Every new school year brings a discussion of the educational goals a school will strive to achieve for its students. This is not the time for a complete rewrite of goals; there is no time to retool for new goals. But August is the right time to confirm existing goals and ensure commitment of all school resources to achieving those goals. In the weeks before children walk into school, be bold in publicly broadcasting your educational goals for your students and embolden all educators to achieve your/their goals.
Achieving educational goals is not a New Year Resolution; be loud, be active, be honest!
Where are your school’s or your classroom’s achievement goals published today? Most often they lie in the humdrum posting of school mission statements, the finer print in newsletters, and are announced on day one but seldom to never mentioned after day one. It is no wonder that so few are achieved. We allow the busy urgency of school days to overwhelm the goals that our school business is supposedly committed to achieve. State and restate your achievement goals every week in order to keep them vibrant.
Educational goals are not like an annual new year resolution. Most of us break those resolutions before the end of January, if not before. First, educational goals are about children, not our proverbial self-promise to lose ten pounds of body weight. Instead of looking at our image in a bathroom mirror, we look at the faces of classrooms of children who are counting on our commitment to advance their education. Each child’s face stands for our promise to cause that child to learn and grow because of our work. Every time we look at a child’s face, we need to tell ourselves “Advance this child’s education today!”
Achievement goals are a public commitment
Educational achievement goals are public commitments to cause children to learn and grow. They are not silent, personal promises to give up late night bowls of ice cream. Publish your educational goals as a school and as individual classrooms. One of the reasons new year resolutions fail is that we keep them to ourselves. We do not tell anyone that we want to lose ten pounds; we make it a silent, personal struggle. Instead, we need to enlist all educators, school parents, and school community in helping our goal achievement by telling them on day one and all school year-long what we will achieve this school year for our students.
There is a positive and active snowballing effect when goals are loudly published. Snowballing occurs when a small effort begins to accumulate more mass and more membership because it is in motion. As goal achievement occurs, individuals want to be part of the snowball; they want to be identified with its positive imaging. We need to celebrate snowballing and proclaim every classroom that is joining in the achievement work.
Achievement is personal
We need to make our educational goals for children personal. Teaching and learning are essentially personal activities between teachers and children. It is extremely personal, yet we always depersonalize the outcomes of teaching and learning. We aggregate the data of goals achievement, and we drop names and drop accountability, usually because we do not achieve the goals we published. Instead, we need to keep the data disaggregated and personal. If a teacher knows that her students’ learning achievements will be averaged with all other students’ data, there is diminished urgency every day to “push” on those goals. We see data obfuscation clearly with high achieving schools whose high averaging practices hide the reality of low achieving classrooms. Or with low achieving schools whose averaging practices hide the reality of high achieving classrooms. We need to disaggregate data to make goal achievement real at the classroom level where achievement is measured. There always is a worry that disaggregation allows data to identify students. The equal worry is that fully aggregated data makes those students disappear. Let’ see – using data to effectively educate all children or using data to hide children who are never fully educated. As our practices are FERPA-compliant, we shall decide to educate all children.
Be bold with honesty
Honesty about goals and goal achievement is a necessity. Too much of our culture today is hammered by “big lying” about data and practices. Without commenting on our “big liars”, consider the big lie effects. Lying makes facts untrustworthy and fact checking is ridiculed. Honesty is what honesty does; it builds trust. We need to talk about our positive achievements, and we need to talk about when we fail to achieve the goals we set. And, after explaining our failure to achieve, we need to recommit ourselves to achieving success by honestly discontinuing failed efforts and beginning new efforts. No one likes to hear that a school or classroom failed to achieve its goals, but they dislike even more the lies that are told to hide the honest facts. Educators, parents, and community will respect honest effort with honest reporting that is followed by honest changes in effort.
This August, publish your student achievement goals. Publish the work efforts that will achieve your goals. Publish and talk about the team commitment of educators, parents, and community to accomplish your 2025-26 student achievement goals. Publish the date of your first reporting of progress on your goal achievements. And publish your commitment to every child in school that they will be goal achievers.
Be bold and be emboldening regarding your student achievement goals for the 2025-26 school year.