How to improve our schools | Eastern North Carolina Now

I've told this story many times before, but it bears repeating.

    When I was a principal at a large high school in Wake County back in the 80's the first year we used computers to schedule students' classes we used the old punch card system. For those who don't remember they were cardboard cards about 3X8 inches with holes punched them to impart data to the "card reader". Those data were then processed by the computer. You put the student's courses on one card for each student and then you had "header" cards that input the master schedule.

    The keypunch operator made an error on one card and put the number for "honors" on two header cards but labeled the classes "regular". This meant that about 60 of our regular ability students got assigned to two sections that were entitled Honors. The teacher (one of our best) taught both classes as though they were comprised of top notch academic students. Only at the end of the semester when grades were being recorded in the permanent records did we discover the "error."

    Then we found something amazing. Most of the 60 regular students did as well or better in the course taught as Honors as did the Honors students in the other classes that were really Honors.

    Moral of the story: Expectations matter.

    This is nothing new. It is so well known and documented in educational research there is even a name assigned to the phenomenon. It's call the Pygmalion Effect. The idea is that if you expect more from students then more of them will achieve more than if you set the expectation low.

    I know this is going to sound racist and for many years we who went through the early years of school desegregation knew it but kept quiet about it for politically correct reasons. When the all-white schools were consolidated with the all-black schools there was immense social and educational tension in these desegregated schools. To deal with those tensions, many teachers adjusted their standards, both academic and behavior/discipline standards to "accommodate" students who had been used to different standards. The blame for this I now put on white administrators who imparted expectations to white teachers that their expectations should be "realistic." In my experience the black teachers either maintained their prior standards or in most cases raised them. This was especially true for discipline/behavior standards.

    Incidentally, what I have just described is what they mean when you hear someone talk about the "vestiges of segregation." It took years to overcome some of these vestiges, and I'm not sure we have yet done so completely.

    One vestige I believe we have not only not overcome, but indeed have institutionalized into the modern system for most students and teachers who have no clue about the historical segregated system is that we have institutionalized mediocrity in public education. We are now seeing the same phenomenon with "English as a second language."

    I blame the teachers' unions in other states, and thankfully that has not been as true in North Carolina as in some states such as Illinois, Michigan, California etc.

    But most of the blame must be put on politicians.

    Politicians want to run as supporters of "Education." No wonder...it get votes. But they also want to be able to have some substantiation that they were "Education Governors" etc. So they developed an accountability system, based for the most part on standardized tests, that could be manipulated to produce "proof" of how much "progress" was being made.

    I will never forget a presentation made by Jeff Moss to the Beaufort County Board of Education one time after the test scores came back in which he proclaimed, with his chest poked out, that "we're making progress" according to these test scores. The truth was that the test scores showed most students making less than "statistically significant" progress and when compared to the common sense analysis that the demands of the real world were increasing it actually meant our students as a whole were falling further behind. Not one board member, including a former principal (Robert Belcher) nor the current chairman (Mac Hodges) raised one question about the presentation. Why? No doubt because they intended to use the 'dog and pony' show to garner credit for the outstanding job they were doing.

    So last week we saw a controversy created in Florida when the State Board of Education of that state adopted student performance goals by racial category.

    What is needed in Beaufort County and North Carolina is an accountability system that measures how much progress each individual student makes compared to how much progress that student could be reasonably expected to make in a year of school. Teachers should be evaluated on the percentage of their students who met this standard, the percentage that exceeded it by a statistically significant amount and the percentage of their students who failed to meet the standard expected of each one of them. Schools should be measured accordingly. That is, the proportion of their students who meet the individual standard, who exceeded it and the percent who failed to make expected gains.

    The technology is currently available to manage such a system. Setting individual progress can be computed very accurately and a policy can be applied that sets expected gains based on "stretch goals" for each student. That's where the emphasis should be placed. Tell students they are expected to meet the expected but if they achieve higher goals they will be rewarded. The report card grading system and the testing programs should be adapted to reflect this.

    Teacher unions will oppose it because they don't want any kind of accountability for student achievement, except the subjective assessments teacher can manipulate. But politicians will be happy, if they can brag that it was their idea and IT people will be jubilant.

    But what hopefully would happen is that we would change the system from focusing on minimum performance of groups of students to one of meritocracy based on individual student performance. It would be a way to instill in young children that achievement matters and that there is no virtue in making a "C" if you should be making a "B" and could be making an "A."

    Just think of what that would do to the Real World when these "producers" got out there.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.