What is school for, anyway?

One of the prompts for #IMMOOC Season 4, Week 1 is: What do you see as the purpose of education? I was starting to think about my answer, but then I came across George's own paragraph in the Introduction to Innovator's Mindset:

"My focus is not on whether kids can knock it out of the park on some science test in grade three. What I care about is that kids are inspired to be better people because of their experiences at my school."

I love it. I've been telling teachers as often as I can that as a site administrator, I really don't care about state test scores. And I wish that our teachers could set them aside as easily...but I get it. They've been conditioned over the years to worship test scores. Or maybe to know that "the bosses" worship them.

Listen: students learning (and students caring, and students becoming better people) is SO much more important than an arbitrary number that doesn't tell us much anyway. So...what does that look like? As a classroom teacher, that means providing student choice in learning (of COURSE within parameters). That means making learning relevant and meaningful. That means working on character development in all scenarios: when doing well, when needing to give more effort, and also when having a bad day.

As a middle school vice principal, that means working on helping students become better people at every encounter. That means getting to know them (in the classrooms, out at lunch, when they're sent up to meet with me) and valuing them as a person even if they were sent up as "the bad kid".

My mentor, Dave Rios,  had this posted in his office as Vice Principal at West Hills High School. I stole it. I have students read it out loud whenever I sense that they're not used to having positive experiences up in the office. And yes, I have to teach them what "retribution" is (I usually explain it as "payback").

I'm sure I could flesh this idea out a bit more, but as Cori Orlando (@coriorlando1) says, "Just hit Publish!"