Russell Shaw thinks it’s time for parents to let their kids fail more. As the head of Georgetown Day School, he wrote in The Atlantic recently that he was disturbed when a mother came to complain to him about her daughter receiving a B in calculus. She didn’t know if the girl, a senior, could handle the disappointment.
“In trying to protect their children from any hint of failure,” Shaw wrote, “many parents risk making them more fragile.” That’s true, but Georgetown Day begins in Pre-K. What were this girl’s teachers doing for the past 13 years?
Shaw advises that parents should “resist the urge to rescue.” When a child struggles with homework or gets a bad grade or experiences some consequence for poor behavior, parents should sit tight. “Each intervention sends a message to the child: You can’t handle this.”
Again, this is all true, but school leaders have helped to create this monster, and it’s time for them to own up to it. It starts in the younger grades.
Even before grade inflation kicks in, for many students, there are years when there are essentially no grades. Report cards in elementary school are based almost entirely on “effort” or what teachers perceive as effort. Many schools eschew letter grades entirely until middle school. Quizzes and tests are often deemed to be stressful experiences and are minimized. But here’s a hint — if you want tests to feel like they are low-stakes occurrences, give a lot of them. Get kids used to them. Make them feel as if quizzes and tests are a normal part of life — you may do poorly on one, but there’s another one next week. Try again.
My kids all had the same favorite teacher in elementary school. She was exacting. She gave grades on every assignment. There was a list of items that had to be completed for projects and a list of points each one was worth. Kids knew exactly why they got the grade they did. And it didn’t matter if they just forgot to label the diagram or if they were just lazy. The transparency meant there was no reason to argue and no excuses. She did not put up with whining from kids, and very few parents crossed her.
Sports are one of the few arenas where kids learn to fail. But it seems as if we go from elementary school where games are made for everyone to win all the time to high school where the stakes are so high that parents are shelling out thousands of dollars for private coaching so their kids can get college scholarships. What if third-graders had kickball games where someone actually got out? Or what if they played sports that adults could recognize? Instead of “blob tag,” "hula-hut throwdown" or other cooperative games in which no one ever seems to win or lose, kids could play soccer or basketball, or just race across the school yard.
I was not very athletic in elementary school, and I was picked last for a lot of teams, but life went on. Either I figured out how to get better at a particular skill, or I realized that I excelled at other things. It wasn’t the end of the world. But school has become a place where competition is all or nothing.
And then there is the discipline. Shaw complains that parents intervene when there is a consequence for their kids’ behavior. But I have to ask: How often is that? At the public, private and parochial schools my kids have attended there are few if any consequences for disrupting class, cheating or even physical aggression. If by “consequences” you mean something besides a stern talking-to. When one of my daughters was in fifth grade, two boys in the class passed around a “hotness list” of the girls in the class. School officials were horrified. But instead of, say, docking recess or suspending the boys involved, the entire grade was forced to sit through multiple discussions about respecting others. Maybe Georgetown Day is different, but I doubt it.
And then, finally, there is grade inflation. If your school never gives kids a grade below a B, it’s hard to imagine how they will learn about the importance of failure. Now, this problem, as with many of the other problems I’ve described here, is obviously influenced in part by parents’ actions. Teachers get tired of giving poor grades and having to listen to students’ complaints and parents’ threats. But the schools need to create a culture where this is expected and where teachers who give real grades are supported. Even Harvard managed to cut the percentage of A’s the university was giving out from 60% to 53% in one year.
The move to ban cellphones in schools is instructive here. A few years ago, there were some parents who wanted to be able to reach their children at all times and there were some teachers who didn’t want to enforce a prohibition. But most teachers and most parents have come to appreciate that without phones, there are fewer distractions to kids’ learning. Similarly, many parents may want their kids to experience consequences for their actions, but they fear they are living in a culture where some kids will and some kids won’t. Many teachers want kids to have consequences, but they fear the wrath of parents. There is plenty of room for consensus. But letting school leaders place the blame on Mom and Dad ignores all of the ways in which schools are ensuring kids never experience failure. Principal, heal thyself.