Accounting for What Counts

Abstract

o Child Left Behind legislation makes it clear that outside evaluators determine what gets taught in the classroom. must ensure they measure what truly counts in school. This fact is poignantly and sadly true for the under funded, poorly resourced, low schools that may be hammered by administration accountants in the near future. However, the discrepancy between teaching and testing is equally important for high performing special schools, such as the North Carolina Governor's School. These schools serve the top ranked students of our nation. Although state or federal regulations do not drive the Governor's School's curriculum, we used it as a test case to measure if one special program was having the intended impact--a matter not often counted. At the North Carolina Governor's School, a six-week residential program gives bright students an opportunity to deepen and expand their academic knowledge through exposure to new points of view and divergent ways of thinking. The program is designed to challenge intelligent and highly motivated twelfth graders to think analytically, critically, and creatively about themselves and the ideas they encounter. The Governor's School's unique curriculum includes intensive work in Area I, II, and III courses. Area I includes advanced course study. Half of Governor's School's four hundred students choose one of five core academic areas. The other half does intense creative work in the arts. Students attend Area I classes five days a week for seventy-five minutes in the morning and again in the afternoon, plus once again on Saturday. In addition to their specialized study in Area I, students attend three classes each week in Area II. Area II examines the relationships between special fields of knowledge and considers the varied epistemological stances of the ten disciplines. Students attend another three classes in Area III, focusing on self-knowledge and exploration of individual values and social constructs. The faculty and staff are aware of the substantial impact this special curriculum has on most of the students who attend each summer. Parents also know because their returning sons and daughters offer glowing testimony about the summer experience. Students overwhelmingly (95 percent) describe the program on their final evaluations as one of the most powerful experiences in their lives (Milner 2002). The Director of the Morehead Foundation, who interviews exceptional students from all of North Carolina's schools, concurs: We know for certain that many Morehead Scholars have benefited greatly from their Governor's School experience. I personally have heard hundreds of Morehead candidates identify it as the most important intellectual experience of their high school careers (Lovelace 2002). play a major role in shaping these students' intellectual lives but have not obtained quantitative data to substantiate the success we believe we achieve. This past summer we decided to find ways to measure the Governor's School's life-changing quality. Our students were selected in part because they did well at their regular schools and had high intellectual potential. But we wanted to reach further, to see how the core of their thinking had been changed by the experience. For years, Robert Sternberg (1997) has celebrated a triarchic model of intelligence that offers a broader measure of intellect than mere analytical capacity. He believes we