Our hearts go out to all who are living though the loss and devastation associated with Hurricane Sandy.  The impact is both hard to imagine, and even harder to fully calculate.  In some cases children and their families will be forever changed as a result of the events that took place this week.  This is a stark reminder of how fragile life is, but also how we come together in times of great need.  Suddenly our priorities shift, and we realize what’s really important.

Creating an equivalent, clear, and easily understood metrics of how the far reaching impact from the storm may be calculated from one family to another, or one community to another will certainly test those who aspire to neatly fit pieces together in a puzzle designed to measure all things educational through the lens of test score driven accountability.  We must look beyond the narrow metrics of value added measurement for a deeper, long-term understanding of how schools should play their part in a hopeful future born out of an effective system of education.  From another perspective, there will be many lessons learned from this catastrophic event, not least of which should be how our humanity depends upon a spirit of cooperation and forethought to be better prepared for any similar occurrences in the future.

Debates will ensue about how best to retool our infrastructure, rebuild shattered communities, and protect against nature’s fury when the next major storm reaches our shores.  Let us also look to re-examine how we aim to maintain the right focus for student and teacher learning.  Undue pressure from a misguided set of criterion designed to match test scores and teacher performance should give way to a more healthy focus on civility, a robust engagement through a well-rounded curriculum, and maintaining the integrity of our ability to shape the agenda at a local level.

Those who promote a psychometric solution to hold the system accountable will miss the mark when we see the picture from 10,000 feet above.  Looking down as we have from a few hundred feet through the eyes of those who tour via helicopter the devastation wrought by this storm, we can’t help but wonder about how close some of us came to being in the throws of a life turned upside down.  At a ground level view we can quickly come to the conclusion that life is precious, communities are precious, and the time we spend with children is precious.  It is not something that should be driven towards a score that forms the basis of our success or failure.

The scenes from this week take our breath away.  In the days and weeks ahead our focus should be to help one another.  Our goals in schoolhouses most affected should be to bring a sense of normalcy, not to bring on more on test prep to make up for lost seat time missed from the storm.  Times like these demand a greater focus on the arts to puzzle through the experiences both near and far—music to heal the soul, poetry to touch our hearts, and vivid imagery cast by the hands of students of all ages to remember this time and place along the continuum of life’s events.

The innovative minds that will produce the scientific and engineering solutions to the challenges in energy, climate, and systems analysis for towns and cities throughout the land will need as much creative white space as possible to collaborate and not race against one another as individual competitors.   This will no doubt be a watershed moment when public and private interests and people of all persuasions will have had the opportunity to take a fresh look at how we do things and how things get done.  I hope the current trajectory championed by the psychometricians in the way that we assess our progress in schools and classrooms does not escape a different kind of reality check that repositions our priorities regarding how we educate our children.