Ohio is phasing in a new A-F school grading system. When it is implemented, most schools and districts will receive a lower grade than what their evaluation in the current system would indicate. Now, 52% of Ohio schools are deemed “Excellent” or “Excellent with Distinction,” but in the new system only a few schools will be deemed worthy of a grade of “A”. Most schools will have a grade of “C” or less.
The point of the new system is to “raise the bar” with a tougher curriculum and harder tests and in so doing push students and schools to greater success. Here is what area educational leaders, Kevin Kelly and Frank DePalma, recently wrote in a DDN opinion article: “Ohio has raised its standards in bold and important ways for our children. When demands increase, it always takes time to adjust. The lower grades are an inescapable part of the process of asking our schools, teachers and children to aim higher.”
Yes, I agree that public education must be guided by higher aims and bolder purposes. But, really, the thought that the aims of public education can be distilled into objective tests of discrete academic curriculum is mind boggling. What is easily measurable has become most important to school evaluations and those elements of education that through the ages have always been considered most important — though difficult or impossible to measure — are being largely ignored.
The theory supporting this new grading system is that the merit of a school can be determined by analyzing the educational progress of its students — as measured in objective tests. The educational program itself — the use of school time and resources, the ethos of the school, the attitude of teachers and students toward the love of learning, the degree to which the school promotes a culture of thoughtfulness, empathy, respect, and the degree that its students and teachers practice good citizenship — according to this theory, should be simply ignored.
The philosophy of education that supports this new grading system is that the purpose of education is to transmit a a defined curriculum. It sees children as deficient — lacking in knowledge — and it sees the purpose of the school to correct that deficiency and to fill up the heads of kids with curriculum and other stuff, like “thinking skills.” This point of view asserts that objective tests can reliably assess how much knowledge the student has accumulated — the more the better — and when he or she has accumulated a sufficient quantity of this measurable knowledge, the student then is considered “educated.”
Flowing from this philosophy is the notion that a great teacher is anyone who can raise test scores and a great school is any organization that succeeds in getting most of its students to get acceptable test scores.
This guiding philosophy would have us believe that a child isolated at home or in an institution with a computer as his or her teacher has the same chance for a good education as a child within a loving school community and with a teacher who is his or her mentor. If the child makes acceptable scores, then his or her educational experience, by definition, was a success. This philosophy would have us believe that a school could be operated with a ruthless oppression worthy of North Korea — homogenizing children into non-thinking test taking automatons, brainwashing children into the acceptance of arbitrary authoritarianism and systematically crushing any independent thought by teachers or students — and, if the school’s test scores met the state’s criteria, the school could be deemed an “A+” school.
What is happening to public education seems so bizarre that anyone who thinks in terms of conspiracies has to wonder if the unstated, but underlying, aim of building a school evaluation system based on such a goofy and dangerous philosophy is, in fact, to destroy our system of public education and to replace it with something more business friendly. When we have diminished our understanding of what the purpose of public education actually is, then public schools can be given to the profiteers who will know how produce good test scores by using low-cost computers and by degrading the role of teachers to the status of low-paid blue collar workers.
We had a ten+ year experiment testing the philosophy that the way to make public education successful for students and communities is to center the whole system around transmitting a standardized curriculum and establishing accountability via the relentless giving of objective tests. The idea behind this experiment is that, if public policy is established that demands good test scores from schools and, if there are enough rewards and punishments, then, somehow, from this will emerge a good education. The results are in. It is clear that this approach to improving public education hasn’t worked and there is no reason to suppose giving harder tests and lower grades will make the results much better. While demanding more and grading harder may raise more students and schools to a level of minimum accomplishment, it seems clear that gearing up more and more pressure will not result in the explosion of quality that public education actually needs.
The problem is, the flawed and dangerous philosophy behind this experiment is so dominant it cannot be replaced unless a sufficiently compelling point of view and an inspiring model of public education takes its place. Communities must find a way to exert local control and must give a lot more thought into what makes a good school. Educators must create new school models that will show how the role of teachers can be elevated to a new level of professionalism. Through a vitalization of their local democracy, communities should work to define and implement a philosophy of education that will inspire students and teachers to do the hard work needed to achieve educational excellence.
