WHEN exam results are released, adverts about how students performed dominate the media. In my view, the performance of a school should not be measured by the number of first grades it gets.
Eisner Elliot, an educational researcher, warns that those wishing to exercise leadership in education must go beyond accepting the inadequate criteria used to determine that schools are doing well.
Good results cannot be used as the standard of performance. The performance of a learner studying with limited resources, with another studying in an enabling environment should be viewed differently.
Schools have different curricula and can emphasise some aspects over others. For instance, making comparisons between students’ performance in math in one district with those in another, without taking into consideration cultural differences, allocation of time for instruction or teaching approaches and exposure, makes it hard to account for the differences in performance.
Nowadays, many schools are business-minded, and bad results mean going out of business.
The reward system that pays school heads based on the performance of their students in standardised tests has consequences for a school’s priorities.
There is a danger of narrowing the curriculum to what is to be tested and dividing subjects into core subjects while marginalising others. This violates the function of schooling which is to enable students do better in life — what students learn in school should exceed in relevance to the limits of the schools programme.
We need to emphasise individuality in our assessments. Educational achievement should be assessed by the way learners use what they have studied to do what they want to do.
