Report Cards and Soda Pop

School isn't really about school. It's a place to learn things so that when you are not in school you can live a thoughtful and compassionate life. In short, school is about non-school. This is important to consider because we forget it fairly often. It's especially forgotten when Departments of Education publish report cards, not to mention when students drink soda pop.

There have been two articles in the last week that at first seem disparate, but which both speak to the same concern I have for education. The first describes the City of New York's system for assessing and ranking its schools throughout the five boroughs. The second reveals that removing soda machines from schools does little to curb students' consumption of it. At the heart of both is an inherent forgetfulness that schooling is nothing if students don't take it out into the world with them. School, remember, isn't about school.

The City's report card system for assessing the effectiveness of its schools uses a multi-layered, extensive process that includes test scores on math and literacy, assessors of quality (consultants from England...Cambridge, I think) who spend a few days interviewing members of staff and students, touring classrooms, and greatly following a regimen prescribed by the principal. Parents are also surveyed. In the words of the grading system's creator, it is "the only school-accountability system in the country where the results could not be predicted by poverty or race, since all results are adjusted based on demographic peer performance. He also said that, analyzing the data, school size and class size do not appear to be important factors affecting progress on test scores." That all sounds wonderful. However, there are many flaws to it. I'll leave it to the numerous critics of the system to spell out most of these flaws. I'd like to add one I've not heard.

The underlying problem of the school-accountability system is that it focuses on the schools. Granted, there is a need to ensure certain functionality--school culture, safety, teacher experience. But, what happens when students leave school? Do they read at home or on the train in the morning? Do they speak about politics or literature with friends online at night? The measure of education shouldn't be just what happens in school--it's much more about what students take with them when the academic doors shut behind them. They are only in school (at a very generous estimate) for seven hours a day, five days a week, ten months out of the year. What of their schooling follows them for the other seventeen hours per day, two days a week, and two months? Well, they are drinking soda, apparently.

The soda machine article supports this idea that school is about non-school. It would be reasonable to think that if soda machines are taken out of schools--where students spend chunks of their lives--there would be a decline in the drink's use. But this isn't the case. It's not the case because, though we shudder to think it, students are only students when they are in school. Otherwise, they are live, breathing, decision-making human beings.

Schools must do a better job, and teachers especially, at making students find the meaning of school outside of school. Some researchers have already begun trying to do this. Elizabeth Birr Moje, as one example of many, has studied how students conflate the various spaces they encounter each day: school and non-school especially. Another researcher, Lalitha Vasudevan, studies young people's use of multi-modal literacies, which seem to both serve and subvert institutions like school and home. These researchers need help, however, from the classroom.

I would add that teachers must take up the charge to confront the internecine role-playing that goes on within school walls: the role of teacher and the role of student. We must move beyond the facade of report cards and become much more serious about our work as educators. We, as pedagogues, have a lot to learn from soda pop.