Philosophy of education: Who do we serve?

[velvetpage]

"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.

Comments

[thexphial.livejournal.com]

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.