To measure, to reduce, to minimize - these are the goals of the policymaker - who is incentivized to think in 2-4 year cycles. Addressing issues like systemic poverty of income inequality require long-term thinking - and they are complex. Solutions are expensive. But if we can measure the proxy for "student success," we can claim to develop solutions to "improve it." Funny that decades later, it turns out "A Nation at Risk" really wasn't at risk - but embracing that idea led to profits for some and re-election for others - all while no one asked students or teachers what story they wanted to write.
This made me think of Margaret Thatcher's "there is no society" statement so I looked it up - "who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first." It's sad because the statement could actually be interpreted more reasonably than I always assumed. People should do what they can, and the government should act through the people. Unfortunately she took it to mean we should eviscerate public institutions and only look at things through a narrow, economistic lens that promotes measurable things like profit, but not the more valuable things you mentioned above.
To measure, to reduce, to minimize - these are the goals of the policymaker - who is incentivized to think in 2-4 year cycles. Addressing issues like systemic poverty of income inequality require long-term thinking - and they are complex. Solutions are expensive. But if we can measure the proxy for "student success," we can claim to develop solutions to "improve it." Funny that decades later, it turns out "A Nation at Risk" really wasn't at risk - but embracing that idea led to profits for some and re-election for others - all while no one asked students or teachers what story they wanted to write.
This made me think of Margaret Thatcher's "there is no society" statement so I looked it up - "who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first." It's sad because the statement could actually be interpreted more reasonably than I always assumed. People should do what they can, and the government should act through the people. Unfortunately she took it to mean we should eviscerate public institutions and only look at things through a narrow, economistic lens that promotes measurable things like profit, but not the more valuable things you mentioned above.