What Makes a School "Good"?

Assumptions about school quality can conflict with reality.

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I recently read two articles that got me thinking about what constitutes a “good school.”

One was authored by the pseudonymous blogger “Cafeteria Duty,” unmasked by Holly Korbey as Patrick Hunt, a columnist and school administrator. The piece, called “Playground Confidential,” appeared on both Hunt’s own Substack and on Korbey’s Substack, The Bell Ringer.

Hunt observes that the parents he encounters on the playgrounds of Brooklyn—apparently in affluent neighborhoods—are all anxiously searching for a “good school.” But, he says, they define “good” in a way that places no emphasis on academics or test scores. In fact, these politically progressive parents turn up their noses at standardized tests and the test prep that often accompanies them.

When Hunt looked up the scores of some of the “good schools” parents were aiming for, he found they were often mediocre or, for subgroups like students who are non-native English speakers, worse. At one sought-after school, there were no reported test scores because so many parents had opted their children out of the tests.

When pressed to define what makes a school “good,” Hunt writes, the Brooklyn parents gave vague answers about “child-centeredness” or instilling curiosity and a sense of social justice. But, Hunt argues, these parents are overlooking the value of standardized tests—not just for their own children, but also for those of the less privileged families whose causes are ostensibly embraced by those concerned about social justice.

Especially in a situation where almost all students perform below “grade level,” which is the case at many schools serving low-income populations, a letter grade may not tell parents how their child’s performance compares to that of kids at more affluent schools. Test scores can, and have, revealed inequities in a way that grades cannot.

And good test scores, Hunt writes, are “far from being evidence that the school has turned into a Dickensian abattoir of childhood innocence dominated by drill-and-kill instruction.” Rather, he argues, those scores—or, more accurately, growth in those scores—are “a reliable indicator of an equitable and supportive school culture with high expectations, good teachers, competent leadership, and evidence-based curricula filled with lots and lots of science, history, math, literature and art.”

But good score growth alone, especially at the elementary level, might not signify those things. It’s relatively easy to boost the scores of elementary students through test prep, because the tests at that level don’t assume a lot of sophisticated knowledge and vocabulary. At higher grade levels, though, when tests increasingly do assume that kind of knowledge, the gains often evaporate. That’s a sign students have not been getting “lots and lots” of the science, history, literature and art that enables comprehension of complex text. Instead, they’ve been getting lots and lots of test prep.

Test Scores Can Indicate School Quality

On the other hand, good scores can signify all the things Hunt lists. That brings me to the other article I’ve been thinking about, which appeared in the Atlantic and was written by Thomas Chatterton Williams. The headline is “Competence Is Controversial,” but the subtitle is what’s revealing about the article’s focus: “Meet the Strictest Headmistress in Britain.”

That headmistress is Katharine Birbalsingh, who founded and leads the Michaela Community School in Wembley, which Williams describes as one of the poorest neighborhoods in London. Michaela is roughly the equivalent of an American charter school. I visited in 2017, when I was researching my book The Knowledge Gap. Williams was there more recently.

Talk about test scores: Michaela is ranked as the best school in England in terms of the progress its students make between the ages of 11, when they enter, and 16, when they take—yes—a standardized test called the GCSE. Despite serving a low-income population, Michaela sees more than 91% of its students pass the English and Math GCSEs, and more than half get the equivalent of an A or A+ in five of the GCSE subjects. Those who stay on to do A-Level exams, which are required for college applications, also do amazingly well.

As Williams details, Michaela is known for its rigorous behavioral rules: silent hallways between classes, a strict uniform code, punishments for things like forgetting a pen. Williams notes that critics also charge that the school is “overly focused on test scores and rote memorization.” It sounds like a Brooklyn parent’s nightmare.

But as Williams saw, and as I saw when I visited, students at Michaela are quite happy. And they’re not just learning test prep tricks. Williams sat in on a classroom of 11- and 12-year-olds who were “involved in a spirited discussion on atheism.” I saw a class of students of the same age drafting essays on the influence of religion on England’s early development as a nation.

When I sat with some kids at lunch (visitors are encouraged to choose a table at random), I found them polite, well-spoken, and knowledgeable. One boy, for example, compared Mary Shelley’s poetry unfavorably to her husband’s (not as good as “Ozymandias,” he opined), but did give her credit for writing Frankenstein. When I asked them if there was anything they would change about the school, they couldn’t think of a thing.

It’s Not Just About Discipline

It’s nice that the Atlantic is giving Michaela some well-deserved positive publicity; the school certainly gets enough of the negative kind in the UK. But Williams falls into the usual trap of attributing its success to strict discipline and hierarchy. Those things may be necessary for creating the orderly conditions in which learning can take place. But learning—true learning—doesn’t necessarily follow.

Many of the so-called “no excuses” charter schools in the US took a Michaela-like approach to “school culture,” which essentially means a disciplinary system. (In the last several years, many have abandoned that approach in the name of social justice.) They succeeded in creating the calm environment that enables students to learn and teachers to teach. But most didn’t have good information about what to do next.

It was as though they had set the stage beautifully, but when the curtain went up, they were using a script that didn’t work—or only worked in the short term. They produced kids who might do well on a third-grade standardized test but eventually struggled to, say, write a coherent essay in high school.

What distinguishes Michaela from those US charter schools—and from virtually every school in the US—is its fierce commitment to the principles of cognitive science. Yes, teachers require students to memorize things, including poems, but they don’t treat memorization as an end in itself. Rather, guided by the evidence, they view memorization as the necessary foundation for higher-order thinking. Perhaps just as crucial, they explicitly teach students how to write about what they’re learning.

No doubt it helps that standardized tests in England are grounded in specific topics in the national curriculum. In the US, “reading” tests attempt to measure comprehension in the abstract, which not only is impossible but also distorts the curriculum to focus on “skills” that are largely illusory. But the problem in the US goes deeper than test prep. It has to do with the way educators view the nature of learning.

Teaching Guided by Cognitive Science

Those outside the education world may be surprised to hear that education orthodoxy—in both the US and the UK and some other English-speaking countries—has long dismissed memorization, and even the transmission of knowledge, as not only unnecessary but harmful. Prospective teachers learn that it's much better to have students discover information through inquiry.

Those views, which fly in the face of lots of evidence from cognitive science, have seeped into the consciousness of affluent parents not only in Brooklyn but throughout much of the developed world. While the children of less highly educated parents suffer the most from an education system based on erroneous assumptions, the offspring of the well-off are not immune. I’ve spoken to parents who are journalists and PhDs who are distraught that no one has, for example, taught their children to compose a coherent essay or even a paragraph.

It would be interesting to know how Michaela’s graduates stack up academically against the graduates of the schools Brooklyn parents revere as “good.” If experience in the UK is any guide, they would do quite well. “One joke I heard repeatedly in conversations about Michaela,” Williams writes, “was that a savvy posh family could spare the £50,000 annual tuition for Eton, purchase a flat in Wembley, and rest assured that their child would enjoy the same outsize chances of gaining admission to Oxford or Cambridge.”

But what about creativity and self-expression, I can hear the Brooklyn parents cry? That might not suffer either. When I was at Michaela, I was so impressed by the student artwork hanging on the walls that I asked Birbalsingh if the school selected kids for their artistic ability.

“No,” she told me. “We just teach them how to draw.”