Aunt Jenny and the Pig: An Outsider's View of Guidance Counseling In An Age of Testing By Kenneth Kitts, Ph.D. Francis Marion University (About Author) This article originally appeared in the Winter 2005 edition of The Carolina Counselor, the official publication of the North Carolina Counseling Association. Reprinted with permission.

Recently I had the privilege of serving as the keynote speaker at a week long series of guidance conferences sponsored by the Carolinas Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (CACRAO). My audience was composed mainly of guidance counselors from South Carolina. Along with a handful of CACRAO officials, I made five stops across the Palmetto State to give college representatives and counselors an opportunity to meet and greet, to exchange ideas, and to hear the latest news regarding developments in college admissions.

It was a great experience. I met some extraordinarily fine people and came away with a renewed appreciation for the level of talent and expertise that exists in both secondary and higher education. And having spoken with guidance counselors from the coast to the mountains, I can attest that South Carolina students are in good hands.

Now let me be clear on an important point: I am not a guidance counselor now, nor have I ever been a member of the profession. Instead, I'm a political science professor who, after twelve years plugging away in the classroom, moved into the administrative ranks. In my current position as Associate Provost at Francis Marion University, I dabble in a wide range of programmatic and student issues. As to why I was chosen to keynote at CACRAO, you'd have to ask the conference organizers. I suspect that it had something to do with my public speaking experience plus my interest in the politics of education. My willingness to spend many hours behind the wheel of my 1996 Honda Civic didn't hurt either. As with any endeavor in life, finding someone to say “yes” is half the battle.

I titled my speech “Aunt Jenny and the Pig” in a shameless attempt to grab the audience's attention. Rather than trying to summarize the address, I think it fairer to simply present it (or at least the main body of it) as delivered and let the reader absorb it without any preamble. Here goes:

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Today we focus on you and your role as guidance counselors. I've always had a general understanding of what guidance counseling is about, but when I was asked to address this conference I thought it wise to seek more specific insight into your world. As luck would have it I have a family relation who has over a decade's worth of experience in the trenches as a guidance counselor. In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that Aunt Jenny works in North, not South, Carolina, but my guess is that the dynamics and pressures that shape her job are very similar to those you confront.

Aunt Jenny kindly agreed to indulge my desire for the inside scoop on her profession, so we sat down for a little Q and A. It was a very enlightening experience, and I thought you might enjoy hearing her responses to some of my questions. For example:

Question: What is the biggest misperception that outsiders have about your job?
Answer: That because we don't teach, we have all this extra time on our hands to take on additional duties.

Question: What is your typical day like?
Answer: There are no typical days. Seriously, I come into work with an idea of what I need to get done, but at 9 a.m. a student, parent, or administrator walks through my door and, boom, my day is suddenly headed in a very different direction.

Question: Would you define your job as primarily educational in nature or administrative in nature?
Answer: Hmmm. Hmmm. Good question. I'll have to get back to you on that one.

Question: Is there a close correlation between what you were trained to do in graduate school and what you are asked to do in the course of your job?
Answer: [Laughter] My education emphasized counseling and student development. That's where my heart is and that's why I went into this line of work. Unfortunately, though, I get asked to perform so many administrative, even clerical, tasks that I just don't have the time I would like to work with individual students.

Question: What is the most important skill you possess?
Answer: The ability to count. I'm a quick counter, and that's a great thing. I can count pencils, bubble sheets, and test booklets more quickly and with more accuracy than anyone I know.

Question: What development or trend has most affected your profession? Answer: The emphasis on testing. It's just incredible. It drives the curriculum, dominates our discussions, and consumes a huge chunk of my time. My title might read Guidance Counselor, but in reality I've become a glorified test coordinator and administrator.

Well, what do you think? Did Aunt Jenny get it right? If you'll permit me a couple of minutes, I'd like to address that last point. The emphasis on accountability and evaluation is also reshaping higher education, so Aunt Jenny's comments on the impact of testing caught my attention.

At the college level, we evaluate everything - our institutions, our programs, our facilities, and our people. In fact, you don't know it but I stand before you today as a perfect faculty member and a perfect administrator. At least I should be. For you see, I am evaluated on more levels than I can count. I am evaluated by my students via course evaluations; by my advisees via dictate of the faculty handbook; by my boss via the annual evaluation form; by my faculty colleagues at Francis Marion via the Promotion and Tenure Committee; and by political scientists across the U.S. via peer review of my research. I figure anyone who survives that gauntlet must be nearing perfection.

The emphasis we place on testing and assessment is, at best, curious, and at worst, just plain nuts.

Well, ok, I'm being facetious, but there is a point here. And it is that, from my perspective as a mid level administrator in the vast machinery of American education, the emphasis we place on testing and assessment is, at best, curious, and at worst, just plain nuts.

But you have to be careful how and when you say that. Say it outside an educational setting and the business and political folks will dismiss you as being “change averse” or of “resisting accountability” - with the corollary suspicion that you are afraid of what an objective evaluation might reveal about your school, your program, or your individual performance.

Well, I don't know about you, but I know how hard I work and how hard my colleagues at Francis Marion work. Data has its place. I know that. I am, after all, a political scientist by training. But I don't need mean, median, mode and standard deviation to show me the tangible difference we make in the lives of our students.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're all in the people business. In fifteen years of college teaching I've never celebrated when Mean told me she was accepted to law school, I've never worked to keep Median in school after the death of a parent, and I've never watched with pride as Mode made the transition from shy high school student to confident, successful college graduate.

Yet somewhere along the way we became obsessed with the notion that everything must be categorized, quantified, and evaluated. Testing now drives curricular decisions and structures the political debate over education policy. The cynics used to say that testing has become a cottage industry. That's not true anymore. It's much larger than that. The testing industry is now an expansive complex populated by test makers, number crunchers and consultants. Testing has become an end in itself rather than a means to an end.

I'll take my critique a step further and submit to you that sometimes the most important outcomes are those that are the hardest to measure. Some may even be impossible to measure. I'm reminded of the experiment where Mike Royko, the late Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, attempted to evaluate Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address using grammar check software. The results were not encouraging. As writing goes, Honest Abe's beautiful prose received low marks. The evaluative software did not appreciate Lincoln's ability to inspire, his ability to challenge, his ability to appeal to our better angels through the effective use of language.

As I reflected on Royko's experiment, I began to wonder about the type of student our educational system is producing. Are we turning out real people who, like Lincoln, understand the human condition and understand that knowledge is useless unless it's harnessed for the larger good, or are we graduating faceless test takers distinguished solely by their ability to “make the score” as determined by the Standards, the PACT test, the HSAP, or the SAT?

If any of this rings true to you, take heart. The first step to correcting any problem is awareness, and my sense is that a growing number of people in education are getting fed up with the numbers and testing game. Recently a college president at one of our state schools met with members of a visiting accrediting team who demanded to see more numbers, more data, and more empirical evidence of constant evaluation in the quest for continuous improvement. It must have come as a shock when he failed to respond with the normal apologies and assurances of full cooperation. Instead, he offered this simple observation: “Weighing the pig doesn't improve it.”

As I look out over the landscape of American education, both secondary and higher, I see a lot of pig weighing going on, and it's going on at the expense of a real discussion of whether or not any of these tests are making a difference in the lives of our students.

And that brings us back to Aunt Jenny, and to you. My wish is that others might join this college president in saying yes, we welcome accountability, and yes, we recognize that testing has a place in education. But no, we will not surrender to the Cult of Testing that has so distorted our efforts. And no, we will not waste the time of talented professionals like you by asking you to weigh the pig again and again and again.

In short, I want Aunt Jenny to reconnect with what she was trained to do. I want her to be able to define herself once again as a guidance counselor and not as a testing clerk.

That's my two cents worth on Aunt Jenny and the pig. It's time for me to bid you farewell so I can return to my campus and you can get on with the important business of CACRAO. I hope you found something of interest in my remarks. If not, don't worry, for I'm sure you'll have the opportunity to evaluate this conference and my presentation. Call it one last opportunity to weigh the pig.


So there you have it. With only small modifications along the way, these are the remarks that I used in my quest to engage and entertain South Carolina's corps of guidance counselors.

At each stop my comments were greeted with warmth, laughter, and enthusiasm, leading me to the conclusion that something in the content had hit close to home. For that, I take little credit. In preparing my address, I simply had enough good sense to realize (1) how little I knew about the subject; and (2) that I needed a seasoned veteran to help me understand the profession. If anyone's star shines a bit more brightly after these guidance conferences, it is Aunt Jenny's, not mine.

The one part of the talk that drew the strongest reaction from the audience was when I relayed the question to Aunt Jenny: “Is there a close correlation between what you were trained to do in graduate school and what you are asked to do in the course of your job?” Before I could answer - indeed, before I could even finish the question - the guidance counselors were already laughing, shaking their heads, applauding, and otherwise making it clear that their collective answer to the question was an emphatic NO. This phenomenon repeated itself without fail at each of the five stops on our road show.

As I reflect on the many positive experiences of the week, I cannot help feeling a touch of sadness that my account of Aunt Jenny and the Pig resonated so deeply, for in reality it's a cautionary tale about occupational disenchantment. I offered up a cynical snapshot of guidance counseling in The Age of Testing, and my audience members said, in essence, “Aunt Jenny's right and we can relate to the diversions, indignities, and frustrations she describes.”

I find that troubling. What you do is far too important to have it shunted aside in the national hysteria over testing. I'm not sure that I'll ever have another opportunity to address such a large, broadly representative group of guidance counselors. But if I do, I hope next time I encounter an audience less enamored of Aunt Jenny and the Pig.


This article originally appeared in the Winter 2005 edition of The Carolina Counselor, the official publication of the North Carolina Counseling Association. Reprinted with permission.

The author is Associate Provost and Professor of Political Science at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC. Please direct comments to .