The quest for success in education is a familiar narrative for students, teachers and home educators alike. Schools especially can often get caught up in the elusive search for success. As Christian schools, the desire to reach as many students as possible in order to make as big a kingdom impact as possible is laudable. As classical schools, the ambition to provide a rigorous education in order to propel students onto the college pathway is powerful. The urgency of achieving success now on all fronts means that most of us are confronted with the “success syndrome,” in other words, the condition whereby we give undue focus to certain markers of success to the detriment of our own well-being and the good of our students.
I am consciously borrowing from the title of an immensely important book in my life written by Kent Hughes. Pastor Hughes was close to retirement when I had the privilege of joining the pastoral staff at College Church. In the short time I worked with Kent, I gained so much from him in terms of leadership principles, homiletical theory and shepherding a congregation. I pored over Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome while serving at College Church, which helped me to see how Kent operated as senior pastor in a deeper light, but also assisted me in my fledgling and brief career as a vocational pastor. The principles from my time at College Church have lived with me beyond my time there and are nicely encapsulated in Kent’s book. I have since spent over a dozen years in education and have found that his principles carry over to schools.
How Do We Measure Success?
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” is a famous dictum of management guru Peter Drucker. Most have taken this to mean that success must be measured in clearly defined terms that are trackable over time. There is tremendous wisdom in Drucker’s phrasing, but as often occurs to great ideas, they become applied in awkward ways. Education has suffered from an unthinking application of this principle. In my March 2019 article covering speeches given at the Education 20/20 series, I brought out the educational policy of the 1990s as Yuval Levin described it. There was a bipartisan coalition that based education policy around standardized tests. Here was something measurable that could be managed.
About the same time that policy setters were promoting standardized testing as the means to educational reform, serious doubts were being raised about the effectiveness of standardized testing. James Popham’s 1999 article “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Education Quality” describes one aspect of the problem:
“The substantial size of the content domain that a standardized achievement test is supposed to represent poses genuine difficulties for the developers of such tests. If a test actually covered all the knowledge and skills in the domain, it would be far too long.”
Standardization of knowledge means chopping off a wide array of knowledge domains. Anything not showing up on the tests receives less funding, credit hours, etc. But even the knowledge domains that do show up on the tests are pared down to the bare essentials.
Standardization not only reduces knowledge, it emphasizes the average human experience. It proposes to predict future ability and achievement by comparing all test takers to a mean. In their 1998 Journal of Higher Education article “Are Standardized Tests Fair to African Americans?,” Jacqueline Fleming and Nancy Garcia look at SAT data to evaluate whether disadvantaged minorities are evaluated fairly, raising the question of the predictive validity of the test. Human beings are complex creatures and evaluating according to an average standard blunts all the colorful variety every individual possesses.
Yet the standardized test has remained one of the chief measures of success for schools. The stakes are high. College admissions and scholarships are on the line. The standardized test has held a prominent position as the gatekeeper for college and career pathways. The pressure for success has led teachers and administrators to pour time and resources into test preparation. The result can be great scores, a roster of National Merit Scholars, and placements at selective colleges. But have we really measured the success of education in the life of the student?
Student enrollment is yet another measure of success. Over the past decade many schools have struggled with enrollment. A 2017 article in the Wall Street Journal reported that enrollment in private schools had dropped by 14% between 2006 and 2016 (WSJ Dec. 29, 2017). This nationwide struggle continues today as private schools compete against each other as well as against public schools, homeschool coops, and online schools. The recession appears to have been a major factor causing many families to make educational decisions based on cost analysis over other values, such as religious affiliation or academic achievement (see the 2017 study by Lamb and Mbekeani). Is it the case, though, that all schools that have seen a decline in enrollment are unsuccessful? The inverse is equally worthy of consideration. Ought a school with increasing enrollment to be deemed a success?
Whether we look at test scores or enrollment numbers, measures of success that are based solely on numerical data often don’t tell the whole story. For Christian schools, these forms of data might even distract from the measures of success we would actually want to track. Instead of test data and enrollment numbers, we might want to track how biblically literate our students are, how involved in church and service our students are, or whether graduates have remained in the faith during college. Answers to these kinds of questions are hard to come by and rarely provide convenient measurements of yearly trends. But if the true measure of success lies in these domains, we are best served by shifting our focus to key values that are consistent with the school’s mission and vision.
Measure What Really Matters
In Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, Hughes narrates a period in his early ministry where he almost walked away from the pastorate. He experienced the “dark night of the soul” during which he recognized how he had been caught up in the drive for success evaluated along numerical lines. Church growth models of ministry define success based on attendance and membership. The feeling of failure when things don’t go according to plan is palpable. These dark feelings will be familiar with educators who are questioning the success of their schools by similar means. In response to this struggle for success, Kent and Barbara Hughes committed themselves to study the Bible for answers:
“We made a covenant to search the Scriptures and learn what God had to say about success. We fiercely determined to evaluate our success from a biblical point of view.” (31)
Their study of the Bible helped develop key biblical principles that shifted the definition of success to ideas that matter more than numerical factors.
To measure what really matters, one must detach from the game of counting heads or examining test results and reconnect with core values. Hughes reconnected himself with scripture to answer the pressing internal conflict between his passion for ministry and his drive for success. What he found was that there was “no place where it says that God’s servants are called to be successful” (35). Repeatedly in the Bible we can think about times where God worked through apparent failure to accomplish his good plan. Narratives abound along these lines. The murder of Abel, the enslavement of the Israelites, their exile at the hands of the Babylonians, the betrayal and denial of Jesus by the disciples, the sufferings and imprisonment of Paul… all point to apparent failure through which God worked.
God does not depend on human success to carry out his good plan. Instead of success as the key to ministry, Hughes says, “We discovered our call is to be faithful” (35). Faithfulness matters greatly in ministry and in life. For Kent this meant faithfulness to expositing scripture. God’s revealed word is so precious that he devoted his effort to studying and preaching scripture, which later saw him as a principal figure in the establishment of the Simeon Trust that promoted expository preaching. Kent also saw faithfulness as shepherding the people God has brought into your care. Faithfulness to God’s word and faithfulness to God’s people were concepts I learned over and over again during my time with Kent at College Church.
Faithfulness, though, is not easy to measure numerically. You can’t bank faithfulness. It doesn’t show up as a line item on a report. There is no standardized test for faithfulness. Faithfulness is a quality that is measured in time spent being obedient to a calling. Even if my ministry isn’t cranking out eye-catching numbers, I can assess my success based on the number of days I have spent faithfully carrying out the work of ministry. Faithfulness is a key concept in education. A teacher must faithfully adhere to the texts, the truths, the ideas and the wisdom that must be imparted to students. A teacher must also be faithful to the students God grants to him or her, to teach them fully and holistically, without prioritizing students with good scores over those with lower scores.
Measuring What Is Difficult to Measure
Many of the most important values in education are difficult to measure. Returning to Drucker’s notion that we need to be able to measure these core values in order to see growth in them, we must consider the nature of our educational values with a view to articulating what it means to succeed in these areas. In Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, Hughes shows what success looks like in many spiritual areas. Spirituality is hard to measure, but looking at one example will illustrate for us how to apply the proper mindset to growth in our core values.
Prayer is essential to a godly life. But it is difficult to set aside time for prayer in our intensely driven and distracted culture. Huges calls for discipline in our prayer lives, noting that prayer holds a place of primacy in the Christian walk. He quotes Ephesians 6:18, “With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit…” (77, emphasis his). Prayer is a highly valued practice, but how do we measure something like this? Even asking this question raises a thorny theological issue. If we were to measure our prayer lives, would we fall into the trap of legalism? Hughes addresses this very question.
“There is an eternity of difference between legalism and discipline. Legalism has at its core the thought of becoming better and thus gaining merit through religious exercise. Whereas discipline springs from a desire to please God.”
Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, 78
To grow in prayer, we need to have the right mindset. A mind set on exacting measurement, with the hope that it will meet some divine standard, is prone to legalism. But a mind set on maintaining a consistent, faithful communion with God will reap the benefits of a disciplined lifestyle. I can measure this consistency by setting some parameters. “I’d like to pray every day, so I will check each day I pray, with the goal of never missing more than one day, should I miss a day.” This sets a few rules by which I can track my consistency. It’s focused on a long-term goal of gaining the discipline of daily prayer. The true goal, though, is a deeper communion with God. So one could enter an additional parameter: “At the end of each day I will record a reflection on how prayer has connected me with God for the day.” A review of this daily record will give a sense of whether one is achieving success in the long-term goal of attaining a prayerful life.
Measuring True Educational Success
Many of the tools employed in education, such as standardized tests, report cards, and transcripts, measure specific areas of a student’s education, focusing almost solely on academic achievement in core subjects. Even though these areas are important, they are a very narrow slice of the student’s full education. When we understand the transformative nature of education on the whole person, it becomes clear that academic achievement is not the only area to be measured, nor is it obvious that academic achievement is the best measure of a student’s true education. One of the key reasons academic achievement receives undue focus is because it is simply easy to measure. Here we’ll explore some areas that are equally worthy of measurement, despite the fact that they are difficult to measure.
As educators, we ought to embrace the growth mindset. What this means for measuring success is that overcoming obstacles and failure is a key component of a student’s education. In mathematics, for instance, I have taught students who intuitively understand new concepts quite easily. They often receive high grades simply because the concepts come easily to them. Compare this to a different student who struggles to learn a new concept. This child has encountered an obstacle. To overcome this obstacle, the student must apply previous skills in creative new ways to assimilate and utilize the new math concept. Eventually the student arrives at the same place as the intuitive learner, but along the way the child has not received the same grades as the intuitive learner. However the student has potentially learned it at a more sophisticated level because the obstacle forces the student to examine the new concept from various alternative angles. Imagine this student struggling in multiple subjects compared to the intuitive learner. One report card shows one student to be superior in academic achievement, but there’s a fuller narrative for the other student that might actually show a more thorough learning has occurred that isn’t reflected on the report card.
One method for measuring this is to allocate a growth narrative assignment in a class. Here a student is given a chance to articulate specific avenues of growth which would then be reflected in the course grade. A method used at the schools I’ve worked at are narrative reports on report cards. This enables the teacher to share information about obstacles overcome. More and more colleges are shifting their focus away from the matrix of GPA and SAT numbers to a more narrative-influenced approach. Student essays and teacher recommendations are great ways to communicate student success in overcoming obstacles.
Difficult educational processes such as narration or discussion can be difficult to measure when compared to tests and quizzes where answers are either right or wrong. It is important, though that students aren’t simply examined on problems that have only one correct answer. Helping them articulate perspectives on complex issues or understand the depth and complexity of an author’s point can be extremely valuable to the student’s true educational growth.
Jason Barney, in his ebook available on our website, describes the art of narration. This is a practice that involves focused attention on a reading and understanding what was perceived by remembering the author’s language, the sequence of ideas and the details of the text. Every component of narration is an area of development for the child. They are called upon to narrate difficult passages and sometimes fail to ascertain all the complexity of the text. And yet through narration, each child assimilates a vast array of knowledge that is not easily tested in a standard format. Narration, then is both an educational tool for assimilating knowledge as well as a means of assessing whether students have acquired knowledge from the text.
Again we are confronted by the fact that narration doesn’t fit neatly into the categories provided by tools such as report cards and standardized tests. Narration is both extremely immediate and also of long-term consequence. By this I mean that in the very moment of learning, a student either shows they’ve assimilated knowledge or they have not fully ascertained the text, perhaps through lack of attention or because the student hasn’t fully grasped it yet. At any given point a student can know fully, partially or not at all as revealed by narration, and this fluctuates based on a variety of factors. Yet, when we look at the long-term impact of narration over the days, weeks and years of the student’s training, there is a deep and lasting impression made on the child’s mind through focused attention and assimilated knowledge. Jason writes,
“Because of this it has all the possibilities of an assessment for informing a teacher’s interventions to promote further learning. For instance, after the narration a teacher could correct a student’s narration at a key point, clarify something the child didn’t understand or ask questions to bring out a deeper understanding of the content. Modern education has called this a formative assessment, because it is intended to form or shape the ongoing process of learning, not simply to judge a student’s accomplishment for the purpose of an abstract symbol system like a grade.”
Educational success, then, should be measured not only by the final letter grade received, but through the formative processes that promote learning. Too often the formative assessment gives way to the final assessment as a measure of success, so we need to be careful that the one informs the other.
Finally, personal character is as much a part of educational formation as the acquisition of subject content knowledge. The means of measurement available to us in report cards and standardized test cannot access the character of the student. Yet if we are helping the student to life lives of meaning and purpose, personal character is tremendously valuable to their success in life. I recently came across the US Marine Corps Fitness Report that evaluates “a Marine’s performance and is the Commandant’s primary tool for the selection of personnel for promotion, augmentation, resident schooling, command, and duty assignments.” (USMC Fitness Report, pg. 1). Each Marine is evaluated according to mission accomplishment, individual character, leadership, intellect and wisdom, and fulfillment of evaluation responsibilities. I was struck by how holistically this tool comprehends an individual Marine. Under individual character, the Fitness Report evaluates courage, effectiveness under stress and initiative. Here is the definition of courage for the Marine:
Moral or physical strength to overcome danger, fear, difficulty or anxiety. Personal acceptance of responsibility and accountability, placing conscience over competing interests regardless of consequences. Conscious, overriding decision to risk bodily harm or death to accomplish the mission or save others. The will to persevere despite uncertainty.
USMC Fitness Report, pg. 2
Several aspects of this definition pertain to the combat soldier who places himself in the field of physical danger, which are beyond what would be expected of a student. But the key idea here is that courage is clearly defined. There are aspects of this definition that I would want to put before students, such as “Moral or physical strength to overcome fear, difficulty or anxiety,” “personal acceptance of responsibility and accountability” and “placing conscience over competing interests regardless of consequences.” Now we are all clear on what is expected when we talk about courage as an area of character to be developed.
The Fitness Report provides a scale to evaluate the Marine’s courage. The baseline is that the Marine would “demonstrate inner strength and acceptance of responsibility.” Here the Marine does what is expected, which is to be brave in the accomplishment of any mission. But beyond this is the second tier where the Marine “exhibits bravery in the face of adversity and uncertainty.” Here the Marine’s courage has been tried and tested, revealing that the inner conscience is guiding actions. The highest tier of the evaluation shows not only a “capacity to overcome obstacles” but also to “inspire others in the face of moral dilemmas.” Here the Marine looks not only to his own situation but guides others to have courage in the face of competing interests. This tool goes a long way toward measuring the success of something that is difficult to measure but is clearly a core value to have for a Marine.
There are many virtues that can be developed along these lines, from intellectual humility to compassion to perseverance. Success in these areas comes only through clearly articulating expectations, paying attention to the concept in various circumstances, and then providing feedback along the way. I might tell a student, “Remember how we talked about having compassion. I noticed that you shared part of your lunch with your classmate who forgot his. That’s exactly what we’re going for here.” Once again, this tends not to show up on the tools we regularly use for measuring educational success. Thus finding a means of reporting on personal character is essential if our goals are to be transformative in the lives of the students given into our care.
In closing, I hope I have helped you to overcome the persistent problem schools have in focusing so much on our typical measures of academic success. When we liberate ourselves from this undue focus, we can start to examine what truly matters as we educate our students. To be faithful to our calling as teachers, we need to identify our core values and then seek to think differently about how we measure success. Most of what we would want to measure is actually quite difficult to measure. But let’s not allow this to simply fall back on what is easy to measure, but instead apply creativity to the problem of how to promote these core values in students’ lives. We’d love to hear more about ways you’ve attempted to shift the focus away from the typical tools that measure educational success in the comments below.
