Thornton high school teacher Jessica Keigan wonders what it would take for all education stakeholders to rally around a common goal – our students’ success.
Last spring, my school went through the accreditation process. We did well, but were tasked with creating a unified mission and vision that all staff, students and community members were aware of.
When we went about the process of creating this at the beginning of the school year, my peers and I had the interesting experience of deciding where our focus should be. With a wide variety of experience and passions, each person came to the table with a different bias. The only reason we were successful in our task was because we had a common goal.
Actor Jeff Daniels as news anchor Will McAvoy in the HBO series The Newsroom.
This process called to mind a clip I saw from HBO’s show The Newsroom. In this clip, Jeff Bridges’ character lambasts the idea that America is the greatest country on earth.
Leonard Pitts explored this theme further in his compelling commentary, which responds to Bridge’s character’s argument. Rather than focusing on the cynical aspects of the speech, Pitt’s provides hope in his notion that “the potential of [greatness] lies in America’s endless capacity for reinvention.”
According to Pitt’s claim, the problem isn’t in our potential as a country, but in the fact that we are without a unified purpose or goal. If we are to live up to our self-promotion, we need to align around a common goal. So what will it be?
Obviously, my bias as a teacher is very deeply planted. When I think of what needs to be accomplished to help our country live up to its self-made hype again, I look to the education system and its potential, not just to impact the future but to be innovative and exciting.
There are so many groups who claim to have a similar vision for the future of the education system when in reality their actions work against each other. What would it be like if we all focused on accomplishing the same goal? What if we decided that making sure all of our students had equitable opportunity to learn and be prepared for whatever comes after high school?
Public school used to be the great equalizer — what if it could be again?
What if unions, policymakers, teacher voice groups, district officials and parents banded together to create innovative and creative solutions for making sure our kids were prepared for the future?
What if all educational stakeholders set our students’ success as our goal — what steps would we need to take to attain this lofty vision?
One of the reasons I love my job is that I get to recognize and nurture potential in the students that come into my classes. The U.S. education system has great potential, too. Perhaps it’s time that we look to nurture it as well.
About the author
Jessica Keigan teaches English at Horizon High School in Thornton. A teacher leader with the Center for Teaching Quality, she is passionate about exploring and creating teacher leadership models to improve Colorado’s schools. Keigan is also a member of District 12’s Educator’s Association.
Laudable post. Allow me to offer that you are asking questions that are natural but irrelevant. What goals should we have seems like a good place to start, if nothing else, a conversation about our practice as teachers. When teachers get together to talk about their work, there is bound to be the bonding provided by shared experiences, excitement around just having the opportunity to talk as adults about our life’s passion, and a feeling of self-satisfaction from being able to air one’s frustrations and triumphs.
All for naught. For those teachers who have been around for two decades or so, there is little going on today that qualifies as game-changing for our students’ success. We’ve seen it all before. By that, I don’t necessarily must mean the classroom tactics or curricular strategies or accountability systems; I mean, we’ve seen the political process decide what we as professionals do on the job. In some states, politicians and their citizen-enablers even deny accepted scientific findings in favor of some version of metaphysical magic. We are told the outcomes of reform will indeed be about student success.
Here’s the problem with that approach: Student success is highly subjective. Sure, anyone can put numbers on behavioral and academic outcomes based, biased upon one’s own or some collective worldview. External discipline-based standards are fine and I quite like them. What I find troubling is all the talk about success and achievement and fairness and even equity. Why? I think you know where I am going with this. One might be a successful student at the age of 14 but by 22, that student has a failing gpa in college and fails to get the sheepskin. Now, who failed that child?
Politicians, pundits, the chattering class, parents, private educational corporations, and many other so-called experts in the educational process all claim to have an answer. What the question is, is still somewhat mysterious. Jessica raises a valid question about goals and focus. I would suggest we forget about mission statements, goals, foci, or any other deterministic metric of whatever we mean by success. Just teach. Teach subjects. Teach skills. Teach critical thinking. Teach how to ask good questions. Teach and lead by example. Inspire with passion; connect classroom to life. Trust teachers. Trust what is called human nature. Our species didn’t get to where it is today with Paleolithic State Standards for stone blade carving yet they did have “standards”. Humans are wired for self-discovery and growth by dint of our genetic hard-wiring. We learn new things literally every day simply by being alive and conscious. Our educational system means to control this genetic trait. Good. We need discipline. But the political system seems unaware of modern research into how and why people of any age learn. They fall back upon old nostrums and fail to see the value of research.
So here we are. 2012. But what does it mean?
Ah, yes Jeffrey and dance like no one is watching. The problem is that somebody is watching–society is. I cannot imagine telling a doctor to just go out and practice medicine without a purpose, without a way to assess effectiveness. You may be right that polticians obscure, obfuscate and co-opt the purpose of education, but that doesn’t mean we should just go about our “business” by closing our door and teaching. Are teachers aware of the same research that you argue politicians ignore? Because if teachers are aware of it we do a poor job of advocating and practicing it.
I guess what I’m talking about Mark, are the kind of goals committees create. Ersatz goals made just for the sake of it. Those kind of goals are useless and in great supply these days, to no apparent gain. In teaching a skill or subject, the real goals are present every step of the way, in every move a teacher makes.. Doctors do indeed have goals but they don’t hang around websites or board rooms wringing their hands about what society wants.
Back at the start of No Child Left Behind, we had this goal of third grade proficiency by 2014. For all. Right. Way back then, I predicted we would never meet it and that the process used would guarantee it’s own failure resulting in further complications for reform. It’s all played out exactly as predicted. It was an iron fist in a velvet glove kind of goal and was doomed from inception, just like most aspects of what passes for reform goals in 2012. The process by which the educational establishment makes decisions is deeply and irrevocably flawed. We didn’t have high-stakes tests in the 1960s and America got to the Moon but then, we got there with people who had gone through K12 in the 1930s.
If you disaggregate the 2009 PISA data, you will find Asian-American students lead the world. I doubt they just happen to go to the very “best schools” in the nation. Creating successful students begins at birth. If you want to change anything and even I do–it is to change what happens before preschool. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/for-poor-schoolchildren-a-poverty-of-words.html?ref=education “As the education theorist E. D. Hirsch recently wrote in a review of Paul Tough’s new book, “How Children Succeed,” there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success. Schools have an enormously hard time pushing through the deficiencies with which many children arrive.”
Jeffrey, I’m a little surprised by the tack you’ve taken here though I understand the emotional content of your post. In the past, you have used these same pages to call for the emergence of a common idea of the modern purpose of education, something I definitely support. Are you just feeling particularly dispirited today?
I also understand your concern over “ersatz goals” (you must be around some juniors prepping for ACT too;-). Just because design by committee sucks doesn’t mean it’s not possible to meaningfully establish real shared direction and cohesion in a school district or even in the system as a whole.
As far as what to do for kids before they arrive in kindergarten, I’m libertarian enough that I’m not up for telling parents how to raise their kids or taking on more of the responsibility for them. I am interested in talking about how we make the early preparation of students as easy as falling off a log. The fact is, it’s hard to think about such important matters when your attention is primarily focused on survival level considerations like making sure you’ve got food and shelter.
Quite right Jeff, I have called for a shared notion of what education is for and I am a bit testier…than usual. And I do have some juniors
But the thing is, it just seems we are going ahead with reform founded upon a rationale that says the education of children is meant to create productive members of society to preserve America’s standing in the world, and hold off economic competition from China. From NCLB: “As we ask states to raise their standards to prepare their students for college and the workplace, we will also be asking more from students, families, teachers, principals, and every level of the educational system. To make higher standards meaningful, we must ensure that states, districts, schools, and teachers have the resources and assistance they need to help students reach these standards, such as instructional supports, high-quality professional development, and teaching and learning materials aligned with those standards.”
And Obama says in his preface to the NCLB, “Today, more than ever, a world-class education is a prerequisite for success. America was once the best educated nation in the world. A generation ago, we led all nations in college completion, but today, 10 countries have passed us. It is not that their students are smarter than ours. It is that these countries are being smarter about how to educate their students. And the countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow.”
It’s hard to be much of a libertarian and still be for public schools, isn’t it? The way school culture is structured creates ethical conditions students must meet or they will meet with disapproval or expulsion. Thankfully for me, I’m no libertarian here. And in order to ameliorate the survival mode, I would advocate an expanded social safety net and provision for a wealth of parental training and incentives to grow children thoughtfully with strong supports equal to demanding challenges. See, I believe where freedom (in a libertarian sense) comes in is for the child as she grows into an adult–equip children with a rich cognitive and affective life, and their own personal choices expand greatly with time.