In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel, Center for Education Reform founder Jeanne Allen spoke at length about all the positive developments related to school choice happening around the country. As she discussed the current environment, Allen also described the dynamics of the last several years that led to this moment: “And then we’ve hit rock bottom so many years ago, and then parents finally realized we’d been on the bottom for a while. And so this year, they have more power and more options than they have in the last five years. And instead of saying, ‘Are the schools ready?’ we’re asking, “ready for what?’”.
“Ready for what?” is an important question, and one that we think merits additional consideration. To our minds, asking “ready for what” is another way of asking, “ready to do what?”. Questioning what schools should be doing leads to another and — we think — equally important question: what is it that we want our schools to be producing? In other words, what does success look like for an individual student? What is a successful student outcome?
It’s a difficult question to answer because education as a concept is at once intangible and expansive. Does gaining knowledge in a variety of subjects indicate a good education? Is it building character or gaining what have been fashionably called social emotional skills? When you ask voters how they define what they think high school graduates should know and be able to do, they tend to focus on ensuring students can function in the adult world, mentioning specific skills like balancing a checkbook and changing a tire. Is the ability to balance a checkbook or temporarily fix a flat an indicator of a successful student outcome? However we define success, we do need to define it, and then assess how our students measure up against that definition.
In a focus group several years back, we tried to approach the question in a different way by asking participants what one thing they thought should change to improve schools. The response from one participant in particular has stuck with us all these years later.
That’s a tough question. One thing that would improve our schools. That’s a hard thing to quantify. It’s like, “Oh, the subjects. The student engagement, the parent engagement, the teacher [engagement].” I’m not sure. I’ll be honest with you. I’m not usually at a loss for words, but I don’t know what one thing it would take, or even one thing that would improve the schools. I think we all agree there’s a missing based on the grades we’ve given the schools. But how to improve it? I’m not sure.
This participant thought through several potential elements of what might indicate a good school. And in her defense, there isn’t one discrete change that would make things better in schools overall, let alone individual schools. But what was also noteworthy was that she did not have a definition of success against which to measure any attempts at making progress.
None of this is to discount all the positive developments that Allen described in the interview. More school choice and more innovation are undoubtedly good things. It is good that more parents can have a range of options from which to choose the best fit for their child, and it is good for educators to have the space to be innovative and entrepreneurial. The choice landscape today is very different from the landscape just a few decades back.
But it is to say that, in pursuing these reforms, we should not lose sight of the ultimate questions: what is a successful outcome of our system, and what are we going to do to ensure we are producing those successful outcomes at scale?
