Education is a peculiar enterprise. It's expensive, it's messy, it's unpredictable, it's nearly invisible, it's mostly unmeasurable, it's mandatory (except that it isn't really), it's mysterious, it's agonizing, it's pure joy. It's a dance, a march, a ramble, a race, a rumble, a stumble, a meandering path. It's a hunch, a dazzling flash, a false start, a recurrence, three steps forward, two steps back. It's zero to 60 in hyper-drive, it's sitting still enough to hear the faintest rustle of Fall. Hear that? Can it be measured without being interrupted?
But education is also an private industry and (in some cases) a government institution. Neither industries nor governments are very comfortable with the truth about education. They want education to be a straight path, a direct line, a graduated cylinder. (In fact, in their minds, all graduates must be cylindrical. "We'll have no 'square pegs' in this graduating class, Buster!") Governments need these incremental measures for the sake of making quarterly quotas. Industry needs them for 'quality control' for predictability, and for convincing customers of their value. How are parents to know that they are spending their tuition dollars wisely if not for daily concrete measures of unambiguous progress?
It's no mystery, then, that parents have been taught by both private and government schools to expect a quarterly evaluative Matrix that records everything from shoe size to phonemic aptitude to charm, complete with percentile rankings and prognostication regarding future achievement (by month)! Parents are taught to take great comfort in percentages (which specify that Johnny has learned 84% without every solving the puzzle of '84% of what?' or "What is the value of that particular 100%?")
BUT what if a school refuses to pretend that education occurs along a non-problematic trajectory that can be divided by 13 (years), divided again by three or four (terms or trimesters) and parsed out in intelligible increments? Well, you get something like Corbett Schools. Several years ago, Corbett Schools deferred the assignment of letter grades until students reach high school. (At this point it might be objected that many elementary schools don't issue ABC grades. Ya, OK. They issue ESN or ESU grades instead. It's the same old thing, as I knew when I received my ESN elementary report cards decades ago.)
In Corbett, we report progress. Not as a precise percentage of some false standard of perfection (100%!), but as movement in the general enterprise of becoming a reader, a writer, a mathematician, a speaker, a scientist, an artist, a musician...and if you stop to consider particularly outstanding people in any of those enterprises, the first thing that might stand out is how very different the great ones are from one another. They didn't all follow the same path and they don't all have identical qualities. They were not produced, they were nurtured. That's what we hope for. We want to nurture young people, to protect them and provoke them to do something interesting and deeply human with their lives.
Grades will come soon enough. The high school is full of them. They are necessary in order for colleges and universities and scholarship committees to make sense of how we spend our time. And Corbett's graduates leave here with a transcript that can be a ticket to virtually any school in the country, limited only by the abilities and efforts of each individual student. The evidence of Corbett's success is out there, at Harvard, at USC, at OSU and U of O. At Smith, Willamette, Vassar, Reed, UPS, PU, UP, Lewis and Clark, MHCC, Sarah Lawrence...the evidence of our success is in the successes of our students. It's not in their elementary or secondary report cards. It's in their lives.
Still, how does one know that a second grader is on track for Harvard? It can't be known. Period. But one can know with certainty that someone else got there by walking this path. Kids who grew up in these same halls are making home visits from some of the best colleges and universities in the country on both coasts. Maybe that's enough. It's the best possible evidence...real people, not test scores, report cards or other abstractions.
It's possible that in spite of the availability of first-hand evidence, of real young people, some will continue to desire the illusion of certainty that only a grade Matrix can provide. We will continue to argue that to do so constitutes a desperate case of misplaced concreteness. Worse than that, it creates an atmosphere of anxiety that could well impact children. Childhood is an anxious time as it is, having to learn to share, wait in line, take turns, do as an adult asks...the last thing that children need is to worry about whether they are growing or maturing at an 'acceptable' rate. It's how so many of us have been taught by long experience to think about education and about schools. I believe it to be a kind of cultural damage that has been done. It is 'spilled milk', and I guess that means there's no crying over it.
As it has been in the past, my only advice is that parents choose the school that suits them best and trust that they made a good choice. And if they didn't, it's always OK to change. We are all only human. Always only human, and trying together to do it well and to pass along what we learn to our children. And that's why percentages don't apply. (Or if they do, they should never be hired.)
Looks like good weather for visitors. May all your butterfingers be fresh and may none of your whoppers be hollow.
