velvetpage | Philosophy of education: Who do we serve?

"It's not the school's job to cater to [insert student with a specific difficulty which they may or may not have brought upon themselves here.] It's the student's job to figure out what they have to do and do it."

The specific scenario, in this case, was a teen mom who gave birth two weeks before the end of the school year. She got up from her hospital bed, left her baby in her mother's care, and went to write a couple of tests so she could graduate.

I have a really, really big problem with this.

First, I can't imagine who the school thought they were serving by requiring this. Most women are not at their best intellectually or emotionally a few days after giving birth, so it's not hard to imagine that the young woman in question might have seen her marks suffer when she wrote those tests. That makes the assessment invalid, because it doesn't match her usual abilities. If the test is not a valid measure of her abilities, then it's not serving her needs for her to write it.

She wanted to graduate and go to college in the fall, so the argument could be made that the college needed her marks to know exactly what she could do and to decide on admissions. I'm not buying it, again for the reason of the test's lack of validity: the college was getting a skewed view of her abilities unless she managed to pull some excellent grades on that test. So an invalid test doesn't serve the purposes of the institute of higher education, either.

So whose needs were being served? The school's, of course. The flexibility required to let her graduate without the week or so's missed work required extra work on the part of the school, and a lack of (what the school would call) fairness to other students. They might have to recalculate a GPA to exclude those tests, so she wouldn't be penalized for missing them, or they might have to give her an alternate, less-stressful assessment, or they might have had to plan in advance for her to finish her schoolwork (or at least finish enough of it that she could be said to have been evaluated on the full content of the course) a bit early due to the likelihood that she'd deliver around the time of her final exams.

I don't believe that's what real fairness looks like. Real fairness evaluates students in a variety of ways, giving them lots of opportunities to show what they know and can do. Real fairness can and should look different for different students. A rigorous adherence to a marking system based on tests and GPAs is inherently unfair, not just to our new mom in the example but to every kid who has test-taking anxiety, or a learning style that makes test-taking a problem, to name a couple of possibilities.

If some bureaucracy is inevitable in a public school setting (a debate for another day) then the least schools can do is ensure that what bureaucracy they have is essential to be fair to the students.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I work on the other end of the spectrum, the very beginning of kids' interactions with the school district. I can tell you that the experience is overwhelmingly geared towards making things easy and predictable for the school. Rather than focusing on a child's needs, they are constantly attempting to fit the child into preconceived slots regardless of how appropriate that slot may be. For example, a child with a severe speech delay will qualify for on-campus speech therapy. In order to qualify the district must acknowledge that the child has an educational need for the therapy. But if mom or dad can't take off work and bring the child to the school building, that kid gets NO services. It's beyond ridiculous.

Edited 2010-08-08 23:23 (UTC)

That is so wrong. The school should have let her write the tests at a later date. :(

It never occurred to her to think that she should be able to, because she's bought thoroughly into the notion that the student's job is to fulfill the requirements that the school sets out. She was the one who said that it wasn't the school's job to cater to her just because she decided to have a baby.

I'm wondering where she goes to school. That made me so sad to read that. At my school we reschedule things ALL THE FRAKKIN TIME for the students and I have no problem with that-- I'm glad the admin and guidance do it! I had kids going on a family trip who needed their final exam rescheduled. What's the problem? The transcripts, even for seniors, don't get sent out to colleges until sometime in July. The tests, once written, can easily be left in the office for the student to take, and then corrected once we get them back.

I don't know where she is - she's on Booju and I don't interact with her often.

IME, U.S. public schools do not have the child's interest at heart. Occasionally, a specific teacher might. Occasionally, a specific admin or support staffer might. But generally speaking, no.

And this is why, IMO, we need to reform the whole dang system. I tend to think it'll require fire and salting the earth, but I'm open to perhaps eliminating the salt.

My only concern is that the reform as it currently stands is taking the exact opposite road to the one that is most likely to work, and it's not including the teachers in the discussion hardly at all.

This process has been happening in Ontario in recent years. The system is more responsive than it used to be, in many respects, though it still has a long way to go to be really responsive. Some of the recent gains include a move towards restorative justice as a discipline model, the provincewide adoption of assessment for learning that is embedded into the learning process and student-centered, and an insistence on differentiated instruction as a key facet of classroom organization. I see elements in the rhetoric and documents coming out of the States that are in direct opposition to the last two, and that's a big, big problem.

One of the big problems I see in having a Federal Department of Education is that it makes it difficult to allow State or even Local school districts to reform differently.

I can imagine some areas embracing the things you're talking about, while other localities might be skeptical (as change is always difficult to adapt to). If those forward-thinking localities were allowed to implement reforms, then everyone could track results, and hopefully move towards those reforms that are most successful.

I know the hope is generally that with a Federal oversight, no children will be left behind (ha! :) ). But it also prevents other children from being able to make gains. And it removes too much flexibility from teachers who need it for their individual classrooms.

I totally agree. I think a huge part of the problem stems from everyone having a different idea about what the purpose of our public schools is supposed to be. Once we answer that, the real reform can begin. But I don't see our politicians coming up with any solutions any time soon.

It's ridiculous that parents, students, and teachers have to wait and hope for politicians to figure out how to reform the educational system. That's broken.

I've shifted gears and started in a Waldorf teacher training after a very long time working in public schools in different capacities (4 in my own classroom in a public HS, 8 running a JHS library)...

I'm working on reform in my own small way, talking to one person at a time how my life is changing due to Waldorf and how I can't wait to take my own class up through the grades.

Waldorf is Education with He(art). It doesn't solve everything, but damn is it so much more satisfying to work in than public school.

My daughter did some shadow days at the local Waldorf school & we've been to several of their events. I love it. She bonded to another school, but I still think Waldorf would have been great for her in so many ways.

Universities can be just as bad. See my last few LJ entries.

Philosophy of education: Who do we serve?

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