Fernand and Standardized Measures

It is late August.  I am a public school superintendent 25 miles from the Texas Gulf Coast.  Therefore, I check the NOAA National Hurricane Center web page every morning.  Especially now.  Late August and early September has spawned the Katrinas, Ritas, and Ikes.  I checked yesterday morning.  No tropical storms, no possible depressions, no hint of anything really brewing except a low that was moving westward from Florida toward Texas just off shore. 

Suddenly, a tropical storm forms and it is named Fernand.  It formed quickly yesterday.  It is ashore in Mexico today.

Wow.  We have buoys throughout the Gulf of Mexico measuring wave and wind.  We have Doppler radar.  We have satellite imagery including infrared, water vapor and radar.  We have hurricane hunter aircraft.  We have an array of computer models to analyze this information and forecast the trajectory of tropical events.  We collect a ton of data on the Gulf of Mexico to predict and chart storms.  We never quite get it right.  Fernand reminds us that all that data collection on complex events like the weather, events that involve more variables than we can conceive, may help, but does not give us information we can really take to the bank.  And the weather is inanimate.

I guess that is why we put so much stock on standardized measures of the 4 million school children in Texas based on a single day of testing.  Makes sense to me (he says sarcastically).  Surely the results of the STAAR test are as valid a measure for judging the efficacy of teachers, schools and districts as the weather data collection informs the predictability of tropical storms.  NOAA would get an F. 

I would argue NOAA can no more control the outcome or predictability of storms than teachers and schools can control or predict the outcome of children.  They just report what the data says.

Somehow we understand that the weather is a complex set of variables.  We also know Fernand did not just decide to form and head west.  Schools with little human beings are even more complex, the variables as numerous as tropical weather prediction plus the ability of the carriers of those variables to make conscious decisions and react emotionally. 

I do not oppose, in fact I support, data collection.  What I oppose is judging teachers, schools and districts based on that data collection.  To do so makes as much sense to me as judging NOAA for the predictability of tropical storms.  Worse, NOAA collects data continuously, not on one snapshot day as we do with schools on high stakes standardized testing day.   

We should continue to collect data on both weather and kids.  We should be extremely reluctant to pass judgment on either based on our data collection.  To do so is a presumption of omniscience we do not deserve.

NOAA is lucky.  No one gives them a grade.