We often make things more complex than they need to be.  Take this whole problem we have of education.  I am certainly not making light of the problems in education but so little of the talk has been centered around the kids and around what the REAL problems are and instead focus on those things that seem fixable or at least blameable (parents and teachers mostly, but even students).  Or on problems that are so big and monumental it allows us an easy excuse: poverty.

I have long felt that one of our biggest problems in education, aside from the fact that we still ascribe to pedagogies and philosophies that are over a century old, is one of expectations.  I have been working in schools and education for over 10 years now and I see it so clearly.  Maybe my varied experiences have given me a needed glimpse into education as a larger thing as opposed to just being in one school and teaching in one classroom.  I have always believed and subscribed to the belief that students will rise and fall with teacher, school, societal expectations.  As a teacher, I have always had high expectations.  I gave homework, regardless of whether kids would do it.  I assigned hard reading, regardless of whether kids would do it.  It was hard and frustrating in the beginning, but once the students realized that they were going to have to work, they did and they learned and they were thankful.  I still have thank you notes from students who were thankful that I believed in them and their ability.

I have been in schools where homework is not given because “they won’t do it” or “they can’t do it” or “they have too much going on in their life to be expected to do it.”  These excuses are lazy.  These excuses allow everyone to just get by.  Kids don’t want to Fail.  Kids know and understand the importance of school.  But if schools continually fail them and fall victim to the excuses that society has generate to explain away the often poor achievement of minority students.

I was listening to Radio Times this morning on NPR and Angel Harris was on.  Angel Harris is awesome and thoughtful and smart.  His new book is one that examines what goes into the racial achievement gap.  I know that for some this categorizing of achievement through the lens of race is problematic.  I also think it simplifies things and is quite ambiguous, but that does not change that fact that white students out achieve our black and latino students.  One of the things that Harris mention really spoke to me and is something we really need to examine, “if the system is successful with some students but not others, then the system is biased towards those who are achieving.”  This is so simple and so true.

What is also then obvious, standardized testing is not going to fix the inherent, systemic bias in our systems and the rhetoric of education that has kept the status quo of low expectations.  We need more talk about how to fix the system and really fix it, not just assess it more when we already know what the system is doing isn’t working for a huge proportion of our student body.

All kids want to learn.  We need to start teaching all of them.