Failing Our Brightest Young Minds

Politicians are apparently very fond of giving wonderful sounding names to their public school education programs. Names like "No Child Left Behind" and "Every Student Succeeds". Much like the word Communism itself, such ideas can initially “look pretty good” … at least on paper.

But in “real life” action? As we all know, such high sounding programs have often actually achieved the exact opposite of what they proposed to do.

I know. I was there. For a lifetime. Teaching in public schools.

I cannot begin to count how many times I heard teachers and principals say similar words to the following:

“Oh, don’t pay so much attention to ______. He is bright. He will pass the year end test easily already. To get our school’s scores up, we need to be paying most of our attention to the others. Let’s utilize our smart students to help us teach the other students the basics, enough to get them to pass the year end test.”

Now. Now. Don’t blame these teachers or their principals. They are all profoundly “judged” on how well their students (as a class whole) score on these year end tests. (If you have never been a teacher in public schools, it is difficult to describe the constant and intense pressure we daily face to “maintain” adequate classroom student scores on the Almighty Year End Tests.)

Blame governmental intrusion. Blame people in ivory towers far away who set the standards. Blame people who never taught a day in public schools in their lives, but who still make such laws.

But don’t blame your child’s teacher or school principal. They already know full well the ultimate stupidity of the Almighty Testing System in which public education in America has for too long been held hostgage.

An unintended paradox of all this political posturing to supposedly improve national test scores has been the very obvious result that American students (as a whole) have only grown ever further and further behind on both basic reading and math achievement levels. We are not gaining. We are falling collectively further and further behind. Every single year. More and more.

The reasons?

Well, we must admit there are many. Therefore, there is no silver bullet solution to this tremendous danger to the ongoing future of our republic … and to our form of democracy itself.

The premise of any strong republic is that the better educated its general poplulace is, the more wisely they will vote for those who govern them. Ignorance only breeds more and more bad choices at the political polls, as Thomas Jefferson so wisely predicted.

The answers?

Yes, there are answers. But the answers are not found in a year end test score.

Answers can be found by meeting the needs of our brightest students every bit as much as we currently strive to meet the needs of those students on the “other end” of the bell curve (something I found that public education actually does quite well).

Answers can be found if you put a dedicated, competent teacher in charge of their classroom of students - while removing the constantly looming specter of strict governmental intrusion. It's the method we used for a long time - and we built a pretty darn strong, smart country out of it.

One answer can certainly be found by realizing that something as wonderful and multi-factored as human learning can never be truly “measured” by a number. Therefore, no child should ever be equated with a test score.

If the Ancient Greeks (those marvels who first founded democracy) kept any record of their students’ test scores, we have yet to discover a shred of evidence of it.