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For much of the public, what goes on inside schools is a mystery. Even parents are often unsure as to exactly what happens in their children’s schools or how to tell if the schools are doing a good job. This knowledge gap has made it tempting to use test results in two or three subjects to understand how well things are working.
This desire for simple reporting mechanisms extends to most of our public institutions. We now set goals for, measure and report on things like wait times for hip replacement surgery, numbers of riders on public transit, employment rates for university graduates and recidivism among convicted criminals.
In education, achievement in two main areas—literacy and numeracy—has come to be accepted as a shorthand method for measuring the success of the whole system.
But shorthand has its limitations. When success is defined and measured by narrow goals, other important priorities can be overshadowed. “Evidence-based decision-making” is now the mantra of policy makers, politicians and influential media, but when the evidence is taken from a few narrow or even simplistic measures, it can skew the focus of whole systems.
It goes without saying that literacy and numeracy are important and that we should have high goals for achievement in these subjects, but what about all the other skills and competencies that are vital for success in the 21st century? Schools provide students with much more than preparation in the “3 Rs,” and the evidence is clear that for long-term success, students need more than foundational skills in literacy and numeracy.
The question now is how can we satisfy the public appetite for concrete and understandable indicators of success, without being reduced to measures that fail to recognize the breadth and complexity of education? How can we pull back the curtain on our schools and school systems so that parents and the public understand a little more about what’s going on and why it’s important?
People for Education, an organization that has been working for 18 years to support public education in Ontario, is launching an initiative to identify a broader set of measurable goals for education. We believe that a renewed, broadened and interconnected set of goals for education, with understandable ways to measure progress toward those goals, will help push back against the narrowing definition of education and bridge the gap between “inside” and “outside” in education.
To do this, People for Education, working with national and international experts, will engage a cross-section of organizations, interest groups, experts, school communities and individuals.
Working with teachers, academics and policy makers, we will develop a new, broader set of measures to complement current benchmarking in literacy and numeracy. We will engage extensively with parents, representatives of government, community leaders, and leaders of the business and labour communities to ensure that we’re developing the right measures. And we will partner with selected school communities to pilot the new measures to confirm their validity and adjust as needed.
Assessments for literacy and numeracy are relatively sophisticated and well accepted, but there is less public information about student outcomes or school processes in other domains.
However, there are a range of tools that can tell us how students are doing in terms of their physical and mental health and socioemotional development. There are good measures that give information about school climate and about how schools are doing at stimulating students’ citizenship and creativity. But right now these tools are often too complex for public consumption, rarely work as a set and can be overwhelming.
It’s time to change that. And the change has to come from the inside and the outside—from teachers, government, academic experts and the public, working together to develop a set of measures that are both educationally useful and publicly understandable.
Our goal is to develop a viable alternative to current narrow measures that will both challenge the primacy of simplistic school rankings and provide useful information for parents, educators, policy makers, employers and the public about how well our schools are preparing students for the future.
Broadening the definition of school success is not meant to give schools, educators and school systems more work and greater responsibilities, or to lay burdens on schools without the resources required to manage them. Schools cannot fix the full range of social and health problems facing society and young people, but schools do make important contributions in addressing those problems and it is important to better articulate, measure and report on those contributions.
The right goals play a vital role in setting agendas for our schools and our education systems. Goals that are clearly set out, held in common and understood by the general population, have the capacity to redirect policy, improve resource allocation and improve outcomes in a range of subjects. Conversely, goals that are narrowly defined, limit the scope and potential of our publicly funded schools.
By changing what is measured, the initiative will support positive change in schools and make more room for the curriculum, programs and resources that support health, creativity, citizenship, social-emotional skills and positive school climate.
For more information, and to join the discussion, go to www.peopleforeducation.ca.
