Balance in the Balance

Schools need accountability systems that focus on more than basic skills to produce the outcomes necessary for success in work and life.

Americans have long reflected on public education's purposes. Mostly, we've embraced a balanced set of goals that includes more than basic academic skills. In 1749, Benjamin Franklin recommended that public schools emphasize physical fitness because “exercise invigorates the soul as well as the body.” As for academics, Franklin thought history particularly important, where “questions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, will naturally arise.” He believed students should learn logic and reasoning through debates about historical and current controversies (1749/1931).

Almost 70 years later, Thomas Jefferson (1818/1964) set forth a list of goals for public education:

• To give citizens the information they need.
• To enable citizens to calculate for themselves and to express their ideas and preserve their contracts and accounts in writing.
• To improve, by reading, their morals and their mental faculties.
• To understand their duties to their neighbors and country.
• To know their rights; to choose with discretion their elected representatives and monitor their conduct with diligence, candor, and judgment.
• To observe their social relations with intelligence and faithfulness.