Don't Confuse Assignments with Content

If you are a teacher, what do you teach?

If you are a student, what did you learn in school? 

Chances are, you answered these questions with things like "history" and "math." If pressed for details, you would probably say things like "World War II" and "how to multiply." Schooling, when done right, will help students learn concepts and ideas and processes that they can then apply to any area of life. A pretty tall order, but certainly one that is worth the time and effort.

For several years now, I've been involved in revising the National Standards for High School Psychology Curricula, published by the American Psychological Association. These standards outline what concepts and ideas students should understand after taking a regular-level high school psychology course. The Standards outline content on three levels - Domains (which categorize the content into overarching ideas), Standard Areas (which correlate to typical units of study in the course), and Performance Standards (which define more specific ideas that might comprise a day's lesson). If I can take a minute to say so, I'm pretty proud of the work of my committee and those who came before us. It's a pretty cool document, if you think curriculum documents are cool.

We used to have four levels of standards, however. Our fourth level - called Performance Indicators - provided suggestions for what teachers could do to determine that students had learned the content. These indicators were written in behavioral language - they all started with a nice verb that was likely to be found on Bloom's infamous taxonomy - so that teachers could create active ways to assess student learning. We included about 5 or 6 indicators per Performance Standard so that teachers could have a variety of things to choose from or use them as a jumping off point for coming up with their own ideas for their own students.

When we went to revise the early versions of the National Standards - the ones with the Performance Indicators included - we sent the document out for comment to various psychologists, both those who taught psychology and those who practiced psychology. What happened during that comment period became overwhelming. Psychologists of all inclinations - both the teachers and the clinicians - blasted the Performance Indicators. Some indicators were too narrow. Others were too broad. Some folks wondered why some were included at all (That's so out of date! they would say), while others complained that their favorite activity was not included. As we culled together all these comments into one massive review document, we quickly realized that professionals in the field had little problem with the actual content in the Domains, Standard Areas, and Performance Standards. What they had incredible problem with was the suggested assignment ideas - the Performance Indicators.

This feedback process made me begin to question the difference between assignments and content. The psychologists who commented on the National Standards were confusing the two, in my opinion. The way they taught certain ideas or concepts had become intertwined with the very ideas and concepts themselves. Instead of seeing the Performance Indicators for what they were - suggestions for how a lesson might look if that idea or concept was taught - they saw them as the content itself. 

The implications of this type of thinking about content affects students every day. As a school administrator, I would venture to say that most of the parent phone calls to my office complaining about teachers and/or school can be blamed on this confusion. When teachers confuse assignments with content, grades become about performing rather than learning. I see this most vividly when working with students who have some type of disability, either temporary or permanent. When students with disabilities begin to fall behind in completing assignments in class, teachers who confuse assignments with content become uneasy and resist modifying or eliminating assignments because they feel they are lowering their standards and not teaching their content. The teacher's confusion causes them to hang on rigidly to their own way of doing things instead of being concerned for the student and finding ways for that child to demonstrate their knowledge in a manageable way.

I saw this most recently with a student who has a neurophysiological disorder that affects her motor coordination but not her intellectual capacity. She struggles to write, taking hours to even type out a paragraph. Her parents are willing to give her whatever assistive technology she wants, but she often resists such gestures as she struggles (as all teens do) with not being "different" from her peers. When her teachers ask her if she needs help, she often refuses, preferring to struggle through instead of requesting the help she is allowed. So, when her grades began to fall, and when one of her teachers took off points for not using the required MLA heading, her parents became incredibly frustrated and called my office, wondering if their daughter was getting the education she deserved. 

When I asked her English teacher about why he did not give credit for the non-MLA-heading essay, the teacher became frustrated with me because expecting the heading was so "simple" and "basic." He asked me, "Is it wrong to ask my students to do something they should have learned in elementary school?" I felt his question revealed his confusion better than any question I have been asked. Of course, it is not unreasonable for him to require his students to do the MLA heading. Doing the heading teaches them that there are formats they should consider when turning in work. Doing the heading helps them learn to follow basic directions. But, for this student, to give absolutely no credit for an essay that obviously required an extraordinary amount of effort to complete simply because the student did not do the required heading places the heading requirement over the essay. Any English teacher worth his salt should never think that a heading is more important than the essay it identifies. The ideas are what is important in learning English, not the clerical details. 

Instead of teaching his student with disabilities that taking care of the little details is important, he taught the student that neglecting little details overshadows your ideas. For this student, the details have always overshadowed her ideas as the world looks at her physical condition and projects it onto her cognitive abilities. If the teacher had not confused his assignment with his content, he would have been all right with this student's effort, gently corrected her neglect of the minor detail, and given her credit for her ideas, teaching her English content and perhaps making a life-long learning partner in the process. An opportunity was missed, of that I am sure. 

When you go to Google Maps and ask it for directions, it will give you four different sets - one for walking, one for taking the bus, one for riding your bike, and one for driving your car. There are many ways to get to where you are going, depending on your resources and time constraints. We should not insist that students arrive at our destinations in the same ways because they have different resources and different goals and constraints. That may cause some students to decide not to travel with us at all.

Resilience is about adapting as problems arise. If we are rigidly holding to our assignments as the only way to demonstrate content knowledge, we are not teaching students to find creative ways to master the concept. Imagine what we could learn about our content if our students were working with us to find ways to show us what they know. They might teach us a little something, if we let them.

Avoiding Traps in Defining Success

What does it mean to be a "success"? That question is not answered in a simple way.

• Success is achievement. Specific goals are set, and success is claimed when those goals are met.
• Success is attainment. Specific levels of wealth, power, knowledge, or fame are desired, and success is claimed when those levels are surpassed.
• Success is accomplishment. Specific obstacles are identified, and success is claimed when those obstacles are overcome.

Recently I sat in a professional meeting where we talked about what the "main thing" was for our district, that standard we all seem to be trying to achieve as we educate students. According to the speakers, who had who had conducted many focus groups in the district over the last few weeks, the "main thing" for our district was the High School Graduate. All of our teachers, K-12, should be invested in educating students in such a way that increases their chance of graduating in a timely manner with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed. The speakers talked about colleghttp://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/faq/college-career.pdfe and career readiness and the Common Core Standards and AYP, all of which have driven the definitions of success for our schools and our district.

This definition of success is certainly on the top of my list as a high school administrator, but I see the two traps inherent in this and any definition of success. The first trap is the Disconnect Trap. I think of the hundreds of students I have taught over my 14 years in the classroom, and I know their definitions of success sometimes did not connect with mine. While I wanted for all of them to go to college, I knew not all of them hoped for that future. While I wanted for all of them to make an A in my class, I knew that a few of them really wanted that, and some would not be willing to do what it took to earn that. Their definitions of success were disconnected from mine, and that disconnect made my students and me interpret effort, results, and success differently. If a student earned a low B on a test and didn't turn in a homework assignment, I may view that as a setback or failure, but my student may see that as a success, considering that he was shooting for a high C on his test and decided to hang out with his friends instead of doing his homework. In setting standards for our students' success, we have to remember to include them in our standard-setting. They have to be invested like us in the goals, levels, and obstacles so that the actions necessary to achieve success are fruitful. We have to be connected to them in order to understand and help mold their definitions of success.

The second trap is the Differentiation Trap. The big push right now is to get students "college and career ready." This push recognizes that there are skills necessary for success in both college and the workforce and that schools need to prepare students for a possible future in a college and a possible future in a career. For too long, college-prep and career-prep programs have resided at opposite ends of the educational divide, leaving students with an either-or choice rather than a both-and choice. But educators need to be careful when they say things like, "Not all kids are going to go to college." Even though the new college-and-career-ready focus hopes to make both college and career desirable for students, education has a long history of tracking students into paths that keep the college-ready from the career-ready. We may have the best of intentions, but to neglect the tendency to stigmatize career-prep education in favor of college-prep education is to open ourselves up to judging students before they are finished learning. We have to make sure our benchmarks for success do not keep students from having options for their future selves. If a student doesn't pass the algebra placement test in 7th grade, are they doomed to lower-level math that will not prepare them for college admission? If a student shows an aptitude for fashion design, do we keep them from taking AP Biology? If so, we are not differentiating our definitions of success to include those who may bloom late or who may have college-ready interest in different areas. We cannot fall back into "college or career readiness." We should not be the final arbitors of students' futures. We should be the providers of options for students' futures.

Success involves two important components:

1. The setting of a standard - a goal or a level or an obstacle.
2. An action that moves on toward the goal or level or over the obstacle.

By keeping the Disconnect Trap and the Differentiation Trap in mind as we define success, we can set better standards and plan more concrete action plans that will move our students toward actual success. Whatever our definitions of success for our students, we need to include them in the discussion and be willing to open our own minds to include definitions that we didn't imagine ourselves.

Let's define success in such a way that all students will look back on their K-12 education and say, "My teachers believed in me and helped me be successful in ways I could not have imagined." To me, that's the best definition of success I can imagine.

The Benefits of a Bad Teacher

(Let's try this again - sorry for the original post disappearing...)


Bad teachers are all the rage right now, appearing in news reports, teacher rankings, Congressional and legislative hearings, USDOE white papers and summits, and even movies starring Cameron Diaz. If you are a bad teacher, get a PR person, 'cause this is your 15 minutes. Everybody wants to know your name.


But just as teachers in general are getting a bad rap, so are bad teachers. Bad teachers are not what they seem to be. Yes, there have been and are some truly bad teachers out there - if a teacher is molesting kids or leaving them unsupervised or cheating on standardized tests or totally neglecting their duty, that is more than being a bad teacher. That's being a criminal. I'm not talking about criminals. I'm talking about teachers who don't seem to be getting the job done because their scores aren't good or the kids are complaining or the parents are calling for their jobs or the administrators are annoyed by them. I'm talking about your run-of-the-mill, below-average, not well liked, bad teacher.


Defining a bad teacher is in the eye of the beholder. Some define a bad teacher as one who does not raise students' test scores during the time that teacher is in charge of those students (so called value-added measures). Others define bad teachers as those who are boring or who lecture too much. Still others define bad teachers as those who are too strict or too lenient, uncouth in parent conferences and with students in class. They are those who ask annoying questions in faculty meetings and who don't collaborate well with their colleagues. They don't grade every single assignment they give to students. They don't teach engaging lessons every day. They give out worksheets and "busy work." They lose their patience with students and their parents. They sometimes "phone it in."


The bad teacher is the one whom everyone wants to avoid, but no one can. They can pop up in any grade and any subject. They are the poster children for getting rid of tenure, and the ones parents call about to complain. Everyone has a "bad teacher" story, and these stories are the fuel that keeps the fire of outrage burning against the current status quo of schooling. Everyone knows bad teachers are out there, and they believe that getting rid of the bad teachers will solve what is wrong with schools. Simply putting a good teacher in the classroom will help all children learn and learn well. 


My "bad teacher" stories involve two math teachers and a history teacher. My math teachers were very good mathematicians, but they were pretty bad at explaining math to those with little number sense. My history teacher was the stereotypical "coach," who used my name and those of my classmates as multiple choice answers for questions ranging from who was the president during the Civil War to who signed the Treaty of Versailles. My son's bad teacher was his first grade teacher, who was so rigid in her expectations that he hated going to school each day. 


But the "bad teacher" stereotype is just that - a stereotype. The worst teacher I have ever worked with had a 27% failure rate - pretty bad, if not horrible - but don't neglect to note that he did have a 73% success rate. The majority - perhaps even the vast majority - of students did well in his class, many passing with flying colors. My son's first grade teacher was excellent with kids eager to please adults and follow directions. I succeeded in the classes of my own "bad teachers," learning about algebra, calculus, and American history enough to do well in subsequent classes and in college. My son also learned enough in his difficult, stressful, miserable first-grade class that he went on to subsequent grades and has since thrived. 


Aside from the curriculum, what I learned from my bad teachers, and what my son learned, was how to be a self-advocate, how to negotiate with someone whose perspective was vastly different than my own, how to handle conflict and how to entertain myself without distracting others. Just as everybody has a bad teacher, so too do they have a bad boss, a bad relationship, a boring meeting, or a bad customer-service experience. While we can teach conflict management and social skills all day long, we don't know what we're made of  until we are in a conflict. We don't know how we'll react to someone criticizing us or being unfair until they've criticized or been unfair. Strengths such as bravery and courage are unknown quantities until situations that require bravery and courage present themselves.


Calling a teacher a "bad teacher" attributes their teaching to some internal, personal flaw that  probably cannot be fixed. No amount of professional development can fix "bad teacher," according to the pessimists who are running education reform these days. And children who have these "bad teachers" are doomed if they go through even one year of "bad teacher." And blaming classroom conflict, learner misunderstandings, or boring lessons on a "bad teacher" takes all the responsibility for learning off of the students. They don't get an opportunity to take perspective, analyze interpersonal dynamics, and apply conflict-resolution skills. 


I'm not writing this to advocate boring, neglectful, disengaged, irrelevant, inflexible teaching. My goal is to shed light on the complex interpersonal dynamics that exist in a classroom and use even the "bad teacher" experience as a teachable moment for everyone. There were times where I was a bad teacher - I didn't grade every assignment. I didn't engage my students every single day, and not all my students passed the AP or state tests. I was named Teacher of the Year on more than one occasion, but I still had my days when I phoned it in instead of doing my best. But if I explained my bad teaching moments as merely "bad," I would have likely quit teaching a long time ago. I would have given up on myself and my future students. I would have thought there was no fixing those bad days, so why even try to have some good ones. I did not let my bad teaching moments define me, just as I would hope my students don't define themselves by their bad learning experiences.


Explaining teacher behavior in personal, pervasive, and permanent terms cheats both teachers and students out of teachable moments and the ability to grow from failure. Let's give our students the cognitive and social skills they need to succeed both because of and in spite of the teacher. If students can learn how to thrive with both good and bad teachers, then they can thrive in just about any situation they encounter.

Real Education Reform? In Alabama?!?

I'm going to write something that I never thought I'd ever write in the entire scope of my life and work: 

The state of Alabama might have the answer to education reform.

After you stop laughing, keep reading. Our new state superintendent, Dr. Tommy Bice, has developed quite a reputation in our state for thinking outside the box and, quite frankly, freaking people out. As a former special education teacher, school principal, and district superintendent, Dr. Bice knows what it's like to work in a school and deal with regulations, rules, and standards - and he knows that these things can be used for good and for evil. He's shaking things up at the State Department of Education, reorganizing offices and asking whether programs are truly worth the state's time and efforts. He's advocating some reforms that are making people uncomfortable, but that just might work. 

One reform that I'm a little geeked out about is Innovation Systems, in which schools can apply to waive or modify regulations in exchange for targeted accountability. Schools can waive certification regulations or modify expenditures. They can extend the school day or provide more flexible learning opportunities. In actuality, they can propose just about any change they want, as long as it benefits the students and teachers in their school or district. In return, the school must propose to track a minimum of two accountability measures - one dealing with student achievement (broadly defined) and another negotiated with the State Department. 

Two districts have taken the state up on their offer to be an Innovation System - Florence City Schools and Lawrence County Schools. In Florence, they have created a magnet school for fine arts, an industry-based program for at-risk students, and a project-based history/language arts program designed to increase success on AP Exams. In Lawrence County, they have developed a comprehensive, integrated agricultural curriculum that awards co-op credit for after-school agricultural work and integrates economics into agriscience and business courses. Both districts agreed to be held accountable to their own goals, which includes increasing overall and subject-specific graduation rates and scores on AP Exams and the ACT.

In essence, Innovation Systems are charter schools, without the charter.

These systems are publicly run and publicly funded. The schools are still run by the principals. The classes are still taught by the teachers. No federal or corporate money was spent. No parent triggers were pulled. Schools are simply being allowed to have the flexibility of a charter without having to give up all those things that make a school in the public domain. Dr. Bice believes that what's good for a charter should also be good for a public school. If charter schools are designed to do what's best for kids, why can't public schools be allowed to do what's best for kids? 

I think this program has two strong things going for it:

• Schools can do what's best for kids.
• Schools can determine how to measure what's best for kids.

I believe if we let schools out of their boxes, we will get ideas and innovations that meet students' needs and help students figure out what they want. I hope more school districts in Alabama take Dr. Bice up on his Innovation Systems idea. And I hope more states offer an Innovation System approach to their districts so they can see what educators can do if they are allowed to teach outside the box.

Innovation vs. Standardization or Why My Students are Different from my iPhone

America worships its capitalist ideals, holding fast to the notion that profit and stock market value are the ultimate measures of our collective success. Americans obsess over the numbers that measure our capitalist love affair, pouring over the GDP, the CPI, the unemployment numbers, and the Dow. Whole industries exist simply to analyze what these numbers mean to you and me. Businesses spend a great deal of money and time making sure their numbers show how much they are growing so their stock value can go up so they can borrow more money to spend on making sure their numbers are going up. This amazing cycle of business usually produces companies that create goods and services that meet the needs of the marketplace. Some companies try to compete, but fall short due to short-sightedness or bad management or poor execution of ideas. And other companies, in the mad rush to earn profits and stock value, falsify their numbers to avoid bankruptcy, public ridicule, or jail.

We are able to see just how effective businesses are by looking at their numbers. Stock market values are published in the news media, and people can see quickly how well one business is performing compared to another. Surely anyone can see that the company that makes iPhones is much more effective than the one that makes Blackberries. Both make smartphones, yet one is the biggest company in the world, and the other is struggling to remain relevant. Books are published and consultants are born that analyze how the successful company is different from the failing one in the hopes that entrepreneurs out there will adopt successful ideas and use them to meet the next great marketplace need, whatever that may be.

Today's education reformers want for schools to adopt business models, applying the principles of our much-beloved capitalism to educating our students. They believe schools should demonstrate "effectiveness" which can be easily determined by test scores and evaluation results. These scores get published in the news media, much like the stock numbers, so that all can see how "effective" their local school is compared to other local schools. Books are published and consultants are born to identify the qualities of successful schools so that superintendents and principals can adopt successful practices to make their school "effective." Many schools do well, earning effectiveness numbers that are the envy of everyone around. Others ride waves of effectiveness, earning good numbers some years but not others. And some, especially in today's climate of accountability, falsify their numbers to avoid state takeover, public ridicule, and loss of certification.

The problem here is not the business model of schooling - we can learn a lot from business to run good schools. I am a big fan of leadership books that rise from the business world (John Kotter and Peter Senge are two business-leadership gurus that come to mind whose ideas can be easily applied to schools). The problem here is that "effectiveness" in business and "effectiveness" in schools are two completely different monsters. Business effectiveness relies on the efficient production of goods or services. School effectiveness relies on the careful molding of people.

What we hope for a successful business should not be the same as what we hope for a successful school. I want my iPhone to be a consistent, reliable, nicely packaged, and user-friendly product that I can use every day. I want my iPhone to work just like everybody else's iPhone so I can use and share apps and make phone calls reliably. If my iPhone worked differently than my husband's iPhone, we might not be able to send and receive calls and texts or play Words with Friends as effortlessly as we do. The company that makes my iPhone must ensure that every single iPhone they produce is the same as the next. Derivations in any part of the manufacturing process will end up frustrating customers who expect consistency and reliability in their products. If customers get frustrated with a company's products (say, for instance, the service keeps going out randomly), the products are abandoned for those that do meet the customer's expectations.

I want my school to mold students to be independent thinkers and doers. I want my students to be knowledgable, innovative, critical thinkers who can use what we teach them to adapt to any situation, no matter how difficult. I want for each student to take what they learn from my school to become whatever they want to be - doctor, lawyer, teacher, artist. I don't want every student to be exactly like the next one next to them in class. I want all my students to learn the set of skills necessary to be successful - resilience, grit, perspective, critical thinking, cooperation, knowledge-seeking, intiative-taking - but I want them to use these skills in whatever future they choose for themselves. If my school does not help students learn these skills, then word will get out about how ineffective my school is, and people will move or avoid living in my school's community.

What I find most fascinating about corporate education reform is that they don't seem to have read the works of Kotter or Senge or even Steve Jobs. None of these acknowledged successes in business want cookie-cutter students. They want innovators, creators, intiative-takers. They want workers who can adapt to change and work together with others. They want workers who can read, write, compute, and ultimately think and adapt.

The next big thing in business does not come from standardization, but from innovation. So we should not expect the next big thing in schools to come from standardization. The standardized test scores do not tell you whether students are thinkers or doers. We can sit all day comparing one school's test scores to another, but all we will learn at the end of the day is the schools are different. We have to remember that we are not creating an efficiently produced good or service, we are molding people who can adapt and change and learn and grow. We should measure how well students think and how successful they are in the next phases of their lives.

Revolutionary innovation would be demonstrated by the person who can figure out how to measure that.

Slow and Steady wins the race, thank goodness!

My older son is a swimmer, and as I sit at at a regional swim meet, I'm struck by how important resilience is in sport. My son has been swimming since he was about six, and he's always been quite good (if I do say so myself). We've stuck with swimming because it was a sport that he did well with, for he seems to do better with individual sports than team ones. We've encouraged him to swim through thick and thin because we see that when he's successful, he feels good about himself and learns to set and meet goals. Both of these results are important to us as his parents because we know the effects will stick with him for a lifetime.

Yet, not all of his peers in swimming seem to be in it for the long haul. Many of the boys who have swum with him over the years are beginning to burn out and quit the sport. Some of these kids were amazing swimmers, blowing away the competition (including my son!) in both summer and year-round meets. When people watched them swim, they would be impressed by their swimming talent. But as these kids have aged, they have slowly faded from the scene for a variety of reasons. Some fade because they become involved in other sports (swimming is not the "cool" sport where we live that football is, imagine that). Others, though, have faded because their early talent for the sport is not as impressive as it was. Other kids, who have stuck it out and trained through the years, are catching up, at times matching or beating the young phenoms. Instead of taking that new competition as motivation to get better, these kids are breaking. They avoid big meets and cut back on their training. Whispers among parents at the meets and practices suggest that the kids are either disappointments to their parents or causes of concern as the kids battle depression or act defiantly due to their frustration over not being the best anymore.

These young swimmers are caught up in our culture's worship of talent. While we in the US say we value hard work, what we adore is talent, especially precocious talent. We love the kid who wins the piano competition at age five. We are amazed by the baby who reads or does math before kindergarten. Prodigies get to appear on the Today Show and have one million hits on YouTube. We have built a culture of fame for prodigies, but what happens when their peers catch up with their talent? Has the prodigy, who never had to work hard to be successful, learned the value of hard work? Will they push themselves in order to be better? Or will they give up because they are no longer as good as they were? Unfortunately, I'm seeing too many phenom swimmers giving up, burning out, and fading away.

I hope I'm teaching my son that he needs to be in it for the long haul. He's a pretty good swimmer now, but he's not the best of the bunch. With each year, though, he gets a little better, a little stronger, and a little more savvy in competition. At this rate, he'll hit his peak in late high school or perhaps early in college. He has potential to be a collegiate swimmer, and perhaps qualify to try out for the Olympics if he wants. But that potential does not depend on how talented he is today. It depends on how hard he works between now and then. To me, if he learns that hard work will get him from here to his dreams, then I've done a good job as a parent, whether he actually gets to swim in college or the Olympics or not.

My favorite Aesop's fable is "The Tortoise and the Hare." The talented Rabbit, so sure of his physical superiority in a race, fails to work hard and even slacks off, leaving room for the slower, but persistent Tortoise to beat him. I'm glad that "slow and steady wins the race." That way, more of us have the hope of winning, if we just stick to it. Resilience wins, every time.

What Do the Numbers Really Mean? Not Much, Really...

Recently, two articles from The Washington Post's blog The Answer Sheet got my attention. One detailed the adventures of a school board member who took a version of the Florida standardized, high-stakes test students must take in order to graduate and help their schools earn a "successful" label. The other outlined the "evidence" that shows how education majors come from the bottom third of college students. Both, I feel, tell an interesting story about what we've come to value in education and how we've let it corrupt our notions of learning.

I was very intrigued by the school board member who took it upon himself to take a version of the Florida high-stakes test. While he was not allowed to take an official version, he took one that was similar to what students must face each year. He took subtests in reading and math, and he failed miserably. This upstanding, community-servant, double-master's-degreed businessman could not complete one math question and only got a D on the reading section. His performance, though, was not what intrigued me. His motivation was. He wanted to take the test because the schools in his district were continually being labeled as failing with students not passing these tests, yet he personally knew teachers who were doing outstanding work and students who could read and do math. His experiences didn't match the reported scores.

The second article also intrigued me because I've heard reformers complain before that teaching would be a better profession if we could attract the "best and brightest" of our college students to pursue teaching. Groups such as Teach for America were founded on this premise. TFA began by recruiting Ivy League all-stars to work in schools for two years with the belief that their brief service would revolutionize schools. Being in the presence of a passionate, brilliant Harvard grad would surely make a sullen, inner-city, disaffected youth love learning again, right? But learning that my colleagues and I are believed to be underachieving, dispassionate, regular-college grads who have ruined kids' love of learning was not what intrigued me. My reality was. My experiences do not match this study's report or TFA's philosophy.

I have personally known thousands of students in my career. The vast majority of students I've worked with could read, do math, write, and speak well enough to be successful in college. Now, I'll admit that I have worked in communities that value education and support their schools. Even so, not all students in those schools came from families that supported the quest for education. I've worked with students who did not pass our state tests, but even those students could read, write, and do math. And most of those still went to college and were successful.

I have worked with hundreds of teachers. The vast majority of teachers I worked with love school and learning so much that they overachieve at schooling. They are bonafide nerds about school. They are conscientious about doing work and want to help students be successful at school. While I never sat around with my colleagues bragging about our high school test scores, I do know that most of my colleagues graduated with honors from high school, college, and graduate school. The teachers I know are not in the bottom third of anything, except maybe in salary.

Ultimately, our notions of learning have been corrupted by a system that values test scores over something more meaningful. The fact that I'm calling it "something more meaningful" and not giving it a more concrete name shows that we really actually don't know what we want students to have when they walk across our commencement stages. We want for our SAT/ACT scores and GPAs to mean something - that we've learned something valuable and important. But the more we assign that value to these scores, the less it seems that they actually signify anything important. The numbers have come to have more value than what they signify. And that has lead us to this ugly place where numbers bestow value onto people instead of people assigning value to the numbers.