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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.