On Knowing the Secret of Schools

By Thomas A. Wilson

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

--Robert Frost, "The Secret Sits"

The American way of knowing schools, particularly when there are questions about accountability, skillfully avoids what is actually happening in the classroom. Yet classrooms are the prime workplaces for the adults we pay to educate our children. We avoid the real-life complexities of teaching and learning when we take refuge in measuring student performance.

The national consensus that our schools must improve and that our youths must learn more has put tremendous pressure on our accountability system to tell us how we are doing and what we can do better. Our system does poorly at both. Its inadequacies are more often passed on to schools and teachers, rather than confronted. Since it is not based on knowing and improving actual teaching and learning, it cannot contribute much to our discussion about how to improve the practice of teaching and learning. Our methodology for knowing and relating to schools focuses on measures that relate only indirectly to...