A ritual and the toxic effects of ranking

Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable. —W. Edwards Deming, quoted in Roger Senge, The Fifth Discipline, 2006

The soul is lost within us, drowned out by the noise of the world, the loud blaring of our own insecurities and fears, as we go about the business of living. We rush to build false security for ourselves: positions, titles, made-up identities that will keep us from the terror. All of these belong to the kingdom of lies. Insofar as they possess us, we too are of that kingdom. When they are stripped away—or so we fear—we will no longer know who we are, why we are living, or how to go forward from day to day. —Arthur Green, Seek My Face, 2003

My prep school had a bizarre end-of-term ritual. The teacher would draw a grid on the blackboard, and enter the exam results for each student in each subject. Then, as a class, we summed the scores and produced an overall ranking of every student in the class.

It’s hard to imagine any school doing such a thing today. But we fail to see how deeply ingrained the entire enterprise of ratings, grades and rankings is in our culture, and the many negative consequences that flow from it.

In my resilience interviews, I heard again and again about the humiliation and loss of confidence from getting imperfect grades. For today's students, your GPA determines your worth as a human being, so grades (along with other quantitative metrics) come to replace truer measures of progress. Growing intellectually and emotionally, encountering new ideas, building skills and forging new relationships, finding creative expression—all the elements of developing a life of meaning are cast aside by a mad rush to compete on a long checklist of tasks that, when completed, bring only relief and never real fulfillment.

If we wonder why our students have such warped priorities, we only have to look to ourselves, and the messages we send. As faculty and administrators, we trumpet our rankings in US News and World Report, making us complicit in the promulgation of a toxic world view. You might have thought that academics would pay more attention to the ways in which such rankings can be rigged and totally misleading, and to their wider repercussions, which include increasing the cost of education and favoring wealthier students. But of course we’re human, and rankings have a potent psychological allure—especially when you’re at the top.

Grades don’t even lead to better educational outcomes: one major study found that adding a grade to informal feedback actually reduces student learning. Even offering prizes for performance may do more harm than good; management gurus realized long ago that incentive plans tend to backfire, and rewarding success is no different in principle from punishing failure.

We convince ourselves that no true knowledge comes without data. So we define metrics and procedures to collect them, and in no time at all, our world is being shaped not by lofty goals and inspired visions but by a pile of spreadsheets. Our organizations become layered cakes of data collection activities, with each layer devoting much of its energy to generating the data that the layer above it requires to justify, in turn, its own existence. Even in kindergarten, teachers report that children are feeling stressed and unhappy as their reading goals come not from their own motivation and excitement to learn but from inflexible targets imposed from above.

I’m not sure how we’ll get ourselves out of this mess. It will require a major cultural shift, starting with each of us: how we talk about success and failure amongst ourselves; how we structure our institutions, encourage our team members and report to our leaders; and whether we can tame the growth of data to serve rather than undermine our values.