It is kind of ironic that in my local culture the stance is more that by not focusing on testing school and teachers have room to care about learning.
This is not the kind of “stance” that people have when thinking about subjects in near mode instead of far mode. Imagine a doctor who told you that his policy was not to focus on diagnostics so that he could have more room to care about treating patients, or a hedge fund manager who said that by not focusing on returns he has more room to care about making good trades. It doesn’t even make sense. You create and “focus on” the best measurements you have of health/returns/learning if you care about those things, you don’t if you don’t.
To be clear, there is a sense in which not caring about testing does make children’s lives easier, because most of what we force children to do is learn socially and personally useless skills and subjects and perform busywork, and there’s a strong case to be made that if you added consistent and effective testing to the system it would increase their suffering. Perhaps the people in your local culture understand this on an intuitive level and so don’t want to measure progress. But the fact that there is no consistent and effective testing at all—never mind the uselessness of the process in the first place—the fact that people hold stances like “tests get in the way of learning”, is painfully indicative of how ridiculous the existing system is.
When I was watching the serier Wire there was a depiction of school circumnstances and one of the points seemed to be that the teacher was frustrated with the conditions. It seemed odd that is was supposed to be commenting on real world conditions.
The problem (depicted and what I understand) is not that the supervising examinaations woudl be added paperwork and prepartion angst for the students. Rather it is that the teacher is supposed to teach so much in so little time that there is only room for the most route skim on everything. It is teaching to the test, every student barely passes the test (out of those that do). Minimized time budjet and maximised content expectation from school toward the teacher. No slack at all, constantly teetering on the edge of it being possible at all.
I guess the argument is that the current state is that we care so little about the effect of teaching that no effect is a acceptable outcome. And therefore caring to test that there is more effect than no effect would be an improvement. I feel like the essential part of that is the lack of care.
If you have the expectation that the thing wil not be done if you do not check for it, that is a very low trust attitude. In case you have trust you only need to start monitoring when you lose that trust. If you have to tease and pressure the agent to do the principals bidding you are only going to get exactly what you ask for. Empowering the agent you might get stuff that was not previously tested for. You can’t get Goodharted so bad if you do not micromanage while throwing more resources at it will get you more.
It is quite easy to think of a doctor that is tired and hurries up the patient in order to get enough patients served for that day, looking at X-rays while not listening to pain descriptions. Difference between 10 and 15 patients served is easy to verify. Misdiagnoses or missed depression diagnosis are hard to verify and to pin the causal pathway.
I am also sure that (some) hedge fund managers can appriciate not killing their gold egg laying geese. Or that in data analysis working smart instead of hard might be quite essential. Or that spending some networking time with billoinares is quite an acceptable excuse to be making only 50% volume of trades that day.
It is kind of ironic that in my local culture the stance is more that by not focusing on testing school and teachers have room to care about learning.
“they do not actually care” seems to not describe my local reality.
This is not the kind of “stance” that people have when thinking about subjects in near mode instead of far mode. Imagine a doctor who told you that his policy was not to focus on diagnostics so that he could have more room to care about treating patients, or a hedge fund manager who said that by not focusing on returns he has more room to care about making good trades. It doesn’t even make sense. You create and “focus on” the best measurements you have of health/returns/learning if you care about those things, you don’t if you don’t.
To be clear, there is a sense in which not caring about testing does make children’s lives easier, because most of what we force children to do is learn socially and personally useless skills and subjects and perform busywork, and there’s a strong case to be made that if you added consistent and effective testing to the system it would increase their suffering. Perhaps the people in your local culture understand this on an intuitive level and so don’t want to measure progress. But the fact that there is no consistent and effective testing at all—never mind the uselessness of the process in the first place—the fact that people hold stances like “tests get in the way of learning”, is painfully indicative of how ridiculous the existing system is.
When I was watching the serier Wire there was a depiction of school circumnstances and one of the points seemed to be that the teacher was frustrated with the conditions. It seemed odd that is was supposed to be commenting on real world conditions.
The problem (depicted and what I understand) is not that the supervising examinaations woudl be added paperwork and prepartion angst for the students. Rather it is that the teacher is supposed to teach so much in so little time that there is only room for the most route skim on everything. It is teaching to the test, every student barely passes the test (out of those that do). Minimized time budjet and maximised content expectation from school toward the teacher. No slack at all, constantly teetering on the edge of it being possible at all.
I guess the argument is that the current state is that we care so little about the effect of teaching that no effect is a acceptable outcome. And therefore caring to test that there is more effect than no effect would be an improvement. I feel like the essential part of that is the lack of care.
If you have the expectation that the thing wil not be done if you do not check for it, that is a very low trust attitude. In case you have trust you only need to start monitoring when you lose that trust. If you have to tease and pressure the agent to do the principals bidding you are only going to get exactly what you ask for. Empowering the agent you might get stuff that was not previously tested for. You can’t get Goodharted so bad if you do not micromanage while throwing more resources at it will get you more.
It is quite easy to think of a doctor that is tired and hurries up the patient in order to get enough patients served for that day, looking at X-rays while not listening to pain descriptions. Difference between 10 and 15 patients served is easy to verify. Misdiagnoses or missed depression diagnosis are hard to verify and to pin the causal pathway.
I am also sure that (some) hedge fund managers can appriciate not killing their gold egg laying geese. Or that in data analysis working smart instead of hard might be quite essential. Or that spending some networking time with billoinares is quite an acceptable excuse to be making only 50% volume of trades that day.