9: Possibility and Statistics in Education: Nurturing Individual Potential and Systemic Humanity

Consider Maya, a bright, inquisitive seventh-grader in a large urban school district. On standardized tests, Maya consistently scores in the “basic” range, a label that follows her from one grade to the next, subtly shaping teacher expectations and limiting her access to advanced coursework. Her official data profile paints a picture of a student struggling, one who requires remediation, one perhaps “at-risk” of not meeting future academic benchmarks. This narrative, as I’ve argued in No BS (Bad Stats) (Toldson, 2019), is all too common and damaging, often reflecting more about the limitations and biases of our assessment systems than about the actual potential of students like Maya (Howard, 2019).