Wandering the Internet a couple weeks back, I ran across an article by which raises the interesting question of how we should measure a “good” education.
“Schools with high test scores,” Wheelan writes, “may or may not be
doing a great job; perhaps their students are capable of much more. And
conversely, some schools with middling or poor test scores may be doing a
terrific job educating students who would otherwise be failing
abjectly.
“Obviously,” Wheelan continues, “we can spot the outliers — the
school in the middle of Detroit that manages to send 95 percent of its
students to college, say. If we give researchers enough time and enough
data, they can try to answer the school-quality question using
statistical techniques that take account of what kind of students are
walking through the front door.
“But even then the results are often equivocal. The bottom line is
that it’s hard to evaluate school quality, which is why it’s even harder
to make schools better.”
What Wheelan is getting at is that not all entering students are
equal. Some have more potential than others, and a school district that
has a preponderance of such students because of parental occupations or
economic influences may score better than another school that has fewer
students with parents who have college and advanced degrees.
For the most part education breeds education, and that’s a good
thing, but how do we define a “good” education given the vast disparity
in student backgrounds and parental and community resources.
Wheelan poses the problem but then leaves his readers hanging. “We’re
trying to encourage and replicate success,” he writes, “without being
able to tell with any degree of certainty which schools are succeeding.
Imagine a pharmaceutical company trying to evaluate new cancer
treatments without being able to determine which patients are getting
better.
“So,” Wheelan concludes, “that’s the first big education challenge —
developing a more sophisticated way to identify ‘good schools.’ Only
then will we be able to create more of them.”
Many would argue that
No Child Left Behind is doing what
Wheelan wants by forcing schools to get better and better, where
“better” is defined by performance on standardized tests. When I was a
manager for GE, I believed in Jack Welch’s mantra that what we measured
got better, but now I’m beginning to doubt that it’s a good idea for
either students or teachers.
Think about your own education. Would it have been improved if you
had taken standardized tests that determined whether you and your
teachers were passing or failing? If you struggled with your education,
was it your teachers’ fault?
In my case my teachers were always ready to help, but I wasn’t
necessarily listening. My metamorphosis happened in English class when I
was a junior in high school. Because I finally decided that education
was important, everything changed.
And change, it seems, is the answer to Wheelan’s query: We define a
good education based on the change in the student’s skills and
understanding, not on the student’s performance on standardized tests.
