Lesson observations, school performance against OFSTED or SEF or SIP criteria, SATs results, optional SATs results, pupil reporting, assessment of individual pieces of work, pupil tracking ……. on and on and on. All of these areas have been blighted with the cancerous obsession with assigning numbers – see my Blog http://becktonboy.blogspot.com/2007/06/assessment-2-what-are-results.html ..... 3 years old and still apposite I think.
The attempt to squeeze children into a spreadsheet and fit them on a graph fills me with nausea. The whole crock of levels, numbered targets dreamed up from numbered lists of mythical, often non-sensical levels, tracking an individual's or a group's progress against these phantoms is utter, utter rubbish and of absolutely no value to us or the children we teach. They barely have any meaning when applied to schools because they are so inaccurate and so very easily influenced, measuring not how well a school does anything, except make the figures making up the spreadsheet look good. They are beloved of the number crunchers and their attack dogs because they are not really interested in real education.
Good teachers or schools that end up having to take the numbers game seriously because of the damocletian threat of funding impact or interference, just think Woodhead or clone/OfSTED, end up frustrated and confused. The fault is not theirs it lies with the bizarre, pointless system we are trying to operate in good faith.
My advice to anyone having moral or philosophical difficulties with levels (not standards) of achievement: operate the system in the spirit it was created: make everything look as good as you can as quickly as you can, by the least damaging means possible and try to get on with educating in the time and with the energy you have left.
2 comments:
I believe in the quote there's lies, damn lies and statistics!
One of the eye opening things that I learned as a HoD in my previous college is that success, achievement, retention rates and ALIS scores are utterly meaningless, as the levels depend upon the quality of number crunching which generated them. E.g. in 2010, I was informed that my achievement and rentention rates were very low (my achievment rates had actually improved significantly compared to those of the previous year before I joined the college) because some twit in the 'quality' department decided to withdraw all but 1 of the students who failed the end of my A-level course before the year was out (without my or my line manager's permission or knowledge). I took great satisfaction in telling the powers that be about this mistake (who didn't understand what I was saying for a moment or 2) after hearing that the other A-level HoDs in a different faculty had been lambasted by these fools for poor A-level results in a previous meeting!
I only trust the following statistics:
1. What marks/grades do students get when I first teach them?
2. How many lessons do they turn up for?
3. What marks or grades do students get in their exams?
Most of the time, these give me far more information, so in most cases, what I think they will achieve at a certain point is what they get, if not better!
I think your last paragraph sums things up nicely - a lot of teaching is just making sure the appearances are right first in order to keep your job, then when that's done actually getting on with the real job.
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