Measuring the Schools

Abstract

+N ~OT every one realizes that there are very few methods by which the quality of a school can be directly measured. In education, almost every measure we have is, and must be, indirect. We may make a personal inspection of the school, to see that its students are neatly uniformed, its records properly kept, its laboratory equipment adequate, and its classroom teaching efficient, but we cannot then claim to have direct evidence that the school is doing a good job. We cannot be sure (although we can come a great deal closer to it), even if we take time to watch the actual nursing care which is being given to patients. These are indirect, but they are not direct measures of school quality; because the value of the school depends not upon what the students do while they are in school, but upon what they do after they leave it. The true measure of whether or not a school is good is the sorts of nurses it graduates. That measure, unfortunately, is one which, for two reasons, it is not yet feasible to make. First, the graduates are not usually available for study. Second, the graduates represent not the school as it is, but the school as it used to be. Yet, the quality of the graduates is the only direct measure of the quality of the school. All the others, whether by statistical reports or personal inspection, are indirect measures, because the school may make a good record on any one of them and still, somehow, fail to create good graduate nurses out of its student material.