So, who really owns education? Who ultimately holds the responsibility for it and benefits from the process of teaching and learning? To answer this question, it is necessary to define the word “own” for a variety of shareholders.
For the businesses that brand and sell educational products, it is Pearson – the largest for-profit education corporation in the world, which designs and markets the new state achievement testing program known as PARCC. Its textbooks, computer software, intervention programs, trademarked worksheets and high-stakes standardized tests are sold as the methods to reach academic achievement. According to Pearson, if its research and development departments can control the classroom from planning to instruction to testing, then students will grow. This may or may not be true, but it is reality that these companies are profiting from our nation’s desire to show the world how smart we are.
If we ask the federal government and the pundits who outline the meaning of that term for them, it is Finland or South Korea. For the past several years, East Asian and Scandinavian nations have topped lists compiled by Pearson Education and other groups in which national test performance is compared in tidy charts. These nations, and their like, are held up as models for our own schools’ aspirations. There are certainly lessons to be learned from these examples, but for our nation to duplicate their achievement, it would require cultural changes that ignore the independent and heterogeneous nature of the United States. We are a fundamentally different culture that genuinely attempts to educate all students who walks through our schools regardless of their differences.
According to the state of Colorado, the ownership of education falls squarely on the teachers. Our own Legislature’s work on the subject has been centered on dictating the curriculum delivered in classrooms through the adoption of the national standards outlined in the Common Core. Coupling this curricular standardization with the parameters created by the Educator Effectiveness Act (SB 191) places the onus of learning fully on the instructor. One creates a standard product to be measured while the other defines the ruler by which we do the measuring. These two moves illuminate the mistrust that our own politicos hold for the lessons tailored and taught by Colorado classroom teachers. For legislators, the only way to ensure a quality education is to remove an instructor’s potential to teach unimportant minutia in a manner that lacks measurability and then repeatedly measure that process.
Unsurprisingly, our own community stands behind this form of ownership as our own school board invests in this standardized and repeated measuring of classroom instruction. How many tests for the district and state has your own child taken (and will take) this academic year for which the results will be used to size up the performance of the teacher and school?
For many schools, it is the family who possesses the key to learning. Teachers often point to the environment that students emerge from as the primary factor in their achievement. “Their” meaning both student and teacher. You will often hear from teachers that student performance is based on the level of parental involvement. There is a correlation between the investment of families and how well a student performs in school, but it is general. Some students achieve or fail regardless of how important education is in a particular household, and ultimately, this is beyond the control of any teacher, school or district. We either benefit from it or work to mitigate it.
For our school this year, the answer is the student. Our recently completed student-led conferences were an attempt to have the kids own their personal growth and achievement. We didn’t invent the model; rather, we borrowed heavily from the efforts of other schools to devise a structure that empowered students to speak clearly about their progress in both craftsmanship and perseverance.
After much research, our entire staff created the criteria for these 20-minute student showcases from communication to reflection to performance. Every student assessed his or her own growth toward learning targets through products and processes from each classroom, wrote a script for presenting and then set academic goals for the remainder of the year. The results were perfect in their imperfection. Regardless of the quality of the individual student-led conference, each one revealed the level of personal responsibility the students held in their own education. For 20-plus minutes, kids talked about themselves and their learning while parents and teachers took notes and asked questions. It was enlightening.
As it turns out, these conferences answered the question about owing education. It is “all of us.” From educational businesses to nation-states to communities to schools to parents to teachers to students. We all reap the benefits or suffer the consequences of it. Education is a social endeavor. It ultimately transmits the values we all hold. To make it effective and relevant we all must play a part, we all must decide what is important, we all must invest in it and we all must hold everyone accountable. So, the real question isn’t who owns education; rather, it is what do really value?
John Hise is an instructional coach at Escalante Middle School. Reach him at jhise2@durango.k12.co.us.
