by by Courtney Luce
I sat in a meeting the other day with a forward thinking administrator from our school’s district office. We were chatting about some of the struggles that exist in reforming education and discussing different programs that schools were trying. At one point someone made the comment, “And the worst thing is, we don’t even know if it works.”
I have been wrestling with what works in education for years while going through the process of opening a school that looks, well, anything but traditional. During this process we were told, “It’s important that you are not experimenting on children!” I thought to myself, “aren’t all educators experimenting on children?” That is education in and of itself. We try something to see if it works; when it doesn’t work the way it was sold, we blame “teacher fidelity.” We change to something else that has been “proven” to work, and the cycle continues. It’s always an experiment in “what works.” But then “what works” is always only defined by one thing: test scores.
A couple years back I was writing a social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum for a school district. In my pitch to them, I discussed how SEL has been shown to improve test scores. When we pitched our idea for a school to our local school board, our presentation centered around how project-based learning has been shown to improve test scores. And several years ago, when my child was getting recess taken away because she was slow at getting her work done (in 1st grade! Who does that?), I advocated for her by explaining how movement is essential to improving test scores. All of these things are true. There is a sizable body of research to show how SEL, project-based learning, and movement can increase test scores. However, when we talk about programs and lead with how they improve test scores first, we reduce the entire purpose of an education to succeeding on the test.
When my children were toddlers, I would sometimes make them a special, homemade macaroni and cheese. It had an extra-cheesy sauce that they loved. What they did’t know was that sauce had pureed carrots in it. I needed to sneak in the veggies because they didn’t necessarily care what was good for them, they only wanted what they liked. We do this sometimes in education. When I led with test scores in pitching the SEL curriculum, that was the mac and cheese, the familiar, what we know we like. I knew about the carrots. I knew SEL was really good for kids because explicitly teaching them SEL helps give them the skills they need to be successful in goal-setting, problem-solving, and intra/interpersonal communication, all skills needed to be successful for the 60+ years most students will spend outside of education. But many in education don’t want to eat carrots if they aren’t hidden in the mac and cheese. It’s not enough to say that movement is important for lifelong health or that true and authentic project-based learning helps students to learn how to deal with failure or how to create something authentic, if there isn’t some connection to how that will in-turn impact test scores.
In education, the people deciding are the adults, and they should be fine trying some new and healthy foods. They should know that the point of school isn’t school, and a test can’t possibly measure all the skills a child might need outside of school. However, education will never change if the conversation around what works in education is only connected to how it works at improving test scores despite so much information that suggests something else is needed. And while innovation in education is all the rage, we won’t ever know if reform works by using tests that are less than innovative.
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