Parents, businesses, and even school districts are interested in how well local schools are performing. In our nation, school measurement has been the task of educational assessments experts for more than a century. But their success is still marginal. For much of the last century, most educators thought that standardized tests would level the playing field for children from different backgrounds. But such tests are now known to overemphasize the “standard” English of the majority population and penalize those from nonstandard backgrounds. Worse yet, they often turn education into a Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy-like game that misses critical skills. Many of our nation’s greatest universities have even stopped using standardized tests like the SAT and the ACT in their admissions processes.
A few years ago, the National Education Association updated the 3 Rs (Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic) of the 20th century. Their new, 21st-century basic skills are the 4 Cs: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking. These skills are central to business and government priorities, like problem solving and community engagement.
Recently, I attended a meeting of the Education Council of the Fuquay-Varina Chamber of Commerce led by Wanda Denning. There, I learned that Wake County schools are being graded on the basis of the percentage of students achieving grade-level scores on tests. Some of the principals at the Council meeting pointed out that growth measures are just as important. Next year will be my half-century mark for work in educational assessment. I heartily agreed that their argument for multiple measures is powerful and that our readers would like to know more about it.
High Score versus High Growth
Pupils from impoverished homes begin school with many disadvantages. One of the most egregious is the recent report that children from impoverished homes have heard less than one third as many words as a typical child from a non-impoverished home. This difference accumulates over the first 5 years of life. Erasing those differences is not an easy task and teachers who have accomplished it are incredibly valuable to our collective futures. Unfortunately, our society has not yet learned how to reliably duplicate their expertise.
Decades ago, I learned that principals are often the major change agents for schools. They can open up more opportunities for teachers and children than most can accomplish without them. The principals that I have interviewed at Fuquay-Varina schools are all committed and effective. So, how well does each school’s score capture the story of the school?
A school that has a high growth rate in the percentage of students achieving grade-level performance is likely to have an unusual number of teachers and principals who know how to provide what children need regardless of their entry skills. The growth score in North Carolina reflects how students grow in comparison to other like-scoring students (either exceeded the rate of others, met the rate, or did not meet based on its Education Value-Added Assessment System).
I learned recently from Camille Miller, Principal of Willow Springs Elementary School, that her school has shown steady growth in scores over the last 14 years to becoming one of the district’s highest performing schools. As Principal Miller put it, “The growth score in North Carolina reflects how students grow in comparison to other like-scoring students (either exceeded the rate of others, met the rate, or did not meet based on North Carolina’s Education Value-Added Assessment System). Our success has been documented with continual exceeding growth expectations, which has helped us to increase our proficiency scores overall—so that we have been designated an ‘A’ school this year.”
Principals who know their schools’ pupils and serve their teachers create environments that work for student development. Even students who are far ahead of their peers can benefit from being in schools with such professionals. And such students also have much to learn from their peers, who have not been as fortunate.
Does anyone go online or to a store to buy a 92 or a 47? When we think of the 4 Cs, assigning a number to pupils and schools seems to miss the mark. So how should parents, businesses, and even school districts choose a special school for their children, employees, or constituents?
We can all learn much more from an interactive visit than from a number or two. To do so, we need to go to the schools, talk with the principals and teachers, observe classrooms, and discuss the school’s opportunities. All the time, we need to ask questions related to the 4 Cs. Below, are some ideas to help us remember, learn from, and use the 4 Cs.
Communication
Communication cannot develop without models and great models can be found first in personal discourse and later in books. Parents need to observe their children’s favorite activities and remember that childhood changes can occur rapidly. Smart phone text and games can be highly addictive but result in little educational value. On the other hand, I have seen children gain 5 years in tested reading skills in 5 months, after they became addicted to reading.
Fuquay-Varina citizens love their library. A young family that spends time there will achieve deep gains in discovering the educational opportunities that attract their children. Take books home, read and talk about them with your children. If the children have some basic phonics knowledge, try stopping at a most exciting part (parents always have chores to do). Delay picking the book back up until you see that the children have stopped trying to read it themselves. Give another burst of reading up to an exciting point and end with another chore. Soon noses-in-a-book will become an everyday occurrence.
To learn how schools encourage communication, meet with the principal to find out how classrooms manage it. Having small groups where every child is expected to express his or her point of view with adult support, like Lincoln Heights Elementary School does, is extremely valuable for learning how not only to communicate but also later to collaborate on projects.
Collaboration
A decade ago, I conducted developmental interviews with 60 faculty members in 20 departments of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Our goal was to discover the levels of development in each of several dimensions of expertise in their fields. We would then use these to create developmental rubrics to identify the students’ progress. One result related to collaboration was especially surprising to me (a product of highly competitive universities). Department after department of SCAD had a dimension of collaboration and whether it was Architecture or Interactive Design and Game Development, the development was always similar. Students begin reticent, afraid to contribute. Next, they contribute but insist on having their own way. Collaboration did not begin until the students realized that other students knew things they did not. Architectural students who accounted well for human use of buildings were not the same as those who knew their engineering well enough to keep the buildings from falling. Game designers who were good at creating stories or environments were not so good at creating characters or even hair that looked real. When the students realized their differences, effective collaboration began.
All of us can learn more about how to discover what other people know that we do not. Whether our age is 5, 20, or 80 years, we will reap many benefits from getting better at that skill and the first of those benefits is better collaboration. Teacher support for children sharing special skills is necessary for a school to develop collaboration.
At an initial school visit, ask what the school does to learn and share the special skills that make each child unique.
Creativity
All the SCAD interviews combined included over 600 dimensions of the development of design expertise. A small group of faculty members and I combined them into 20 dimensions and later, for my book, I used a text analysis program to combine the twenty into just six. Each dimension develops at a different rate, but all of them are used at some level in any design process. First, designers must frame the problem. Second, they envision various solutions. Third, they specify what they need to create it. Fourth, they prepare, often by making and testing prototypes. Only after designers accomplish all of these are they ready to implement, the fifth step. During each step, designers continually ask themselves if there are different and better ways. I call this the FESPIQ process for Frame, Envision, Specify, Prepare, Implement, and Query.
When we imagine a FESPIQ process, or better yet, do it with a child for a project at home, the value of drawing, writing, and making things becomes clear. All three are powerful ways to learn and powerful ways to generate new ideas.
Ask the principal of a school during your visit if there is a classroom project that you could observe. Watching children design together can be one of the most fun things to do for visitors, children, and teachers alike.
Critical Thinking
I learned from writer Dani McClain a few days ago about a wonderful TED talk by the acclaimed Nigerian writer and MacArthur Fellow, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She called it “The Danger of the Single Story.” She begins with telling how at a very early age she loved to read. Her father was a professor and her mother an administrator in Nigeria and for many years she only had access to English and American children’s books. The result was that when she began to write (at the age of 7), she only wrote about blonde-haired, blue-eyed people, who worried about grey skies and other weather problems. It did not occur to her that literature could include children like her in lands like where she lived.
Then, Ms. Adichie added the story of a domestic helper that her parents hired when professors were still paid in Nigeria. Her mother told her about the woman being very poor, so often that one day when she visited her, Chimamanda was very surprised to see an amazingly beautiful basket she had made. If her mother had just added how hard-working her helper was, it might not have come as such a surprise. Ms. Adichie goes on to tell through many other “single” stories how captivating and dangerous they are. “Single stories” blind us from the reality of other people and our natural world.
Questioning occurs at every step of design. It is essential for effective involvement in our government, community, finances, and daily life. In order to think critically, we need to learn or discover multiple stories about everything we think about. Among my 300+ developmental interviews of experts in hundreds of fields, there are many versions of critical thinking, but none are limited to a single story.
At school, listen to children working together. Respectful questioning from all participants is a wonderful sign of educational success.
Choosing a School
To choose a school, learn its stories, especially how communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thikning happen. Drawing, writing, discourse, mathematics, and design tell four more stories. Community involvement, civic engagement, and financial literacy have become new commitments. Practice makes perfect is very old advice and transformative learning is new. Every student project tells a story. There will be many more educational stories as artificial intelligence and global warming change our lives. None of them are captured well by a number. By remembering the 4 Cs and the FESPIQ process, we can have much fun finding the best school for our purposes.
