Do we really value achievement?

We, as Americans, say that we value achievement. We profess to be the best - at virtually everything - and that plays throughout our culture as important. We revere professional athletes who excel at their sport and pay them exorbitant salaries. We need to have the best military, the best economy, and the best political structures. But what happens when we apply that same thinking to education?

It has been reported for many years that the United States lags behind other countries in education (read more here). We are well aware that even with higher standards, on 38% of American children are ready for college according to the NAEP National Report Card. While we could propose reasons for this that range from the numbers of mothers who have to work to the number of single parent families to the degree of poverty many families live in to the increase in refugee populations, I propose that many people are intimidated by achievement.

When my oldest son started Kindergarten, he was already reading fluently. I had a friend of mine assess him and he was reading on a 2nd grade level. When I told his Kindergarten teacher, she nodded disapprovingly at me and said "We'll see." When I went for parent teacher conferences in October, she exclaimed to me "Your son can read!" I asked for enrichment to keep him moving forward and he was assigned to a teacher for two hours a week who worked on his pencil grip. Teachers make decisions like this all of the time - we pair the "high student" with the "lower student" to help the lower student stay on track. We let our higher students be "self-directed," which too often means that we let them teach themselves. We often hear high performers being called "teacher's pet" or "brown nose" by other students. Our classrooms often teach to the middle - which leaves high performing students on the fringes, bored, or even acting out to find some level of engagement.

We, unfortunately, do this with our teachers as well. We ostracize high performing teachers and call them "Principal's Favorite" or make comments like "well, you wouldn't know what we are dealing with since everything is perfect in your classroom." We might include the high performer in our group, but assume that he or she will carry the majority of the load because it is "easy for them." We tell our high performing teachers that they should be careful about sounding "too smart" so that they don't intimidate those around them or we caution them to "slow down" or "lower their expectations" because not everyone wants to work with people who expect so much from those around them.


What is the impact of this duality on our schools? As we well know with our own families, "do as I say not as I do" is a very ineffective technique for raising children. Likewise, for creating vibrant school cultures. If you are creating a culture of achievement, high performance and achievement must be valued, honored, pushed, and grown throughout the system. For high performance to become the norm, all stakeholders must be able to find ways to nurture, appreciate, and challenge high performance.

We live in a system of standardization - a "one size fits all" approach to testing and achieving. Daniel Pink, in his new publication To Sell is Human, talks about how teachers have amazing opportunities to sell learning to children each and every day. In order to do that, we, as educators, must let go of our fear of achievement and performance and embrace the ways that our students and our teachers are changing the way we teach and learn each and every day. We have to train our brains to accept challenge as a way to grow our brains, accept that ongoing reading and learning is the way that we can and should be engaging in dialogue and discourse with our peers, and accept that we are all stronger when we push one another to higher levels.