PERFORMANCE IN “SCHOOL FOR ALL”

A preliminary idea, without which it is not possible to accurately frame the problem of poor performance, is that compulsory school is everyone’s school.

Elementary school, as well as middle school, is a school for everyone or everyone, it must welcome everyone and not reject anyone. If some children are lost, “then the school is no longer a school. It is a hospital that rejects the sick. It becomes an increasingly irremediable instrument of differentiation” (Scuola di Barbiana, Letter to a professor).
And in fact, until a few years ago, the school, basing its criteria on a selective approach, abandoned all students who did not achieve a certain result, considered sufficient. That is, it rejected those who “for various reasons were not able to follow the process established by the Ministerial Programme, to which everyone had to rigidly adapt.
And he rejected them without caring whether or not they had achieved “that basic formation of intelligence and character, which is the condition for an effective and conscious participation in the life of society and the state”, which the elementary school programs set as their goal.
It was said that those who were “suitable” for studying should go to school, for the others there was work.
In fact, it created a dichotomy between children judged capable of reaching certain levels of culture and children incapable of reaching them and consequently abandoned to their fate.

Most of the time the “capable” kids were the luckiest kids, that is, those who lived in an environment that offered them more favorable conditions (culture, assistance, etc.).
The selective idea, on which the school was founded, “dies hard and still persists in that part of the teaching staff who grew up in that school environment; unfortunately we often find it at the origin of school mortality.
But the maturation of society’s conscience and pedagogical reflection have today led to a reversal of this conception.

Throughout the civilized world, compulsory education has penetrated the conscience of families and all adults as an indifferent necessity, and the right is claimed for all children to be able to draw on those cultural, human and civil assets, which are today irreplaceable for fitting into society with certain requirements, and increasingly imperatively required by the world of work.
This enormous socio-cultural event has overturned the patterns of selective schooling, making it completely anachronistic, and has placed orientation schooling in its place. The orientation school does not reject anyone: in it what the children of Barbiana affirmed should come true, saying that “… those who were baseless, slow or listless felt like the favorites… it seemed that the school was all just for them”.

The guidance school places the student at the center of the entire educational process, considers the program as a tool for developing the child’s humanity and guarantees at least educational and training assistance suited to his or her own abilities and aptitudes.
Anyone with some experience of the reality of our schools can confirm the statement that this concept of school is not yet fully embodied in the concrete situation.
And the phenomenon of poor performance is an exceptional “litmus test” of the real situation of our school. In fact, by what criteria is the performance of a student judged in many cases? With the criterion of its adaptation to the plan established “a priori” by the teacher.
The evaluation, in this case, essentially boils down to determining the pupil’s degree of formal docility and his ability to repeat, with more or less faithful verbal approximation, the ideas of others.

In a school where teaching is carried out simply on the basis of the teacher’s explanations and the children’s answers on what they have studied at home, it is clear that performance will be measured by the degree of “conformism” of the students themselves. Performance in these cases is also judged in a distorted way, because it refers to scholastic demands that have nothing to do with the children’s interests and their objective abilities. But the most radical ambiguity is that based on the confusion of the two terms that must be kept clearly distinct: measurement and evaluation. The usual evaluation practice of our school is based on a criterion that ignores evaluation as an educational act carried out by the teacher; furthermore, it does not attribute to measurement its characteristic character of objectivity: how is the evaluation of the pupil’s performance carried out? The teacher establishes a level of preparation and knowledge, which can be considered “sufficient”; consequently the children who reach it have a normal performance, those who exceed it have an excellent performance, while those who fail to reach it are the children with poor performance.
At the root of this conception is the lack of respect for the originality and unrepeatability of the child and the claim that “everyone absorbs the same nourishment within the same period of time, as if civil age were a guarantee of equality of development…”. Teachers who base their judgment on this criterion usually defend their position by hiding behind the screen of justice. “I know a task is worth a 4, I give it a 4; if it is a 6, I give it a 6”. It’s not such a new phrase that it’s surprising.
These teachers did not make a fundamental distinction in their minds: it is one thing to measure performance, another to evaluate it; and the teacher’s educational work is above all that of evaluation, evidently on the basis of careful measurement.

Let us now carefully examine what it means to measure performance: “measurement is an objective control of the value of an academic result (mostly in written works), either carried out by referring only to notional accuracy, or by purposely ignoring the human personality and situation of the pupil who produced that result. With measurement the aim is to avoid what psychologists call the halo effect, i.e. the influence of the preconceived opinion around the pupil (and of the possible affective predisposition of sympathy and antipathy), — often present in teachers — over judgment, an influence that leads to altering it, moving it away from adhering to the actual value.
This type of control must take place using instruments built with particular care and precautions aimed at guaranteeing the absolute objectivity of the measurement.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, tools suitable for this work have long been studied and developed: achievement tests, which allow us to establish, before correcting the work, a yardstick – through scores – that is the same for all students.
This objectivity of measurement can be contested by teachers who are “champions of justice” to whom it can also be pointed out that “the very numerous research concerning the evaluation of written tests has highlighted first of all that different examiners measure with different results, regardless of the subject being tested: 142 English teachers gave the same English test grades ranging from 64 to 98; 114 geometry teachers gave grades ranging from 28 to 92 (i.e. from 3 to 9!) to the same geometry task… and so on. Even more astonishing results were obtained in 1930 by Laugier and Weinberg: the corrections made by the same person over time resemble each other like the corrections made by different people” (Mario Gattullo, Didat­ti­ca e doci­mo­lo­giaArmando, Rome 1967, p. 159).
The measurements made through objective profit tests eliminate this oscillation of judgments.

But evaluation is something very different from determining (even if with mathematical precision) the level of notional contents that a child demonstrates to possess. The result of a measurement is only one element of the evaluation, which must be reported in the context of the human situation of the individual child; the same result takes on a different meaning when compared to children who experience different situations. Evaluating is an exquisitely educational act, which only the teacher can do, an act that engages the deepest qualities of the educator.
Evaluating is an act of a complex nature, which has measurement as its first factor, but arises from the correlation of the latter with another series of factors – of a biological, psychological and environmental nature – specific to each child. To give an example, we can think of two boys with a performance that is identical on a measurement level, but for one it is the maximum he can reach, due to his human situation, for the other it is only a part of what is expected of him based on his situation.

On an evaluative level, the performance of the two boys will therefore have a profoundly different value.
We thus move from a concept of evaluation, whereby it is equal to measurement, to a new concept, whereby evaluation arises from relating the technical result of measurement to the data that constitute the human situation of the individual.
Thus a new definition of academic performance is born, no longer understood as the achievement of a level established a priori and the same for everyone, but as the realization of the real possibilities of the boy, where by boy we mean every single concrete boy in a certain defined situation.
When teachers talk about children with poor performance, they are generally referring to children who do not possess certain abilities or do not know a certain series of notions or who commit “mistakes”, that is, they refer to the objective quantity and quality of their “knowledge”.

Well, if what was stated previously is true, the real bad performance occurs where a child “performs” to a lesser extent than what could be expected in relation to his biological, psychological or environmental situation. Therefore an objectively sufficient performance can in fact be a bad performance if it refers to a child living in an optimal situation, while objectively poor performance can be a sign of a good performance in relation to a child living a difficult human situation.
The evaluation of academic performance must not arise from a comparison of the children with each other, because the human situations of the children are irreducible to each other, but we must develop within ourselves a profound sense of the radical diversity of each child and of his human situation to evaluate the performance in relation to the child himself.