By the end of this past school year, I realized something simple: Rigorous education is far less popular on the ground than many policy wonks believe. Of course, everyone pays lip service to high academic and behavioral expectations in general. But when it comes to the particulars, many people—parents, teachers, and administrators alike, most kids, too—bristle at what rigorous education means in practice.
I noticed it first with parents. Working mostly in schools of choice, it was easy to sell prospective parents with rhetoric about academic rigor, challenging curriculum, and the like. But those nodding heads at enrollment meetings often turned to disgruntled emails as the year began. Nightly homework? Demanding tests for which students would need to study for hours? Stressful academic gauntlets? The occasional bad grade or negative disciplinary report? You won’t give full credit for late assignments even if they’re good? No thank you. Give my child straight A’s, don’t mess with my evenings and weekends, and tell me all is well.
Like a golf course that sets sand or water traps just outside the real range of play, many parents want the veneer of rigor without genuine challenge. An unskilled golfer can feel accomplished with only the appearance of difficulty as many parents want to believe their child is getting a rigorous education without the frustration of an entire essay rewrite.
To be fair, it’s not laziness or poor parenting that causes this preference for mediocrity. Rigor requires trust. To accept a poor grade or support a school’s exacting standards, a parent must trust that what the school is asking is actually worthwhile for their child—and worth the effort.
Too often, that’s not the case. Teachers assign various projects full of glitter, glue, and razzmatazz without any academic purpose. Schools mistake repetition and heavy workloads for actual quality or challenge. Or they assign ideological course work—think Howard Zinn or genderbread men—with which parents aren’t comfortable. If those are the assignments that students are bringing home, maybe it is better that their child spend a few more hours outside playing instead of doing schoolwork.
Teachers and administrators, too, are guilty of rejecting high expectations. Maintaining academically challenging coursework is hard. Grading nightly homework or leaving personalized feedback on essays, planning well-designed lessons, and running an efficient, teacher-led classroom where students are learning every minute is hard work that takes a lot of time day in and day out.
The alternative is much simpler. “Project-based learning” and group work mean a teacher only has to grade a handful of projects, likely light on writing, instead of an essay or test for every student. During class, they can provide work time and grade or plan instead of running lessons, managing behavior, administering quick knowledge checks, and actively teaching—all cognitively demanding compared to the alternative.
Assigning poor grades is likely to mean disgruntled parents. Sending misbehaving children to the principal’s office requires more paperwork. And preset curricula often set a brisker pace than is comfortable.
Once again, I don’t want to advance the “lazy teacher trope” as the sole explanation for these dynamics. If a behavior referral will mean a livid parent calls a teacher or admin to hector them past work hours, keeping them from their family, can we blame them?
For administrators, it’s easier to sweep poor behavior and academic mediocrity under the rug and instead boast about how your school “met the standards.” Meanwhile, truly high standards from local, state, or federal policymakers mean a school is more likely to get dinged by accountability measures or simply bad press.
For a real-world example of the preference for complacency, look no further than Mike Miles in the Houston Independent School District. In two short years, he has led the once flailing district to “significant performance gains,” but he will forever have the modifier “controversial” appended to his name and record numbers of teachers have quit. Everyone mouths support for academic excellence but not what it actually requires: tough curriculum, enforced behavioral codes, hard choices, demanding leadership, and retained students.
We’re not without recourse here. A resurgence of accountability and standardized testing from state and federal policymakers would do much to advance academic rigor again. Mike Miles may be “controversial,” but standardized testing allows him to point to the score board whenever he’s facing public pressure. And when incentives naturally push towards complacency, accountability provides a counter-incentive towards the tough choice. As an administrator, if I knew my job or school depended on a third-grade reading cutoff, I’d spend more time on our retention policy, pushing teachers towards rigorous phonics, and encouraging parents to read with their children at home.
School boards are also an essential lever. High expectations remain and ever will be popular in the abstract. Rhetorical calls for exacting standards win members their board seats. Once there, they can use that general popularity to maintain high standards in the less-than-popular particulars. Retention policies, behavior codes, curricular choices, pay scales, instructional best-practices, professional development regimes—these are the board-created polices that either empower teachers and administrations to maintain high standards or allow them to slide into mediocrity.
All of these changes and nudges might be deemed “eat your spinach” policies. Everyone wants six-pack abs until that means salad for lunch and a workout on your break. It’s incumbent on policymakers in particular—those outside the day-to-day hustle, bustle, and stress of the school—to make the changes to push each actor in school towards academic excellence. Where eating spinach or high standards may prove unpopular on the ground, policy leaders must nudge schools towards rigor and thereby look out for the long-term interests of our schools, not just immediate comfort.
