Garrison Kiellor has gotten a lot of laughs over the years with his sign-off line about Lake Wobegon, where “all the kids are above average.” It’s funny the way he tells it, but if I ever wanted to get serious about it, there are a few questions I would want to ask.
Let’s start with this one. Is “strawberry” an above average ice cream flavor? Like me, you want to go to whether its popularity is above average, but you’ll notice that isn’t what I asked. If you ranked all the flavors just on their goodness, would you have an average? I don’t see how. So strawberry would not be either above or below that average.
You hear a lot about states that are above average in the quality of education they provide. This isn’t completely senseless, like the ice cream example, but it isn’t as good as you might think at first. First you test everyone at a certain grade level and you arrange all the scores from high to low. Now you have an average, so you will have states that are above average. But to get that average, you had to sell your soul. It didn’t hurt all that much did it?
To get the average, you had to agree that by “education” you mean the results of the math and writing scores. You have to agree that what the test measured was what the schools were trying to teach. And you have to neglect the costs to everything else that are usually incurred by schools in pursuit of high achievement scores. You also have to pretend that the pattern of students who are sick on the days the tests are given is really entirely random; the students who missed taking the test are just the average mix of students, not mostly the low-scoring students as they appear to be.
And it’s worse for teachers. I got shoved down this road by a columnist snickering about the very high percentage of teachers who call themselves “above average.” Of course, we know by this point in the post that there is nothing odd about that at all. If you start with the idea that each teacher is trying either to teach in the way he does it best or to teach in the way appropriate for this particular group of students, you will have a really stirring variety of teaching styles. Some will be based on sober contemplation; some on raucous dispute; some on focused complexity; some on sensitivity to nuance. And if you were foolish enough to propose that all those styles by measured by a single metric—you know, so you could have an average—you really ought to be laughed out of the building and on a good day, you would be.
I would be very much surprised if I were not at the top 10% of teachers who are trying to do what I am trying to do—if there are any. How many teachers are trying to do what I am trying to do, do you suppose?
So the really funny thing about Garrison Kiellor’s signoff is not so much the good humored poke at Wobegonians. The really funny thing is why we think it is funny.
Let’s start with this one. Is “strawberry” an above average ice cream flavor? Like me, you want to go to whether its popularity is above average, but you’ll notice that isn’t what I asked. If you ranked all the flavors just on their goodness, would you have an average? I don’t see how. So strawberry would not be either above or below that average.
You hear a lot about states that are above average in the quality of education they provide. This isn’t completely senseless, like the ice cream example, but it isn’t as good as you might think at first. First you test everyone at a certain grade level and you arrange all the scores from high to low. Now you have an average, so you will have states that are above average. But to get that average, you had to sell your soul. It didn’t hurt all that much did it?
To get the average, you had to agree that by “education” you mean the results of the math and writing scores. You have to agree that what the test measured was what the schools were trying to teach. And you have to neglect the costs to everything else that are usually incurred by schools in pursuit of high achievement scores. You also have to pretend that the pattern of students who are sick on the days the tests are given is really entirely random; the students who missed taking the test are just the average mix of students, not mostly the low-scoring students as they appear to be.
And it’s worse for teachers. I got shoved down this road by a columnist snickering about the very high percentage of teachers who call themselves “above average.” Of course, we know by this point in the post that there is nothing odd about that at all. If you start with the idea that each teacher is trying either to teach in the way he does it best or to teach in the way appropriate for this particular group of students, you will have a really stirring variety of teaching styles. Some will be based on sober contemplation; some on raucous dispute; some on focused complexity; some on sensitivity to nuance. And if you were foolish enough to propose that all those styles by measured by a single metric—you know, so you could have an average—you really ought to be laughed out of the building and on a good day, you would be.
I would be very much surprised if I were not at the top 10% of teachers who are trying to do what I am trying to do—if there are any. How many teachers are trying to do what I am trying to do, do you suppose?
So the really funny thing about Garrison Kiellor’s signoff is not so much the good humored poke at Wobegonians. The really funny thing is why we think it is funny.
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