Grading Schools

This is an unpublished letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press.

It may be that the provincial government is pandering to the Manitoba Teacher’s Society and protecting schools from public scrutiny, as your editorial “Schools need to be graded” states. Yet in your vehement rush to condemn you fail to acknowledge that the kind of accountability that can be measured in standardized testing only validates a fraction of what public education is and is meant to be.

Publishing scores focuses the public attention on a school's ability to teach concrete facts and figures—the reasoning, critical-thinking and deeper understanding we expect of students is harder to test. On the important but impossible to test end of the spectrum we have things like: the spirit and dedication (or lack thereof) of the school’s staff, the capacity to transmit and inspire genuine feeling and the ability to help students develop a positive sense of community and self.

Public discourse tends to devolve into a shallow dialogue about academic achievement when accountability is raised in the media because that is the only thing we can reliably measure. However, a good education is not just about the A, B and C’s.