Winning in School

As I sit here in the frozen northeast laid up with a badly  sprained ankle, I got to thinking about my last post. In that post, I concluded with the thought that when you try to change the paradigm of school. students who "won" at the old systems would naturally resist any changes. This got me thinking about the concept of winning in our schools.

Even if we don't realize it, much of the current structure of many American schools is designed to guarantee winners and losers. Class rank is probably the easiest example of this, and I'm sure if you think back to your own schooling you can recall an example of how class rank caused friction in your graduating class.

Our culture's obsession with free-market economics has deemed competition to be necessary for a successful society. However, much of the research compiled by Daniel Pink in his book "Drive" suggests that outside of menial tasks, competition (and rewards) lowers achievement. This means that regardless of what we perceive colleges and scholarship committees want, we need to ditch this kind of competition in our schools. Too often we ignore the answer to the question: "Is this best for our students?" and instead lean on the status quo or other less relevant factors.

One thing I like about our move to a standards-based system is that much of our work was based on what is best for students. Gone is the thought that only some students should achieve and that grades should be based on a bell-shaped curve that assumes a percent of the class should fail. Now, the belief and expectation is that every student can achieve high standards. It isn't perfect (nothing is), but I still believe we're on the right track.