use of the system’s work and energy would be to give a modicum of unassailability to issued grades. If grades — even if they contain the inevitable bit of subjectivity — were understood to be the educated judgment of an experienced subject matter specialist, then parents and students might not feel so free to question them.

The concepts of measurement and evaluation are used throughout civilization. Customers in a grocery store do not routinely question whether the twelve-ounce package of cheese is actually twelve ounces. Homeowners being billed for using 850 kilowatt-hours in a month don’t habitually voice doubts about the accuracy of the electric company’s measurements.

Why, then, do people feel free to question the grades which a teacher issues, causing teachers to waste countless man-hours in the generation of spreadsheets in grading software, so that such numbers are ready in reserve to defend grades?

A Poor Substitute for Education

Here’s what Alvin Toffler did not write: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

That sentence is widely posted as coming from the pen of Alvin Toffler, but he did not create it.

While those words might rightly be seen as a bit of wisdom for those who must interface constantly-changing hardware and software, it is not good advice for navigating social and political situations. While this insight can help a person adjust to the latest version of an operating system or to the newest update of an app, it is a poor way to view the world in general.

Instead, people are most successful in understanding the world when they seek and discover the unchanging principles which underlie and shape reality. However old human history might be — let’s say 10,000 years although the oldest known writing samples are only 5,500 years old — human nature hasn’t changed during that time. While people reshape technology and fashion at a dizzying pace, human nature remains reliably constant.

Likewise, the physical properties of the universe remain the same: the laws of physics and chemistry.

All which presents itself as new and different is usually a repackaging of something much older.

Education, to be truly useful, must give students skills and knowledge which will apply in the unanticipated and unpredictable circumstances of the future. Sometimes dismissed as ‘essentialism,’ an education which helps students to understand human nature, and therefore be able to understand all people, is a meaningful key in the midst of changing appearances but steady immutable underlying realities.

Human nature is a constant, a foundation under the diverse appearances of ethnicities, languages, nationalities, religions, and other demographic variables.

This is why the ancient utterances of Confucius and Aristotle largely agree with the common sense of today and tomorrow.

What did Alvin Toffler actually write? In his book Future Shock, he wrote: “Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.” In the context of changing computer systems and financial systems, Toffler is correct.

It is a misuse of his words to apply them to the essential structure of human society or to the timeless characteristics of human nature.

Charitable Reading: Why Recontextualization Is Worth the Effort

To explore texts from different eras, different places, different languages, or different cultures requires a sympathetic reading: assuming that what might at first appear nonsensical or bizarre has a reasonable interpretation, and assuming that the author was expressing, or attempting to express, a rational and plausible idea.

Recontextualization is work. It requires one to find analogues and parallels in one’s own era, own place, own language, or own culture.

The reader who devotes exertion to this task is rewarded.

Two texts which merit such exploration are books authored by Mortimer Smith. The first is titled And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public School Education, published in 1949 by Henry Regnery Company as part of “The Humanist Library” series. The second is The Diminished Mind: A Study of Planned Mediocrity in Our Public Schools, which appeared in 1954 by the same publisher.

Smith’s prose is dated, and his examples are by now obscure bits of trivia in the history of education, but the generic principles which he puts forth endure. The insights gained from these books are valuable principles which continue to explain education in the United States.

Educational Administration: Subversive or Merely Incompetent?

People who do not regularly inhabit the workplaces of school administrators may be forgiven for imagining that they’ve been transported to the surface of Mars when they encounter the verbiage and decision-making processes of such administrators. Ordinary common sense and standard business practices count for little in the world of educational bureaucracy.

One such average human being who wound up as a visitor in the domain of educational administration was Mortimer Smith. He was surprised by what he found, and wrote a book to share his experiences with anyone else who wasn’t a full-time educational administration, i.e., with 99% of the human race.

Reviewing Smith’s book for the University of Chicago, Manning Pattillo writes:

As a member of a board of education in Connecticut, Mortimer Smith was given the responsibility of interviewing candidates for a public school superintendency. He reports that this experience was rather depressing because so few of the applicants seemed to have any real interest in education as such. Their concern, according to Smith, was almost entirely with the machinery of education, with the equipment and organization of schools, rather than with the purposes of education. And when the candidates did talk about educational philosophy, the author was impressed by the extraordinary uniformity of their ideas. Nearly all of them seemed to hold the same views and to express these views in precisely the same words. So Mortimer Smith began an investigation to discover what influences ces are operating on the public schools and why public educators are the kind of people they are. And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public Education is the report of his finding.

In the book, Smith notes that one of several causes for the inept management of schools is found among the parents and voters themselves:

This, then, is an essay about education by a layman and an amateur, and it is not written in sackcloth and ashes; it is written in the conviction that laymen that is, parents and taxpayers ought to get over their lazy indifference to the public schools and study the theory and practice of public-school education; in short, to find out what it is we are paying for and to which we so glibly turn over our children.

Smith’s message would seem to be, then, that if educational offices are staffed with functionaries who have little interest in, or knowledge of, content and curriculum, then these offices are so occupied because of under-involvement on the part of voters and parents.