The First Step Is Failure

When self-esteem became an edu­ca­tion watch­word in 1986, I thought it was a harm­less fad. I was wrong: It wasn’t harm­less. Many teach­ers were per­suad­ed that stu­dents should be pumped up with praise, regard­less of their per­for­mance. Schools low­ered expec­ta­tions so stu­dents couldn’t fail. Every­one got an “I Am Special” stick­er. Till the stan­dards and account­abil­i­ty move­ment kicked in, stu­dents often were judged by how they felt about learn­ing not by whether they’d actu­al­ly learned something.

I remem­ber a children’s book about a bad­ger (or such­like) start­ing school who’s afraid to tell his teacher he can’t read. In the denoue­ment, the teacher assures the bad­ger that she “loves” him “just the way he is.” Sure­ly not. Teach­ers can’t love all their stu­dents in any mean­ing­ful way. And the whole enter­prise of school­ing is about chang­ing chil­dren from what they are, such as illit­er­ate, to some­thing bet­ter, such as lit­er­ate. er. It’s OK to start school not know­ing how to read. It’s not OK to stay that way.

What hap­pens to those “special” chil­dren if they don’t learn how to read, write and cal­cu­late flu­ent­ly in the ear­ly grades? Even­tu­al­ly, real­i­ty bites.

I spent years hang­ing around Down­town Col­lege Prep, a San Jose char­ter high school, to write a book, Our School: The Inspir­ing Sto­ry of Two Teach­ers, One Big Idea and the Char­ter School That Beat the Odds. DCP recruits stu­dents who earned Ds and Fs in mid­dle school and tries to pre­pare them for four-year col­leges. I call it the anti-self-esteem school.

Most Down­town Col­lege Prep stu­dents come from Mex­i­can immi­grant fam­i­lies, speak Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage, qual­i­fy for a free lunch, etc. They’ve got plen­ty of excus­es for fail­ure. Held to low stan­dards for years, most start ninth grade with fifth-grade read­ing and math skills and ter­ri­ble work habits.

DCP puts them in a mix of reme­di­al and col­lege-prep class­es and demands they do home­work every day and show respect for their teach­ers, class­mates and their own futures.

Hon­esty is the school pol­i­cy. No time is spent inflat­ing self-esteem. Instead, stu­dents are told that they’re way behind but have the abil­i­ty to improve if they work hard.

Stu­dents don’t crum­ble when they’re told that they’re behind. They’re not stu­pid. They already know that. What they don’t know is what to do about it. Their teach­ers tell them how to catch up, step by step. Stu­dents are praised for mak­ing progress, even if that means mov­ing from an F aver­age to an F+. But they’re remind­ed again and again that they need to pass with a C or bet­ter to qual­i­fy for a pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty. If they fail a class, they can try again in sum­mer school or repeat the grade.

If they need to spend two years in ninth grade, so be it. The school’s unof­fi­cial mot­to is: We’re not good now, but we can do better.

When Greg Lipp­man, the school’s co-founder and first prin­ci­pal, insist­ed stu­dents prac­tice pub­lic speak­ing, a teacher wor­ried they’d be embar­rassed. “I dis­agree that it’s more humil­i­at­ing to be told what you’re doing is crap­py than to have peo­ple tit­ter­ing in the audience,” Lipp­man replied. “Bombing out, and com­ing back from bomb­ing, is a big part of what we do here. It’s just like those PSAT scores. They were crap, garbage. OK, let’s go and get better.”

After awhile, it’s obvi­ous that stu­dents who do the work do improve.

Sel­ma, who I thought wouldn’t make it out of ninth grade, is now in col­lege study­ing to become a nurse. Anoth­er girl who’d gone through school as a straight D stu­dent came alive in 10th grade and made it to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at San­ta Cruz. Who knew Gina was smart? Gina will grad­u­ate in June with a psy­chol­o­gy degree and go on for a master’s in social work.

Loren­zo, who wore the “loaner” shirt every day because he couldn’t get it togeth­er to wash the uni­form shirt, turned out to be a tal­ent­ed artist. No kind­ly adult told him that his tal­ent made it unnec­es­sary to pass read­ing, writ­ing and math tests. It took him five years to pass col­lege-prep class­es, but he made it. Loren­zo is now an art major at Chico State.

Nation­wide, about half of stu­dents who start col­lege nev­er earn a degree; most drop out in their first year. The num­bers are worse for His­pan­ic and black students.

Most DCP grad­u­ates strug­gle aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly in col­lege, but they don’t quit: 80 per­cent are on track to earn a bachelor’s degree. Their ambi­tions are backed by basic skills, strong work habits and the resilience that comes from know­ing how to fail, try hard­er and improve.

The will­ing­ness to admit fail­ure isn’t just for stu­dents. Lipp­man and co-founder Jen­nifer Andaluz told me many of their ideas about how to edu­cate left-behind stu­dents didn’t work very well in practice.

“Our kids couldn’t read,” said Andaluz. “We didn’t real­ize how seri­ous the prob­lems were when we start­ed. We thought we’d get every­one to cal­cu­lus as seniors. It was just a mat­ter of engag­ing kids, moti­vat­ing them. We dis­cov­ered Mar­ta couldn’t mul­ti­ply 3 times 4.”

They scrapped the Alge­bra 1 book because stu­dents couldn’t read it. They added Eng­lish assis­tance for immi­grants. In the sec­ond year, they added reme­di­al Eng­lish and math. In the third year, they redesigned the ninth grade cur­ricu­lum, requir­ing most stu­dents to take reme­di­al cours­es in addi­tion to Eng­lish 1 and Alge­bra 1. In the fourth year, they raised stan­dards and told more stu­dents they’d need five years to be col­lege ready. And so on. Like its stu­dents, DCP is get­ting better.

Schools won’t improve until admin­is­tra­tors and teach­ers can admit the prob­lems, ana­lyze what’s going wrong and try new strate­gies. Stu­dents won’t improve if they think they’re “special” just the way they are. Many schools aren’t good now. But they can do better.

– Once a Knight Rid­der colum­nist, Joanne Jacobs now blogs on edu­ca­tion at joannejacobs.com.

Her book, Our School: The Inspir­ing Sto­ry of Two Teach­ers, One Big Idea and the Char­ter School That Beat the Odds, is avail­able online and in book stores.