More At Risk Than Ever: Education Next, Part 1
Doug Lemov and the damage done by the "everybody wins" culture
This week’s big education story—perhaps the biggest in a few decades -- is one we’ve seen before – in 1983, when A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform was published. Officially, NAR was “A Report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education United States Department of Education by The National Commission on Excellence in Education,” a slim book that attracted enormous attention, not just for the seriousness of its purpose and the credentials of the 18-member Commission charged with examining the condition of America’s public education system, but for its major conclusion: that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
It was thus that I jumped a bit when I saw Education Next’s new cover, on its Winter 2024 issue, Mediocrity: Why reach for the top when you can settle for less?” picturing a lone person sitting in a chair on a dazzling mountain, authored by one of America’s most famous teacher trainers, Doug Lemov, author of Teach like a Champion, a friend of mine, featured in a monthly that I once worked for (see here), an often understated publication whose writers and editors have been setting the agenda for the nation’s education reform movement for the better part of the last two decades. The formal title of Lemov’s cover story is an answer to the question of what happens if we don’t reach for the top, “Your Neighborhood School is a National Security Risk.”
This story is a must-read for all educators, administrators, and policymakers – and thus for all citizens. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Lemov is here to tell us that “student achievement and merit are losing prospects in the era of `everybody wins.’” Lemov wraps up many of our great debates—and thoughtless fads—from the last twenty years into a coherent package of terrible side effects of our “everybody wins” education world (spawned in K-12, now raging in higher ed), like runaway grade inflation and conflation—where exceptional work gets you a 95 or 96, credible work gets you 93, and 90 puts you in the bottom half—where class rankings and honor rolls are no longer even attempted, in the name of equity, and grades determined with “an obscure and jargony scale: mastery, partial mastery, and emerging mastery” that means nothing to anyone. One thing Lemov is a master at – in part no doubt because of his business MBA, teaching credentials and increasingly enveloping expertise in educational philosophy and policy—is describing and communicating the extent and importance of the nation’s dangerous tossing of merit and its attendant measures like grades and tests, including the SAT and ACTA. An experienced athlete, he is also a believer in the value of competition and, dare I say it, the stress caused by competition. In academics as in sports, says Lemov, calling attention to Stanford’s health psychologist Kelly McGonigal’s book, The Upside of Stress, who found, “to her surprise that the people who are healthiest, happiest, and live longest are not those who have the least stress but rather those who are able to view stress as part and parcel of doing things consequential things in life.” Lemov even provides a Yerkes-Dodson Curve to describes the data to show it. Lemov is always on the lookout for the many euphemisms that have taken the place of words describing things we don’t like or in any way make a student “feel pressure.” And he knows from the experience of watching thousands of teachers in the classroom: “if my teacher applies a bit of pressure--`There’s a test on Monday.’… suddenly I am more apt to study over the weekend,” adding this bit of wisdom missed by our current non merit, non competition culture: “In fact, even if the test isn’t graded, the stress involved in the process of recall helps encode learning,” which is a bonus for teachers who wonder what happened to knowledge retention. And, of course, the biggest question about the American education system’s competence as a result of this institutional “everybody wins” ethos is the mothballing of our national college entry exam tests: the SAT and ACT. Lemov paints a picture of an accumulated culture of lying and faking to pretend that these tests don’t in fact offer an objective test of merit.
Finally, if all this attention to mediocrity doesn’t persuade you that our nation’s new interest in reaching for less is not a national security risk, Lemov shows pretty convincingly what Russia, China, and India are doing to encourage American “happiness” while working their children to study hard. Lemov even imagines, with facts to prove it. that China invented TikTok “to nudge us on our path to mediocrity.” And one of the great joys of Lemov’s piece is that he manages to dismantle these new edifices of mediocrity without mentioning DEI.
Stay tuned: Next week we will feature more Ed Next stories and writers, like Rick Hess and Cami Anderson.
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