Gerald W. Aungst

I am a big fan of the pro­gram Fresh Air on NPR, hosted by Terry Gross. Every day she presents an extended inter­view with a pub­lic fig­ure in con­tem­po­rary arts, news, or cul­ture. Her genius is that she approaches each inter­view with gen­uine inter­est and curios­ity, get­ting into the lives, and often the heads, of her sub­jects with a depth that I have never heard else­where. Instead of tack­ling the inter­view from a spectator’s posi­tion, ask­ing rou­tine and super­fi­cial ques­tions, she finds a way inside, bring­ing the lis­tener along. Gross presents her sub­jects in a way that hon­ors and respects the pas­sions, the intel­lect, and the work of each, while still ask­ing chal­leng­ing and thought-​​provoking ques­tions that pry back their facade.

On count­less occa­sions, I have tuned in to the pro­gram to dis­cover that Gross is going to be inter­view­ing some­one out­side of my area of inter­est. Per­haps it is a rap musi­cian, or a romance nov­el­ist, or an activist pur­su­ing what I per­ceive as a fringe issue. My ini­tial reac­tion to these is always to turn it off, since I’m likely to be bored. I’ve learned to resist that urge, how­ever, since with­out fail, Gross is able to put me in a place where I not only appre­ci­ate the depth of their work but under­stand their life jour­ney in a deep way. By meet­ing the per­son where they are and walk­ing along­side, she deftly splin­ters my expec­ta­tions, and I spend the hour watch­ing them blow away in the wind. Inevitably, the next time I see that person’s work, I have an appre­ci­a­tion of where it came from. I may still not like it much, but I can relate to it.

Last week I sat in a meet­ing at one of the schools in my dis­trict with sev­eral other staff mem­bers talk­ing about stu­dents and what we need to do to make them more suc­cess­ful. A wor­thy con­ver­sa­tion, no doubt, and I know that each one of the adults in that room was look­ing out not only for the school’s needs, but more impor­tantly the best inter­ests of each indi­vid­ual child. But I became very aware of a dis­turb­ing ten­dency. It’s one I’ve been con­scious of for a long time, but have recently become increas­ingly con­cerned about. Through­out the con­ver­sa­tion, no stu­dent was men­tioned by name.

Instead, we dis­cussed clus­ters of stu­dents as if each clus­ter was some­how uni­form and homo­ge­neous. There were the stan­dard labels we attach to stu­dents in these kinds of meet­ings: the “Basic” and the “Pro­fi­cient” kids, the “gifted” and the “ELL” and the “Spec Ed” kids. Then there was the term that jolted me the most: the “Cusp Kids.”

Who are the Cusp Kids? These are the stu­dents who, on the most recent bench­mark test, are just a hair below the cut off score for pro­fi­ciency. They are the ones who are “on the cusp” of pass­ing the state exam. “What are we doing for the Cusp Kids?” one of us asked. And the dis­cus­sion for the next few min­utes focused on the col­lec­tion of inter­ven­tions we were going to enact to ensure that the Cusp Kids were boosted up to pro­fi­cient in time for the state test next month.

Don’t mis­un­der­stand me. We did not ignore any of the other groups. Teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors in that school are very con­scious of work­ing with every child and doing every­thing pos­si­ble to ensure they are achiev­ing at their high­est pos­si­ble level. Though there was a hint of a mind­set to focus our resources and atten­tion on the group that would give us the most return (in terms of AYP) on our invest­ment, there was never any inten­tion, explicit or implied, that we would ever ignore a group because they were a lost cause.

My worry is that we have lost sight of the indi­vid­u­als. We have lost sight of the fact that each one of those Cusp Kids is a per­son, with unique needs, inter­ests, desires, back­ground, fam­ily, knowl­edge, skills, and pas­sions. Yet we treat them as if they are all the same, and that the only thing we need to worry about is get­ting them “up to pro­fi­cient” (which in itself is a con­cern­ing phrase to me, but that will have to wait for another blog post).

Labels have great power. As soon as we attach one to a person—whether that label is “rap musi­cian” or “fringe activist” or “Cusp Kid”—we imme­di­ately assign all of the traits and ten­den­cies asso­ci­ated with that label to the per­son, and we neglect to dig beyond that.

Labels do have their uses, how­ever. It makes broad con­ver­sa­tions and strate­gic plan­ning more straight­for­ward. Our dis­trict, for exam­ple, has a sig­nif­i­cant racial achieve­ment gap, and if we were to always look at just the indi­vid­u­als instead of clus­ters of kids, we would never be able to rec­og­nize that gap or do any­thing to alle­vi­ate it.

So what do we do? How can become more like Terry Gross in our approach to chil­dren? How do we get inside their heads—individually—and honor them as peo­ple instead of mem­bers of an arbi­trary clump? How do we cre­ate truly student-​​centered schools and class­rooms where the child (sin­gu­lar) is the most impor­tant thing we think about? Some of the influ­ences that affect this are out of our local con­trol. State tests, fund­ing issues, reg­u­la­tions; these drive much of what we do every day. But there must be things we can do even within those con­structs. What has to change in our admin­is­tra­tive struc­tures, our cur­ricu­lum, our con­ver­sa­tions, that can move us towards the goal of know­ing each indi­vid­ual child?

I am wrestling with these things every day, and would love to hear your thoughts. Keep the focus on real actions. As I heard in a ses­sion at Educon this week­end, stop say­ing, “Yeah, but,” and start think­ing, “What if?” If we can start mov­ing towards treat­ing chil­dren like peo­ple instead of labels, it would truly be a breath of Fresh Air.