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What all these wrong-goal examples have in common is that people have tried them over and over, and they never work the way you want. The reason they never wor
by apenwarr 9y ago
What all these wrong-goal examples have in common is that people have tried them over and over, and they never work the way you want. The reason they never work is that they don't specify the method. As one of my favourite Deming quotes says, "If you can accomplish a [numerical quality/goal] goal without a [new] method, then why were you not doing it last year? There is only one possible answer: you were goofing off."
What ends up happening is that people will cheat the system so they can hit the target you enforced, while sacrificing some other critical thing you forgot to enforce. In the educational system, for example, what happens is "teach to the test," which causes improved standardized test scores at the expense of actually learning things. And, of course, you get schools that outright cheat when scoring the tests: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/01/how-and-why-convicted-atlanta-teachers-cheated-on-standardized-tests/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/...
Re: ETAs, those are predictions, not goals. Predictions are good. Most of the article is about the difference between the two.
- peterwwillis 9y agoThe goal is not the problem. The method is not the problem. The problem is the problem. You will have to increase the educational system's budget. You will have to raise taxes. You will have to build more classrooms. You will have to hire more teachers. You will even have to feed the damned kids, and improve their home life. There is no "method" that avoids having to do these things. These are the problems you have to solve to reach the intended goal. How you go about solving these problems does not matter. Use whatever method you want. Sweet talk them. Bribe them. Hire a guy named Vito with a baseball bat. The method doesn't matter. Just solve the problems.
- apenwarr 9y agoI think we agree here, except on definitions. To me, potential "methods" are the list of things you describe: taxes, classrooms, teachers, home life, baseball bats. And also the ones I described: teach to the test, fraudulent scoring. A manager that just says "teachers will be evaluated based on their students' standardized test scores" will get nothing useful, because they did not provide a method, and the teachers aren't empowered to solve their problems in a productive way.
- peterwwillis 9y ago> A manager that just says "teachers will be evaluated based on their students' standardized test scores" will get nothing useful, because they did not provide a method There is no method for a teacher to solve those problems. It's a systemic issue.
- amw 9y agoHe didn't say anything that was contrary to that. Note that it's the "manager" that didn't "provide a method" in his framing, and note that "manager" is a shorthand for "the teacher's boss, the school board that created the policies the teacher's boss follows, the federal/state governing bodies that created the legislation that governs the school board's decisions, etc etc"