5 -- How do we know our students are learning?

"After all these years of common schooling, we still have no real way of knowing if students are learning."

Well, it's very simple right? You pass out a worksheet, maybe students diagram a sentence, find all the nouns or verbs, complete a vocabulary worksheet, and if they get a good grade, we know they are learning. You give a few quizzes, and then the big, high stakes test at the end, and they do well, and we know they are learning. You throw information at them, like shoveling coal into a furnace. They memorize preconceived content, "basic word lists" and "general information. They spit it back in more or less the same order, and we know they are learning.

And then they go home and never open a book again until the next morning. They graduate and become adults who don't read the newspaper and don't keep up with politics, who lack the critical thinking skills to analyze the claims of advertisements or the rhetoric of politicians. They go to work and they come home, and they go shopping, and they question nothing, resist nothing of the life that has been sold to them -- content, satisfied with mediocrity, satisfied to be fodder for every demagogue, evangelist, and swindler to come along. This is because all the content and general information in the world is meaningless if it without context in our students lives. They learn the facts without practicing the skills of learning. Its like teaching students how to drive by having them study a manual, instead of practicing driving.

In my more optimistic moments, I might argue that schools aren't doing so bad. I'm a product of public schools, and I think I turned out okay. I went to college, to law school, to graduate school. I think I'm reasonably informed and literate. All of my class mates have survived the public school system as well, and are now prospering in graduate school.

But then, for the most part, I am from a privileged background and my high school was rather wealthy, and I grew up in a wealthy area. It's not a fair comparison with those who haven't had the same advantages. And it is this divide of class that is the problem in the first place. The wealthy class will always get by -- we will be judged by how we educate the weakest among us.

The only way we can know that our students are learning is if things start to change, if the divide between rich and poor begins to narrow, if poor minorities are graduating with a useful education that serves them well, to help them prosper and escape poverty. If the next generation is better informed, and more active than the own before, if things begin to change for the better, that is how we know children are learning. That is much more meaningful than a score on a report card.

After saying all this, what are we left with? What are the immediate answers? The above is my personal philosophy -- it's that teaching is not a profession that offers instant gratification. We will not see the results of our work right away, it will not materialize between our eyes. Our students probably will not thank us right away for the work we do for them. I think that is something we need to let go of if we are to survive as teachers.

The results will be visible, as I said above, in the future, when our students inherit this society and we see what they do with it. Do they make it a more open and inclusive place? Do they tackle the problems we face with new ideas and new innovation? That will be the assessment that matters.