Get ready for more measurement

At the last faculty senate meeting, Paul Reville, the Secretary of Education in Massachusetts, gave a talk about education policy. Among other things he said:

In addition to the basic skills that we now set as standards, employers are repeatedly telling us we also need to have a well-rounded education for our children, an education that includes a suite of 21st Century skills. Colleagues of mine like Dick Murnane have
written about this for some time. These skills include the capacity to work in groups, to present persuasive oral arguments, to solve complex problems with contemporary technology, innovation and creativity. It also includes problem-solving and awareness of the United States and its position in the new global economy and world order. Those kinds of skills are more difficult to measure at the state level. Nonetheless, it is important for us to send signals to local schools, colleges and universities that these kinds of capacities are important for young people to have as they come into the system.

I thought this was really interesting. These are exactly the kinds of outcomes that are getting squeezed out of curricula because they aren't something that gets measured by existing assessment strategies. So I decided to ask about that. They didn't quite get my wording right -- I don't think I said anything about "parishes of facts". But you get the idea:

Senator Steven Brewer stated he was pleased to hear Secretary of Education Reville talk about these broader kinds of measures that he is interested in implementing. A lot of people have talked about the culture of measurement in education producing parishes of facts in terms of teachers trying to teach to the things measured by MCAS and neglecting the other kinds of richer outcomes that you are talking about like citizenship, economic success or being the head of a household or the other 21st Century. If you look at the biology department website, you could see that our learning goals include many of these things. How are you are actually going to change the culture which is focused on things that you can easily measure? It is like looking for the keys under the streetlight not because that is where you lost them but because that is where you can see. It is a real challenge to look at things that are intangible.

His answer goes on for a couple of pages, but the relevant part was this:

This assessment should build on, not displace, our current system. Our critics will say we are introducing all of these new features in order to subvert or dilute the focus on basic skills that have brought us to a position of national leadership in education reform. We say, it is not an either/or proposition; it is a both/and proposition. We can do this if we develop the right tools and set of standards and measure appropriately.

In other words, get ready for another round of new tests, designed by the measurement community.