08: Are Schools Designed for Students?
Takeaways from what we know, what we don't know, and what's going out the window
I belong to the camp of education practitioners who believe that teaching is less of a noble pursuit than it is a social science. I picked this bias up from one of my grad school professors who argued that reducing teaching to a form of charity invalidates the professionalism it demands, and even perpetuates the idea that teachers are dispensable. On top of that, without any scrutiny over how schools measure their success, we end up affording it too big of a room for error that we wouldn’t normally allow in, say, hospitals.
Some would say that isn’t true—that we do have global and national metrics from standardized testing. But these statistics have long been showing the disparity between school districts that they no longer serve any accountability purpose. And with school re-openings at the forefront of pandemic recovery news, there are a lot of forecasts left and right about where we’re heading.
A lot of them paint a dire picture, mostly for students who have always been underserved by the system. Others shed light on the chaos districts are experiencing in an attempt to keep their teachers safe and employed during this crisis. Either way, public schools are expected to be operational this fall, albeit without any of its systemic issues resolved. Wealthy schools are able to sidestep the worst of the pandemic’s impact on learning, while the rest of us are barely able to deliver remote learning properly.
Once again, it’s like one giant experiment: we will return knowing that we still allow school districts serving mostly Black and brown children to receive $23 billion less in funding annually than whiter districts. Then, we will assess them on nationwide proficiency tests expecting results to change. As the year starts, we’re going to obsess over baseline assessments and fixate over the summer slide in high-poverty schools, even though we’ve always known about these learning gaps prior to COVID-19. From a purely methodological standpoint, we just don’t seem to be measuring the right things.
Achievement vs. Opportunity Gap?
Over the years, I made the conscious decision to move away from the narrative of the achievement gap. In my mind, to be outcomes-oriented when talking about schooling is to impose college-bound standards that require students to consistently perform well in tests. It is an acceptance of the current power structures that make it hard for the most marginalized students to succeed. I shifted my focus (and language) to opportunity gaps instead, which recognizes that a plethora of opportunities are made easily available for some and not for others—thereby resulting in further inequalities. The opportunity gap can include, but isn’t limited to access to a college education. It’s about leveling the field for choice.
If we de-prioritized test scores as a way of assessing nationwide school performance, we would radically change how our schools operated. Instead,
We can count and compare the nationwide staff-student ratio as a metric for access to individualized attention; or,
Measure the volume of direct supports and related services. A reading specialist? A counselor? A nurse? They’re not in every school;
Or, tally the number of opportunities in every public and private high school that lead to social mobility: internships, colleges, work-based learning, entrepreneurship.
I have a feeling we’d see much more grim statistics, but certainly ones that put less responsibility on individual students and more on the institutions that are supposed to help them.
A Reckoning with Rules & “High Expectations”
It’s not that I don’t believe in individual progress. I’m not a testing abolitionist. I believe students can do well on tests, that students rise to the challenge of high expectations, as do adults. I believe that students must grapple with rigorous, grade-level appropriate tasks with differentiated supports, and that you can’t differentiate without knowing what’s needed. On a structural level, you can’t turn around a “low-performing school” without a unit of improvement.
So you do a lot of tests.
You set up tight structures.
You name behaviors and their consequences.
What applies to one applies to all, and we don’t lower the bar for anyone—especially not for those who’ve been historically underserved. If we do, it implies that we think they can’t rise to the challenge, and they can.
I once held these beliefs strongly during my time in a high-performing charter school. Now, I’m much more selective about where they apply. Rules, tests, and high expectations are comforting, necessary, even utopian in some ways. But where rules and expectations exist, there are people who create it and enforce it.
This is the part where we turn to Foucault’s principles about power. To him and to a lot of other constructivists, society decides what it accepts as true and what it allows to function as true. Power can only be distributed and negotiated. Foucault says that “the ‘battle for truth’ is not for some absolute truth that can be discovered and accepted, but a battle about the rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power are attached to the true.”
A recent This American Life episode eloquently describes our relationship with rules and the powers attached to it. In Act 1, they told the story of Jerome Ellis, who spoke at the annual St. Mark's Poetry Project this year. He was a guest with a speech impediment, and was given the rule to stay within a time limit despite his natural, sometimes lengthy, unavoidable pauses in speech. In the middle of his powerful performance, he says, “I understood intuitively that the purpose of this time limit was to create as non-hierarchical a space as possible. But in removing one hierarchy, the time limit introduces another. A time limit assumes that all people have relatively equal access to time through their speech, which is not true.”
We need information to negotiate power. But a test is only one way to get it—and who is negotiating?
Most rules and tests have an equity imperative. But many institutions are already using this time to rethink the “specific effects of power” that are attached to testing, like what doors close and open for people because of it. And they’ve made strides: the UC system is allowing college students to be admitted without the ACT or SAT. More and more graduate programs are no longer requiring the GMAT or GRE. Even the Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) is offering variable term waivers that will allow teachers who haven’t satisfied the testing requirements of their credential program to continue teaching. (These testing requirements disproportionately affect teachers of color.)
As expected, we’re already hearing a lot of caution on the other side of the spectrum. “You can’t change what you can’t measure,” they said. “When we let students move to the next grade willy-nilly, it signals a loss of accountability for schools.” Sure. But how much of this accountability is ensuring that students must change to fit the schools instead of the other way around?
Our same concerns, that “advantages helped buffer wealthier students from lost learning time” and “school district responses correlated with family income” are being used to argue for testing, because the test itself is an instrument of power. I long to see the day that students can organize and create an assessment for the broken school system.
In the final thoughts of the CTC memo, they wrote:
“Staffing classrooms with teachers who have partial training is arguably better than relying on people with no training. [...] For instance, in WWII it was better to have a doctor with some training than none at all; but always with the expectation that the doctor in training would have support to learn their work beside more experienced peers; and when the crisis was over, licensing exams would still determine whether the doctor was fit to serve in the profession at large.”
I think that’s my final worry about this time: that we would consider this academic year as an exception to the rule, instead of an opportunity to rethink the rules itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is famous for saying many things, but I credit him most with his conditional optimism that “this time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” The circumstances of the pandemic already allowed us to negotiate what teaching and learning looks like—may we not remain stuck with our unjust notions of accountable, equitable schools.
A Bright Spot:
In my brief stint supporting the implementation of personalized learning at Rocketship, visiting Rocketship Fuerza was one of my favorite experiences. This week, I loved reading about how their students see themselves differently because of this pandemic (as told by their Principal, Juan Mateos). And I agree: it’s time the world sees it, too.