The main subject of the dissertation I wrote for my doctorate was “school effectiveness.” Choosing this subject was driven by a personal belief that the school contributes most to an individual’s development. It is in school where a person formally acquires and develops most of the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values they need and ought to have.

I placed emphasis on the word “formally” in the preceding paragraph, for it could be argued that the home and the church also contribute to an individual’s formation.

It is true, but not all parents are trained educators. Teachers (presumably) are. And not all families are functional. The dysfunctional ones may fail to help in the proper development of an individual. A school is, presumably, always functional. This is not to say that the home does not contribute to an individual’s development — it does, but not as comprehensively as the school could.

What about the Church?

An individual cannot be forced to embrace religion. Many people have none. And even those who profess a religion cannot be obliged to go to church or attend services during days of spiritual obligation. Thus, religious institutions may contribute little, if at all, to an individual’s development. A young person, on the other hand, cannot avoid going to school. No parent in their right mind would want their children to go without an education. For as long as the family can afford it, children will be sent to school from basic to tertiary education. And even when a family lacks the resources for private schooling, government-run or government-subsidized schools serve as an alternative.

The school carries on its broad shoulders the task of ensuring that the students entrusted to it acquire and develop the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values they ought to possess. The school, already acknowledged as an extension of the home, should even be ready to serve as a vehicle of the church in spreading the gospel — except, of course, in societies where religion is not part of the culture.

The school, then, cannot afford to be mediocre. Schools, as a matter of course, should always be a paragon of excellence.

But how do we measure excellence in schools?

Excellence is an abstract concept, but it can be tested empirically. The excellence of schools can be quantified through existing measures of school effectiveness.

Existing literature suggests that measuring school effectiveness requires accounting for student performance or achievement. Scheerens¹ refers to school effectiveness as “the performance of the organizational unit called school. The performance of the school can be expressed as the output of the school, which in turn is measured in terms of the average achievement of the pupil at the end of the period of formal schooling.”

Student achievement in basic skills is undoubtedly the most widely used criterion for defining an effective school. Sergiovanni² explains that an effective school is one in which students perform well in basic skills as measured by standardized tests. Schools, therefore, take pride whenever their students top government examinations — proficiency exams for basic education students and board exams for college graduates.

But are grades and scores on standardized tests and government examinations a valid measure of school effectiveness?

Sergiovanni’s model, and similar approaches to quantifying school effectiveness, have been criticized as unidimensional and insufficient. Critics argue that focusing exclusively on academic achievement ignores the relationship between effectiveness in academic outcomes and effectiveness in other dimensions — citizenship training, the development of self-esteem, independence training, and the development of self-discipline.

This overemphasis on academic outcomes has made society too obsessed with grades.

Schools are believed to have purposes beyond teaching basic skills. School effectiveness, therefore, should not be measured only by whether graduates can read, write, and compute, or by how well they perform on government examinations.

Effectiveness should be measured along other dimensions as well. To measure school effectiveness through Sergiovanni’s model alone is to take a myopic view of the purposes of education — it considers only the intellectual purpose of schooling, which, according to McNergney and Herbert³, includes the teaching of basic cognitive skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics, and the transmission of specific knowledge. McNergney and Herbert identify other purposes of education as well — political, social, and economic.

A comprehensive measurement of school effectiveness should attempt to quantify how schools perform across all of these dimensions.

It is beyond dispute that schools play a vital role in the development of the individual and in nation-building. They cannot, therefore, disregard their political and social purposes.

Measuring the effectiveness of schools should not stop the moment their students graduate. How those students perform in the workplace and in society as they grow older should also be considered.

The school is the vehicle for the delivery of education, and the quality of education that a citizenry and its leaders receive through the educational system determines whether a nation is destined for greatness or condemned to socio-economic stagnation.

A nation, it is said, is only as good as its citizens. One measure of school effectiveness, then, is the kind of citizens — the kind of members of society — that schools produce.

Whatever a country’s condition at the moment, whether progressive and peaceful or not, is what its citizens have made it to be. And how the citizens have made their nation reflects the kind of education they received from their schools.

Measuring school effectiveness this way, admittedly, is difficult. But even the simplest of minds can easily answer the following:

Which school is more effective — the one that produced graduates who topped board examinations, or the one that produced responsible, productive, and conscientious citizens and leaders?

Which schools are effective — those that produced topnotchers in standardized and board examinations, or those that produced citizens and leaders who contribute positively to the betterment of society, the nation, and the world?

The answer, I think, is self-evident — yet our systems of accreditation, our league tables, and even our own instincts as parents keep reaching for the test score anyway, because it is easier to count than character. Perhaps that, in the end, is the truer measure of a school’s effectiveness: not merely what its graduates score, but what they become, and what they choose to build with what their education gave them.

References:

1. Scheerens, Jaap. Effective Schooling: Research, Theory and Practice.

2. Sergiovanni, Thomas. The Principalship: A Reflective Practice Perspective.

3. McNergney, Robert & Herbert, Joanne. Foundations of Education: The Challenge of Professional Practice.