Why I hate (most) measures in complex systems

My sons school has started a reading league table and a part of my soul just died.  

At age 6 my son is in year 1 at primary school, it’s a small rural school so he shares a class with year 2s and they have one teacher for a class of 30 odd children aged 5 to 7.  That’s a tough job and on a national teachers strike day, one what is woefully under paid.  Like all schools there are things they do well, things that could be better and that goes for the teachers and the decisions they make.  I try not to worry too much as ultimately the whole educational system if flawed and life is too short for that much stress.

But…

We have just had a message via Class Dojo, for those who don’t know Dojo, imagine the worst possible social media & messaging app and times by 1000 and you won’t come close to the loathing I have for it.  Anyway, his teacher excitedly shared the display they have just created with large photos of all the children and the number of nights they have read at home for.  It’s purpose, apparently, is to “celebrate the classes love of reading” but I see an altogether sadder consequence for this type of competitive learning.

I quickly scanned the image to find my boy and check how his number compared to others, not because I want him to be the best but because I worried how he would feel if he wasn’t.  He turned out not be somewhere in the middle, which he will be ok with but the next thing I noticed were children who had no numbers next to them.  Those children, won’t understand at their tender age how everyone learns differently and at different speeds, that the range of ability between 5 and 7 year olds can be huge,  that their home situation may not make it easy for daily reading or any number of reasons why they ‘score’ lower than their friends, all they see is an empty space next to their face and their friends being celebrated for something they are not.  I also feel for their parents who have now been shamed in front of all their peers for not reading ‘enough’ with their kids.  We often receive passive aggressive messages from the school to read more and this feels like the worst one yet as it is publicly sharing our children’s progress in direct comparison with each other using a single metric. 

We read all the time, as a family of book lovers books are part of our everyday existence.  We are lucky, fairly financially stable, two parents, a roof over our heads and food on the table. But with us both working full time jobs and 3 primary aged children we do not always force our son to read his school book if he doesn’t want to nor do we remember in the melee of everyday life to complete his reading dairy.  He is, despite all this terrible parenting, learning to read and read at a perfectly acceptable level for his age, as I suspect are all of his peers in their own varied way. 

What’s the point of this post.  Not so much to have a whinge about the school, although it is a little cathartic but to use as a beware the intended consequences example. 

I speak a lot about measures in my line of work and measures can be the most dangerous thing when not thought through, particularly if focused on a single metric in a complex and variable area. 

Bad measures, can stop the thing you want to happen happening.  I wonder how many parents may now fill in a reading diary slightly less truthfully and add a couple of days in here and there.  They also have an negative impact on the thoughts and behaviours of others.  I’ve seen through my work similar measures which compare productivity of one team to another, I remember one such report being referred to as the ‘spreadsheet of shame’.  The report counted the number of pieces of work that were considered overdue, this led to a culture of desperation to not be at the bottom and work then being rushed, this led to very poor outcomes for the clients and high levels of unnecessary work coming back in as it failed first time.  When looking to improve work flow and manage demand we can spend a lot of time analysing those aspects but without taking a part and understanding the consequences of how we measure the work, changes will be in vein.  Our responses to measures are ingrained from a very young age, but until we can fix the whole educational system these measures should be thrown out with the bathwater