Forgotten Purpose

“Given enough time, any bureaucratic organization will eventually work toward goals that are directly antithetical to those for which it was first founded.” — Author unknown
Consider this: what was the original purpose of America’s public schools?
Of course, there are variations on the central idea, but, in a nutshell, America’s public schools were created as “places where all students would learn.” In other words, their purpose, their primary goal, was learning.
Schools were not created as places where students would have the opportunity to learn, nor was their goal for some students to learn well while others learned less and still others were left behind altogether. Although it was not their primary purpose, one of the “unintended consequences” of offering students a place to learn was that it also provided them enculturation and the social skills needed in getting along with others.
When America also opened its arms to people from other lands seeking new lives and opportunties, the curriculum expanded to help foreign-born students learn this country’s primary langauage, English. Thus, the country’s new arrivals were enculturated, mastered critical social skills, learned the country’s language and learned the required curriculum.
Helping students learn English as a Second Language demonstrated that public education was for all students and not just a priveleged few.

Thomas Jefferson’s ideal was that a good education for all citizens formed the very foundation of democracy.
An extended and observant visit to most American schools these days would make the observer wonder if schools held a clear idea of what they are supposed to be accomplishing. These days, are schools actually working toward goals directly antithetical to those for which they were created? If the very definition of “teaching” is “causing someone to learn,” is that what is going on?
This confusion about purpose may be the result of a bureaucratic creation: standardized tests. The purpose of these tests when used in schools was to measure how well a student or various groups of students had mastered the curriculum they had been taught. They were to measure learning and achievement. Doing well on the standardized test would be the result good teaching not its goal.
Some forms of these standardized tests called Normed Reference Tests were designed to compare how well one student or group of students compared to another student or group of students. In other words, tests compared students to other students. These standardized Normed Referenced Test measurements bear no relation whatsoever to whether or not the a student actually mastered the material. In fact, this bureaucratic and political passion for comparing performance completely ignores whether or not the performance was good or if mastery was achieved. It focused instead on how well one test taker did as compared to other test takers. This is very much like saying that a runner finished fifth or tenth in a race without knowing his time, the length of the race or if the time was a good one or not.
Similarly, aggregating test results into class and grade level averages merely compares the averages of one group to those of another. An entire claas or grade level may have done as well or better than a grade level at another school, but it does not mean that mastery has been achieved.
Nevertheless, in spite of great misunderstanding about tests and their purposes, politicians decided that schools should measure their success on these Norm Referenced standardized tests.
Under such pressure, schools responded by deciding that getting a high test score (performing well on the standardized test) was the new goal of education. Thus, instead of measuring how much learning had occurred, achieving high test scores became the goal. The tests themselves became the goal of schooling. It is very much like reading about a beautiful vacation spot and seeing wonderful pictures of it, but not going there.
Test scores do show whether students can answer questions covering what they were supposed to learn, but tests do not show if students can apply the learning to actual life situations. Just as no picture of the Grand Canyon can do it justice, no test score acurrately predicts or measures how students will fare using the tested skills in real life.
Like the schools in which they are used, therefore, standardized tests are now used in ways that are directly antithetical to their intended purpose. The more a school does to focus upon and “raise its test scores,” the less the test actually performs its stated purpose of measuring how well a student has learned. Learning becomes compromised into test-taking.
Many schools are no longer places where creativity, critical thinking and problem solving are valued, or even taught. (Texas even tried to legally ban teaching of critical thinking skills). Instead, these schools now force students into a rigid “standardized” curriculum, concentrating on those standards which will be most heavily tested, and stressing heavily what is presented rather than what is learned.
Let me repeat that phrase: Schools now focus heavily on what is presented rather than what is learned. The very definition of teaching has changed.
In fact, school districts often compel teachers to follow “pacing guides” or “pacing schedules” which rigidly prescribe what and when objectives are to be presented. These “guides” assure that the teachers will “get through and cover”everything that will be measured on the test. Adhering to the “pacing schedule” supersedes the expertise of the teacher in deciding what objectives students have learned or failed to learn. The focus becomes the time spent presenting an objective instead of whether or not students have learned the objectives. In other words, “This train departs at 11:18 am whether you are on it or not.”
Objectives required in the Common Core Curriculum exceed the number of objectives that can be reasonably learned before they are tested in or around the 26th week of school. Moreover, each standard actually includes many sub-skills which need to be taught if a student is to master the standard as a whole. Of course, students who are behind grade level or are hampered by second language difficulties are really out of luck. Their pace cannot possibly match that of the “pacing guide.”
This testing and accountability mania means that students must study far more than can be reasonably learned in a year. “Coverage” supersedes “mastery.” Students “learn” only to sufficient depth to allow them to possibly do OK on the standardized test. In other words, students will get plenty of “book learning,” but will leave every grade level largely unprepared for what is expected in the next. They are even less prepared for the rigors of real life in a world where the speed of change is unparalleled in human history./

If the “purpose of school is cause students to learn” and “learning” means “mastering the skills and concepts needed to succeed in life,” many schools no longer fulfill this stated purpose. Instead, they have become the quintessential examples of how institutions seriously lose their way. Like so many other institutions, schools begin to work for goals that are directly antithetical to those for which they were created.
