Schools of Thought

I've been thinking a lot lately about just how much goes on in a school. Specifically, stemming from conversations with friends and family members who are educators and my own experiences shadowing teachers for a day in a local elementary school, the not novel but often forgotten aspect of non-academics. I'm not simply talking about the social network, but everything that gives a particular school its character -- major policies, how safe the halls are, how much of a community exists, how happy the students are, how happy the teachers are, etc. These are factors that never show through on even the best assessment, whether it be standardized or performance-based.

As Noel Epstein put it:

They not only provide before-school programs, breakfasts, lunches, after-school care, afternoon snacks and sometimes dinners (as well as summertime meals). They also instruct children about sex and, in many places, teach them to drive. They face growing pressure to take tots as early as age 3 in pre-kindergarten programs. They share responsibility for keeping children off drugs, making sure they don't carry weapons, instilling ethical behavior, curbing AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, battling alcohol abuse, preventing student suicides, discouraging cigarette smoking, tackling child obesity, heading off gang fights, providing a refuge for homeless children, ensuring that students are vaccinated, boarding some pupils, tending to toddlers of teenage mothers and otherwise acting in loco parentis in ways not anticipated a generation ago.

Though critics bemoan this trend, there's little chance of fundamentally altering it, for several reasons. Chief among them is that schools generally are reacting to what the public wants. Many people seem to think that adults' worries about schools center mainly on student achievement. That's wrong. While test scores certainly keep business, political, media and other elites up nights, they are not what most trouble the wider citizenry, as polls have long shown.

According to a Public Agenda analysis of opinion surveys, for example, Americans in 1999 said that the top three problems facing public schools were lack of parental involvement, drug use and undisciplined students. Academic standards came in seventh. Similarly, that year's annual Gallup education poll found far more concern about violence, gangs and other student behavior than about academics, which trailed in ninth place. By last year, when Gallup ranked the public's top five school concerns, academics were not cited at all (inadequate funding led the list), and this year's poll showed again that student achievement wasn't among the public's main worries.

Now, it's obvious to me that the first and foremost goal of schools should be the academic education of its students, since that's where the equality of opportunity comes from. But there's so much else that goes on in a school which directly affects the academics that it can't be profitably ignored. An educator I know was telling me about her high school, which serves a poor, high-minority population and actually does amazingly well under the circumstances. Still, she said, there are parts of the school which her female students will not enter alone. Similarly, another educator's elementary school recently found gang graffiti in the bathroom which led to a great deal of fear among the faculty and parents and caused new rules such as requiring whole-class bathroom breaks.

These auxillary factors don't often come up when judging a school's effectiveness, but as we move into the next generation of accountability (growth models, etc.) it seems to me that school profiles would provide a rich source of context. Some school report cards in California, for example, do report the number of recorded fights; but of course, the minute you tie consequences to number of recorded fights, the number of recorded fights is going to plummet. Eventually, the ideal would be massive data banks with every concievable metric about a school, thus allowing interventions to be better targetted and subtler problems to be found and addressed. Some of these, no doubt, are going to have to have more subjective pieces, but that's ok. So long as the data isn't high-stakes, there's no danger in subjectivity and there's little incentive for dishonesty.

Test scores are a fine first-look sorting mechanism. But how safe is the school? How involved are the parents? How is the principal judged by students, staff and the community? How much agency do the teachers feel they have? The students? A school is more than lessons and tests, and it would be worthwhile to actively acknowledge that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12, 2006 at 1:34 PM. |