The madness of bean counters

A couple of our friends are training to be teachers, having previously had careers in other sectors, and hearing their tales of the amount of reporting they have to do has been truly jaw dropping.

Don't get me wrong, I had little sympathy with teachers back in the old days when they used to moan about the amount of marking they had to do while finishing work at 3.00 and having endless holidays - we are talking a different league here. Teachers have to produce vast amounts of data and reporting on their activities and their pupils' performance to a mind boggling degree of granularity. Add on to this the extra burdens placed on them when their school is having an Ofsted inspection and teachers truly having something to moan about.

The trouble is that all of this work is based on three false assumptions. Firstly the false assumption that anyone is going read the damn stuff! There is just too much of it and it is too detailed. I just don't believe that anyone in the groups who demand all this reporting can actually take it all in. The second false assumption is that having read it and taken it in that they could make any sense of it. Too much detail and not enough interpretation makes information a burden and not a benefit. Lastly the biggest false assumption is that anything is going to do anything with what they "learn" from all of this stuff. It is just too hard to be confident that it means anything and that your decision to do something is the right one.

Now - and you would expect me to say this - what if you applied what I call the "ooh that's interesting principle"? What if every teacher had a blog? What if they were encouraged spend 15 minutes a day writing about the really interesting things they noticed about their students and their classes as a whole and to write that in plain English, accessible nuggets of writing? What if other teachers, who were also blogging, could read each others blogs and notice similarities and discuss what they noticed in comments? What if teachers could use folksonomic tagging to label their writing and what if school management then subscribed to interesting RSS feeds or tag searches in a local version of deli.cio.us that allowed them to see what were important themes or issues worth dealing with?

What if this worked and you applied it to any situation where bean counters place crippling demands on people to produce reporting that is practically meaningless?

Comments

[Matt Mower]

Isn't the reason for the increasingly onerous reporting regime that nobody really trusts teachers any more? Hence their every micro-encounter with the precious tots must be accounted for?

[Euan Semple]

That may be true but has little to do with the efficacy of the process for dealing with it.

[Jenny Ambrozek]

Euan, interesting to hear about issues with teachers and measurement in the UK in light of what I've observed in the U.S. with the No Child Left Behind Initiative that demands burgeoning standardized testing. My concern is the impact on students. I was at a school meeting where the principal estimated 30 instruction days would be lost in 8th grade by test taking and teachers out of the classroom marking and reporting tests. Agree there is a serous systemic issue confirmed by an associate working with a not-for-profit trying to regenerate one of the most poor performing school districts in the New York region.

[Mitchell Weisburgh]

You can also look at this as stages we have to go through as we become more sophisticated about what we need to measure in education. First was start measuring things that are really simple to measure. Then we start measuring practically everything. Then we start getting more sophisticated and start measuring and analyzing the things that really make a difference. At least that's what I hope the next step is.

[Mitchell Weisburgh]

As I thought more about my comment, it seemed a little too deterministic. Although, in the best of circumstances, that's what happens.

But, there are other potential steps. For example, in business, you sometimes measure performance. People start paying attention to what is being measured, and performance improves. That's good.

But then, people may start learning how to "game" the measurement. The more measurement becomes a method of punishment or reward, the greater the risk that it loses its focus. Which is why Deming and Juran were so adament that rewards not be tied to measurement.

But, on the other hand, if the measurement is not tied to rewards/punishment, it may become bureaucratized and lose its focus. Things get measured because that's the way it's done, but nothing happens to the information.

Look at the SAT test. It was originally a way to level the playing field. People of wealthy backgrounds couldn't just get into the college of their choice over people of poorer backgrounds. It became much more a meritocracy. But today, the wealthy pay $750 to $2,000 to have their kids tutored to boost their scores by 100 points or more. We interviewed 6 kids at our local High School on different topics, and it turned out that all 6 had private tutors in at least two subjects.

[Euan Semple]

Very interesting Mitchell. It reminds me of a story, I think in Freakonomics, of the way the Chicago school system introduced a scheme for measuring the effectiveness of teachers which became gamed very quickly and produced the entirely opposite results from those desired.

[Jon Husband]

what if you applied what I call the "ooh that's interesting principle"? What if every teacher had a blog? etc.

Of course ... but too simple, inexpensive and almost sure to be effective to make it past the structural / protocol-focused gatekeepers.

That's not "the way it's done around here" .. the accountability involved in being (presumably) honest, open, reflective and transparent ain't good enough.

[Teemu Arina]

The ammount of reporting you have to do changes from country to country. In Finland I think we don't do that much of unnecessary reporting.

But what makes social software important for teachers is the fact that teaching is often a very lonely job. You are not developing your teaching skills in a community of practice, but rather in a pyramid of sealed chambers. No wonder why some teachers have the same set of slides from year to year. Many teachers also develop a my-content-is-best syndrome. Many are reluctant to share any of their creations. We need a reform of educational practices. I feel it in my bones that it's just behind the corner.