No School Is Perfect

We recently moved to Cleveland from New York, and while at first we took it as a given where we would send our kids to school, after talking to a few people we gave the decision a second, much longer look - going through a similar process as we'd done two years previously in Queens. Ultimately, in both instances, we ended up sticking with our first choice; but in both processes, we were forced to think about what deficiencies the school we'd ultimately send our daughters to would have.

A friend recently pointed out an interesting article from the Jewish Week that touches on this point, albeit in a different context, that of special needs:

In short, there is a tension between our demands that our Jewish day schools be able to compete with Sidwell Friends and Choate, while deeply covering Jewish subjects, as well as comprehensively addressing special needs. There is no way around it. [...] 

When I was a kid, and went to Jewish day school, my parents made a major financial sacrifice, and accepted that they were not going to get 100 percent of what they wanted from one school. I got a decent Jewish education if not the best secular education (I did supplemental work with my parents and a tutor out of school) but on balance am grateful for the experience. It was compromise, and a lot of my education -- Jewish and otherwise -- but the goal was to imbibe the mesorah and to participate in the construction of the next generation of the Jewish community.

No school will ever be perfect. As parents, we need to determine which school is best for our children; for some, that is the school that is the most like them. For some, it is the school that provides the most specific approach, for others the most open approach; for some, it is the school with the strong Judaic or secular education; for others, it's the school with the best middos, or some combination of the above. And for many, it's "Which school can give me the best tuition break!?" All of these are valid approaches when applied correctly.

For us, though, it was less about a specific trait than about an approach: What aspects of our children's education are we least and most equipped to supplement? I bumped into an older supporter of one of the schools whose children had gone to both, and who had grandchildren in both as well. The first words out of his mouth were that I was making a mistake, and should definitely send the girls to the school that we had not chosen. (He is nothing if not open about his opinions.) We ended up having a fantastic, if quick, conversation on the subject, and he noted at one point: "I will acknowledge, [the school we picked] does a fantastic job of ingraining X." For us, it is easier to supplement our child's (say) math education than supplement X - and therefore, we chose to put ourselves in a situation where we can supplement any potential problems.

By placing children in schools which match the parents, while it helps with consistency, it also can create a redundancy - both positively and negatively. While the school's strengths may be further enhanced by equally strong parents in a given area, any lacking the school may have would only be compounded by the parents lacking the same. But by viewing the school more as a teammate in a child's upbringing, where the strengths of the school and the strengths of the parents help overcome one another's deficiencies, it can help a child become a more complete person.

A New Paradigm for Note-Passing

 
Imagine the following scenario: You work in a company where you get evaluated on your performance. You either work hard as you  can, have your personal struggles, and there are weaknesses in your performance. Then about 3 to 4 times a year, your manager sends your performance appraisal to another manager and they meet without you to discuss your performance. Afterwards both managers tell you how your performance has been, impose goals on you, and how you better improve your performance or else. Sounds crazy, right?

I was recently at a conference where someone who works in the People Analytics department at Google was talking about how they introduced an instantaneous feedback system. As an introduction, he talked about how in grade school you would get a report card in the mail, your parents would read it, and you would cover in fear after PTA. Then he described how note passing between classmates is a form of more instantaneous feedback and how they developed an internal platform to give employees instant feedback from their coworkers to help improve their performance.

From a performance management division it was kind of cool and it got me thinking about how we do performance reviews - in the classroom.

Well that's not even close to the way  teachers try to enhance performance of students in the classroom. They work hard (or not), get a report card, then the teacher and parents sit down and discuss the way that the child's performance is going to improve, what interventions or punishments to use, etc - all of this without the child's buy-in for the improvement or his/her input! There has been an effort by some to institute a character based report card as well, however there is opposition to it (from what I've heard, especially from Preparatory schools). I have also heard that some schools are starting to invite children to come to PTA meetings. I think that these are important steps to improving education.

In performance management, there are best practices to achieve higher levels of performance: The person being evaluated should rate themselves on a series of behaviors, skills, and knowledge. (Not just one performance dimension, but rather let's say 10 dimensions of their skills e.g.- motivation, knowledge, teamwork) Then the manager should rate them and they should sit down to discuss where the employee is doing well, where they are meeting expectations, and where they need improvement. The employee has the ability to explain their performance and then together they set goals and an action plan to achieve those goals. I am not an educator nor a child/school psychologist; I do however have knowledge of how performance management works. It works well to improve performance especially when the goal of the review is to develop the employee rather than decide whether they are getting a raise or promotion. I am not saying to do away completely with grades for subjects. I am saying that performance for subjects should be broken down by dimension; composition, vocabulary, grammar, etc. This will not only help students understand their weaknesses but their strengths as well.