Picked up a book called Time to Learn by Christopher Gabrielli and Warren Goldstein; 264 pages of cheerleading for extended school hours. Here’s an interesting statistic from their introduction:
More than 60 percent of Americans (as measured by a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll) give the entire school system grades of C, D, or F. On the other hand, when it comes to their own community schools, or the schools their children attend, the grades improve markedly. Roughly half the respondents give their community schools an A or B, and 70 percent give the school their oldest child attends an A or B. We seem, in other words, to be convinced that the system as a whole is mediocre, while at the very same time we believe that the schools closest to us are just fine. Both cannot be true. We appear to have taken up residence in a town like Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Woebegone, but one where all the schools are above average.
Gabrielli and Goldstien conclude that the parents are simply deluded. The *think* their children attend good schools, but in fact they do not. (And if only you do what the authors suggest, that will all be fixed. A topic I might look at next month.) Today I’d like to toss out an alternate theory for these apparently contradictory results.
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When I was in college I lucked into an awesome course. Award-winning professor teaching a class that was highly recommended by the students who had taken it, and which promised to be the kind of thing you would be glad, decades later, that you had studied. I can remember sitting in class thinking to myself, “this is a really good class”. And knowing that if only I could be bothered to pay attention to the lecture and then actually do the homework, I would learn a ton.
Naturally, slack student that I was, I did not do this. I did the bare minimum to skate through the course, and frankly I even misestimated that minimum, and thus did more poorly than even I had hoped. If you used my knowledge coming out of that class as a guage of how good the course was, you would be very sorely mistaken. My conclusion: You cannot judge that quality of the teaching soley by the achievements of the students.
I can fully imagine that many parents who give their children’s schools high marks know this too well. The teacher is wonderful, if only you could convince your child to actually do the homework. There’s a fabulous school library, too bad your kid never wants to check any books out of it. And so forth. You can lead the kids to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.
So that’s one element of my theory: The parents can see that their children attend good schools – they are being asked to rate the school itself, not to rate how much their children actually bother to learn at the place.
The second part of my theory is this: Quality of education varies within schools. Again, this is not a big secret. There can be really good teachers and really lousy teachers working in the same building. If your child is able to get into the better classes, you’ll have a better impression of the quality of the schools. Sometimes this is even very explicit: a certain sub-population of students participate in a special program (honors, magnet school, resource room, bi-lingual classroom, etc) that gets all the best the school has to offer. Parents of the program may not even know that kids outside the special program aren’t getting as much attention or as good of teaching, and will rate the school highly based on their own experiences.
And thirdly, it all depends on what you want. Does your idea of a ‘top notch sports program’ mean that most varsity players will go to college on athletic scholarships? Or does it mean that 90% percent of the students are involved in an intra-mural sport? Asked to rate your own school on a given subject, you might give it a high grade because you know that an excellent specialty program is available for those who qualify; but you might in turn give a poor grade to other schools, because all you see is the statistics on the general student population.
And that leads to a final, a very likely, cause of the disconnect: We don’t actually know what happens at all the other schools. We can see the statistics on student performance, school violence, drop-out rates and so forth. We might see a newspaper article featuring students or alumni of other schools. If these give an ugly picture, we conclude those other schools aren’t doing so well. Our own school, in contrast, we know very well. We can give a more nuanced evaluation, one that distinguishes the efforts of the teachers and the administration from the results of the students, and that balances strengths and weaknesses in giving an overall judgement.
I think that Gabrielli and Goldstein present some good ideas in favor of the extended school day, though I have several reservations about making it a universal practice. But I think the accusation that parents are simply incapable of knowing that whether their children are currently offered a good education is both patronizing, and based on a very narrow interpretation of the statistics they offer.
[Funny contrast: When given objective data on the results of homeschooling students, I think people get too good of an impression. If you compared homeschoolers only to children of parents who were actively interested in education, enjoyed learning, spent significant time with their children, and supervised the children’s educational efforts to ensure homework was done, tests studied for, and classes chosen carefully, I bet the results between public-, private-, and home- schooled children would be very similar. Despite what the statistics might lead you to believe, homeschooling will not turn your child into a genius. Good form of education? Yes. But no alchemy in it.]