Sizing
Up The Quality of Schools
It’s not all about test scores!
Here is some
useful information about measuring the quality of schools from author
Alfie Kohn. Kohn is the author of seven books on education and human behavior,
the most recent being The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond
Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards" (Houghton Mifflin).
Everyone knows
that buyers are attracted to neighborhoods with good schools. But not
everyone knows what makes schools good. That's why many people continue
to assume -mistakenly- that high test scores are a positive sign.
To begin with,
test scores closely parallel the income and educational level of the families
who send their kids to a particular school. Wealthier neighborhoods have
higher scores for reasons that have little to do with what's going on
in the classroom. Thus, it's misleading to cite those scores as an indication
of educational quality.
But that's not
the whole story. Most standardized tests are regarded unfavorably by qualified
teachers. The tests measure the temporary retention of low-level skills
and soon-to-be-forgotten facts. The questions are often multiple-choice,
which means that students don't have the chance to generate answers or
explain their thinking. The tests are timed, which means that speed matters
more than careful, reasoned thinking. Many of the tests are "norm-referenced,"
which means they're designed not to judge whether students know what they
should but solely to determine who's better than whom. (Someone in the
top 10 percent isn't necessarily successful in absolute terms.)
Research confirms
that very talented, hardworking students often do poorly on standardized
tests, whereas some superb test takers tend to think superficially and
don't really understand why the right answers are right. Moreover, terrific
teaching can actually cause scores to go down, and terrible teaching can
cause scores to rise, because the kind of instruction that's aimed at
test preparation is very different from the kind that helps kids become
critical, curious, creative thinkers.
Thus, when politicians
or school officials brag about test scores, the proper reaction from parents
should be, "If that's what you're concerned about, I'm worried about
the quality of schooling here." Of course, not all parents know enough
to say that.
Every time a neighborhood
is recommended or selected on the basis of school test scores, the tests
gain a little more legitimacy and the schooling that children receive
becomes a little worse. Not only is it foolish to sell or buy houses on
the basis of standardized test results, but it actually does damage.
The obvious question,
then, is, What can be used as a marker of good schools? The easiest answer
is size. For many reasons, including but not limited to academic achievement,
smaller schools are usually better. Other answers may require a little
investigation, as well as awareness that the most meaningful indicators
of quality can't always be reduced to numbers. The schools worth bragging
about are those where students feel as though they're part of a caring
community, where even kindergartners get the chance to write stories,
and where the teachers create democratic classrooms so that kids learn
how to make good decisions.
If a local school
encourages kids to learn in teams instead of alone and parents are given
qualitative accounts of their kids' improvement instead of traditional
letter grades, chances are that that school is something special. If the
teachers make sure students understand ideas instead of just memorizing
facts, people ought to be clamoring to live in that district.
So by all means,
talk about the schools when you're selling or buying houses. Just make
sure you're not using test scores to explain how good those schools really
are.
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