Quality Education / Pressure And The Pointer

What gets quietly abandoned when only some things are counted

The unmeasured parts of a course have no advocate in the budget meeting.

Every measurement system draws a boundary, and inside the boundary sits whatever can be recorded. Outside sit the things that resist recording: the difficult conversation that changed a student's direction, the assignment redesigned three times until it finally taught what it was meant to, the willingness to fail work that deserved failing, the slow cultivation of a habit of thought that will not surface for years. These are real activities with real costs, and none of them produce a figure that anybody reports. They are visible only to the people in the room at the time, and often not even to them until much later.

When resources tighten, the unrecorded activities are the ones with no defenders. Nobody decides to stop doing them. They are simply not on the sheet when the sheet is reviewed, and effort migrates to the columns that will be looked at. The result is an institution that gets steadily better at everything it counts and gradually thinner in everything it does not, while reporting improvement the whole way. From inside, this looks like progress, and every individual decision along the path was defensible when it was made and would be defensible again if anyone went back to check.

The remedy is not another measure to cover the gap, because the new measure will draw a new boundary with new exclusions. It is to keep asking, explicitly and in the room where decisions are made, what is being neglected because it is not on the sheet. That question has no data behind it and cannot be automated. It has to be asked by somebody with the standing to make people uncomfortable, and asked repeatedly, because it is very easy to stop asking once nobody expects the question any more.