The Race

 
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Author Charles Wheelan gave readers of the Wall Street Journal a preview of his latest book at the end of April in an essay entitled “10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’tTell You.” Perfectly timed with the onset of the prom dress and cap-and-gown season, I was especially drawn to item #5 on his list. He refers to what he calls “the Little League arms race”, an extended metaphor that illustrates a social trend that, I would argue, is increasingly defining American culture
: “We are systematically creating races out of things that ought to be a journey. We know that success isn't about simply running faster than everyone else in some predetermined direction. Yet the message we are sending from birth is that if you don't make the traveling soccer team or get into the ‘right’ school, then you will somehow finish life with fewer points than everyone else. That's not right. You'll never read the following obituary: ‘Bob Smith died yesterday at the age of 74. He finished life in 186th place.’ ”

Poor Bob. 186th place? He probably attended our public schools.

With bracing clarity, you can see this alarming cultural trend unfold when you review the way lawmakers over the past twenty years have renovated our educational landscape. We are now a far, far cry from the principles of Frederick Froebel and Maria Montessori, who sculpted classrooms into intellectual forests where kindergarteners were encouraged to explore, search, examine, wander and wonder at their own pace. Now, our kids are all racing. Racing to the top. Racing towards college. Racing to catch up. Racing to get themselves up and out of the house to reach the first class before it begins an hour before their brains will fully awaken. Between the bells, we push American youngsters through a nine-month decathlon of learning. Our campuses are little more than a series of academic short tracks and instructional javelin fields. Froebel’s forest has been leveled.

As soon as President Clinton defined American schooling by its product rather than its process, the downward spiral began. He was the first Chief Executive to insist that states publicly spell out their curricula and install a system of testing to gauge whether students were proficient in the various standards. This is the first point where the learning process was given a definitive endgame on a national scale, and it really changed the mindset of educators and educational leaders. I fully support transparent schooling – every family should be able to see exactly what a child is expected to learn, but the price we pay is a de-personalization of learning. By switching to a standards-based model, we have now set the finish line separate from the students. If we expect a school or district to achieve a certain amount of proficiency in the standards (President George W. Bush made such expectations law in 2003), then those institutions will naturally narrow their focus towards that precise, easy-to-comprehend goal. In looking ahead at this finish line, though, we neglect the little humans that actually run through our course – their abilities, their challenges, their need for a different kind of growth or a particular kind of communication that may not align with this particular standard or set of standards.

Wheelan’s Little League metaphor helps to illustrate this shift. When you’re piecing together a baseball squad, you really don’t expect every single player to have the same capabilities. Indeed, you need a few strong pitchers, plus a handful of infielders who can catch the balls that race to them and throw them quickly and accurately, as well as a second set of players who can catch and throw over longer distances (your outfield). Oh, and hopefully, some of these kids can actually hit a baseball with a bat. It would be ludicrous to expect or demand that every single player have a .250 batting average and a .900 fielding percentage, so you adjust the line-up based on the skills present. This is called norm-referencing – determining which kids are the best out of the group. There may be only one guy on the team whose batting average barely surpasses .200. That’s not a great mark, but guess what? He’s your lead-off hitter regardless. Your ace pitcher may be the young man who can throw it kinda close to home plate about 80% of the time and who’s never beaned an opposing player. Strikeouts don’t even enter the equation. Norm-referencing isn’t the method by which you assemble a championship team; rather, it’s how you assess the kids you have and place them all in a position where they may find some success.

Which brings us back to how we define “success” in all this. Sure, we expect our local Major League teams to win everything often. San Francisco and Saint Louis can puff their chests and boast of their recent World Series titles, yet how do we perceive the Texas Rangers, who played in both of those World Series? Fascinating how that team, the two-time defending American League champions, has a faint stench of failure on it.  But American sports fans have always had this strange, cutthroat loyalty with their adult, millionaire professional athletes. Do we really expect a coach in Little League to approach a team of seven- and eight-year-olds with the same heartlessness? As opposed to the “manager” in the big leagues, the “coach” for a young team should focus on building up the skills and abilities of every player. If the aforementioned squad can bring its leadoff hitter up to a .250 batting average, that’s a successful season. Maybe all the team’s pitchers throw the final week without hitting a single batter at the plate. That’s a fine coaching job. Take the team from twenty fielding errors in the first month to five in the last. That is substantial growth that deserves recognition and reward even if the team never earns a single victory. In the professional ranks, baseball teams are governed by an enormous array of statistics. Brad Pitt even put a face to this phenomenon, known as sabermetrics, when he starred in the film version of Moneyball, a treatise by the real-life general manager of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane. Such statistical gluttony should be a boon to the Little Leagues in our country, and particularly their coaches, for they offer numerous ways to measure a child’s improvement over the course of a season. Each player on the team should be able to set personal performance goals that can focus their practice time. Every child should be able to earn a sense of pride and accomplishment as they hone one or two particular skills on the diamond.

Tragically, it seems many of our Little Leagues are adopting a more big-league mentality, focusing almost entirely on one statistic that defines the whole team: wins. Even more appallingly, our public schools are becoming similarly narrow-minded when they decide whether their own educational season is a success or a failure. Do we expect our teachers to perform like big-league managers, pushing every classroom “team” so that they all perform above a pre-set average? In a standards-based world, yes. It matters not how low a child’s skills are coming into the year, nor does it matter that they grow by leaps and bounds. If they don’t reach the officially designated level of proficiency, that’s a strike against the school. In the standards-based mentality, every ballplayer needs to hit .250, field at .900, and throw strikes at least 70% of the time. And now, the teachers are held to the same standards. Although the Obama administration postures itself as backing off from the strictures of “No Child Left Behind”, its grant program brings teacher performance into the mix, requiring schools to factor student achievement into instructor evaluations. Obama actually completes the tri-fecta: now students, schools, and teachers are all racing towards an elusive “A+” and suffering the consequences if they don’t get there. The teachers that earned accolades years ago were, quite simply, the best coaches. They could take any motley crew of ragamuffins and push all of their skills forward. Even if their test results at the end of the year were all over the map, the common thread was that every student showed remarkable improvement. This was the model back when teachers were honored as intellectual coaches. Today, we are far more likely to celebrate the teacher who “managed” their classroom to a higher level of group proficiency if and only if that level exceeds the prescribed standard. In a 180-day “season”, a teacher that can’t squeeze more than ninety “wins” out of their classroom is deemed unsatisfactory or inadequate.

Despite the myriad ways that a student’s intellect can be considered, and the many variations that can be presented to show genuine growth and learning, education has been stripped down to just a race towards proficiency. We view all students equally, but in this case, it’s a cruel equality. There are many young minds who come into our schools fit and prepared to learn. The beauty of public education is that they study alongside the crippled, the not-yet-fluent English speakers, the emotionally downtrodden, the disabled and the distracted.  Nonetheless, the politicos would like to tout the universally high standards and strict accountability as an orderly urban marathon, with everyone from all backgrounds marching as an organized crowd along the same educational path towards the same triumphant finish line.

From the vantage point of my teacher’s desk, watching this evolution unfold for the past thirteen years in my classroom, I can tell you this: it’s not looking like a jog through Boston. I see Pamplona. And yes, teachers are being gored and students are being trampled.

Before summer is out, I hope to explore how the onset of the Common Core standards may actually present our schools with a way out of the ridiculous racing mentality towards a more authentic mindset about teaching and learning. First, though, I hope to use this space, as I did last year, to showcase the top schools at the National Forensic League Championships, the largest academic tournament in the world, where the best kind of learning shines in a very competitive environment.