What do students actually need to thrive in the "real world"?
An interview with a standards-based grading specialist makes me acknowledge the opportunities and limitations of education to prepare students for the "real world."
What do students actually need to thrive in the “real world”?
This week, I revisited my interview with Candace Borro, a standards-based grading specialist, for a final round of edits. Standards-based teaching woos me: it offers opportunities to create more equitable assessment structures; it provides more frequent avenues to mastery for a greater number of students; it can (when implemented effectively) streamline teachers’ workflows. Its cheerleaders also tout the structure as a better way to prepare more students for their future lives as workers. This might be true, but the I want to think about that claim more deeply before I believe it.
Standards-based curriculum design and teaching decenters what educators call summative assessments – the tests, essays, and presentations that make up thirty or forty percent of a grade in a standard middle or high school class. In their stead, teachers and schools identify a broad array of academic and dispositional skills, some of which are discipline-specific and some of which are not, that offer students multiple ways to accomplish mastery at a more individualized pace. I encourage you to read my interview with Borro, in which she outlines her processes in more detail and more effectively than I can.
Some of the most appealing benefits of a more standards-based model are easily measurable: teachers and school districts that make the standards-based move generally report a significant lift in student motivation and well-being. At a time when students feel increasingly disconnected from their learning and teenage suicidality rates are multiplying, teachers, schools, and parents yearn for any intervention that will make a dent in those concerns. Standards-based learning makes more than a dent, and to me, every motion toward a standards-based model that a teacher, school, coach, or institution can make represents a step toward a happier society.
A Google search surfaces significant numbers of peer-reviewed studies (I liked this one) suggesting that standards-based learning increases the depth, breadth, and “stickiness” of learning. Any professional person who’s attested to not really using or remembering much material from primary, secondary, or tertiary education knows the problem of stickiness, which is a buzzword (more en vogue 6-10 years ago) to stand in for the idea that people often learn and then forget what they learn in quick succession. Standards-based grading builds motivation and well-being, and it also creates avenues to more lasting and profound understanding for more students.
What I’m not sure about is whether or not these benefits actually benefit students in the work world any more than existing practices, which signal to students and parents a general focus on performance under pressure, competition, ranking, and a narrower set of skill mastery and behavior. Systems produce the products that they produce for a reason; I certainly believe that a lot of top independent schools have not embraced standards-based curricula because they, and the parents who hold stake in the schools, believe that a critical lesson for kids who aim to sustain their inordinate privilege is the lesson that some people are better than others and therefore more deserving of advantage. In response to the deep interest in hierarchical, high-pressure achievement, schools lean into grade inflation or “flatness” (when most students earn the same grades) because, of course, those schools want to tell all of their kids that they are the top of the heap and worthy of the privilege they hold. That’s the problem that Borro notes in our interview of “top schools” that send off college transcripts with all As. No one likes when this happen, but few people are ready to recognize the deep irony that our counterintuitive obsession with win-lose experiences really just fosters environments in which every kid still wins (and mistakes or shortcomings aren’t learned from but swept under the rug).
Many people who we would call successful say that these winning-centric, ranking-centric activities and institutions are key to their preparation for the real world, because competition, especially in a global capitalistic world, is a part of life and, some would argue, progress. If a traditionally successful person didn’t find school particularly meaningful, they often name that sports or clubs were; avenues from college sports teams to the boardroom still thrive, and some of the reasons for those pipelines are that a rankings-based system, and its competitive outcroppings, does prepare some people well for their future work in a world of winners and losers.
The problem, I think, is that naming losers among children tends to train them to assume ranking as a title, not merely a position. If you learn that you have “it” or you don’t based on a series of high-pressure measurements before your prefrontal cortex is formed, you’re screwed. Similarly, if you achieve too much, too soon, you’re less likely to develop the resilience to face true difficulty. What looks like the “real world” doesn’t prepare kids well to learn and grow regardless of initial performance – and Borro’s right that that kind of learning is what we need.
Teaching kids through pressure-cooked, summative-assessment-centered that how you are on one day matters more than how you learn every day might prepare them for some parts of “real life,” but it’s not the way to pursue the greatest good for the greatest number. Because of the way that traditional assessment structures in schools crystallize in the developing child’s mind, it’s possible that they actually actively restrain us as a nation from fostering democratic ideals, specifically the ideal of equal rights and access to opportunity for all (not just those who show up at the right place and the right time).
In fact, when critical thinking and mind-changing seems out of vogue, one could argue that we as a society crave an attitude that prioritizes learning and deemphasizes winning.
Borro says that a mastery-based system prepares people for a different kind of work. She says:
“[Mastery-based learning] shows kids that when they take the time to relearn and reassess, they see improvement – they’re not dinged for not having understood sooner. That more appropriately mirrors how the world works. If you’re not good at something, and then you get it, people notice the fruit of your labor. We want to build the practice in students to take feedback, reflect on it, act on it, improve, and then demonstrate mastery so that they can move on without lingering on the fact that they didn’t ‘get’ it the very first time. Really, this isn’t just about redesigning assessment; rather, it’s about redesigning the feedback loop and making sure that we build student reflection so that teachers aren’t the purveyors of learning. These are the dispositions that we all want in our colleagues, employees, and supervisors, so let’s build them in our children.”
I’d argue that Borro overreaches when she says that achieving skill mastery at one’s own pace “more appropriately mirrors how the world works.” I think that, by the end of this outtake, she’s more on the nose: a system like this is aspirational, reflective of how we would want the world to work. Not all skills and abilities come without work toward them, and most teachers can name that successful students usually display both a consistent work ethic and a certain set of predispositions that make work either within a particular subject or within school as a whole easily accessible to them. I always thrived in school, but a simple Strengthsfinder test (the kind of personality test that you might take in a college career services office) reveals that my greatest strength, by far, is “Input,” or the passion for taking in and organizing new information. Of course I thrived in school, because it was made for people like me. I didn’t thrive in the social organization that school created, and so for a long time, I assumed that I would never feel “successful” in a more social leadership position. I’ve recently come to question the truth of that assumption, but our youthful habits can be difficult to unlearn. My own life and career trajectory is a testament to the fact that the path to opportunity and growth often requires many, many opportunities to restrategize and reimagine. My inordinate privilege to have those opportunities is impossible to quantify.
Standards-based curriculum doesn’t more accurately prepare people for the work world into which they’ll enter – but it should. I would argue that, ultimately, standards-based curriculum will only complete its mission of motivating students toward work in an optimally transferable manner if work itself, at all levels, shifts to center learning and growth over time in place of immediate satisfaction of output aims.
Borro said it herself: “Points and averages are really ranking and sorting systems. If a school’s goal is to develop the potential of every student, the way that they measure student potential, progress, and achievement needs to change.” I would argue that the only way standards-based curriculum can be implemented on a broad scale, the only way that it can truly transform our schools, is if all of the think tanks and politicians and business magnates focusing on the “#futureofwork” adopt similar or related models. Such models would flatten internal hierarchies, measure success as not only short- but also long-term achievement, and root assessment of worker efficacy more broadly. Is it possible to have a world in which we learn ways of being in school that carry forward and also build the world around it?
Teachers and school leaders thinking about future of schools have to be talking to professionals thinking about the future of work, and vice versa. We’re asking the same questions and our design can, and I’d argue should, align.
You could say that integration of thinking about work and education structures would lead to a socialist model of work and school, and it might. (West) German schools after World War II can represent an interesting case study in centralized planning of systems around workplace imperatives. Really, it’s an efficiency and problem-solving model. It wouldn’t be revolutionary: all schools, I would argue, reflect in their assessment structures and discipline systems the expectations and opportunities that our society overall anticipates for the students that attend them. We already live in a country in which the real-world, real-life expectations for people in this country are fully integrated into our schools; in order for the schools to truly change and for effective systems within schools to efficiently carry students into the adult workforce, the workplace expectations (the feeling of work, the lifestyle of work) need to evolve. They have to go together, and they have to have at their core a true belief in, investment in, and desire for the thriving of all, not just some.