Oh, The Humanity!

Maybe it's because I grew up in the 70s and my teachers had been in college in the 60s, but I've got some issues with our expectations of our teachers and schools right now. I'm not talking about the curriculum, although that would certainly be a good discussion. And, I'm not trying to say that we expect too much of our teachers and schools, even though we do. What I'm talking about is the pressure on teachers to focus relentlessly on academic achievement and closing the achievement gap, with little, if any, regard for the development of the individual student. This is particularly true in schools with high poverty rates. Yes, academic achievement is extremely important, and I agree that we have an unacceptably unequal situation in our public schools today. It's shameful that a country with our wealth and resources has allowed children in poverty to languish. It's horrific that we have allowed schools that serve children in poverty to accept significantly lower academic skills from them. I recognize all the reasons we have created this pressure on our teachers and schools to spend all their time and energy on covering the curriculum, getting higher achievement out of their students, and getting more of them to enroll in college. But what has the cost been? Because, there's always a cost.

I believe that the cost has been (bear with me, please) our humanity. OK, that's a sweeping and dramatic statement, but stop and think for a moment. I did not grow up in affluence. Until high school, I attended schools in a lower-middle-class/working-class neighborhood. My fellow students were white, black, Latino, and Asian. Most spoke English as their first language, but not all. In other words, my teachers were asked to work with the same demographic then that most teachers work with now. Yet, because of how the school and curriculum were structured, and because they were not being evaluated on how we performed on a test, they took the time to connect with each one of us. There were no high-stakes tests and no value-added evaluations. They made us feel valuable. They slowed down when we needed them to slow down and they asked us what we liked and what we wanted to be when we grew up. I personally witnessed several instances of my teachers stopping to talk one-on-one with a classmate about something entirely separate from the lesson. I can remember several instances when one of my teachers pulled me aside and talked with me about what was going on in my life and in my head. I felt loved.

My point is, do our schools today have the "luxury" of encouraging teachers to really get to know their students? Are those relationships valued? Gilbert Highet spends a significant amount of time in his book, The Art of Teaching, explaining the importance of the relationship between the teacher and the student. I worry that we have ventured so far from that realization, the realization that children need to know that their teachers care about them and that their personal development is truly important to them, that we are creating a situation we never intended to create. What will the long-term impact of this be on these students and, therefore, on our society? Will they ever feel fulfilled? Will they ever mature into the steady, responsible, happy people we will need them to be? How deeply will they care about their fellow human beings? Will they be capable of empathy?  

I hope I'm over-reacting, I really do. But I've got questions. Everyone who works in schools today has heard the "Rigor, relevance, and relationships," mantra. They're the Holy Trinity of education, or at least that's how some think of them. But how much attention have we paid to the third part of that group? In schools with high poverty/low achievement, how much attention have we been allowed to pay to that third one? We get so wrapped up in getting kids up to grade level or up to proficiency that we don't spend time on the truly important elements of childhood. We can't. The pressure is too great. 

In my opinion, we have so badly skewed the educational process that it is distorting our view of children. When did the goals of education become test scores? I want it to be about helping children develop into capable young people who understand themselves and the world, at least to a certain extent, and who have an idea of what will make them happy in life. I don't care how they score on standardized tests. If we want to "close the achievement gap," we should demand that our government take steps to greatly reduce the number of children living in poverty. Changing the dynamic between teachers and students isn't going to "close the achievement gap." It's going to exacerbate it.