I recently agreed to lead a short writing activity with my department at the start of a meeting. Here’s what I asked them to do: Think of a student who you are currently having a hard time with, for whatever reason. Now imagine that in ten years that student comes up to you in the supermarket and says, “Hey! I’m so happy to see you. I really want to tell you about what I’ve been doing since high school.” Take three minutes and write what you would hope that student would tell you. Articulate the best things you can imagine for that student’s life.
Everyone wrote. Since time was short and we couldn’t share everything, I asked them to read back through their work and choose a single word to share with the group. Here are some of the things they said: “grateful,” “working,” “rooted,” “happy,” “settled,” “energized.” The meeting had to move forward, so this is where the activity ended.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It felt unfinished. Back in my office, I wondered if each person’s answer really represented something they value, some quality they want to instill in all of their students. Maybe this little prompt was a way to explore our values without actually asking anyone to articulate them. By imagining what we want for our most challenging students, we cut to the quick of our educational philosophy at its most fundamental. At our best moments, we want our students to be proficient at writing and math, and we also want them to be working and rooted and energized and happy. We want them to feel gratitude. And we want this for all of our students, even the ones who challenge us.
“By imagining what we want for our most challenging students, we cut to the quick of our educational philosophy at its most fundamental.”
There’s a long standing comparison of school to some kind of machine with students entering on one end and coming out the other side, improved in some consistent and measurable way. Ken Robinson invokes this metaphor in his final, posthumously published work, Imagine If…, when he tells us that,“traditional methods of formal education are often compared to an industrial factory… children are the commodity… teachers are the factory workers.” He goes on to say that, “the shared goal of mass production and most major education systems is the creation of a standardized final product, and the methods they use to achieve it are remarkably similar” (Robinson 53).
For a long time I saw this as a fitting metaphor for the way school works, both as I endured it as a student and as I hoped to change it as a teacher. Robinson’s solution involves redesigning school not as “an industrial factory” or an “industrial farm,” but as a “regenerative farm,” where “individuals are recognized, and the diversity of their talents is celebrated” (61). As an aspiration, this sounds lovely, but how do we begin to do it?
As I look at it now, the idea of schools as factories and children as our commodity is too flat. It oversimplifies the complexity of the machine that is the modern educational system. As a teacher, I am not molding students entirely of my own design. I am working from a set of policies and procedures decided upon by my state and my school district. The people who make these policies do not work with students. They work with data. Their decisions are based on data. Policies and procedures are enacted because of data. Those of us who work with young people everyday on the factory floor don’t make students; we make decisions. These decisions make information that policy makers use to determine how we all move forward.
As students move through the school and have interactions, a flow of information is created and sent up into the administrative levels that drive the future of the system. What information is sent up? Standardized test scores, for one thing. Those are sent. And discipline data. That definitely goes up. And how many students are failing. And graduation rates. And how many students have been moved to alternative placements. Those all go up.
“It is not surprising that so many teachers have a deficit view of students when our system prioritizes deficit-focused data.”
Here are some things I’m pretty sure don’t get sent: the conversation I had with a student who has been struggling and was finally able to articulate what was getting in the way of his coming to class. That doesn’t go up. The students coming back from lunch and telling me how they had continued our class discussion in the cafeteria and now they had to bring me up to speed before we could restart class. That doesn’t go up. And the student who finds out, hopefully not too late, that she doesn’t hate reading. She has just never read something she liked before. That doesn’t go.
So many positive things happen in our schools everyday. But from everything I can tell, those rarely become data in the same way the negatives do.
It is not surprising that so many teachers have a deficit view of students when our system prioritizes deficit-focused data. The problem with this is gravity. What goes up eventually has to come back down. When deficit data goes up, the policies and procedures that come down are focused on deficits, and maybe focusing on deficits reinforces deficit thinking. What we measure is what we value, and what we value is what we try to grow. So we try to grow skills in math and reading and writing. Those are important, but with no other data, maybe we try to grow them at the expense of something else.
My deepest hopes for my most struggling students will never include the ability to compose a five-paragraph essay on Macbeth. I’m going to take a moment right now and think about my most challenging student. With her in mind, here is what I hope: I hope in ten years she will be settled. I hope she will be energized and rooted. I hope she will be happy. I hope that we can change the type of data that goes up into the decision making machine, and I hope we can transform the policies and procedures that come down so they prioritize health and joy and well-being for every student. I hope that in ten years, when I have struggling students, I won’t have to hope about what they’ll become because there will be systems in place to make sure they are okay. And maybe if we focus on wellness first, greater learning will follow.
Adam Murray is a 2023 Rowland Fellow. He teaches English at Essex High School.
