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 that an individual formally acquires and develops most of the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values they need and ought to have.

I emphasize 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 not contribute to an individual’s proper development. A school (presumably also) is 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 can not be forced to embrace religion. Many people do not have a religion. And even those who profess to have religion can not be obliged to go to church and attend masses (or church services) during days of spiritual obligations. Thus, religious institutions may not help (or may contribute only a little) to an individual’s development. On the other hand, a young person can not avoid going to school. No parents 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 forced to attend school from basic to tertiary education. And even if a family may not have enough financial resources to access expensive private education, schools run (or subsidized) by the government may 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 necessary knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values they ought to possess. The school, which is already acknowledged as an extension of the home, should even be ready to become a vehicle for the church in spreading the gospel… except, of course, in societies where religion is not part of their culture.

Thus, the school cannot afford to be mediocre. The schools, as expected, should always be a paragon of excellence.

But how do we measure excellence in schools?

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

Existing literature suggests that, to measure school effectiveness, student performance or achievement should be taken into consideration.  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.  Sergiovani² explains that an effective school is one in which students perform well in basic skills as measured by standard tests. Thus, schools take pride whenever their students top government exams – proficiency in certain subject areas for basic education students and board exams for college graduates.

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

Sergiovanni’s model (and similar approaches in quantifying school effectiveness) is being criticized as unidimensional and insufficient. Critics argue that focusing exclusively on academic achievement overlooks the relationship between achieving effectiveness in academic outcomes and effectiveness in other dimensions, such as citizenship training, development of self-esteem, independence training, and development of self-discipline.

Focusing too much on academic outcomes has made society too obsessed with grades.

Schools are believed to have purposes and goals other than teaching basic skills. Schools’ effectiveness, therefore, should not be measured only in terms of whether the graduates could read, write, and compute and could get good grades and perform well in government examinations.

The effectiveness of schools should be measured in other dimensions as well. Measuring school effectiveness through Sergiovani’s model takes a myopic view of the purposes of education. It takes into consideration 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. There are other purposes of education which they (McNergney and Herbert) identified – political, social and economic.

A comprehensive measurement of school effectiveness should attempt to quantify schools’ performance across all the aforementioned areas.

It is hard to deny that schools play a very important role in individual development and nation-building. Thus, they cannot afford to disregard their political and social purposes.

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

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

It is believed that a nation is as good as its citizens. One measure, then, that could be used to assess the effectiveness of schools is to determine what kind of citizens (and members of society) they produce.

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

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

Which school is more effective? Is it the school that produced graduates who topped board examinations or the school 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 are contributing positively to the betterment of society, nation, and the world?

__________

References:

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

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

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