I was raised in schools that prioritized academic and athletic successes above all else. This was unspoken fact for young baby boomers in the 1950s. As Kindergartners, we did not know that grades and scores would define how we would be perceived, treated, and schooled in the next thirteen years. We were the first generation of school children for whom it could be said – we are our achievement scores – and, in hindsight, baby boomers as educators perpetuated this paradigm for the next 70 years. We shaped and led schools with the rear-view mirror mentality that what mattered in the 50s, 60s, and 70s matters in the 2020s. Our mantra has been “schools today must reflect how we were schooled”.
How did this happen?
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in a large circle for our weekly “show and tell”, every Kindergartner was center stage every week for several minutes at a time. Across that year of “show and tells”, we learned and appreciated the joy and responsibility of being the center of attention. The shyest as well as the most gregarious classmate was given the same opportunity to “show and tell”. When Jimmy, sitting next to me, emptied his marble bag one week to show a collection of purees, cats-eyes, agates, woodies, and steelies, all eyes were on Jimmy, including the teacher’s. Sadly, that was probably the last time I remember Jimmy being the focus on any positive attention.
By the second grade, classroom attention was portioned according to reading groups and school recognition was aligned with scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, quarterly grades, and a student’s time in the 50-yard dash and ability to throw and catch a ball. Tattoos were not a thing in the 50s, but if they were each child’s ITBS percentile would have been inked on their forehead. Jimmy’s ITBS score was below the 50th percentile. We knew enough back then to peek at each other’s ITBS scores when a sheet of tabled numbers and small print was handed to each child to take home to unaware parents. Scores mattered. As a result, Jimmy was in reading group 4, the last to meet in the reading circle with our teacher before lunch each day. Teacher attention to Jimmy and his group mates’ reading progress was more often ended by the lunch bell than the conclusion of the lesson being taught. Low scorers went to the periphery of school.
The pecking order of scores was shared across the school. The top 10% were most often picked by art, PE, and music teachers to take center stage on school teams, exhibits, and musicals and plays. Barb had an eye for design, shape, and color. When we created with papier-mâché, tooled tile blocks for block printing, and made hanging mobiles, Barb’s wore the blue ribbons. But, no one in the school ever talked about artistic kids, because art was not a score. Barb’s work went from her art table directly to her home. Barb’s standardized test scores were in the 70th percentile and she was just inside the periphery.
Gradually this reality suggested itself and now, decades later, it was as clear as a full moon on a cloudless night. Children who got good grades and were on the starting teams had more opportunities in school than children who did not; the did nots were given fewer opportunities.
By junior high school, Jimmy and Barb were lost in the academically tracked classes of low and underachievers and although he was cat-like and agile and she saw art that her classmates could not even imagine, their academics consigned them to the background of school.
There were 736 in our high school graduating class. Jimmy’s photo does not appear in our senior yearbook and his name is printed only once – in a list of “those not submitting a photo”. Barb appears alphabetically in the rows of senior photos with no other citations of her high school years.
Scanning the on-line obituaries of my hometown newspaper, I recently recognized Jimmy’s face before I read his name. He was loved by his wife, children, and grandchildren, worked for 45 years as an electrician, and was valued by his church and the local Boys and Girls Club where he was a mentor. A good life well-lived, by all accounts, yet I wonder what his life might have held if school had not numbered him as a low priority. Perhaps his life would have been the one he lived; however the paradigm of his schooling did not treat him well enough for him to find out.
The paradigm has changed.
With time, the world moves past and beyond our generations. Gen X, Millenials, and Gen Z display core characteristics and values that influence how they live and how they want their world to be. Their’s are not the values of Boomers, yet it is surprising how Boomer values persist. Perhaps it was the high number of Boomers who took leadership in our governmental and educational institutions and by virtue of their seniority have sustained values of Boomerism. Public education has been exceptionally slow to relinquish the idea that “children are their achievement scores”, but it is happening. We are looking at children as children beyond their academic metrics.
The pandemic is an accelerator for a new paradigm. In the immediacy of our return to in-person teaching and learning, the concern for lost or missed academic learning was pre-eminent in our schools. We believed we must make children whole in the school’s academic scheme of what is important. But, just like a racehorse coming out of the pack along the rail and into the lead, concerns for the social-emotional and mental health of children have become the new, overarching driver of post-pandemic educational programming. Concern for social-emotional well-being disaggregates children from achievement groups and academic tracks into individual, single children as points of interest. When we ask, “How are you doing?”, it is in the singular, personal tense. Today we are asking Jimmy and Barb to respond directly to the question with the mutual understanding that Jimmy and Barb are each the sole point of our interest.
New realities also emerged from the pandemic economy. High school students are seeing more opportunities for post-high employment and careers that do not require a baccalaureate degree. Hands-on experience is valued as highly if not more than an academic transcript. Certainly, the amount of personal debt associated with an college education is a factor. The result is a lowering percentage of high school students intend to matriculate to college and this causes schools to reconsider their high school graduation requirements and traditional course sequences pointed toward college. We are looking at programming for high school students individually rather than as college-tracked cohorts. If Jimmy had been seeking high school preparation as an electrician, his success would have been as important in school as a classmate who was accepted to Harvard.
Give another credit to the pandemic. As children re-entered their schoolhouse doors, national and local media highlighted principals who greeted children individually and by name. While social distancing forbade hugging, a principal’s recognition of a child by name proclaims a new paradigm. This is not to say that pre-pandemic principals did not know children by name, but intentional public and personal greeting on a daily basis tells us that things have changed. Jimmy and Barb were faces not names.
Will a new paradigm hold?
Statistics tell us that over time everything regresses toward the mean. The old mean average of school was narrowly focused on Boomerisms. Without concerted efforts for change, school will center itself again on its older constructs. Soon, we need to find out if the implementation and growth of more holistic school programming can be made permanent. If so, then the mean will shift, and we will have recentered school on what matters in the 2020s.