Yesterday I had a great conversation with a school district administrator about how we measure “student success”. As I thought about this, one of the ideas that lingered in my mind is the difference between measuring student success, or measuring the impact of school and our organizations on success.
But then there is the word “success”. What does being successful mean? Many schools will share statistics regarding how many of their students go on to post-secondary, but if a student has a college degree but is unhappy, compared to a student that didn’t go to college and is, do we deem that a success? The other part of this is what role did school play in this? We state there are many factors outside of school that play in the success of a child, so would school be the sole reason a student goes to university?
The success of a school should not only be measured by what students do when they are there, but their impact on what they do after they leave. We also have to realize that the word “success” is not necessarily one that we can define for our students. As discussed with my colleagues, their impact on society also has to be a part of this. You can make a lot of money, be happy, or both, but are you a positive contributing member of the community? Again, this is not necessarily for a school to determine, but could be looked through the lens of the student.
As a survey to students after they leave school, here are three questions we could ask them to determine how we have done as schools, whether it is 1 to 100 years after the fact.
1. Do you consider yourself as a successful, contributing member to society?
2. Why did you give the answer above?
3. What impact do you think school had on your answers?
The answers will not be in nice and neat little packages, but they would tell us a lot about what our schools are doing. These three questions would not only give us some powerful data, but the shortness of this survey leaves it more likely to be answered while compiling some powerful quantitative data.
These questions could be a good start, but I would love your thoughts. How would we measure our impact on student success after they leave our schools? What questions would you ask?
P.S. This video below REALLY challenged my thinking on what being “successful” means. It would be a great video to discuss with staff and students and what schools are trying to do. Are we trying to replicate the same world we live in, or help our students to create something better?
