We read today how Panel Urges Schools to Empha­size Core Math Skills (Wash­ing­ton Post). Now, there is a more fun­da­men­tal ques­tion to con­sider: what should the schools of the XXI cen­tury look like and do?.

To cre­ate a much needed dia­logue, I asked one the most thought­ful edu­ca­tion blog­gers around to share her (I guess it’s “her”) impres­sions with us. Enjoy!
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What do we want our schools to do, and for whom? 

–By edu­won­kette

“Schools,” Stan­ford his­to­rian David Laba­ree wrote, “occupy an awk­ward posi­tion at the inter­sec­tion between what we hope soci­ety will become and what we think it really is.” What do we want our schools to do, and for whom?

Schools, like most orga­ni­za­tions, have many goals. These goals often com­pete with and dis­place each other. Rely­ing heav­ily on the work of David Laba­ree, I will dis­cuss three cen­tral goals of Amer­i­can schools – social effi­ciency, demo­c­ra­tic equal­ity, and social mobil­ity. Through­out the his­tory of Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion, these goals have been run­ning against each other in a metaphor­i­cal horser­ace. While they are not mutu­ally exclu­sive, the three goals intro­duce very dif­fer­ent met­rics of edu­ca­tional suc­cess. More often than not, they sit uncom­fort­ably with each other.

The first goal of Amer­i­can schools – what Laba­ree terms “social effi­ciency” — is to pre­pare chil­dren to assume their place in the econ­omy. Advo­cates of the social effi­ciency goal include busi­ness lead­ers and elected offi­cials. Mag­nates like Lou Ger­st­ner of IBM or Bill Gates, and even your local con­gress­man, stress that stu­dents’ human cap­i­tal must be devel­oped to ensure that we main­tain a com­pet­i­tive econ­omy. In this view, pub­lic schools are a pub­lic good. Each citizen’s wel­fare is enhanced by the exis­tence of a strong econ­omy. Increas­ing stu­dents’ aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment, as mea­sured by their test scores or their grades, is the gauge of goal attainment.

The social effi­ciency per­spec­tive accepts that soci­ety is strat­i­fied. What this means is that in the sta­dium of life, the seats behind home plate are lim­ited. Some seats pro­vide bet­ter views than oth­ers, and not every­one can sit in the best seats. Inevitably, some fans will be rel­e­gated to the bleach­ers. Oth­ers may not squeeze into the sta­dium at all. The school’s func­tion, then, is to fit stu­dents of vary­ing abil­ity into appro­pri­ate loca­tions in this social hier­ar­chy. In this view, our coun­try needs beau­ti­cians, doc­tors, and store man­agers, and schools func­tion as a pow­er­ful sort­ing machine that effi­ciently allo­cates stu­dents to their right­ful positions.

A sec­ond goal of pub­lic schools is to achieve demo­c­ra­tic equal­ity. It was this goal that pro­pelled Horace Mann’s 19th cen­tury quest to spread the “com­mon school” and achieve uni­ver­sal ele­men­tary edu­ca­tion. The repub­lic could not per­sist, Mann argued, if stu­dents lacked a shared social­iza­tion expe­ri­ence that ini­ti­ated them as mem­bers of a com­mon polity.

Accord­ing to Laba­ree, the demo­c­ra­tic equal­ity goal has two sig­na­ture com­po­nents. First, it demands that schools pre­pare chil­dren to become active cit­i­zens in a demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety. Stu­dents, at the very least, must have the tools nec­es­sary to serve on a jury, vote, and under­stand the rights and respon­si­bil­i­ties implied by our social con­tract. Sec­ond, to ensure equal­ity in the polit­i­cal arena, it requires that social inequal­ity remains in check. Achiev­ing this goal does not neces­si­tate equal out­comes. But it does charge schools with atten­u­at­ing, rather than exac­er­bat­ing, pre­ex­ist­ing inequalities.

Schools’ achieve­ment of the first com­po­nent of the demo­c­ra­tic equal­ity goal proves more dif­fi­cult to mea­sure than social effi­ciency. That’s because these out­comes are not observed until well after stu­dents leave K-12 edu­ca­tion. The sec­ond com­po­nent, rel­a­tive equal­ity, is eas­ily quan­tifi­able and has been incor­po­rated into the fed­eral No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which man­dates that schools close the minor­ity and socioe­co­nomic achieve­ment gap.

A third goal of pub­lic schools is social mobil­ity. One per­spec­tive on the social mobil­ity goal sees schools as break­ing the link between par­ents and chil­dren. In this argu­ment, schools level the play­ing field by pro­vid­ing a neu­tral venue in which each stu­dent can show­case his nat­ural tal­ent and merit. Because all stu­dents have an equal oppor­tu­nity to suc­ceed in this con­test, America’s unequal rewards are fair and legitimate.

A less char­i­ta­ble view of the social mobil­ity goal con­ceives of edu­ca­tion as an object of strug­gle. In the fierce con­test to main­tain or enhance one’s rel­a­tive posi­tion, edu­ca­tional cre­den­tials are pow­er­ful weapons. Schol­ars writ­ing in this tra­di­tion con­tend that priv­i­leged kids ben­e­fit from the align­ment of their dis­po­si­tions with those val­ued by the edu­ca­tional sys­tem. For exam­ple, these par­ents teach their kids to seam­lessly express their pref­er­ences, to respond to ques­tions rather than com­mands, and to look adults in the eye. Schools, in expect­ing the same behav­iors, give upper-middle class kids a leg up on their peers. Irre­spec­tive of one’s take on the effi­cacy of schools in pro­mot­ing social mobil­ity, both sides agree that the social mobil­ity goal is achieved when one’s ini­tial sta­tus is not a strong pre­dic­tor of one’s edu­ca­tional and labor mar­ket out­comes. Put sim­ply, the child of doc­tors should be no more likely to make it to grad­u­ate school than the child of con­struc­tion workers.

What’s the prob­lem? Can’t our schools do it all? When it comes to these broad con­cep­tual goals, the answer is no. For exam­ple, con­sider the ten­sion between the social effi­ciency and social mobil­ity goals. Should we pro­vide voca­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties for lower achiev­ing stu­dents? Or does doing so rel­e­gate work­ing class kids to work­ing class jobs, since they are more likely to have lower test scores? There are sim­i­lar ten­sions between the demo­c­ra­tic equal­ity and social mobil­ity goals. Does the SAT allow the best stu­dents to be iden­ti­fied, or give a mobil­ity advan­tage to afflu­ent kids with pri­vate tutors?

Laba­ree neatly summed up the prob­lem this way: “From the per­spec­tive of demo­c­ra­tic equal­ity, schools should make repub­li­cans; from the per­spec­tive of social effi­ciency, they should make work­ers; but from the per­spec­tive of social mobil­ity, they should make win­ners.” Because we can­not suc­ceed in all of these goals con­tem­po­ra­ne­ously, we would do well to frankly acknowl­edge these edu­ca­tion pol­icy trade­offs at our din­ner tables, in our fac­ulty lounges, and in our statehouses.

Please let me know your thoughts about this ques­tion, “What do we want our schools to do, and for whom?”, so we can cre­ate a good give and take. Also, by mid-April I will write a follow-up arti­cle, more spe­cific about the skills and com­pe­ten­cies we would want our schools to fos­ter. Many thanks to Alvaro for the invi­ta­tion to guest blog at SharpBrains!

–edu­won­kette is an anony­mous blog­ger who writes a fan­tas­tic Edu­ca­tion Week blog described as “Through the lens of social sci­ence, edu­won­kette takes a seri­ous, if some­times irrev­er­ent, look at some of the most con­tentious edu­ca­tion pol­icy debates.”

 

 

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Related posts:

- Are Schools (Cog­ni­tively) Nutri­tive for Children’s Com­plex Think­ing? by Thomas O’Brien and Chris­tine Wallach.

- The First Step Is Fail­ure by Joanne Jacobs.

- Brain Con­nec­tion: Eric Jensen on Learn­ing and the Brain

- The Ado­les­cent Brain: Inter­view with Robert Sylwester

- The Art of Chang­ing the Brain: Inter­view with James Zull