In 1993, the U.S. Department of Education issued a report charging that American schools were shortchanging their brightest pupils, and that gifted students often sat bored and unchallenged in classrooms, where they endured the daily tedium of working on curricula far below their abilities and interests. (The study found that gifted elementary students probably had mastered as much as half of the curriculum in basic subjects even before the school year.) While major U.S. corporations were complaining that the shortage of high-achieving students in math and science was forcing them to fill jobs with students educated abroad, the department found that only two cents out of every $100 spent in education went to provide opportunities for academically gifted students. Although many school districts offered programs for talented students, they were often token efforts. But the indifference of American schools toward excellence is not merely reflected in the amount of money spent. Americans have long been ambivalent about “intellectuals,” but seldom has it been more obvious that the culture of the nation’s schools is suspicious of good students.
“In America, we often make fun of our brightest students,” Gregory Anrig, president of the Educational Testing Service, wrote in the report, “giving them such derogatory names as `nerd’, `dweeb’, or, in a former day, `egghead.’ “
It wasn’t just kids mocking kids. In American schools today, “elitism” is regarded with suspicion while “fairness” and “equity” are regarded with almost totemic awe. The result is that the stray youngster who isn’t satisfied with self-esteem programs, rap sessions and vaguely conceived “thinking” skills does not quite fit. Such nonconformists pose an embarrassing and awkward challenge to the educationist passion for cooperation, equality, “success for all” and the other buzzwords that constitute the dominant ideology of American schools in the 1990s.
Consider:
– In Fairfax County, Va., seven high schools have decided to dump class rankings, part of a national trend toward eliminating such distinctions and honors. Other schools have stopped naming their top student as valedictorian. Many more schools are expected to drop both ranking and other honors as schools move ahead to replace traditional grades with “alternative assessments” that will blur the difference between average and above-average student performances.
– In the fall of 1993, the Los Angeles city schools implemented a new grading system that abolished the grade of “Outstanding,” and replaced it with a system designed to make it easier for students to get the highest marks. Previously, the highest grades were reserved for students who performed advanced work, such as a 4th grader who was able to do 5th-grade level math. From now on, students will have to master subjects only at their own grade level. Under the change, the letter S, which used to stand for “satisfactory,” or average work, became the highest grade, indicating “area of strength.” Other grades include the letter G for “growth,” and the letter N for “needs improvement.” No grade denotes exceptional achievement.
– The Illinois Junior Academy of Science, a private group dominated by teachers from schools across the state, voted to bar the Avery Coonley School, a private school in the Chicago suburbs, from competing for prizes in a statewide science fair after the school won its fourth straight team prize. The academy decided that Coonley’s team should henceforth be banned from winning so the contest could be “more equitable.”
– Administrators from Minnesota’s Apple Valley School District assured parents that gifted students would be given “enrichment exercises,” while slower students worked to catch up in their outcome-based classes. A gifted student in Minnesota’s Apple Valley School District describes his “enrichment” assignment: “We had to do a diorama this year on dinosaurs,” he says. “We also did that in kindergarten. That was enrichment.”
– A student in Oklahoma writes to a state legislator, explaining his “enrichment” project: Eight high-achieving students, he says, “were sent to measure a room.” While one kid took measurements, the rest of the exiles from the outcome-based classrooms sat around talking and goofing off.
– Charles Willie, a professor of education at Harvard, declares that the goal of education should not be “excellence,” because that is a matter of personal choice and requires sacrifice. Instead, schools should be concerned with “adequacy,” and should weigh non-traditional types of intelligence, such as “singing” and “dancing” at least as heavily as “communication and calculations.”
– Peggy McIntosh, an influential educationist from Wellesley College, believes that “excellence” is a dangerous concept for schools and argues that schools need to stop giving out “gold stars” and other honors, because they reflect an outmoded white male culture of “vertical thinking.” McIntosh heads up a program known as Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED), which already has enrolled several thousand educators from 30 states for seminars on making schools more equitable and cooperative and freeing them from the “ideal of excellence.”
“She has a Pol Pot approach to education,” says one critic. “She seems to be trying to make everybody equal by making sure that nobody knows anything.”
– While special programs proliferate for student needs, programs for gifted students are often targeted for budget cuts. In 1993, the Department of Education proposed to divert funds from the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Program to “schoolwide efforts to provide challenging curricula . . . to all students,” and called for eliminating the National Research Center on Gifted and Talented Education, which has been a still, small voice advocating for gifted students. (Ironically, this was the same department that was almost simultaneously bemoaning the lack of resources for gifted students-proving once again that consistency is not a strong point of the education bureaucracy.)
– Both programs for gifted students and the practice of “tracking” students by ability have been attacked by critics who see them as “elitist.” Under the banner of “fairness” and “inclusivity,” educationists are moving bright students into classes with students of lesser abilities. In the same vein, advanced courses are under attack across the country as “racist” and “undemocratic.” A top Justice Department official in the Clinton administration announced that tracking would be challenged in court on the grounds that it violated federal laws and court rulings outlawing illegal segregation.
– In Alexandria, Va., the central administration decided to dismantle the district’s honors courses in world civilization, planning to randomly mix 9th graders whose reading ability ranged from the 2nd- to the 12th-grade level. The course was restored after politically influential parents protested. But the district’s educationists added requirements that students in the honors class stay after school three days a week and attend four-hour Saturday sessions twice a month. Those requirements, some teachers complained, were intended to discourage kids from enrolling in the advanced courses.
According to Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at Alexandria’s T.C. Williams High, many of his students are youngsters “who cannot or will not do the work required to succeed in school,” while a smaller number “are so disruptive that they poison classes and make it impossible for other kids to learn.” Both politics and the reigning educational ideology, however, dictate that high-achieving students are placed in the same classrooms and given the same course work. A student at Welsh’s school told him about a class in junior high that had celebrated the richness of “inclusivity”:
“By the middle of the second quarter the teacher practically gave up because of discipline problems. About four kids attempted to do any work. Kids were sleeping, talking and throwing stuff. When he would divide us into groups (the new panacea called cooperative learning), kids would say, ‘I’m not going to work. Shut up!’ It was a lousy mix of rotten students. I learned absolutely nothing.”
There is probably no word used more frequently by educrats than excellence. They pledge it, commit to it, trumpet it, include it in mission statements, press releases, curriculum guides and endless presentations to parents, school boards and local businesses. To hear American educators talk, you’d imagine that they think about little else. Such is their faith in the word that educationists act as if the incantation of “excellence” somehow compensates for the ebbing of its substance.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the more they talked about it, the less they did to assure it. The more aggressive the assault on “excellence,” the more strident the public relations campaigns insisted on the fealty and undying commitment of educators to preparing children for the global marketplace. Despite these protestations, however, educationist doctrine and practice is dominated by a voice of therapeutic egalitarianism that invokes terms like equity, fairness and cooperation, but which is often hard to distinguish from the nagging, ancient voice of envy.
“My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student”
A few years back bumper stickers began appearing on cars reading, MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT. . . . Compared with the ruffles and flourishes-the parades and dinners and cheerleaders and newspaper articles-that celebrated the athletic achievements of various schools, the stickers were a modest expression of parental pride and recognition of academic achievement. They were also an endorsement of schools, presenting an unabashedly pro-education message. Unfortunately, it was elitist. Not everyone made the honor roll, which by definition excluded students who did not excel in academics. Thus the backlash.
In July 1994, Education Week devoted a full page to a commentary attacking the bumper stickers, and lauding parents who had responded with a bumper sticker declaring, MY KID BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT. That slogan, wrote Mark Mlawer, the executive director of the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education, “helped clarify this issue” by expressing the “resentment at the unfairness of the honor roll and at those who flaunt their child’s academic feats. . . .” Parents who carry the bumper sticker announcing that their child is an honor student, he claimed, “have turned their personal pride into a public event and therefore, are undoubtedly bragging.” In general, educationists have few qualms about self-congratulation on a rather expansive basis. But Mlawer used the term bragging to signify any expression of pride of which he disapproves, a malediction that falls heavily on celebrations of educational success. As if he senses that his complaints might sound mean-spirited, Mlawer quickly adds that he is concerned with “moral issues.”
“Both the educational practice of maintaining an honor roll and the parental practice of public proclamations of this status,” he writes, “create and reinforce a certain specific of unfairness, one which necessarily causes resentment.” Thus he dresses up the green toad of jealousy as high principle and resentment as a passion for “fairness.”
The honor roll, which singles out students who excel in school is, he says, “a tradition which reinforces some of the least attractive aspects of our culture, and for that reason should be eliminated or radically altered.” Besides its elitist cast, Mlawer objects to the honor roll because it is so academic. It is a “dishonorable institution” because it does not take into account every child’s “unique mix of abilities and talents, average capacities and areas of incapacity and disability,” by which he seems to mean that not everyone makes it. “If we wish to teach and transmit values like fairness,” he says, “then we must award honor in a more individualized manner, one which takes into account a child’s potential, efforts and circumstances . . . .”
The passions aroused by the issue of academic honors are so fierce because the stakes are so small. For some students, the honor roll may be the only honor the world bestows on them during their adolescence. Even so, in the elaborate hierarchy of peer prestige, the honor roll is a relatively minor counterbalance to the honors handed out by nature and by peers.
For the teenager who can’t run the 100-meter dash in record time, looks unimpressive in basketball shorts, doesn’t have naturally bouncy hair or a body destined for the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, for kids who can’t compete for status by owning the best cars, the latest video games, most expensive tennis shoes or latest CD, the recognition of academic success is at best a minor consolation.
The sculptured blond quarterback and prom queen have been awarded accolades by nature that cannot easily be repealed. Try as they might, the legions of therapists, social workers and educationists will not be able to level these advantages or soothe the wounded self-esteem of the dorky, the homely and the flat-chested. So they focus instead on the academic achievers: the handful of students who have ability and have worked hard enough to excel in their school work.
Of course, they are not satisfied merely with leveling students academically. Distinctions of any kind annoy the genuine levelers. The executive director of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, for example, feels so guilty about being associated with something with competition in its name that he declares that “we must stamp out the concept of the better.” Obviously, educationists don’t feel quite right about athletics (after all, it results in winners and losers). In the “new gym class,” the New York Times reports, “competition is out and cooperation is in.” Instead of playing basketball (and keeping score) students get to practice with a ball “that’s the right size and weight for their skill.” No one is made to feel inadequate by an aspiring Michael Jordan who can slam-dunk the ball. In the new class, everyone has a chance to dunk, or so it seems. The Times reports that the enlightened phys ed class provides kids with “a movable target that can be adjusted as their accuracy increases.” But even then, “the goal is not so much to learn to score a basket as to develop body awareness. . . .”
Games like dodgeball, which involve the elimination of players, are frowned upon and kids no longer pick teams, since it is traumatic to be chosen last.
And of course it is. Recall that solemn ritual of the playground and gymnasium: The order you were chosen was a reliable barometer of popularity and status. To be chosen first was a sign that you were the most popular guy in the class; to be picked in the lower half was a sign of social failure; to be chosen last of all, of irremediable geekhood. But as bad as this was, choosing up sides was also a powerful incentive to be good at something. If not at football or volleyball, then at history or current events or English. To excel at something was not just a form of street revenge, it was a kind of modest salvation for kids who might not otherwise have fit in. No, it didn’t compensate for the way burly guys drove Mustangs and got to date the best-looking girls, but it was a win nonetheless, to be cherished in private, with family and close friends. When the honor rolls are dropped, those victories disappear. The burly guys still get the girls and the fast cars.
There are also ideological consequences that inevitably arise from the practice of competing for and handing out honors. The attack on “elitism” and competition in the schools is at bottom not about education at all. It is about equality and ultimately about how much “fairness” we can expect from life. Educationists engage in endless and tedious debates about grades and the need to abolish failure, but at bottom many of them share the belief that there is something undemocratic not just about academic awards, but about competition in general. It’s not just schools they want to make more fair; they want life to be fair. Prizes, scholarships, citations, laurels and guerdons encourage competition, ratify success and nurture a taste for being “better” than others. In other words, they prepare children for the real world. And some educationists are just sick about it.
The Cry of the Dodo
Alfie Kohn is one of American education’s more successful entrepreneurs of anti-elitism. Kohn has been a featured speaker at state teachers union conventions and his books have sold briskly among educators across the country. Kohn’s ideas are so popular that apparently he makes a living spreading his gospel: Grades are bad, competition is evil, and rewards and punishments of every kind should be done away with. Kohn, whose books include “Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes,” waxes Dickensian when he contemplates the horrors of the marketplace and the complicity of schools in the degradation of innocent youth. “A treadmill appears under any student’s feet when first grade appears. . . .” Once a child graduates from school, he finds more competition, more rewards to be sought. “Now they must struggle for the next set of rewards, so they can snag the best residencies, the choicest clerkships, the fast-track positions in the corporate world. Then come the most prestigious appointments, partnerships, vice presidencies and so on, working harder, nose stuck into the future, ever more frantic.” And to think it starts in first grade.
For Kohn, grades are the original sin and the root of the competitive evil. Not only do they “dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task,” Kohn claims, but they “encourage cheating and strain the relationship between teacher and students. They reduce a student’s sense of control over his own fate and can induce a blind conformity to others’ wishes. . . . Without rewards, incentives and grades, Kohn insists that children will somehow come to develop an “intrinsic” interest in learning for its own sake. He advises teachers to scrap grades if they can; make them meaningless if they cannot: “Reduce number of grades to two: A and incomplete. The theory here is that any work that does not merit an A isn’t finished yet.” Never grade for effort. Never grade students while they are still learning something. No pop quizzes.
Utopian ideas have long exerted a powerful and nearly irresistible attraction for educationists; but the appeal of Kohn’s idea sheds light on the attitudes toward accountability and academic excellence among the educationists who are shaping the various reforms in American education-from Outcome Based Education to the ambitious agenda of Goals 2000, the federal legislation designed to establish uniform, national educational standards. Unions anxious to reduce measures of accountability wherever possible have a readily understandable attraction to any criticism of grading. But the assault on rewards also has a strong ideological pull for the educational levelers who are suspicious of any distinctions among students and who interpret equality as equality of achievement rather than equality of opportunity. For the levelers, every accomplishment must be deemed to be equal with every other. Prizes are given to everyone, lest anyone feel left out. Standards that might “exclude” anyone must be lowered or done away with altogether. If the movement had a slogan, it would be the cry of the Dodo in “Alice in Wonderland:” “Everyone has won, and all must have prizes.”
In fairness, Kohn is more honest about his agenda than many other critics of competition. While they concentrate on eliminating failure, Kohn admits his goal is to abolish success, or at least its trappings. Ultimately, however, there is not much difference between giving everyone prizes and giving prizes to no one. In either case, distinctions based on performance, effort and ability are eliminated. Everyone has either won or lost; as long as everyone is in the same boat, the levelers are satisfied with either result.
Despite Kohn’s newfound celebrity, his ideas are hardly new. Over the last 20 years “absolute success for students has become the means and the end of education,” according to University of Iowa education professor Margaret M. Clifford. “It has been given higher priority than learning and it has obstructed learning.” Since the 1960s, educators have tested Kohn’s ideas in thousands of schools where grades have been watered down or inflated, when they haven’t been replaced altogether with more benign assessments. But instead of the “well-adjusted, enthusiastic, self-confident scholars” the child-worshipers of the 1960s imagined would emerge from the schools once competition was overthrown, Clifford noted, the efforts “to mass produce success in every educational situation” had created a cult of self-celebrating mediocrity, washed on every side by a tide of phony successes and inflated esteems. Meanwhile, students who were gifted or who worked exceptionally hard were increasingly attacked or ignored by the people who were supposed to be educating them and encouraging “excellence.”
Schools Without Failure
In 1969, William Glasser wrote “Schools Without Failure,” a veritable handbook for schools that would fail over the next two and a half decades. He criticized objective tests, because they placed all their emphasis “on correct answers as opposed to reflecting upon important problems for which there are no right answers.” Indeed, Glasser objected to all closed-book examinations which, he said, were “based on the fallacy that knowledge remembered is better than knowledge looked up.” Glasser thus redefined knowledge as something that did not need to be known, a rather bold stroke even by the creative standards of educationism.
Glasser’s critique of grades also was influential. Giving students grades, Glasser declared, was “probably the school practice that most produces failure in students.” Grades were “an unpremeditated plot to destroy the students.” For the first six years of schooling, he insisted, no child should ever be failed, regardless of their efforts or their skills. After that, Glasser proposed replacing A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s and F’s with S for superior work and P for passing. Lest the S be confused with an A, Glasser declared that no student be allowed to earn more than one S per semester. Even then, any student who wanted to get an S would have to agree “to devote some time each week to help those students who are not doing well.” If students eventually did earn a passing grade, no mention of the earlier failure would appear in their transcript; it would be as if the failure had never happened. When a student left school, his records were destroyed. Glasser seemed to think that the stigma of failure is removed simply by not writing it down. His policy, however, assures only that colleges, employers and parents are not told of the failure; but it cannot be kept from the student himself. He knows. So Glasser does not succeed in abolishing failure, merely in obscuring the recognition of failure, which is not quite the same thing.
Eliminating grades, however, was just the beginning. Glasser also argued that there was something inherently unfair and undemocratic about homework. “Realizing that poor students rarely do homework,” he complained, “teachers gear the assignments to the A and B students who do the homework, thus widening the gap between the successes and failures in school.” In other words, if good students do homework and poor students don’t, should we dumb down the homework that is assigned? That was exactly what Glasser had in mind, and he was immensely influential in shaping education philosophy.
“Shorter and more relevant assignments might attract the poorer students,” he wrote in 1969, “who could go at their own pace at home and might use home study to catch up instead of falling further and further behind as they do now. . . .” This means that all homework must be pegged at the level of the poorest of the students, lest they become discouraged or disheartened. “We must use homework in a way that reaches the poor students,” Glasser insisted, “or at least not use it to their detriment while we are figuring out how to reach them.” If this sounds like it is writing off bright students, Glasser was quick to point out that gifted students are also victimized by demanding homework assignments. “Excessive homework penalizes the bright, creative student,” he explained, “because by doing it conscientiously, he has little time for other pursuits such as music, dancing, art, theater, science and crafts.”
Since he was writing in 1969, Glasser was apparently unfamiliar with hanging out at the shopping mall. He seems to have believed that youngsters would spend their free time attending Broadway productions and penning librettos if only they didn’t have to write a geography paper.
But eliminating failure means more than simply not measuring students against one another. If they are measured against any objective standard, there is also a possibility students will fall short or even fail. So Glasser also proposed changing the standards and goals of education. He acknowledged that even in a system where students are only rated as “passing” P or “superior” S, standards will have to be re-examined.
Schools, Glasser said, should give up the attempt to keep academic standards high. “Our present attempt to keep standards high is ineffective,” he wrote. “Teachers present too much material and hold students responsible for learning more than they can assimilate.” Too many courses were too hard. “In courses such as chemistry, physics, advanced math, economics or literature,” Glasser complained, “a few able students keep up, but the rest fall behind and learn next to nothing.”
Under the no-failure regime, teachers would not be able to “maintain present unrealistic standards.” They would have to teach less and to teach it more slowly. “We can continue to teach complex courses,” Glasser allowed, “but we must cover less ground and we must cover the material we do present more slowly and in greater depth.”
Another tactic Glasser recommended was redefining the goals of schooling. He suggested emphasizing “thinking skills,” and a flexible schedule for students to meet their teacher’s goals. “If one child takes a little longer than some others,” he wrote, “it makes no difference.” Glasser’s book is proof that ideas do, indeed, have consequences. Twenty-five years later, Glasser’s ideas would be called Outcome-Based Education.
Lowering the Hoop
Like Glasser, the architects of OBE envision a world in which no one fails, or at least in which no one fails in school. “For the most part,” declared Albert Mammary, “we believe competition in the classroom is destructive.” Mammary has been superintendent of New York’s Johnson City Central School District, where he developed an “Outcomes-Driven Development Model,” which he describes as the “nation’s first comprehensive school improvement model.” The model is built on slogans along the line of “Success for all students” and “Excellence for All.” For Mammary, the first step to success begins with doing away with failure. “Outcome-based schools believe there should be no failure and that failure ought to be removed from our vocabulary and thoughts,” he wrote in 1991. “Failure, or fear of failure, will cause students to give up.”
Former students may recall that, to the contrary, the fear of failure was an inducement to try harder, a spur that caused papers to be written and formulas memorized. But Mammary sees the threat of failure only as a barrier to enthusiastic learning. “When students don’t have to worry about failure,” he insists, “they will be more apt to want to learn.”
Tests also are transformed in Mammary’s vision. They are no longer trials of knowledge, but celebrations of success. “Testing should be creative,” he insists, “aligned to learning outcomes, and only given when the students will do well.” This is only the beginning of his redefinition of “success” and “excellence.”
“Outcome-based schools,” he declares, “believe excellence is for every child and not just a few.” They achieve this not by dragging the top kids down, he writes, but by bringing expectations for everyone up. He does this, however, by insisting that everyone be a winner. Mammary is explicit on this: “A no-cut philosophy is recommended. Everyone trying out for the football team should make it; everyone who comes to the program for the gifted and talented should make it.”
There is a dreamy, utopian quality about all of this. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was a prom queen; if everybody who dreamed of being quarterback could be one; if every aspiring pianist could star in a concert? The world, unfortunately, doesn’t work that way. But that is precisely the point. Dreams have such power to fix our imaginations precisely because everyone cannot achieve them. Boys aspire to be the quarterback because of the level of accomplishment it represents. Not everyone can do it. If anyone could be quarterback, what is left to aspire to? There is also a practical concern here. A football team that must play anyone who wishes to be quarterback will quickly become a team in which no one will want to play any position. By abolishing failure (or at least the recognition and consequences of failure) and redefining excellence to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, we deprive success of meaning. In the ideal OBE world, everyone would feel like a success, without necessarily having to do much of anything to justify his or her self-esteem.
In its goal statement, Milwaukee’s suburban Whitnall district declared that “By 1996-97, all students will demonstrate 100 percent proficiency in the District’s performance outcomes.” Whitnall school board member Ted Mueller quotes one astute resident remarking, “If we require all students to be able to stuff a basketball to be able to graduate from high school, the only way you’re going to be able to accomplish that is to lower the basketball hoop.”
Off with the Grades!
If Mammary appears a dreamer, there are practical applications of his philosophy. The most obvious is the hostility of OBE to traditional grades and measurements of achievement. The emphasis on abolishing grades and traditional tests is central to the philosophy of OBE advocates. “Grading lies at the core of how our current system operates,” declares OBE guru William Spady, the director of the High Success Program on Outcome-Based Education. Spady quotes conservative reformers such as Chester Finn in his writings, but he follows Mammary in calling for the leveling of distinctions based on ability, industry or achievement. Grades, he writes, are gatekeepers, separating good students from others. “This, in turn, reinforces the system of inter-student comparison and competition created by class ranks. Such a system, of course, gives a natural advantage to those with stronger academic backgrounds, higher aptitudes for given areas of learning, and more resources at home to support their learning.” His objection appears to be based less on educational grounds than on his suspicion of inequality of any sort. Grades favor the smart and the studious. Spady wants to make up for the unfairness of it all. Grades are oppressive, Spady writes, because they “label students, control their opportunities, limit their choices, shape their identities, and define their rewards for learning and behaving in given ways.” Grades pit students against one another, he complains, “implying that achievement and success are inherently comparative, competitive and relative” (which, in fact, they are both in school and in life). Indeed, Spady sees the issue of grades in terms of class struggle. “The usual result: The rich get richer, the poor give up.” Not necessarily. The student who gets D’s can work to become a student who gets C’s and the C student will strive to become a B or an A student. The A student may work harder so that he does not become a C student.
But Spady sees no link between grades and motivation to succeed or improve oneself. Instead, he focuses on the potential damage that poor grades might inflict on “young people struggling toassumes here that identity and self-worth are independent of achievement. Like Mammary, Spady envisions a grading system with no failure, but also no bad grades at all. OBE, he explains, eliminates labeling and competitive grading and stresses “VALIDATING that a high level of performance is ultimately reached on those things that will directly impact on the student’s success in the future. In other words, all we’re really interested in is A-level performance, thank you, so we EXPECT it of all students, systematically teach for it and validate it when it occurs.”
The OBE buzzword for its approved evaluation system is “authentic assessment.” Assessment is authentic, apparently, only when it becomes impossible to rank one student’s performance ahead of another’s. In this new system, Spady suggests that teachers will be able to “throw away their pens at evaluating and reporting time and replace them with pencils that have large erasers.” Although he does not expand on the point, the abolition of “permanent records” has obvious advantages for educationists as well as students. The eraser takes both off the hook at the same time.
One form of accountability especially detested by the educational establishment creates measurements by which academic achievement can be readily compared among schools and among districts. Such comparisons are widely publicized and have considerable influence on policymakers who determine how and where to distribute scarce tax dollars. Evaluations that are constantly in flux obviously cannot be compared in this way. At most, schools could report progress toward their educational “goals,” which may turn out to be notoriously difficult to quantify. Those goals, however, will be a benchmark of sorts and educationists can be expected to point to them as authentic measures of their success. Indeed, success of one sort or another seems inevitable, since the goals often appear to be set to accommodate the lower common denominator.
Attack on Ability Grouping
The most direct assault on programs for brighter students are denunciations of programs that group students by ability as both undemocratic and racist. “Classes for the gifted,” Federal Judge Robert Carter said in a newspaper interview, “usually mean classes for whites and special education classes usually mean classes for black males.” The National Governor’s Association released a study by UCLA professor Jeannie Oakes charging that “conventional, if increasingly obsolete, conceptions of intelligence, as well as deep-seated racist and classist attitudes and prejudices support tracking.”
The most common indictment of tracking is that it pins a negative label on children too early, thus becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for children who find themselves stuck in a system of low expectations and limited opportunities. This is especially true of special education classes, many of which have indeed become dumping grounds for minority children. But the real evil of the tracking system is the way that it has been used to dumb down the classes for students who are most in need of academic help. Standards for children in the lower track are often scandalously low and thus do contribute to a widening gap between white and minority students and between students of varying abilities. A 1st grader who might have been half a grade below grade level and so is placed in a lower and dumbed down track, might fall two or three grade levels behind by the time she gets to 6th grade. But instead of focusing efforts on improving the curriculum or raising the standards and expectations of those classes, opponents have turned their fire on the overall system-including the practice of letting brighter students work at an accelerated pace in classes geared for students of advanced abilities. Instead of raising the floor, the trend is toward lowering the ceiling.
Struggles over tracking often pit middle-class families against the forces of equity, with huge stakes for the public schools. Parents who can afford to do so will often choose private or parochial schools based as much on the prospective student body as on the curriculum. But as English teacher Patrick Welsh wrote in The Washington Post, ability groups may be the “last line of defense” for middle-class parents who either can’t afford to escape or are genuinely committed to public education, but who want to “minimize their kids’ classroom contact with troublemakers and laggards.”
In Alexandria, Va., where Welsh taught, the political pressures to create “inclusive” classrooms forced teachers to teach honors students at the same pace as students who were deficient “in even the most basic academic tasks.” One of Welsh’s colleagues recounted, “These kids feel that as long as they come to school, they are entitled to do exactly what they want to do. All they want is to get a D. If they get a C it is like they have wasted too much time working.” Welsh has had similar experiences. “When I recently promised a student that if he finished an assigned novel I would give him a C for the quarter, he seemed offended. “I don’t want no C, man! I want a D,” he replied.
Even where the class can operate at a reasonable level of efficiency, the one-size-fits-all classroom must still make compromises. “Some people will say that the top students are going to excel anyway,” says 8th-grade teacher Richard O’Laughlin, whose Lowell, Mass., school has abolished ability grouping. “Well, that’s not true. If they’re not told a certain fact about history, they can’t possibly know that. It they’re not taught to think on an abstract level, they can’t think on that level.” In his mixed group classes, he says, he must move much more slowly and often is unable to introduce activities like writing essays or drawing historical comparisons. “It’s going to hurt the country to water it all down,” he warns.
As usual, the educational merits of tracking are less clear than the politics. But the evidence suggests that no matter how politically incorrect they may be, enriched programs for brighter students do pay educational dividends. Researcher Susan Demirsky Allan found that both meta-analyses (studies of other studies) and so-called “best-evidence” research agree that “some forms of grouping were found to improve the academic performance of gifted children, and it is likely that the real benefits were greater than could be shown by the method of measurement.” Likewise, James A. Kulik and Chen Lin Kulik, two of the most prominent researchers in the field, concluded that “academic benefits are striking and large in programs of acceleration for gifted students.” The Kuliks also found that gifted students did much better in advanced classes than they did in mixed-group classes. In fact, the overwhelming weight of the research evidence indicates that academically advanced students benefit greatly from programs that are geared to match their pace of learning. Although critics frequently claim that ability grouping might have damaging effects on the self-esteem of slower students, this also apparently is not the case. In 1985, Chen Lin Kulik found that slow learners actually had higher self-esteem in classes designed to work at their pace. (In contrast programs for the gifted seem to have only a trivial effect on the self-image of bright students.)
Ability grouping allows slower students to experience the sort of success they are unlikely to enjoy in classes where they are mixed with fast-learning students. For gifted students, on the other hand, ability grouping may mean that bright students are faced with real competition for the first time in their academic careers. Ultimately, however, the research findings may be beside the point since educational practice seems less driven by student needs than by establishment ideology. Lloyd Hastings, a principal from Texas, spoke for much of the educationist establishment when he said: “The ability grouping of students for educational opportunity in a democratic society is ethically unacceptable. We need not justify this with research, for it is a statement of principle, not science.”
The disdain of educationists for tracking and ability grouping is matched by their enthusiasm for “cooperative learning.” Professor Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University, who argues that ability grouping and tracking runs “against our democratic ideals” and “against our national ideology that all are created equal,” enthusiastically endorses cooperative learning. Alfie Kohn sees cooperative learning as an antidote to competition, elitism, and is, therefore, “one of the most exciting developments in modern education.”
Supporters of cooperative learning often suggest that one of the real values of forcing students of various academic levels to work together is that gifted students will learn democratic values and humility in the process. Other educationists argue that gifted students will experience a “higher-level processing” of material that they have to explain to other, slower students in their groups, and will therefore improve their social skills and self-esteem along the way. Students often don’t see it that way. When education professor Marian Mathews interviewed gifted 6th and 8th graders in cooperative learning groups she found:
– The brighter students couldn’t understand why other students couldn’t grasp material that they found to be easy. They resent having to explain material to students who don’t listen.
– Gifted students resent the time taken away from their own studies.
– None of the students say they understand the material better after explaining it to others. Mostly, they were bored.
– They feel used.
– Because they are concerned about quality, many gifted students end up taking over the group and doing much of the work themselves. “I did a project last year,” one student told Mathews, “and I spent half of my time explaining to the others in the group what to do and they sat there reading magazines in the library all the time. I did all the work and still got a D on it because they did absolutely nothing.”
Rather than developing social skills, Mathews found, working in groups “appears to promote some arrogance, a lack of trust in classmates .”
The Bright as “Role Models”
Advocates for cooperative learning insist that they have substantial evidence that cooperative learning works as well or better than other forms of grouping in raising academic standards and achievements.
Unfortunately, however, most of the studies they cite compare cooperative learning groups with traditionally taught control groups, but do not measure the performance of cooperative students against the performance of students in groups with different curricula and paces of instruction. Based on the actual evidence, write William G. Durden and Carol J. Mills of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, “it is clear that the abandonment of all forms of ability grouping and the wholesale, uncritical acceptance of cooperative learning is at least premature, and most likely unwarranted.”
As serious as the doubts about its academic value might be, cooperative learning raises equally grave questions about its underlying morality. How appropriate is it to use bright students for the benefit of other students, at the expense of their own education?
The Coming Educational Revolution
The dumbing down of American kids is also very much a family affair, often abetted and even encouraged by parents. Our dilemma would be considerably eased if parents were clamoring for higher standards, more homework, and more rigorous grades. But this is hardly the case-teachers often have to adjust their expectations and standards downward because they cannot count on support from home for more demanding requirements.
The emphasis on dysfunctional families is misleading. Despite the massive shifts in family patterns during the last several decades, most students still come from intact families.
But even traditional, two-parent, middle-class families contribute to the educational crisis because of their attitudes toward education and their own responsibilities.
American parents do not like what they regard as excessive homework and frequently express distaste for schoolwork if it interferes with other activities they think should be given equal or even greater value.
Unless American parents raise expectations, it is unlikely that America’s schools will ever raise them unilaterally. Mediocrity, unfortunately, is contagious. But so is excellence.
THE RELIGON OF SELF-ESTEEM
Perhaps because the fear of working children too hard has become a preoccupation both of parents and educationists, self-esteem has virtually become an official ideology of American education. All children must feel good about themselves no matter what.
But the emphasis on self-esteem is not simply about education, or even about the psychological health of children. It is also about equity, one of the parallel obsessions of the American school. Unlike many of those implementing the self-esteem programs in schools across the country, educationist Martin V. Covington is familiar with what the academic research shows and does not show about self-esteem. Indeed, he has the rare good grace to acknowledge that many of the studies of the relationship of self-esteem and academic achievement do not support the educationist dogma on the issue. He admits the “lack of conclusiveness” about whether self-esteem causes achievement or achievement causes self-esteem and notes that “the most disquieting feature of these studies is the generally low magnitude of association found between self-esteem and achievement.” Because Covington supports dramatic and sweeping changes in the educational system to enhance self-esteem, he acknowledges that these findings present educationists with “a dilemma.”
Covington acknowledges that sometimes “a lack of a sense of worth is a more powerful stimulant to achievement than self-confidence is” and that high self-esteem “may not always promote the continued will to learn.”
But despite the doubts and hesitations suggested by the research, Covington proposes sweeping changes designed to eliminate competition, equalize rewards and generally raise the self-esteem of students. The contrast could hardly be more striking between the evidence he cites and the conclusions he draws.
For Covington, the issue is competition. He acknowledges that competition “appears to be almost inevitable, generated in part by a minority of students who define their worth in competitive ways.” While this might suggest that competition is a natural process and that kids will compete, regardless of what grown-ups say about the joys and consolations of cooperation, Covington calls for vigorous efforts to stamp out the competitive spirit. It is not enough, Covington declares, “simply to oppose classroom competition in the abstract. Rather teachers must actively restructure classroom learning incentives to encourage other, more beneficial reasons for learning.”
He acknowledges possible “downsides” to the elimination of competition, such as undermining the motivation of some students and giving others an inflated sense of their abilities. Despite those doubts, however, he insists that efforts “to promote more equity structures in school should be seriously considered.” His goal is not strictly educational; it is at least in equal part an ideological attack on certain values in American society as a whole. Eliminating a competitive environment in schools will require eliminating the competitive environment in society. Schools won’t be non-competitive until American society is made non-competitive, and vice versa. “To most Americans,” he writes, “achievement is everything; it is our badge, our national identity.”
And that attitude about achievement-in schools and in society-is, ultimately, Covington’s target. The instrument to transform both society and the schools is not class struggle, but self-esteem. “Perhaps only for the sake of self-esteem,” Covington declares, “would we be willing to carry out policy recommendations that seriously question two of our most cherished beliefs: the cult of achievement and the myth of competition.” In practice that also translates into an attack on the idea of excellence and its weight falls most heavily on gifted students.
