If School Is Not Relevant

by Shelly Blake-Plock

Had a conversation with a friend a while back; we were talking about how to best evaluate what was working in schools.

After rambling through all the usual arguments about testing and achievement and technology and pd, he said to me, "You know, for all the effort we put into the kids while they are our students, we do really little to gauge how we did once they are out the door. We treat school as though it is the most important thing in the world; and then they get out only to find that most of what they spent all those years doing there wasn't relevant. The only ones who ever really come back to talk to us are the ones who got something relevant out of school -- whether with grades or football or even the class clowns who owned the place while they were here. The kids who got something out of school come back and tell us how great we were. So there we are only getting feedback from the kids for whom the whole thing -- or at least something important in it -- worked. But when's the last time you heard back from any of those kids at the bottom of the rung? The quiet kids? The ones whose names you never could remember right?"

Most of the forms of evaluation and assessment we use have to do with finding out how a kid is doing right now; but "right now" isn't necessarily the best indicator of where we are headed. Even worse, "right now" often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Think about how many kids in reality are graded and assessed in the minds of the teacher before they ever open their mouths; how they are assessed in advance based on the accumulation of all of those "right now" experiences and testing events devoid of the context of a child's life. Unfortunately, for a lot of kids, that becomes the de facto of their school experience.

That's not to knock teachers, it's just reality; as institutions, schools are really good at stereotyping kids and how that plays out at the classroom level in terms of attitudes accorded to students by faculty and peers alike -- well, that's an unfortunate but absolutely real part of the school(ed) experience.

And so we Scantron and five-paragraph essay our kids to death in the interest of getting them to achieve; but what is that elusive achievement? Is it a demonstrable improvement over time? (If so, why do we give grades based on summative assessments?) Is it an accumulation of honors? (If so, does that imply that most kids achieve nothing?) Is it an acceptance to the next level, the next school, the next diploma?

And what of when they leave our tutelage?

Imagine if schools were judged not by how well students achieved while they were in school, but in how well they achieved once they left. If schools saw their worth not in how many kids got accepted to college, but in how many kids went on to live meaningful and engaged lives and who would point back to their school years as the point of relevancy that was the foundation of it all.

If schools gauged themselves not by how many kids passed a test, but in how well it prepared those kids who did not pass the test to see themselves as worthy of respect and ready to take on the challenges of life. In fact, if schools worked to make entrepreneurs and role models of every kid who failed a standardized exam. If failure became a calling card for innovation.

If schools prided themselves on knowing the dreams of the quiet kids. If they prided themselves on helping those kids attain those dreams.

Dreams don't always fit into curricula.

Neither do successful failures.

We need schools that recognize failure as being as much a matter of how well one fits into a prescribed system than how well one understands, well, much of anything really.

And kids know we are blowing smoke when we give lip-service to how everyone should think outside-the-box and then we hand them a box and tell them that everything they've learned should fit back into it. And when they leave things outside-the-box we define them as failures.

We do this at our increased peril.

Because we are all failures of one sort or another. And though we like to focus on what we consider positive, it is more often the case that we live in a world comprised of systems of struggle and unanswerable questions. And we fail on a regular basis. And we need students who understand how to fail.

And we know this, yet we continue to punish students who fail -- as though our invented system of textbooks and number-two pencils were a better predictor of intellectual and creative capacity than life itself.

I wonder if I did a good enough job explaining that to my students. I wonder about the students who slipped through. I wonder about the ones who failed out.

I feel like they are the ones we should be talking to.

They are the ones who understand the impact of schooling. Enough of the smartest kids in the class always getting to answer the questions. I want to hear from the kids for whom school didn't work. I want to hear from the alumni who feel cheated by the system. I want our schools to be judged by how well we respected the humanity of the student who graduated with the lowest GPA and how we celebrated and engaged his or her capacity within society.

Because we are a society, we are connected one and all; and ultimately, if school is not relevant for that kid, school is not relevant for any kid.