How can educators make students achieve at a high level without lowering their standards? Actually, that first question begs a series of question: What is our measure of success? What steps do we take to define success? To initiate it? To chart it? To prove it?
These are not rhetorical questions; they all have concrete answers. Unfortunately, the answers vary depending on who answers. There is absolutely no consensus on how education should work or even what it should look like. School districts, administrators, teachers, students, and parents all have differing versions of what it means to be educated. How can we possibly fix a system wherein there is no concrete version of student achievement and/or teacher accountability? And to what extent are administrators responsible for the achievement of both staff and students? What responsibility do parents shoulder in the education of their offspring?
Here’s the hypothetical situation: An observer walks into a classroom and sees a class of 30 students. Of those 30 students, 20 are busily writing something in their notebooks. 5 of them are chatting with each other. 1 is sleeping. 1 is walking around the room intermittently speaking to other students. 1 is on the computer looking at videos. 2 are listening to headphones and staring at the wall. The teacher is sitting at the front of the room, also writing in his or her notebook.
The general conclusion might be that 20 students are on task, which would mean a roughly 70% achievement rate. But common sense tells us that the math here is too easy. It’s impossible to measure achievement based on observation only, especially the brief, intermittent observation afforded by administrators. Of those 20 students busily writing, three quarters of them might be writing notes to their friends. There is no way to tell without interrupting them and asking. The five who are chatting might be making sense of the assignment, and thus more on task than any of those writing silently. The student who is wandering around might suffer from attention deficit and need to occasionally get up and move around in order to be productive at all. Those with headphones might be trying to drown out the “school room” noise in order to focus their thoughts in for writing. No observer would ever know.
Here’s another hypothetical situation: Students are assigned a project in class, due in one week. Students are then given four in-class work days to put together the materials necessary. Each day the teacher works his or her way around the room, helping students as needed. When the day comes to check the work, 10 of the 30 students have nothing to turn in. Another 10 of the 30 students have roughly half of the work done. The other third of the students are right on task, work done, ready to be checked.
So what’s the story? Perhaps the teacher hasn’t given students enough time to do the assignment. Maybe 30 students are simply too many for the teacher to tend to one-on-one to help them meet the expectations. Maybe the expectations are too high. Or maybe the 10 kids who did the assignment and turned it in on time were the ones who listened, worked hard, used the tools at their disposal in the classroom, and met the expectations. If the last is correct, should the teacher work at the pace of the slowest kids or the fastest? If students consciously waste time and don’t achieve at capacity, should the teacher and the other students be made to stop and wait for them to catch up?
There is no correct answer. There is an answer, depending on who you are and what your agenda is, but there is no one, correct answer. It’s all relative. Welcome to the dilemma of education.
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One of the biggest conundrums is accountability. Schools change to 10-point scales so fewer students fail; they eliminate Ds so students don’t simply creep by; they allow students to retake tests until they pass; they eliminate homework so work left undone doesn’t pull down the percentage grade; they don’t factor in work that was either not turned in or not done at proficiency level.
Where does it stop? When do students become responsible for learning?
Do we honestly think that students don’t know that they can manipulate the system to their advantage? To be sure, there are students who need extra help and who benefit from accommodations, but the general population of students is no less intelligent than they were 100 years ago. If anything, they are more savvy with information and technology than ever before, so why are we treating them as though they are illiterate and incapacitated? There is a word for this in addiction/recovery programs: enabler. America needs to face the fact that we are slowly moving toward a culture where it is the school’s job to learn for the student, not the student’s job to learn. Yes, the school needs to provide a solid, informed, balanced, researched curriculum. And yes, the student needs to engage and be responsible for learning the information. At the rate we are going, however, the changes in education will do nothing more than lower the bar of expectation and make teachers more adept at manipulating numbers in order to satisfy a public yearning for high test scores, even if the trade-off is less-educated and less-well-rounded students. Just as long as the newspapers can publish some impressive-looking numbers, even if those numbers reflect absolutely nothing.
More and more, the debate about education comes down to what sounds good and appeases the majority. It’s utilitarian both in the media and in the home; as long as most people are happy, that’s all that matters. Unfortunately, most people are happy with window dressing. They care only to the point that they might have to do something about the problem, then the responsibility rests solely on the shoulders of classroom teachers, whom parents have decided to entrust the entirety of their children’s knowledge. It’s a scary thought, really, that parents are so willing to hand over the reigns of their children’s minds to absolute strangers. We should all be paying more attention to what and how, where and when our children learn things. We should make sure that they question ideologies, including the ones we try to instill in them, because critical thinking is the real measure of education, not arbitrary test scores.
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