Winners and Losers
This is the third explanatory note from James Herndon.
He says,
“The fundamental act of the American public school is to deal with children in groups…The school’s purpose is not teaching. The school’s purpose is to separate sheep from goats.”
If this was true in the 1960s, it’s become even more true now. With testing increasing in nearly every state, schools must figure out 1) which students are smart and dumb, and 2) how to make the dumb kids less dumb so they can show progress (and get more funding).
If there’s one things schools are great at, it’s putting kids into groups: the winners and losers. Winners are destined to go on and do great things in the next life. Losers are stuck with no options. And they keep up the myth that kids who do good at school do (proportionately) good at life.
Schools are so good at this, they can do it at any level. At an extremely elite private school for the gifted, you will find the kids who know they are the dumb kids. And at a very impoverished and “underperforming” school, everyone clearly knows who the smart kids are.
If a teacher were to give all A’s in a class, something is clearly wrong. How could a school be doing its job of teaching all the kids? Obviously the school expects that it will fail to teach the kids and there will always be dumb kids.
Beyond Academics
Herndon puts this in the context of academics, but of course, schools provide direct and indirect grouping and ranking in other ways too. Academics, music, sports, art, debate–all these things must be ranked or they don’t matter to a school.
Think about kids playing sports. When they play their own self-organized games, do they keep track of wins and loses? Or do they simply play, and if it’s not fun, they mix the teams up? It only when adults (and schools) get involved that sports performances get ranked.
But most of all, a school ranks kids socially too. There are the cool kids, the rich kids, the poor kids, the dorks, the nerds, the jocks, and endless other groupings. Popularity rankings are just as important in a school as any other ranking. When you are in a school, you know immediately where you land on the hierarchy, who’s in charge, and what it takes to move up and down. This is not done explicitly by the school, but it encourages it and supports it.
In fact, long after students forget how to do math and what books they read in English class, they will remember the rules of the social structure and a large number of adults are still trying to apply these rules to their lives.
Advanced First Grade Math
Educationally, I was always a winner. I always knew how much work I needed to do to stay in the top group and did that much or more. I got grades, awards, certificates, and eventually money for doing well in school. I never knew what it was like to be on the other side.
My son entered first grade this year. At the start of the year, he said his favorite subject was math. We would do things around the house to play around with math, and he learned how to add complex numbers and do some simple multiplication. At the start of the year, his teacher announced that there would be an advanced math class, and like Pavlov’s dogs, I started to salivate. A grouping of students? Smarter vs. dumber? A chance to get in the fast track? I’ve got this.
They did the test on a computer (which was my son’s first real interaction with computers). They delayed any teaching of math until the results from the computer tests came back so they could group the students.
When the results finally came back in, my son was put in the ‘normal’ group. Being an expert in school rankings, I knew this was not good. Surely there was some mistake? I looked over the objectives for the year for the ‘normal’ group. He already knew all these things! How could he be put in the ‘normal’ class? What might happen? Might he get discouraged? Would he be mediocre? Would he lose his love for math?
Thankfully, my son hasn’t really learned how schools rank, so he is still not too bothered. What he does know is that math is now a boring subject where “they don’t even teach pluses yet”, so he is now learning How to Pretend Like You Don’t Know Something.
Feeling the Rank
What was more telling/upsetting to me was my reaction to it.
One part of me was upset the school had relied on an obviously flawed computer system to evaluate children when they could have easily sat down with him and realized his ability.
The typical Midwesterner in me didn’t want to cause a stir, and be ‘that parent’ who demands their child be put in the top math group.
But even more, I wondered why it made me so upset. Why did I want so much for him to be in that top group? Because he deserved it? No, because I believed the lie that in order to succeed in life, you need to be ranked well in school. The same lie the school tells itself. That kids who do well in school will do well in life.
The only way to counter this is to reject that assumption outright. So what if the school thinks my son should be in the lower math group? We keep doing more math stuff around the house and he puts up with the math lessons in school.
Teaching my son that his classes are irrelevant is not something I really want to do. I wish there was more to do to be a benefit to the other children and to break the lies that are out there about how we rank kids. But I’m not seeing a lot of options out there.
