Data driven teaching rocks my very small world

I have noticed in my role as a music teacher that there has been a recent swing away from open ended, student driven learning to data driven, closed, assessment and results driven learning. When I started teaching I was so excited to learn that things had moved from the draconian days when I was a child, at the same time I was warned that everything in teaching goes in cycles and I have now been a part of the institution to see the first turn.
Once again things such as task completion and surprise, surprise “Spelling” assessment have taken over in the scale of importance from concepts such as deeper level thinking and the encouragement of “ideas”.
I love data collection because it shows us whatever it is we want it to show us and justify whatever it is we want to justify, including bad teaching and wow does it make us feel so much better about ourselves to be able to carry around reams of useless paper with various results on them.
We feel better about our sad selves because of the amount of work it took to get all those results.
Sad Sad Sad small world