What is the Purpose of School?

The national conversation about education has been focused on accountability, “college readiness,” and of course, test scores.  The condemnations of educators and schools is a loud chorus with different segments advocating some overhaul or another.  I work in schools, and have been in them most of my life.  I work at a really good school right now, and we’re on the firing line regularly. 

I find it fascinating that the public education system lacks a uniform mission. Some would say it’s about a citizens that think critically enough to sustain a free society—as the many of our founding fathers argued.  Others point to assimilation, vocation, leveling the playing field, and on and on.   Each of these justifications is worthy of debate.  Take a look around now and you’ll see these have all been lazily combined into the increasingly ambiguous term “college readiness.”  In complete defiance of all common sense and mountains of apparent data, this is boiled down even further to the almighty ACT/SAT scores.

It’s obvious why the political system, where the primary focus is on accountability—that is, bang for your buck—would look to these scores: they are readily available, seemingly objective, and if you’re not an educator, they it just seems logical: higher test scores must mean better schools, right? …..Right?.....

Wrong.  First and foremost, about 70% of all test score variation across schools is explained by socioeconomic status alone.  In other words, if you used the income level of their students, the school rankings we see would come out largely the same.  It’s not that schools don’t have an impact on students, and some are better than others.  It’s just that, using these test scores as the criteria not helpful. 

There’s more though.  Take a look at the tests and expectations to which schools are often held.  For example, ACT’s College Readiness Standards are deeply flawed when it comes to predicting how well students will do in college.  Surely, the higher the score, the better, but scoring high on ACT does not guarantee success at any level of school.  Probably even more important to this argument: students that fail to meet various college readiness bars based on these exams along regularly go on to get degrees.  Perseverance, ability to delay gratification, willingness to participate in the daily activities necessary to pass courses, family influence, perceived likelihood of success, perceived value of a degree…all of these things are important factors in college success that are not measured by these exams.  This list is far from exhaustive, and probably even lacks some of the most significant factors that affect college success.

This all brings us back to the question, what is the purpose of school?  If it’s not just about maximizing this one dimension of student performance, and it clearly is not, then we should reconsider our commitment to these exams.  The goal is learning; genuine, authentic learning.  It’s complex—really complex—to deal with and measure.  Educators generally are very good at this when it comes to individuals and small groups, but because learning itself is so complex and dependent on so may factors, it’s very difficult measure and grow the system from the top down.  This is akin to requiring all children speak their first words or take their first steps by the exact same date.

For this, there are no shortcuts, only the kind of individual, human intelligence that allows us to work others, empathize with their individual needs (whether or not they are in common with the group), and provide feedback.  Assessment performance should be supplemented with careful consideration of the factors that led to the performance, and this is true whether it’s the parent/teacher viewing a student’s marks or a prospective home-buyer evaluating a community’s school systems.

Primal Learning

Educating the young is a fundamental and critical task of any society.  I’d say “it’s more important than ever,” but it’s not. Education has always been, and will always be, the essential task of youth and adulthood, both as teachers and learners.  Though changes in society may make certain skills and knowledge “more important than ever,” taking a moment to step outside of the common use of the word education—going to school—reminds us that what we’re really talking about is the transmission of knowledge, skills, and characteristics needed to survive/thrive in society. 

In the US, education is often thought of as matriculating through the school.  This is an error in thinking.  School is the means, education the end.  Nevertheless, the discourse on education generally centers on schools: standardized test scores, school performance, teacher evaluation and preparation, and funding.  Our focus on these, and the core ideas of aggregation and centralization that they are expressions of, are precisely the reason why the house is on fire.  Education is not about these.

At the core, teaching and learning are not products of the school system, or the proprietary skill of trained educators.  They are instincts.  People of all ages teach and learn constantly.  The bulk of all learning that has ever occurred has taken place between individuals or small, tightly knit groups.  To make the point, let’s imagine a preindustrial, hunter-gatherer or agrarian society.  Children learned in small groups led by their elders, people with whom they had a personal connection.  The skills taught were directly and obviously relevant—hunting for dinner, for example. I’ll refer to this as primal learning.

Realizing this began when we decided to home school.  As an “educator,” I didn’t doubt that we could pull it off.  What caught my attention was how families were able to homeschool their kids with little education or training, and they were generally very successful.  Eventually it became obvious.  By instinct, going 1-1 with kids automatically triggers many of the characteristics of primal learning: accurate understanding of the student’s abilities, lots of feedback, checking for understanding, the right pace, interest, persistence, emotional commitment, and greater relevance of the content.

Teaching and learning: how it usually happens.

As much should be obvious, but the fact that it’s not shows how deeply ingrained the concept of learning as “school” has become.  When we teach our children to tie their shoes there are no PowerPoints, no standardized exams, no grades, no certified shoe-tying instructors…none of it. Yet, nearly everybody learns this skill.  This is valid teaching and learning, as valid as anything generated by the school system.

How do schools compare with primal learning?  Typical class sizes of 20-30, knowledge that isn't directly relevant or at least doesn't appear to be relevant in the eyes of student, teachers unattached to the kids except though school, coercion, classroom management concerns, difficulty providing extensive feedback consistently, the need to produce defensible report card grades, and all the rest.  The typical classroom teacher and their students are fish out of water in this environment. 

Preparations to test about 300 students at once to comply with mandated PARCC testing

US Education has become a race to complication and aggregation (or perhaps it should be aggravation).  It is a vicious circle wherein students are dehumanized by the inherent nature of the system, and when problems arise, we often double down on the very things causing them or address symptoms rather than root causes. For example, an exam score focus causes schools to implement a culture of test prep. Students are disengaged, resulting in more problems, lower scores, more prep.

Parents and teachers can best serve their students by always beginning with the individual, how he/she would have learned without a school system, and how pedagogy and technology can be used to replicate primal learning conditions. By doing this we’ll address the fundamental issues in learning, not merely symptoms.  

What Gets Measured Gets Done

What gets measured gets done

If the goal is to improve learning of students, for most teachers, the big project to tackle is classroom assessment policy.  

Classroom assessment practice, perhaps more than other components of teaching, is still shaped a great deal by what is pragmatic.  As I’ve mentioned before, the primary negative effects of the factory school system we imported from Europe come from class size combined with the need for consistent records.  Assessment is particularly impacted by this, and for much of the modern era has been reduced to merely grading assignments.  

As always, technology may be of some use in mitigating this, but also can make the situation worse if we’re not careful.  The advantage of tech in grading is to save the teacher’s time in doing final calculations: teachers enter grades as they go, and the system keeps a running total that, in more recent years, is live-updated or pretty close to it.  Parents can log in at a glance and see how their kids are doing.  Teachers are spared the work of calculating a student’s grade repeatedly and a lot of phone calls are probably saved as well.

Is this practice ideal? Has it primarily evolved due to its practicality or its educational value?  Has the advent of digital gradebooks shifted focus to the wrong place, the grade instead of learning? I believe so.

One of my sons attends his public high school, another attends a private elementary school.  Though his teachers use grading software, on a weekly basis we receive a folder with all of his work from the previous week. My wife or I go through the folder.  We look at each assignment and discuss the good and the bad.  Most importantly, if there’s something concerning, we see it right away and in detail.  For example, one week this spring we realized he didn’t understand improper fractions, so we worked on it and practiced--a quick adjustment.

With my older son, the conversation is different.  “You have a 2/10 on ‘Practice 5.  What’s going on?”  It’s hard to get it much more specific without the work, etc.  It’s not that one couldn’t get to the same place as in the example above, but it would be a lot harder.  More importantly though, grading in this way implies the most/only important thing is the final grade.  What gets measured gets done.  Kids will focus on the final grade.

Grades are the end result, the record of learning, but slowly they’ve crept into our minds purpose of learning, as opposed to mastery.  We’ve saved time with our current grading practices, but they’ve also shifted the mindset of students, teachers, and parent away from thoughtful qualitative discussions about learning to more mechanistic systems of reporting.  The cost of this is in actual student learning, not to mention the extent to which school starts to become about how to game various systems and become a more educated human being.

Whether a teacher or a parent, we have to think very carefully about what we choose to measure and tend. We need to focus on measuring and reporting learning--the formative, not summative marks.