“If we do not establish what we want students to know, and the means by which we know if they got it, we are in trouble.”

As if. We’ve been doing that forever as well.

To paraphrase Jeff ‘s post above, even if we filled their heads with each and every standard, what kind of adult will any particular student be? Why can’t outcomes be measured 30 years after high school?

Why not?

I do agree that we need to establish and then commit to a set of goals for public education. The fact that we know more Americans are overweight means we have goals for health care. One that we are obviously struggling with.

OK, I’ll bite. How do we define success? The only suggestion made here would be based on a variety of test scores, the ones we’re not allowed to question without the charge of being anti-reform. I guess helping to start a new Innovation school contributes to my reform bona fides so charge me.

Unless the understood goal of education is high test scores, we have to admit that there is a lot of room to define success beyond these limited instruments. I do not believe that high test scores are our goal even though they have become a de facto end in themselves. And I’m not even sure that they correlate with the things I do believe are the goals of education.

Does a high test score predict college matriculation, graduation (on time and with good grades)? If we control for the demographic factors like SES of the family, educational attainment of the mother, etc., what’s left?

Do kids who get high test score experience more satisfaction in their jobs, relationships and adult lives? Are they engaged in the civic and/or cultural lives of their communities? Do they manage their money in intelligent ways that support their life’s goals and refrain from undermining the economy? I don’t know the answer to these questions (I do have an opinion that you can probably guess) and I don’t know of any study that confirms or denies any of these links.

Health Care protocols operate in a different environment. The goal is pretty clear – identify and cure a disease, and the indicators of success are know to correlate closely with the goals.

The process of education is less tidy (in reality health care is too) and so teachers need intuition and professional knowledge gained from serious study and practice (doctors still do that, don’t they?) of both the art and science of what we are doing. (due respect to the good TFAs I’ve met, some people are naturals, but no one would dream of dropping someone into a doctors office after a summer intensive).

And anyway, if health care protocols are so effective, then why is the US population more over weight than that of any other industrialized nation? Diabetes, heart disease, asthma, etc. are on the rise. Can we say that doctors can’t do anything if families are making themselves fat and sick? We definitely cannot say that teachers can’t do anything since families are keeping themselves ignorant.

Maybe focusing on narrowly defined goals with tightly correlated indicators isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe zooming out to a more holistic view point would do both health and education some good.