Educational Phrenology

I am fascinated by phrenology--the defunct pseudo-science of the 1900s. It has some interesting parallels to education, but first some background. Franz Joseph Gall developed a "scientific" procedure to determine personality traits and cognitive abilities based on the characteristics on the human skull, which came to be known as phrenology. His rational was that a person’s skull mirrored bumps, concaves, and the shapes of their brains. Ultimately, brain shape indicated potential--sounds great. The graphic to the left shows a sample of a phrenological diagram used to map or chart areas of interest. I imagine that the people who "scored" well really loved the science and the people who didn't...well it affirmed their worst fears.

Educators use tools like this all the time. They just have different names. DIBELS, Quality School Indicators, and the lists go on. Many tools are useful, however as people we tend to generalize and extract correlations that do not exist. For example, in a recently published article about small high schools, David Hoff writes,

High schools receiving $80 million in annual federal funding to support “smaller learning communities” can document that they are taking steps to establish learning environments more intimate than found in the typical comprehensive high school.

But, according to a federal study , such smaller schools can’t answer the most significant question: Is student achievement improving in the smaller settings?

He goes on to say that student achievement is defined as grade level promotion. Is grade level promotion a true indicator of student success? Is it an indicator of student engagement? Is it an indicator of students being valued and inspired? Maybe, maybe not. Studies turn into phrenological maps if we don't question there validity. Do assessments, diagnostic indicators, and curriculum maps show us the way? Sometimes they do--when coupled with common sense and research, I think we can find appropriate indicators of student success.

I am challenged with the temptation to use the maps available and accepted by today’s educational experts. Some of them work well, but I'm jolted to reality when I notice myself viewing kids as cars with engine trouble, instead of creators and learners with needs. All students can learn--it sounds cliché--but I've seen it happen. For example, a student with an I.E.P. who didn’t seem to care or have the ability to learn was given the chance to engage a course of study, found she could learn, and made huge gains. Did she advance a grade level? No. Did she make more progress than students in her class? Yes. Educational phrenology is dangerous. It gives us the false sense of knowing--it helps us wrongly say, "I got it all figured out."