The Christian School Journal: Do our Schools Exaggerate the Truth?

Escaping the Awesome Excellence of Hyperbole and Facing Reality

By Mark Kennedy

Have you noticed the popular use of hyperbole in describing common place things? For example the word “awesome” used to apply to that which inspired worshipful fear or wonder. Now people attach “awesome” to anything from a hamburger to a hairstyle when they really mean “delicious” or “attractive” or simply “acceptable”.

Exaggeration isn’t just limited to superficial things. In the last few years the hyperbolic buzz word in education has been “excellence”. Promotional literature in schools of every kind claims “This is a school of excellence”. That concerns me for several reasons. First it sounds a lot like boasting and I am not sure that boasting is a Christian virtue. It is one thing to say that a school is striving for excellence but quite another to claim that excellence has already been achieved.

Furthermore the word “Christian” in a school’s name does not guarantee academic quality .A few decades ago some people assumed that a Christian school would naturally have a strong academic program as well as an outstanding spiritual emphasis. After years of observation I have concluded that, in the word’s of Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess, “It ain’t necessarily so!”

If a Christian school can’t supply objective empirical evidence for claims of excellence it is no more credible than a restaurateur who says his meatloaf is “exquisite” or a car salesman who says a second hand vehicle is ‘like new’ because it is on “Born Again Billie-Bob’s Used Car Lot”.

So once we escape from the fantasy world of awesome excellent hyperboles we need to look carefully at what student achievement test results can tell us about the quality of Christian school academics.

Every fall ACSI publishes Stanford Achievement Test results in our teachers’ convention programs. They show that member schools students perform better in language and mathematics than their public school counterparts. At first glance that seems to affirm our teaching effectiveness. But are we making a fair comparison considering:

many of our schools do not enroll students with serious academic problems and/or socio- economic handicaps - public schools have little choice in these matters,
a high percentage of ACSI school parents are actively involved in their children’s education and parental involvement is in itself a major influence in a student academic success ?

Our students had these 2 advantages when they first enrolled. Stanford does not show that we are doing a better job of teaching or that our students are doing a better job of learning .It shows that our students are ahead of public school students but it doesn’t explain why . And that is hardly the point anyway. The most valuable use of Stanford results is not to provide ammunition for any misguided battle against the public school system. The best use of any standardized testing is to show schools their academic weaknesses and strengths so they can make necessary improvements and so later they can evaluate the effectiveness of those improvements.

A more telling comparison appeared in the U.S. Department of Education’s 2003 National Assessment of Education Report that compared public and private school student achievement in grades 4, 8 , and 12 .It involved 700 public and 530 private schools .In an attempt to make a fair comparison the study’s authors tried to factor socio-economic considerations into their scoring – an unfortunately subjective and flawed approach that favored the public schools .The results for “conservative Christian schools” (like ACSI member schools) were alarming . In the critical subjects of language and mathematics Lutheran, Catholic and other private school students out performed both public and conservative Christian school students.

“For conservative Christian schools the average adjusted school mean in reading was not significantly different from public schools ……In mathematics the average adjusted school mean for conservative Christian schools was significantly lower than that of the public schools.” (National Assessment of Education Report, 2003, page 7). Even if we ignore the public school results, our students generally scored lower than students in other private school groups .And that is just in the United States .Although International academic tests do not isolate Conservative Christian Schools they consistently rank students from the United State in the bottom half of industrialized nations academically. So from a global perspective American students are barely mediocre academically and Christian school students are far from being the best of that mediocre group.

So what?

Why should we care? Isn’t it enough to give our students a solid grounding in the faith and, as a distant second benefit, to prepare graduates for good jobs and comfortable lives?

No, it is nowhere near enough!

We in Christian schools are not called to help students conform to a culture of “personal peace and affluence” as Francis Schaeffer puts it .We are called to help shape the future of individual students and consequently to transform the future of the church, of society and of the world. And the world, society and the church desperately need our graduates to be thoroughly and skillfully equipped in all aspects of their educational experience including their academics.

For that to happen at least 4 changes need to occur.

Academic improvement must become a much higher priority for Christian schools. Complacency in this matter will do a gross disservice to our students and to the future. So will making excuses for weak results on national and international standardized tests.
Selection of curriculum materials must be guided both by concern for moral content and by an intentional plan to develop higher level thinking and learning skills. In the past Christian schools have been prone to use learning materials that encouraged memorization and fact recall. According to Bloom’s “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives” that is the lowest of the 6 levels of planned educational outcomes, the lowest rung on the ladder of thinking skills development. We must seek something better.
We need to transform our teaching methods. When students in other countries are out performing our kids shouldn’t we find out what Asian and European teachers are doing right and learn to use their techniques? To that end I recommend 2 books :

The Learning Gap by Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler

A Touchstone Book published by Simon and Shuster

The Teaching Gap by James W. Stigler and James Hiebert

Published by the Free Press, a division of Simon and Shuster

4. Christian schools must be actively involved in programs that emphasize

academic improvement and accountability .For that purpose ACSI offers the

STAR and School Accreditation programs (see www.acsi.org). Even more challenging is the International Baccalaureate program which requires schools to meet international academic standards from kindergarten to grade 12 ( see www.ibo.org ) .

Frankly it is a lot easier to ignore reality and return to the fantasy world of hyperbolic boasting where our schools are always the best of the best. But in the final analysis Christian schooling is about truth ,even if it reveals our shortcomings .That truth should humble and challenge us to genuinely pursue excellence both in our spiritual and academic programs – and that is no hyperbole !

Mark Kennedy , B.A.,OTC has been Regional Director for ACSI Eastern Canada for the past 19 years. He has written various CSE magazine articles ,was a contributing author for The Handbook for Christian Living and recently completed the manuscript for a book entitle Canoe trips into Thin Places.