Provocations Magazine Volume II: "Beyond the Two-Dimensional Student: Humanizing Data in Education"
In a world increasingly governed by metrics, algorithms, and rankings, our children have become data points. Test scores. Percentiles. Growth targets. Performance indicators. We’ve been sold a lie that reducing human beings to numbers is somehow neutral, objective, scientific- when in reality, it’s profoundly dehumanizing.
This is the second edition of Provocations, and if you’re new here, welcome to a space that refuses to tinker at the edges of educational reform. We’re not interested in slight modifications or incremental improvements to a fundamentally broken system. We’re here to provoke radical disruption- the kind that begins by questioning what we’ve been told is inevitable.
This issue tackles one of education’s most unquestioned pillars: data. Not because data itself is evil, but because we’ve allowed it to replace an authentic understanding of children. We’ve let testing companies and policymakers convince us that a child’s growth, learning, and very worth can be synthesized into a letter or number, and even worse, that their only value is in the ranking, sorting, and comparing of those numbers.
This issue brings authors from around the world, in K-12 and Higher Education, with a special spotlight on our partners, Y Montessori and AMI/USA!
The eight pieces in this volume will challenge everything you thought you knew about assessment, measurement, and what it means to truly see a child.
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opens our exploration with “Demonizing Data: When Numbers Perpetuate The Narrative,” asking us to sit with an uncomfortable truth: numbers don’t inherently tell the truth. Drawing on Montessori’s framework of psychic development- moral education, mathematics, and language- Kelly reminds us that we can choose how to use these symbol systems. The question isn’t whether we have data, but whether the data we collect is moral. When was the last time you questioned what story your data is telling and who is telling it? Kelly challenges us to reconsider the very questions we’re asking: not “How are students performing?” but “What are students learning?” Not “Are students succeeding?” but “What does success actually mean?”In “Our Lives Are More Than Scores: The Urgent Need For Humanizing Data in Education,” I draw a direct line between how we measure students and how we prepare them for citizenship. When students spend their entire educational lives under authoritarian governance, where their value is determined by external evaluation, where their academic gain means someone else’s loss, where there is only one right answer dispensed by authority, we socialize them to accept authoritarianism in society. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s the logical conclusion of a system built on ranking, sorting, and reducing humans to scores. I argue that our crippling reliance on big data in education is how we raise young people to look outward to authority rather than inward to themselves for value. In a world where democratic governance is collapsing, this transformation cannot wait another decade. It must be radically disrupted now.
Inge Rozendal-Vesters takes us into higher education with “The Only Metric That Matters Is Life,” arguing that when our planet is in crisis, we cannot continue measuring graduates’ salaries or positions in global rankings. Instead, imagine if we assessed architecture programs on how their designs restore ecosystems. If economics departments replaced GDP-based thinking with indicators of well-being and biodiversity health. If business courses were graded on regenerative models that repair environmental damage. Inge confronts us with difficult questions: Can we fail students who choose not to serve the planet? Who decides what “service” looks like? Her vision of “data with a pulse” places regeneration at the core of education, making visible students’ evolving relationship with complexity, responsibility, and the living systems we all depend on.
Caroline Robbins offers a provocative critique of one of Montessori education’s most sacred concepts in “De-Normalizing ‘Normalization.’” When we observe classrooms for signs of “normalization,” what assumptions are we bringing? Caroline argues that the ideal of the “normalized” child often reflects a narrow, Eurocentric, and gendered view of acceptable behavior. Concentration might look like boisterous engagement rather than quiet, seated, solitary work. It might look like observation and silence until a child feels comfortable. “Let’s de-normalize normalization,” Caroline urges. “If anything, let’s normalize that different identities and ways of being are welcome in Montessori spaces.”
Christine Lowry brings us back to our roots with “The Original Paradigm Breaker: Dr. Maria Montessori.” In our challenging times, perhaps we can find guidance from Montessori’s life as an advocate, a scientist, and an educator who devoted her life to studying the child. She was a pioneer in questioning the status quo of education in her times. Christine asks: How might we follow in her footsteps as we reflect and renew our thinking and practice as Montessori educators today? What lessons does Montessori’s lifetime of service offer for serving today’s students? Her life and times can be an opportunity for our own reflection as Montessori educators for today’s learners.
Dr. Paul Epstein traces a devastating history in “They’ve Given You a Number and Taken Away Your Name.” Paul reveals how education’s obsession with data during the Industrial Revolution drove schools to imitate factory logic, implementing standardized testing and statistical methods like IQ tests to classify and rank students as if they were products. Maria Montessori embodied this tension—she worshipped children’s abilities yet required teachers to measure them. Yet when she discovered that concentration defies measurement, she asked teachers to embody the spirit of both scientists and saints. Paul shows us that we must not replace children’s names with numbers- we must be committed to understanding them holistically. Children are not things, and data cannot replace being.
Dr. Sam Ballington demonstrates what’s possible when we center relationships in “Data With a Pulse: Humanising Assessment in Early Childhood.” Drawing on play-based pedagogy, narrative assessment, and parent and teacher voice, Sam proposes a model where data gathered in education is dynamic—reflective of children’s lived experiences, not merely statistics that reject equity and ignore the whole child. Her work seeks change at a systemic level, showing that an alternative approach is possible: viewing assessment data as a living record of relationships, cultures, and stories. When assessment supports relationships and justice, data gains rhythm. It breathes. It pulses with life.
Finally, Sifaan Zavahir asks a question so simple it’s radical: “Where else, other than in Education, do we use Grades?” His answer in “Grading is Degrading” cuts to the bone: The only other time we use grades is for commodities; things like tea, oil, or steel. Grading students commodifies them. But while tea, oil, and steel don’t have feelings, people do. Sifaan reveals that grading students is a practice from an era where people were the product of education—where schools produced soldiers, factory workers, and citizens. Despite a window where education was recognized as a human right and students were rights-holders, we’re being driven back to the student-as-product worldview by a neoliberal paradigm that converts human beings into human resources. And what do we do with resources? We exploit them for profit.
These eight pieces won’t give you comfort. They won’t offer you five easy steps to humanize your classroom data. What they will do is provoke you to see beyond “that’s how we’ve always done things” and recognize that the system we question the least—the ranking, sorting, comparing, and filing that seems so commonplace—is exactly what needs radical disruption.
This work cannot wait another year, another decade, another generation. The prevalence of “big data” in education isn’t inevitable. There’s big money that wants it to continue, and that’s all the more reason it must be stopped.
We hope these provocations move you to make change in your locus of control, whether that’s in your classroom, your school, or your district. Because our lives are more than scores. Our children are more than data points. And the only metric that truly matters is life itself.
Provocations is published quarterly, and subscribers receive access to this issue and our complete archive. Each edition brings together voices you won’t find anywhere else—educators, researchers, and advocates who are pushing the envelope, not bending to dogma, tradition, or “common sense.”
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