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Published: December 6, 2006
Commentary
Outsider in the Locker Room

What the Stories We Tell Ourselves About High Expectations Leave Out

By William A. Proefriedt

Much of the present discourse of school reform may be usefully compared to
the words of a college football coach in the locker room, between the
halves of a game in which his team is down 28-0.

In the current education reform movement, we try again to make bricks
without straw. We pretend that schools and their students exist within a
social and economic vacuum. The standards reformers do not simply neglect
socioeconomic forces in formulating their policies; they argue that those
who appeal to such forces make excuses for poor students and thereby do
them harm. They have devised a marvelously effective rhetoric denouncing
“the soft bigotry of low expectations” and repeating the mantra of “no
excuses.”

The central component of the standards approach is the insistence on high
expectations for students and for those who work in the schools. Set the
expectations, hold students and school people accountable with periodic
testing, and you will bring out their best efforts. As everyone works up to
high standards, individuals ensure their economic success, and the nation
survives and prospers in the world marketplace. A time frame is set up with
the necessity of improved scores each year among all categories of
students. The centerpiece of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act is
that subgroups—African-American, Asian, Latino, Native-American, white,
limited-English-proficient, low-income, and students with disabilities—must
show the same progress as all other students for a school to be listed as
making adequate yearly progress. A district that shows 40 percent of its
students as proficient on standardized tests this year will keep improving
by regular intervals each year until, in 2014, 100 percent—every last one
of its students—will demonstrate proficiency. All of this is to be
accomplished solely through attention to individuals and schools.

How do we account for this self-deception and illusory thinking? Firstly,
we fool ourselves with careless language. America’s public schools, we
hear, ought to provide equal educational opportunity to all, will provide
it, or do provide it. Educational rhetoric often skips merrily over some
important distinctions. Audiences, for their own reasons, do not listen
carefully and are left with the sense that all is well, that equality of
educational opportunity has been achieved. While we acknowledge the
differences in expenditures among school districts, we resist dramatic
change. We don’t take seriously the impact of parental economic status on
student test scores. We pretend it doesn’t matter that there are dramatic
differences in income and wealth in the society from which the students
have come and into which they will be moving.

Statements like “all children can learn if only they are held to high
standards” have an inspirational quality to them. They are proclaimed in
contexts that are unlikely to generate critical questions. Much of the
present discourse of school reform may be usefully compared to the words of
a college football coach in the locker room, between the halves of a game
in which his team is down 28-0. The coach will appeal to the players’
desire to win, and urge them to redouble their efforts. He will tell them
that no matter how badly things seem to be going, if each one gives his
absolutely best effort, the team will be triumphant.

It would be utterly inappropriate for an outsider in the locker room to say
aloud that the team will be lucky if it can score a touchdown, and hold the
other fellows to 50 points; or to note that the other team is better
coached, larger, more talented, and better conditioned. An outsider who
said the team should play the game with the realistic sense that little
good will likely come of it would be unwelcome indeed.

We should not say the coach, in his pep talk, deceived his players. To do
so would be to misunderstand the context in which the coach is operating.
He is inspiring his team to make its best effort. He may have made some
shaky truth claims as part of his talk. He may have spoken cynically; more
likely, and more effectively if so, he believed everything he said when he
said it. Importantly, every once in a while, the unlikely upset occurs. The
home team, badly mismatched, nevertheless pulls off a victory. That is the
story we love to hear and tell. The outsider bringing gloom to the locker
room is unlikely to contribute to a winning outcome; hence, he is not
welcome.

Let us shift from the locker room to a scene in central Brooklyn. A
superintendent speaks to a meeting of her principals. For years, she has
been involved in the standards reform movement. She has complied with state
curriculum standards; she has developed programs for teachers, training
them to prepare students for standardized tests; she has organized summer
school classes for students who did poorly on these tests. She is familiar
with state and federal laws and regulations relating to curriculum,
testing, and the impact of test scores on individuals and schools in her
district. There have been some bright spots with the tests, but too many of
her schools are labeled “needs improvement.”

Our district superintendent asks principals whose students showed improved
scores to share their best practices with the other principals. She speaks
movingly about “our children” and about our responsibilities toward them.
She reminds all present that there are some who don’t believe these
children can succeed, but says that she, and she hopes, they, will never
give up.

Much good may be done in this district during the school year, partly
through the efforts of the superintendent and principals and the teachers
who work in the schools. The superintendent, though, has looked at a state
report showing the differences in scores between her district and districts
in the northern part of the borough of Queens, and in suburbs out along the
North Shore of Nassau County.

What we leave out is that individuals and schools do not function in social
and economic vacuums, and that holding out high expectations is necessary
but not sufficient to the task at hand.

She has not elected to pass on the score differences at this meeting. She
may not allow such information to enter her consciousness while she speaks.
She attributes the few victories on test scores in her district to the good
work of her principals. She is like the weekend gambler in Atlantic City
who tells his family only about the day he hit the slots for a $3,000
payout and neglects to speak of the accumulated losses he has suffered over
the years.

The superintendents, the principals, and the teachers form a team with a
shared purpose: the success of their students, and hence their own success
as educators. This is their life’s work, and why would they not want to
believe in their own efficacy? Some of them have driven to work from homes
in those areas with better test scores and seen the changing quality of the
real estate as they drove. If these perceptions are registered, they are
rarely connected to the educational outcomes of the students, and if the
connections are made they are certainly not voiced. Self-deception does not
require cynicism.

Yet, the educators, like other parents, do know these connections exist.
Many of them have moved out of neighborhoods such as the ones they teach in
to more economically privileged areas, or have sent their children to
private schools. We not only repress information; we can know when it is
useful for us to know, and not know when it is necessary to alleviate our
anxiety. We can then ask students and teachers in poorer neighborhoods to
go out and play their hearts out in the second half of the game when they
are down 28-0. It’s a wonderful story. No one wishes to challenge it.
That’s why we don’t invite outsiders into the locker room.

Shift the scene to a wealthier school district. Its superintendent meets
with parents and informs them that over 95 percent of students in the
district scored at the proficiency level or better on the state’s
standardized tests for that year, and that 78 percent of SAT test-takers
scored at a level of 1150 or better. Ninety-three percent of last year’s
graduating class is attending college. She lists the number of graduates
matriculating at various elite institutions. She talks about the care with
which new teachers are selected, the success that two of the science
teachers have had in preparing students for the Intel scholarship program.
She points to the large number of students in the high school who are
pursuing Advanced Placement courses. She thanks the parents for their
support and encouragement of their own children, and their willingness to
ratify increases in the district’s budget. She concludes by speaking of the
hard work and dedication of the students themselves, citing one, an
immigrant who had arrived here at age 13, mastered English quickly, and
then, by dint of her own hard work, her parents’ support, and the
commitment of numerous faculty members, won a full scholarship to Harvard.

The teachers are, indeed, a dedicated and talented lot. The high salaries
offered by the district allow it to recruit an excellent faculty. The
schools’ programs are first-rate. The superintendent does not mention that
other districts with similar parental incomes produce equally admirable
results. It is in everyone’s interest to believe that the high standards
the school has set, the parents’ support, and the hard work of staff
members and students in responding to those standards explain the
district’s success. Parents find it anxiety-provoking to think that the
success of their own children is linked to the very economic status they
sought in moving to the district, and that other people’s children are
excluded from the same opportunities.

Much information about the world we live in has to be at once known and
unknown, repressed, forgotten, unexpressed, in order for us to carry around
our ideals of equal opportunity and, at the same time, settle for the vast
economic inequalities in our society we replicate in our schooling. We tell
ourselves a wonderful story. What we leave out is that individuals and
schools do not function in social and economic vacuums, and that holding
out high expectations is necessary but not sufficient to the task at hand.

William A. Proefriedt is a professor emeritus of education at the Queens
College campus of the City University of New York, and serves as a writing
mentor for younger faculty members in CUNY’s Faculty Fellowship
Publications Program. He can be reached at [log in to unmask]

Vol. 26, Issue 14, Pages 31-32

Robert C. Bowman, M.D.
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