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Stanford GSB News

 

Schools Need More than High Test Scores

November, 2003

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Raising standardized test scores is a laudable goal, but if a school really wants to thrive in the long term, it needs to pay close attention to its values, panelists agreed in an Oct. 30 program at Stanford University.

VanderArk

VanderArk

"When parents are looking at schools for their children they may look at test scores, but that's a secondary consideration," said Tom VanderArk, executive director of education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. For most families, he said, the most important thing about a school is "a sense of what its expectations are and how people treat each other in the place."

In the program titled "Leading Visionary K-12 Education Organizations," VanderArk, a former business consultant and public school superintendent now responsible for the Gates Foundation's K-12 education grants and scholarship programs, was joined by Jerry Porras, the Lane Professor of Organizational Behavior and Change, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Their discussion was moderated by Michael Krasny, host and senior editor of San Francisco KQED Radio's award-winning Forum.

VanderArk likened the current "testing mania" in American public schools to a high-pressure business climate in which the focus is almost exclusively on quarterly earnings and short-term results. Raising children's test scores can be an important goal for a school, he said, but if it replaces any sense of moral purpose, that institution is not going to be a long-term success. "Today especially, educators have to be really zealous about their school's culture," he told the audience in Bishop Auditorium. "They need to think carefully about how they're going to treat each other and how they're going to interact with young people."

Porras

Porras

Porras, whose research focuses on the characteristics of visionary companies such as Hewlett-Packard and 3M, agreed on the importance of core values in the school setting—ideals like integrity, innovation, and respect. "You can set all these politically attractive goals," he said, but if companies or schools don't have an overarching sense of purpose, over time they will just wander. When it comes to educating children, Porras added, "there are healthy processes and there are less healthy processes. If you only look at output, you fall into traps."

Another way to judge a school—besides looking at its values—is to see how many of its students leave ready for the next stage of their lives. While the national high school graduation rate is about 70 percent, the real fraction of graduating seniors ready for college-level work is about a third, VanderArk lamented, "and you can cut that in half when you're talking about low-income kids." Part of the problem, he said, is that most urban schools and school districts are too big to be administered properly. Many districts have problems with high superintendent turnover. Perhaps the biggest reason for high dropout rates, though, is that American secondary schools are just plain dull.

"I was just at a high school in Los Angeles," VanderArk told the audience, "and most of the students were bored out of their minds." He noted that American high school students actually do have a lot of choice in education, "but it's all the wrong kind. Today we assume that every kid within a boundary ought to go to the same high school, and then they choose from 100 courses of varying degrees of difficulty with little or no adult guidance. They build their own curriculum. We assume they have the knowledge and motivation to do that successfully, and it's a disaster for 75 percent of our kids."

At the Gates Foundation, he said, "our notion is that instead of the comprehensive high school, there ought to be three or four types of choices, and the least-advantaged kid ought to have access to the same options as the most-advantaged." The foundation's eventual goal, he said, is to help lift the national high school graduation rate from 70 percent to 80 percent and to ensure that all those who do leave 12th grade "are ready for college work and citizenship."

Porras' and VanderArk's appearance was organized by the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute, a joint effort by the Graduate School of Business and the School of Education to support the professional development of current and emerging K-12 leaders. The program was co-sponsored by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, a new publication from the Business School's Center for Social Innovation that highlights innovative ideas in nonprofit management, philanthropy, public policy, and corporate social responsibility.