For Whom Do Public Schools Exist?
For whom do public schools exist?
This question serves as the title of Chapter 8, the penultimate chapter in a book titled The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform (Sarason, 1990). Wave after wave after wave of reform has come and gone. Still, our schools are sites for the systematic, predictable reproduction of unequal outcomes.
Sarason located the roots of our repeated failure to reverse cycles of educational injustice and our propensity to engage in epistemic violence in the soil of an unquestioned and unexamined belief that schools exist to serve children. Could it be that schools exist to control children? Could it be that children exist to serve schools? What is the role of the child in schooling?
Authorized by law to accomplish contested public goals, public schools exist to serve a myriad of masters. In today’s discourse, schools exist to serve colleges and corporations in a meritocracy; children are students in school not to be served, but to be formatively and summatively assessed in preparation for a distant future—college or career. Children become students, students become grade point averages.
Sarason and others have argued that as long as the power to make educational decisions is located in fragmented silos with federal politicians and bureaucrats, school boards, state legislatures, and the corporate world injecting special interests, there can be no effective systemic reform. As long as there is no clear, constitutional vision with a coherent framework of schooling with children at the center, there can be only piecemeal change.
When adults believe uncritically that schools by default serve children, no one can ever critically examine schools to make visible the circumstances in which children fail to learn. When everyone believes schools that repeatedly fail children nonetheless exist to serve children, there can be no change.
In a culture where adults working in schools serve children, not other adults, the experiences of children would inform pedagogical reform. In a school system where adults serve children, not other adults, adults would have an incentive to learn to teach, not to deliver a curriculum on behalf of a college or an employer.
I’ve been working on a rubric for judging the quality of a rubric. Some rubrics are quite valuable in teaching (score = 6). Others get in the way or introduce distortions (score = 1). The key is to discern details of a performance which others can also discern, students as well as parents, other teachers, and interested stakeholders; rubrics can establish joint attention on work processes and products and provide ground for discussing a piece of work dispassionately. It’s not enough to say that some work is weak, some is ok, some is beautiful. What makes it so? Because rubrics are by nature applied to qualitative data, they are a tool to quantify what is inherently non-quantifiable (e.g., creative expression). Because people can see objects in similar ways, they can learn to agree to value particular details or features more or less than others. By collaborating with others in making concrete statements that refer to visible and knowable aspects of a performance, we see how principals can learn to lead, teachers to teach, and kids to grow.
Powerful post, Terry. Here are two quotes that stood out to me, and why:
"As long as there is no clear, constitutional vision with a coherent framework of schooling with children at the center, there can be only piecemeal change."
- Instructional frameworks are essential for achieving that vision of school that works for all kids. I use it to support teachers when someone from the outside might be critical of their practice. Frameworks (not rubrics!) articulate the practices that serve as a pathway toward that vision.
"In a culture where adults working in schools serve children, not other adults, the experiences of children would inform pedagogical reform."
- The labels "teacher" and "student" are antiquated if you see the relationships in a learning environment as based on reciprocity. Teachers who learn during instruction and respond in real time are most effective; students often make the best teachers for one another when supported through structured dialogue and discussion.
Thank you Terry for bringing us back to our big purpose!