As your next paragraph indicates, you need to compete in your class.

Which, by having enough classes, is tantamount to rewarding effort. The point about this school is the students getting left behind *are* the class, or one of the major classes.

Nice tear jerking snark, though. Glad you made the effort.

Snark? It was a perfectly apt analogy. I’d say the only snarky comments on this thread have been your sarcastic and slightly rude comments to Stacy.

When you’re getting your house remodeled be sure to let the contractors know you pay for effort, not achievement.

I hope that craftsmen who find that their substantial effort does not lead to above average results leave the field.

I *really* hope that students who find that their substantial effort does not lead to above-average results do *not* leave school.

Rewarding children for effort and not achievement does not prepare them for the adult world.

If you want children to continue to make an effort and thus eventually achieve, rewarding effort is *exactly* what you do. (Or, if you prefer, placing children in their appropriate class so their achievement is a considered sufficient.)

Of course, in reality, we reward both effort and achievement, letting students know (if by some miracle it’s not crushed into them thoroughly before) where they stand in the as a whole, while rewarding achievements appropriate to their capability.

By staking out the far end of the spectrum, Mrs. Davis, you risk making yourself look like an ideologue.

By all accounts, the high school here is a happy place, and I can see that myself, having had one SPED son attend the school for 7 years. Parents give credit for this to the principal, who deserves it. The person at the top really does set the tone.

How does he do this?

Interesting question. One of my kids is now attending a Catholic high school that is such a happy place the word “joy” probably isn’t too far off; the school is joyous and strict. At least, that’s the way it seems thus far.

Putting the two schools side by side, I’ve begun to see common practices.

For one: both schools plan orientation activities that have the effect of “inducting” freshmen into the school community. The Catholic school actually stages a formal ceremony in which seniors present freshmen with a special Freshman pin they are to wear on their blazers.

For another: both schools foster “class cohesion.” The public high school, for instance, holds “color wars” every year. I gather that each class has its own color, which students wear in a competition that takes place one day a year. Students rave about it.

The Catholic school bestows a new pin upon students each year, so that by their fourth year they will be wearing a string of four pins across their breast pockets, somewhat like military insignia.

In short, both schools intentionally foster a group or community identity that softens the reality of individual competition for class rank and college admissions. Thus students develop a degree of commitment to each other as well as to their own work.

The Catholic school also directly addresses the issue of individual competition with the kids. (It’s possible the public high school does, too — I don’t know.) The athletic director gives students a pep talk about how to handle not making the football, basketball, or baseball teams. His advice includes both an inspirational story about a kid who was cut one year but went on to be a star player the next AND the matter of fact observation that, “Everyone gets cut at some point. I thought I would play pro XXXX, but I got cut.”

Another example: one of my son’s teachers told his class, “You’re not battling each other, you’re battling the course.” By this he meant that he doesn’t grade on a curve. “If you work hard,” he said, “you can get an A. I want everyone to do well. I want everyone to get an A.”

Last school year my son attended the Catholic school for one day to see what it was like. As luck would have it, he was present on the day report cards came out. Students were handed their report cards in person, inside their small “mentor groups,”and they seem all to have known each other’s grades. The boys congratulated the two kids who had achieved “High Honors”; one student who hadn’t done so well told the group what he planned to do better next semester. Then they put away their grades and turned to a service project they do each year for a local nursing home.

From what I have seen so far, this school hits all the notes. It pushes students — all students — to strive for excellence, teaches them to take disappointments in stride, and has them rooting for each other, too.

All for one, and one for all.

final thought: Students can’t do this on their own, and parents can’t do it from afar. The school must set the stage.

…………….

Before signing off, I’d like to make a comment about what the principal did or did not mean.

None of us can know for a fact what his intentions were.

That really doesn’t matter. We do know for a fact that many of us read his words as defeatest.

It is the writer’s responsibility to make his meaning clear. If the principal did not mean to create the impression(s) he did, he needs to apologize for the misunderstanding and clarify his intentions.

As for me, I share John Dewey’s reading; I also agree with parent2 that his message is (likely) an open secret amongst teachers and administrators. But that is the problem. As Tracy points out, all schools (including selective schools) have bell curves. If academic competition in this school is so “intense” that the vast majority of students don’t enjoy the “prospect of coming to school” that is a serious state of affairs. It is the kind of thing a professional administrator ought to have some notion how to address.

I have to wonder whether the “Middle Children” in this school are achieving all they could be.

Considering that it takes a 94 average to get an A in Fairfax, Virginia there are few Straight A students. You can look up the straight A honor rolls at most schools and they have few students on them. there have been complaitns from parents that the grading scheme hurts students when applying to college since their cumulative GPA is lower. Also, Fairfax does not rank students in their class. This limits the amount of gaming the system that students can do.

Langley has a school average of over 1200 on the SAT. The SAT average is significantly higher than the Catholic prep schools in Northern Virginia. However, Langley still lags behind Thomas Jefferson but is ahead of the rest of Fairfax County.

I seem to remember that Joanne Jacobs posted a few years ago about families moving away from a superb high school in California (Palo Alto? near Silicon Valley, at any rate), because the competition was too intense.

Near my town, local high schools have chosen to deal with the issue of academic competition and bruised self-esteem by no longer publishing an honor roll in the newspaper. I don’t think that solves the problem, and causes other problems. There is something “off” about an academic institution which will not publicly recognize its leading students.

I don’t think it’s a blame game. I think it’s the attempt of a courageous, new principal to tackle an issue which may be the “elephant in the room” in that district. It’s healthy to open a dialogue about school problems, rather than to impose a solution, or to pretend the problem doesn’t exist. It is probably better to say to the school body as a whole, “we have some unhappy students, and it’s not adolescent malaise, nor is it because they don’t work hard enough.”

One way to solve the problem would be to institute admissions criteria, to turn it into an exam school, for example. That would be bowing to the existing demographics. Or, the school could institute strict limits on the number of AP courses students may take, and the amount of homework teachers may assign. The school could also do away with class rank, or substitute something like, “first decile” etc. None of these options would be popular, of course.

I’m not asking for “face-saving happy talk”. I think Cheryl VT said it best: “I also don’t want them to assume a position of defeat that accepts as “the way it is” that middle-performing kids will come to school unhappy and feel unsuccessful.”

I erred in my interpretation of your remark: “It isn’t caused by the school administration, it’s caused by the real estate choices of thousands of upwardly mobile parents.”

You and the principal are blaming the parents, not the students.

You celebrated an achievement, not an effort, which was well and good. But I’ll bet he didn’t get to that point by practicing with the UCLA track team.

As your next paragraph indicates, you need to compete in your class.

Nice tear jerking snark, though. Glad you made the effort.

That’s your interpretation. I don’t think any amount of face-saving happy talk will change the experience of students who are smart, academically oriented, and are under great parental pressure to excel in school, but who are competing with academic superstars. I would call it exceptional to have NINE of the top TEN finishers in the National French Contest in ONE school. For most high schools, to have one kid finish in the top 1900, that is, the top 1% would be a great achievement.

These aren’t students who don’t “get it.” The principal describes them as “smart and academically focused,…[but].. not academically superior.” These are relative terms, especially “academically superior.”

I suspect this is more about the intense competition at the top of the class. Parental expectations and pressure will play a role. _The Overachievers_, and _Doing School_ , might be introductions to the extreme stress the nation’s very best students may feel.

“I had no pretensions about becoming a scientist (having been graduated near the bottom of my class at the Bronx High School of Science…” William Safire reminisced (New York Times, January 24, 2005).

But that would have been at the bottom of the brightest kids in New York public schools at a time when New York schools were very good. Mr. Safire had to have been smarter than I was to have been in the Bronx High School of Science in the first place. (I went on to get an electrical engineering degree and made a living as a computer programmer.)

Oh dear, I feel so terrible. My 24-year old brother had a bad accident, and had to learn to walk again. And you know what ghastly things my family did? We celebrated the first time he walked two steps without aid! Then we celebrated the first time he walked down the corridor without aid! And then we celebrated the first time he walked upstairs without aid! How could we have been happy with such paltry achievements, when your average 24-year old can walk for miles without pausing! What messages did we send to our younger cousins?! And you know what, even though he still can’t walk as long as I can, I am still so thoroughly unenlightened as to be awestruck by the amount of effort he has put into working through his disabilities.

And I will say that I wish I had been obliged to put in more effort at school, rather than just being rewarded for achievement regardless of effort. I spent years achieving very easily, university came as a vast shock. Ideally, we should set goals that are a stretch, but are also achieveable, for every kid.

In other words, he’s blaming the students who do not fit in for not fitting in.