After exploring two broad topics—PISA and AI—over the past couple of weeks, it’s time to bring things back to what has been happening at The École. For many of our Elementary and Middle School students, that has meant quite a few assessments—in both French and English. I know these aren’t exactly the highlight of the children’s week—and they’re not exactly the teachers’ favorite either (a special shout-out to our STRIVE teachers, who dedicated a considerable amount of their time to ensuring the process ran smoothly!) Fortunately, parents came to the rescue on Wednesday with treats from 80 countries, lifting all our spirits.
For my part, I attended an excellent conference yesterday on multilingualism in New York City public schools and heard about fascinating research being done on the skills children develop when they learn and work in two languages simultaneously. Dr. Alan Cheng, who is kind of the principal of New York City’s high school principals, would like to see these skills better reflected in the academic records sent to colleges and universities. He maintains that those records don’t currently tell the whole story of who students are and what they can do. His goal is therefore to transform children’s academic records across New York City by 2029.
Dr. Cheng is right: numbers can never fully capture what our students experience and learn. The assessments our students take struggle to tell the whole story, too. They are imperfect by their very nature because they separate the two languages from the get-go. The French Ministry of Education ones assess students on the skills they are expected to have acquired during the previous school year. MAP Growth, meanwhile, is based on the knowledge and skills expected in American schools, and focuses more on a student’s progress from one testing period to another rather than on what that student can do at one particular moment in time.
That certainly doesn’t mean these assessments aren’t useful—far from it. Analyzing the results gives us valuable insight into the work that needs to happen in our classrooms and where our priorities should lie, perhaps less at the level of an individual student than across the school as a whole. When a particular skill is less well mastered in one class, the reason can often be traced back to something in our approach that could have been done differently or better earlier on. This is how we continue to improve as a school.
The French assessment results also allow us to compare our students’ achievements with those of other schools. In that respect, it is always wonderful to see that our students finish Maternelle, and later Elementary, with an overall level of proficiency significantly higher than what we see in France (we don’t have comparable benchmarking tools for Middle School). When it comes to MAP Growth results, our students continue to achieve remarkable scores, placing The École among the highest-performing schools.
So, thanks to these somewhat tedious assessments, we have confirmation that all our work and our students’effort pay off. But we also know that assessments are not the be-all and end-all, because there is so much more to our students than a number, a letter, or a percentage on a report card can ever reveal.