Midway through the First World War, a soldier on the Western Front wrote a poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est.” He said it was neither sweet nor fitting to die for your country. He didn’t mean it wasn’t sometimes necessary. The poet himself died as a volunteer in combat. His point was, there’s nothing sweet about drowning in a sea of chlorine gas, and people should stop telling children the “old lie” that there is.
Public education has its old lie, too, though it’s not nearly as old. Our lie is every student can, and will, succeed.
When I was a student, nobody promised or expected every student would succeed, any more than doctors promised, and families expected, every patient would recover.
The first hint of the new regime I had as a teacher was a restructured grading system where the lowest grade was “Making Progress.” My superintendent at the time was a conventional late 20th-century reformer. According to his equally conventional “vision” of reform, “the word failure is never used and never done.”
It might sound pleasant to imagine schools where failure never happens and everyone is always, at the very least, making progress, but it ignores the reality that, on any given school day and sometimes on many school days, some students aren’t improving their skills or building knowledge in any meaningful way, and others, owing to apathy, sloth, malice, intellectual limitations, hardships or mental disease, are even regressing.
Against that real world backdrop, states and districts across the nation adopted the credo, “Success for all students — no exceptions, no excuses.” You could find this lie emblazoned everywhere from official documents to middle school parking lot signs. When one prominent business leader addressed the National Governors’ Association here in Vermont, education experts and policymakers supported his call for “restructuring” and “higher standards.” They also somehow guaranteed that students who currently weren’t meeting allegedly lower standards, would all succeed at meeting higher standards.
The promise of universal success was eventually enshrined in a federal law, No Child Left Behind. This fancifully titled piece of legislation always made me feel like the patriarch Jacob. When his wife, Rachel, complained she wasn’t bearing children, Jacob replied, “Am I in the place of God,” by which he meant he was already doing everything he humanly could and that some things were beyond his power as a mortal man.
In the same way, some promised education feats lie beyond my power as a teacher. It’s especially irksome when those promises are made on my behalf by experts and officials who don’t have to fulfill them.
It didn’t take long, although it took too long, for those same experts and officials to recognize “universal proficiency” was an unrealistic expectation. Of course, they conveniently forgot they were the ones who’d led everybody to expect it in the first place. Without missing a beat or wasting one on an apology, they replaced the unrealistically titled No Child Left Behind with the equally unrealistically titled Every Student Succeeds Act.
The two laws aren’t identical. What is identical is the pernicious fiction that, somehow, with the right laws, the right tests and the right “best practices,” we can make every student succeed.
I care about my students. I want them to succeed. But mandating “universal proficiency” can’t, and won’t, make them all proficient. Their success isn’t a matter of what I want. Mandating success for every student has, however, led to the doctrine I’ve repeatedly heard with my own ears that, if any one of my students isn’t succeeding, it’s because I’m doing something wrong, that if a student isn’t learning, that means I’m not teaching him.
Schools have over recent decades expanded their array of methods and practices to address the needs of exceptional students. But the false promise and premise of guaranteed universal success has engendered and justified ever more radical, unsound “reforms” that have sacrificed the success and education of the many in the vain, sadly fruitless, attempt to procure success for a few.
It happens every day in our nation’s classrooms. I’ve seen it happen down the hall from me.
It isn’t wrong to aspire to reach more students. If I were a private tutor, I could cater to each student separately and specifically. But I’m not. Like most teachers, I teach to the middle of my class and reach out to students on the fringes. Some methods and some teachers are better at doing that, but anybody who tells you that teaching a class is the same as teaching 20 separate students, hasn’t done it.
It’s not that I don’t see my students as individuals, or that I treat them as a faceless, nameless herd. It’s not that I don’t care when one is troubled. One of the hardest things about being a teacher is seeing a student who could succeed but doesn’t. After 30 years, I still remember some of their faces.
It’s certainly not that I write students off based on their race or economic class. My three decades have confirmed that ability and endeavor are individual traits, not the attributes of any group.
Those years, however, have also confirmed that every student doesn’t succeed. They’ve confirmed that many of the obstacles that obstruct student learning lie outside my classroom and inside my students in places where this English teacher can’t go and can’t help.
Schools can’t make all students learn.
I can’t make all students learn.
As long as we judge our schools based on a lie and further plunge our classrooms into chaos based on a lie, we won’t help the students who aren’t learning now, and we’ll ensure more children don’t learn in the future.
That’s the cost of this old lie.
It’s a cost our students and our nation can’t afford.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care ofthe editor.
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