For several years, a division in our cooperative has been doing family engagement work with schools across the region. Recently they turned that work inward and led a learning session for the rest of our staff. For those of us outside the division, it was a chance to learn more about work we had mostly seen from a distance, and to experience it the way the schools they partner with do.

The session centered on the first chapter of Powerful Partnerships by Karen Mapp, Ilene Carver, and Jessica Lander. The chapter asks educators to examine their core beliefs about families before reaching for another strategy. Raffles, pizza parties, childcare, and transportation all have their place, the authors grant, but the first component of a partnership is the educator and the assumptions they carry about the people on the other side of it.

The core beliefs come from earlier work by Anne Henderson, Karen Mapp, Vivian Johnson, and Don Davies in Beyond the Bake Sale. Small groups each took one belief, wrote it across the top of a sheet of chart paper, and worked through it in quadrants: a struggle, a takeaway, a picture, and so on. Two groups ended up with the fourth belief, which says that the responsibility for cultivating and sustaining partnerships rests primarily with school staff. Neither group simply agreed with it. One wrote “It should be both.” Another drew a two-way street with arrows pointing in each direction. One quadrant noted that teaching staff without administrative support cannot absorb one more thing. And in the corner of one sheet, someone had written in orange marker, “Is this contradictory of core belief #3?” The third belief is that families and school staff should be equal partners.

That orange question has stayed with me. The group was not confused. They had found a real tension, and the tension is not really about who sends the newsletter. It is a disagreement about what the school is for and whose project it is. If school is mainly a place that equips students with knowledge and skills, it makes sense for the professionals to carry the partnership. If school is also a place where a community passes itself on to its kids, families are co-owners, and “primarily” starts to sound wrong. The group was having an argument about the purpose of education, held in the vocabulary of responsibility because that was the vocabulary on the paper.

This piece is about that kind of conversation: how we might lead it on purpose rather than stumble into it, what Gert Biesta gives us for doing so, and why we are short on the tools that would help.

What does Biesta give us?

In Good Education in an Age of Measurement, published in 2010, Biesta argues that a culture of measuring and comparing outcomes has crowded out the question of what education is for. We get very good at asking whether something works and much less practiced at asking what it is supposed to be working toward. His response is to name three domains of educational purpose.

The first is qualification, which covers the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that equip someone to do something, whether that is reading a lease, passing a course, or entering a trade. The second is socialization, which is about how education brings people into existing traditions, communities, and ways of doing things. Every school does this whether it means to or not, since it passes on norms about time, authority, and what counts as success. The third is subjectification, which Biesta describes as the opposite of socialization in an important sense. It concerns how a person comes to act and judge for themselves rather than simply as a product of the orders they were brought into. In his later work he talks about this as being able to exist in the world in a “grown-up” way, which is less about age and more about meeting the world without putting yourself at the center of it.

Two things about the scheme matter for practice. The first is that the domains overlap. Biesta draws them as a Venn diagram, not a set of boxes, because almost anything a school does touches all three. The second is that they can conflict. His own example is a school under heavy exam pressure. The push for qualification teaches its own socialization lessons, namely that what is measured is what matters and that other students are competition. A gain in one domain can be a cost in another, so the question of purpose is never settled by optimizing any single domain. It takes judgment about balance, which he develops further in a 2015 article in the European Journal of Education on teacher judgment and professionalism.

Biesta also warns about what he calls learnification, the habit of replacing the language of education with the language of learning. “Learning” is a process word, and it can say very little about content, purpose, or relationship. When a plan talks only about learning, the purpose questions tend to slip by unasked.

How do the domains pull on each other?

Family engagement is a good place to see the pull, since families and schools often weight the domains differently without saying so.

Take a family data night, where staff walk parents through assessment reports. On paper this is a qualification event: here is where your child is, here is what they need next. But it also socializes families into a particular role, which is to be the audience for the school’s data. That may be fine, but it is a choice, and it sits uneasily next to the idea of equal partnership. Families come to a school with their own answers to the purpose question. The first core belief in Beyond the Bake Sale is that all families have dreams for their children, and a dream is a purpose that has not been put into school language yet.

Rural schools add another layer. Michael Corbett’s Learning to Leave, a 2007 study of a coastal community in Nova Scotia, describes how schooling that succeeds at qualification can also teach students that success means leaving home. For a family on a ranch outside a small South Dakota town, qualification and socialization can point in opposite directions. The family may want their child to be capable enough to go anywhere and rooted enough to want to come back. Subjectification complicates it again, since at some point the decision belongs to the student. None of that shows up in a family engagement plan unless someone makes room for it.

That is the value of the orange question on the chart paper. Core belief #3 leans toward shared ownership and a community bringing its children up together, while core belief #4 leans toward professional responsibility. Both are defensible. The group felt the friction before anyone named it, and naming it is what turns friction into a conversation.

What does this look like at the micro, meso, and macro levels?

The same tension plays out differently depending on how many people a decision touches.

At the micro level, the domains show up in single decisions. A teacher deciding whether to call home about a late assignment is making a purpose judgment. Is the call about the grade (qualification), about bringing the family into the school’s expectations (socialization), or about helping the student learn to handle it themselves (subjectification)? Most of us make that call in seconds. Biesta is not asking us to slow every decision down. He is asking us to notice when one domain keeps winning by default.

The meso level is the organization: a school, a district, a cooperative, or a division within one. This is where purpose decisions get made for many people at once, and it is also where purpose tends to get flattened. Strategic plan templates, logic models, grant reports, and LMS reporting fields mostly have slots for qualification outcomes, since those are the easiest to count. A platform or a template is never a neutral container. If the form only asks for measurable outcomes, the conversation drifts toward qualification even when everyone in the room cares about the other two. The internal session is a meso example in its own right. An organization chose to spend staff time examining beliefs rather than adding a strategy, which is a decision about what its own professional learning is for. It treated staff less as people to be trained on a family engagement model and more as people who might change how they see families.

At the macro level, the domains show up in state accountability systems and in public arguments about schools. Many of the loudest public fights about curriculum are socialization arguments, about which traditions and communities a school should bring kids into, carried out in qualification language about standards and scores. That mismatch is part of why those arguments rarely go anywhere. People are answering different purpose questions while using the same words.

The levels also press on each other. Macro accountability shapes the meso templates, and the templates shape which micro decisions feel legitimate. A teacher who wants to make a call home about something other than the grade is working against the grain of a system that only records the grade.

Why do we need more thought technology?

By “thought technology” I mean any made thing that helps a person or a group think something through that they could not think through as well without it. A protocol is thought technology. So is a diagram, a shared vocabulary, a set of questions, or a sheet of chart paper divided into quadrants. Biesta’s three domains are themselves a piece of thought technology. They do not tell you what education should be for, but they give a group words for disagreeing about it productively.

The problem is that we have a lot of technology for measuring education and very little for deliberating about its purpose. Districts have dashboards, data walls, and assessment platforms in abundance. What they rarely have is a regular, structured way for teachers, families, and leaders to say what they think school is for, hear where they differ, and decide what to trade off. The family engagement session showed what that can look like at a small scale. The core beliefs gave people something to push against, the quadrants gave them permission to name a struggle instead of performing agreement, and the orange marker made room for a question nobody had planned.

For anyone leading these conversations, a few moves seem worth trying. One is to take a decision already on the table, such as a new platform, a schedule change, or a family event, and ask what it does in each domain rather than only whether it works. Another is to look for the trade-off instead of the goal, since a group that can say “we are giving up some of X to get more of Y” is having a far more honest conversation than one that claims to be advancing everything at once. A third is to bring families into the purpose conversation before the plan is written, not after, which is the practical meaning of a two-way street. For individuals, the same tool can be much smaller. Before a decision that matters, writing one sentence for each domain about what you hope it does takes a couple of minutes and often shows which domain was missing.

Where does that leave us?

The obvious next step would be to formalize all of this: a purpose-mapping template, a rubric, maybe a dashboard showing where a district’s goals fall across the three domains. That is where the risk sits. Biesta’s scheme can harden into exactly the kind of checklist he argues against, and a tool that scores purpose would just be one more measurement instrument with a different label.

What worked in that room was low-tech and a little messy. The chart paper did not resolve the tension between core beliefs #3 and #4, and it was not supposed to. It made the tension visible to the people who will have to live with it. It is much less clear what the equivalent looks like at the scale of a state or a public argument, where the conversation is larger and the chart paper is much harder to share. That is the open question, and it is one I would like to hear about from anyone who has found thought technology that works at that scale.

If you want to keep going with Biesta, Research-Based Is Not a Purpose looks at another side of his argument: how claims about evidence tend to speak to a thin slice of qualification and leave the rest of the purpose question untouched.

If you have thoughts, questions, or ideas about this piece, reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and find more of my writing at bradylicht.com.