Is ‘galvanic skin response’ a way to measure how much kids learn?

By David McElroy · June 15, 2012

Why has the modern educational establishment become so obsessed with standardized testing and uniformity of measurement? When did so many people start believing that you could plot learning as numbers and graphs — and still teach children what they need to know?

That’s what I kept thinking as I read about a $1.1 million project to look into designing “galvanic skin response” bracelets for students to wear that would measure their degree of engagement with what they were listening to. The goal is to find out whether physiological feedback from these sensors could tell teachers whether students are learning or not.

If you’re not familiar with the phrase “galvanic skin response,” it’s just the name for the process of measuring how electricity flows through the skin depending on changes in moisture. It’s the principle upon which so-called lie detectors work. (Those things are bogus, but that’s another story entirely.)

Is this really the way some people believe we should decide whether kids are learning? Are we going to keep going until we strap a sensor helmet on kids every morning so we can monitor their thoughts for the full day?

Part of the problem is that some people want to turn teaching into a science. They want to make everything quantitative, so they can make graphs with numbers that allow them to compare teachers and schools and cities. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to evaluate teachers and schools, but the obsession with testing and measurement is the wrong way to go about it.

If you hang around teachers long, it doesn’t take too long to figure out which are the good ones and which are the bad ones (and which are mediocre). It was traditionally a principal’s job to know which teachers are worth having on staff and which should be moved out the door. If the principal is competent, he or she can evaluate teachers and make the changes that are necessary. So why do we end up with various ridiculous schemes to tell us which teachers are useful and which aren’t?

It’s because of the twin horrors of tenure and lawsuits. In most states, if a teacher is in a school system for a certain amount of time — generally three years — he or she has tenure, which means it’s almost impossible to fire that teacher. Why do we have tenure? It’s supposed to protect teachers from political pressure since schools are run by the state. At least, that’s what we’re told.

It’s getting harder and harder to fire bad government employees — thanks in part to unions — but the clerks down at your City Hall or county government don’t have tenure. If they’re not doing their jobs, they can be fired. If a bad teacher makes it three years and gains tenure, you’re stuck with him. Why are teachers so special that they get what amounts to lifetime employment in government-run schools?

We really need to get rid of government-operated schools and let the market supply education chosen by parents. But since we’re currently stuck with government schools, we need to at least get rid of tenure and let principals go back to being held accountable for how schools perform. If a school is lousy today, the principal can honestly say his or her hands were tied. If there’s no tenure — and the principal has the power — that person should be held accountable for the performance of the school he or she runs.

If you really think that galvanic skin response is a good measure of how well students are learning, you don’t know teachers very well. The good teachers I know can tell me what their kids are learning and what they’re not learning — and how to modify what they’re doing to reach them. There’s no test that can measure the things that really happen in a teacher’s head that tell him or her how to do what’s right for each student. What’s more, the very best teachers care deeply about their students — and that’s something that the educational establishment’s tests can’t measure, either.

This particular bracelet is allegedly supposed to be a tool to help measure student engagement. I guarantee that whatever their tests show, a good teacher already knows whether that student is engaged in learning. Forget about the fancy galvanic skin response measurements. They really don’t matter.

Let teachers do their jobs. Let principals do their jobs in hiring and retaining the right teachers. Then let’s hold those principals (and superintendents) responsible for performance. If they can’t do the job, replace them with people who can. It works in every other business. Why shouldn’t it work in education?

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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