During the past few evenings I have spent time at my daughter’s
new school waiting to pick her up after soccer practice. The soccer field is located next to the
football field which is also by the area where the band practices and of course
everything is located next to the high school.
As I wait for practice to end, I can see football practice, band
practice, cross country practice and even volleyball practice (they came on the
track to run) take place. I bet that
there are over 100 students practicing or just wandering around. What a great sight. This time of year is a magical time for
students and all of us involved in education…it is truly “The most wonderful
time of the year”! Everyone has the hope
of a new beginning. I can feel the optimism
of the students as they look forward to the upcoming year and sense the joy of
friends and colleagues reconnecting after a long summer. In other words, this is why we are
educators. The kids are happy, excited, and
nervous all at the same time. The start
of a new school year promises unlimited opportunities for the students and
teachers alike.
True learning is so much more than the classes’ students
take or the grades they earn in those classes.
Our school systems provide spaces for students to learn how to interact
with each other; learn lessons about striving hard to reach a goal and become
an important focus for their community. Our
challenge as educators is to remember that we are always dealing with those
wonderful, complicated, frustrating beings called students. They are the focus of everything that occurs
in the school system. They are the ones
creating the energy and excitement for the start of the new school year. We must not allow them to become abstractions
or data points as our educational system becomes dangerously infatuated with “measuring”
students.
The “success” of a student, school or teacher is now
directly related to how well a student performs on a test. In an abstract way this may seem
harmless. After all, shouldn’t the
school system be held “accountable” for what students learn or don’t learn? However,
there is an insidious by-product of the infatuation with testing. As schools, teachers and policy makers pour
over the data supplied by these tests and analyze the results, students stop
becoming individual kids with a life history and they become number. In effect, they stop become humans and are
just a metric that will be used by policy makers in far away locales to determine
future policy decisions affecting local schools. Students become an abstraction, not a living,
breathing person. Interestingly enough, local
communities do not view their children as an abstraction; that is why parents
consistently give high approval rankings for their own, local schools. Communities can “see” their students…they can
put a face on a test score. Policy
makers do not “see” individual students, they only view graphs, trends in data,
and statistical models…the students have become disassociated from actual learning. Over the past few nights I have witnessed the
joy of seeing students as more than just a number. We must always push back against the urge to
allow students to become an abstraction.
Spend some time at your local school this evening as it gears up for the
new school year. You will see (and feel)
for yourself that kids are more than an abstraction.
