COVID and the revelation of a facade: schooling is built for something other than student needs

Organizations can shape themselves to best serve their stakeholders, the members of the group without whom the organization loses its reason to exist, or someone else. Perhaps those in the organization. Or perhaps those outside the organization who hold power and sway over it. Either way, the choice would result in very different organizations.

A hospital built entirely to ease the lives of medical staff will look and feel very different than one designed entirely to ease the pain of patients. What looks like a choice between patients and doctors isn’t really a choice—choose the doctors at the expense of the patients and the patients will go elsewhere. It’s easy to imagine parallels in grocery stores, restaurants, tech companies, online retailers, and most certainly schools.

Of course, organizations do try and strike a balance. Which is understandable because workers should be treated well, but also something we should be aware lest that balance stray too far from the stakeholder. If we need to err, it should be towards them.

One important outcome of the pandemic is to lay bare for all to see just how far schools have been forced to move away from what will benefit students towards what is convenient for a few grownups.

What are some of those conveniences? Grade levels. Standardized content at each grade. Standardized test scores that guarantee a mixed message on schools that justifies underfunding them and underpaying teachers. Grade retention (if based on test scores, a double whammy). Class rank. College entrance exams. Data-driven decisions absent professional interpretations. Continuously assigning marks of failure to those students with the greatest need so you can avoid filling those needs. And on and on it goes.

What I hope we will lose during this pandemic—although the early signs aren’t good—is the naïveté in thinking these things are done to benefit students. The truth is these things make it easier for a few grown-ups in power. It’s much easier and cheaper to crudely drop students into age based buckets and throw standardized content at them than figure out what they need and provide it. It is much easier to declare poor and minority children as failures for having greater needs than others because that blames them rather than a society that needs to change and lets those grownups off the hook. It is much easier to treat a standardized test score falsely as a mark of quality, than address the inequities in the patterns it is designed to reveal.

You get the picture.

What is revealed in the current hand-wringing is that the grownup oriented system broke down precisely because it was grownup oriented. Once all the attention went to the students, those grownups lost their way. How will you promote or hold back students? What do we do now that schools are off the standardized script and schedule (nether of which were that good to begin with)? What do we do if suddenly we can’t confirm the erroneous bias that students in wealthier neighborhoods are smarter than those in poorer neighborhoods? What do we do now that the bias in the old system has been laid bare?

A school designed to benefit students will not look like schools prior to the pandemic that were designed to satisfy some perceived adult need. The teaching and learning that happened during the pandemic, occurring as it did in a highly disruptive environment that called a great deal into question, offers a few insights we would be wise to consider in building a student-based educational system:

1. Standardized testing is for grownups. If those grown-ups are thoughtful researchers, it can be useful, but mostly it’s used for reasons it was never designed to support.
2. Standards are about controlling teachers, not meaningful literacy, or numeracy.
3. Student need for all students in the old system, regardless of actual need, was defined via the standardized content.
4. Equity in the old system is a myth. It was considered to be achieved when all students could be shown to be in the proximity of the same content. That way the equity box could be checked by adults.
5. During a crisis you can get mad that you can’t find the students so you can check the equity box, or mad that you live in a system in which you can’t find the students. Only one of those has an actual equity component in it.
6. The old system confirmed the biases adults had about schools in rich and poor communities, while the pandemic showed that every child is always both a learner and a struggler, and we create a false pedagogical platform when we think otherwise.
7. Students never stop learning, even during a crisis. They all got a little smarter, just not according to the script.
8. Had no script existed, the learning opportunities that presented themselves over the last year would have offered much in the way of priceless content to be explored. Social and racial justice, democratic processes and challenges, leadership, climate change, and social responsibility, each presented, in real time, rich fields for inquiry and exploration that were current and relevant. Instead, the test must go on, so the adults who don’t know how to educate children insist teachers hammer away on reading and math content at the expense of a great learning opportunity.
9. Etc.

Building back better is a really nice mantra. Let’s extend that to schools and finally design them around our mission and not our convenience.