We’ve become a society of instant gratification. Microwave meals, streaming video, voice search on our Iphones. For those of you old enough to remember dial up, how insane would you go waiting for a page to load now like it did in the old days of AOL dial up? My friend Sean and I were uncomfortable the other day waiting 3 or 4 seconds for the page to load because the wireless in that part of the building wasn’t as strong. Unfortunately, society wants that same thing in education. People want to see the instant results. What’s the best way to immediately see results? Often they use test scores, something quick and concrete that they can draw conclusions from. This is the basis for NCLB and many other “reform” initiatives that continue to pop up in discussion and legislation. They take a “last-second” snapshot of a student or teacher’s year and use that as the basis for success or failure. That mindset misses a big part of the overall picture.
The University of Pittsburgh men’s basketball team suffered a defeat to a lower-ranked Butler team this weekend. Pitt had a 28-5 record this year and was the regular season champ of the Big East conference, a conference judged by many as the toughest conference in the nation. And by many, their season will be judged a failure. A failure because they did not win on a given day in March. The outstanding season, the hard work that started in the fall, the hours of time in practice, all of that will fall by the wayside as they are judged by that popular hashtag “#fail”. How similar is this to a teacher or student who spends hours of work, possibly having numerous successes throughout the year, but get judged as “not meeting standard” on the basis of a given day in March- or April, or May, depending on when the MAP, EOC or (insert your own acronym here) falls.
I know that lots of educators are scrambling to “catch up” and try to get information in because of lost days due to snow, etc. Let’s hope that we can find a way to judge not just the final shot, but the overall body of work for them. I’d hate to see them judged as a failure because we only want to see the results of the buzzer-beater and not watch the rest of the game. THAT would be March Madness.