Democratic Education Blog

Ever checked out iTunes U?  It’s iTunes’ collection of lectures and talks by people from around the world on a huge variety of topics.  Basically, it’s like being able to sit in the back of a college lecture hall and hear some pretty smart people talk.

On a recommendation from a friend, I listened to a recording of a talk from a 2008 Stanford University Ethics in Society conference.  The topic was “Charter Schools Closing the Achievement Gap: Results from New York City and Chicago,” and the lead speaker was Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford University Professor of Economics and a Hoover Institution Senior Fellow.  Hoxby, who recently came out with a new report stemming from similar data, described how the study found that students at charter schools in New York City and Chicago performed better on reading and math scores than students who tried to get into those charter schools but did not get picked in the lottery (most charter schools use lotteries to select from the large pool of students who apply for limited spots).

From a research perspective, what I like about the study is how it controls for family engagement and demographics, since the group selected randomly in the lottery will be similar to the group that was not selected.

However, I was glad to hear my strong concerns about the study reflected by the speaker who was chosen to respond to Hoxby’s talk, Kenneth Strike, a Cultural Foundations of Education Professor at Syracure University.  Strike questioned the tools used to assess the students, saying that although math and reading are foundational skills that support other educational goals, “being foundational doesn’t make them proxies for other [goals]” (my emphasis).  In other words, we must not forget that there are other educational goals in addition to helping young people learn how to read and do math.

Then came the part I really appreciated.  Strike talked about there being both “Cultural Goods” like citizenship and autonomy, as well as “Economic Goods” such as jobs, income, and human capital.  He was expanding the goal and purpose of education beyond the narrow approach that looks at young people solely as future workers and job-holders, which justifies a standardized educational delivery for all young people and the merging of the fields of economics and education (such that one can’t be too surprised by policies such as monetary rewards for students).

Strike then questions the assessments themselves:

The way we use testing and accountability has a very high risk of goal distortion.  In fact, I think it tends to erode the adequacy and reasonableness of these things [current standardized assessments in math and reading] because it generates so much gaming.

By focusing so much attention on a narrow academic (though important) set of skills, the risk is that we lose sight of other essential educational goals, namely becoming a good citizen, developing autonomy, being creative, working well with other people, etc – Strike’s “Cultural Goods.”

Strike later says that we must look at measures for those cultural sets of skills and try to measure them.  They CAN be measured, he says.

They can indeed.  Here are a few research studies that study qualities like citizenship, autonomy, creativity, self-determination, compassion, and other important skills.  (These often focus more on what kinds of educational environments can best support such skills, rather than a high-stakes test that threatens teachers with firing, students with being held back, and in so doing completely distorting the educational process):

• Self-Determination Theory: hundreds of studies have been carried out researching how people gain and develop self-determination, including the key importance of autonomy-support and internal motivation in learning as well as the negative impact of control and external motivation on learning.
• The Hope Study: research showing that “motivation to learn increases when schools give students more autonomy, a greater sense of belonging, and more opportunities to pursue individual goals.”
• Lives of Passion, School of Hope: a new book that surveys hundreds of graduates of an innovative participatory school, showing that graduates take part in society as active and productive citizens and point to the school as a key reason for that.
• Moral Development in a Democratic School: describes how young people develop moral behavior through being in an environment where they can choose their own activities and where they are involved in decision-making and conflict resolution, providing students with “opportunities for them to develop and deepen understanding of the balance of personal rights and responsibilities within a community.”
• Comparison of Freedom-Based and Conventional Learning Environments: a small study I did as part of my Masters degree, which establishes a correlation between freedom-based schools and a positive school atmosphere, high levels of perceived autonomy-support, high levels of student intrinsic motivation and self-determination, and strong development of personal qualities such as self-confidence, responsibility, and compassion.  The results also indicate higher levels of each factor for freedom-based schools as compared to a conventional school.

As Strike says, those important democratic and citizenship skills CAN be measured.  We must be wary of the slippery slope potential that measuring could lead to high-stakes assessments in these areas.  However, by measuring for these skills we recognize that they are indeed important, and we start to expand the very purpose of education beyond economic goals and standardized academics to include the cultural and citizenship goals that value development of democratic citizenship, self-determination, autonomy, confidence, and compassion.