Charles Wheelan

There is a common business aphorism: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” True. But you had better be darn sure that what you are measuring is really what you are trying to manage.

Students who live in affluent, highly educated communities are going to test well from the moment their parents drop them off at school on the first day of kindergarten. The flip side is also true. There are schools with extremely disadvantaged populations in which teachers may be doing a remarkable job but the student test scores will still be low—albeit not nearly as low as they would have been if the teachers had not been doing a good job. What we need is some measure of “value-added” at the school level, or even at the classroom level. We don’t want to know the absolute level of student achievement; we want to know how much that student achievement has been affected by the educational factors we are trying to evaluate

Each of us responds to incentives (even if it is just praise or a better parking spot). Statistics measure the outcomes that matter; incentives give us a reason to improve those outcomes