The new old lie about student success

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 that there is nothing sweet about drowning in a sea of chlorine gas, and that people should stop telling children the “old lie” that there is.

Public education has its old lie, too. Our lie is that every student can and will succeed.

When I was a student, nobody promised, or expected, that every student would succeed, any more than doctors promised and families expected that every patient would recover.

The first hint of the new regime that I had as a teacher was a restructured grading system where the lowest grade was “Making Progress.” According to my superintendent’s “vision” of reform, “the word failure is never used and never done.” It’s a pleasant thought that failure never happens and that everyone is always at the very least making progress, but it ignores the reality the some students aren’t improving their skills or building knowledge in any meaningful way, and that others, owing to apathy, sloth, malice, intellectual limitations, hardships, or mental disease, are even regressing.

Around that time 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 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.

This 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 that 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 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.

In time those same experts and officials determined that “universal proficiency” was an unrealistic expectation. Of course, they conveniently forgot that they were the ones who’d led everybody to expect it in the first place. Properly chastened, 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.

Universal proficiency is not the same as wanting as many students as possible to succeed. It has led to the accusation, which I have 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 attempt to procure success for a few.

It happens every day in our nation’s classrooms. It happens 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 twenty separate students hasn’t done it.

It’s not that I don’t see my students as individuals, or 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 thirty 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 schools based on a lie and further plunge classrooms into chaos based on a lie, we won’t help the students who aren’t learning now, and we’ll ensure that more children don’t learn in the future.

That’s the cost of this old lie.

It’s a cost our students can’t afford. Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.

It’s a pleasant thought that failure never happens and that everyone is always at the very least making progress, but it ignores the reality the some students aren’t improving their skills or building knowledge in any meaningful way, and that others, owing to apathy, sloth, malice, intellectual limitations, hardships, or mental disease, are even regressing.