Embrace ambiguity Why predictive metrics arent helping Shawn Loescher
Imagine being on a commercial airliner
midway over the ocean, returning from
a family celebration.
You’re at cruising altitude,
and outside the window is the most
serene, crystal blue sky you’ve ever seen.
Then you feel the panicked clutch
of your spouse’s hand.
Your pulse rate quickens as you
realize that at 7 months pregnant,
she’s having contractions.
Within hours of landing,
you find yourself the parent of a
child fighting for their life
in a neonatal intensive care unit,
or NICU.
In our day to day lives, thinking we know
what’s going to happen next,
what a difference a few hours can make.
In 2006, my wife and I found ourselves
exactly in this situation.
For the next few months, we took up
residence in the NICU,
where we had an up close, firsthand, daily
role in a battle for life and death.
Our NICU was a vast and versatile space,
where care and services were
conducted out in the open.
One morning, I remember doctors walking
through.
They were on morning rounds.
Using statistical language, they spoke
about the likelihood and probability
of the various medical and developmental
risks associated with premature birth.
I immediately projected the gravity of
what they were saying onto our child.
and our family.
And I was crushed. I felt inept.
Perhaps seeing how disturbed I was,
one of the doctors approached me and said,
“Don’t let anyone tell you that we know
what’s going to happen next,
because we don’t. The future
is not known to us.”
Before that moment, with our family’s
future hanging in the balance,
I thought this was something I understood,
but I was entirely wrong.
That was the beginning of my journey
towards understanding the
importance of uncertainty;
that statistical probability is a means of
understanding the past,
and need not be a predictor of the future.
In short, that ambiguity? It’s also a gift
of possibility.
As a social scientist and educator,
I’ve been charged with
working on complex problems
associated with our communities
and schools.
Economic status and opportunity gaps
biased towards race, gender,
or sexual orientation, community
safety and security,
access to healthcare, nutrition,
technology, and transportation.
These are just a few of the socially
embedded issues
that have profound implications on our
educational institution, and our children
I’ve found that many of us feel a deep
connection to learning from children.
As the father of four, I love learning
from them on a daily basis.
And as an educator?
It’s not an overstatement to say that my
students have taught me
far more than I’ve ever
imparted upon them.
And I’m speaking about profound lessons
about love, desire, hope, and resillience,
all of which seem to spring to life
in the face of adversity.
However, of all the lessons,
the one that has and continues to
irreversibly change me at my core
came form my child’s time in the NICU.
That lesson was to embrace ambiguity as
an actionable disposition and approach
to developing a more ideal future.
In 1948, sociologist Robert K. Mertons
wrote of “the self-fulfilling prophecy.”
This happens when we start with a
preconceived definition
of what we think should be,
and then we change our behavior
to make it happen.
Both positive and negative prophecies
can occur,
and even if they are not meant to be on
their own,
we have a way of willing
them into being.
This is how powerful Mertons believed
we were as humans,
and I believe he’s right.
To introduce us to how we collect data
from the world around us,
renowned business theorist Chris Argyris
proposed the concept of “the
ladder of inference.”
This is a belief system that suggests that
we self-select data
that tends to justify our
actions or inactions,
or what is commonly referred to now as
“confirmation bias.”
The danger here is that
if we do not learn to move off the steps
of our ladder of inference
and examine all of the data,
we are engaged in a process of simply
affirming that we are living
the best versions of ourselves
in society possible.
We live in an era of big data and
statistical analysis,
where we’ve come to embrace something
called a predictive metric.
This is a measurement of process
that seeks to predict a future
outcome or result.
This is a shift from using statistical
analysis to understand the past,
to the belief that statistical analysis
will predict the future.
There is a seductively powerful feeling
of security
that comes with believing we can
predict the future.
I know that I’ve been guilty of this.
However, with the shift of predictive
metrics,
I believe we may have weaponized
statistics.
I believe it is dangerous, limiting, and
misleading, as it deprives us
of thinking about the possibilities
that reside within ambiguity itself.
It transforms statistics into a toxic
fuel
that can rationalize or even
expand complex problems
by encouraging us to quickly move up the
steps of our ladders of inference,
to affirm that we think we
already know what should be.
It may force us to react and proceed
rather than to pause, interact,
and engage.
It creates an ideal environment for
self-fulfilling prophecies
made true by the acceptance
of a false set of assumptions.
In education, predictive metrics come in
a variety of forms.
A common one is known as
the norm-referenced test score.
In essence, this is a statement that says
that for someone with your label,
this is where you stand in
your trajectory.
But we also give all of our children
labels,
such as those associated with poverty,
race, gender, height,
intelligence, and so on.
And these labels are used as variables for
statistical analysis,
and have predictive metrics associated
with them:
standardized test scores and
school performance,
cognitive aptitude tests and college
preparedness,
high school graduation rates and
the school-to-prison pipeline,
behavioral risk scales and home
community environments,
and the list goes on and on.
However, I also have found this to be the
case
in other fields that I’ve collaborated in.
Just think of your own line of work.
Whatever your topic, field, subject, or
problem,
whatever social issue you’re taking on,
your approach and how you deal
with it, you’re probably labeling,
and with those labels, you may find your
own cultural norm predictive metric.
But my NICU experience, it gave me the
gift of understanding things differently.
You see my child had several diagnoses,
and with each diagnosis came a label,
and with that label came a predictive
metric for my child’s future.
Let me share with you, based upon our own
beliefs and understandings as a family,
more times than not, that predictive
metric has been wrong.
I believe we have to be careful about
those predictive metrics
as we’re framing our narratives, guiding
our actions,
and rationalizing our social and
cultural norms.
They’re directing our solutions
orientation,
for we are far less likely to feel
compelled to examine if we’re
even asking the right question,
when we think we already
know what will happen.
Yes, statistical probability tells us
what has happened,
but it’s devoid of how it happened,
the specific who, the context of where,
and the most important details of why
it happened.
That requires a separate exploration.
I, like so many other educators, consider
myself a champion of children’s rights.
In education we use phrases such as “all
students” or “each child,”
and discuss equity to achieve a more
equal, inclusive, and just system.
I believe that the vast majority of
educators truly believe in these concepts.
Trust me when I say that within
my given field of work,
there’s no shortage of good intentions and
discussions
about the needs of our students.
However, there continues to be a lack of
effective action on behalf of our children
and communities that are the most in
need.
We continue to seek out off-the-shelf
solutions born of statistical analysis,
focused with that promise of a better
future
that came with the association of a
predictive metric,
and then we wonder why we fail.
We fail because we do not recognize
that social innovations involve changing
individual lives and experiences,
while trying to implement solutions that
are born of generalized ability,
and are not designed for this purpose.
This is one of the reasons why I’ve argued
that rather than simply retooling
existing educational institutions,
we need to engage in innovations that may
blur
our very traditional concepts and
notions of what schools are:
a broader discussion of redesigning toward
human-centered social service centers,
where education and community
transformation
are understood to be one and the same.
Rather than large rigid bureaucracies
that may be expensive, impersonal
and dehumanizing,
we might need to seek out
contextually-bound solutions
that span individual disciplines.
After all, no one wants to be a statistic,
as we are all individuals.
So I wanted to take this opportunity
to invite you to embrace the ambiguity
that the future ought to represent.
Embracing ambiguity is an important part
of getting outside of ourselves,
stepping off of our ladders of inference,
and ceasing the process of a limited
self-fulfilling prophecy
that continues to serve too few too well,
leaving so many marginalized
and oppressed.
Embracing ambiguity, it invites us to
engage with our past
with a healthy reflective practice,
marvel at our future as one that
is filled with possibilities,
and live in this moment of one of solace,
where we should get down to the task
of designing a more ideal
and inclusive future.
I believe that in doing so, we can focus
on what philosopher Paulo Freire called
our first true vocation:
that of becoming more human.
And just think of what a gift that would
be for our children,
our professions, and our communities,
and even for the promise of what
should be a more just society.
We rarely grow up to be who our parents
thought we would be
as they held us as infants,
but for most parents this happens in
incremental steps
over the course of years or decades.
However, for many of the NICU families,
this change seems to happen
in an earth-shattering instant.
That is, until you are reminded that
we can never give up hope,
humans are resillient, and the future
is not known to us.
It’s time to embrace ambiguity,
and remind ourselves that anything
can lay just around the corner.