There’s no denying how pleasurable academic success is — sailing through childhood on the good ship lollipop of easy A’s, fawning teachers, and proud parents. So pleasant an experience should be universal, no?
Such would seem to be the guiding philosophy of our schools. And by this measure, though only by this measure, they are among the most effective public institutions. American students lead the world in their high opinion of themselves, an exaggerated estimate of their abilities that is encouraged deliberately from an early age. Laurence Steinberg puts it well in his new book Beyond the Classroom when he writes that typical public schools ” expect little, penalize virtually nothing, and reward even the barest of achievement.”
Beyond the Classroom (Simon & Schuster, 223 pages, $ 225 is a popularization of a study by Steinberg and two colleagues of more than 20,000 teenagers carried out over the past ten years. This is social science in the grand tradition: Platoons of researchers deployed in nine sites across the country; volumes of data gathered and analyzed from thousands of students, parents, and teachers; the whole enterprise underwritten by handsome grants from the U.S. Department of Education and several eminent foundations.
One cracks such a book with exceedingly low expectations. The very scale of the enterprise suggests it will feature conclusions tepid enough to pass muster in committee and calculated to stroke the grant-givers; its academic credentials seem to promise jargon-clotted prose. The wonder here is not only that Steinberg surpasses these expectations but that he has much to say that is reasonable and interesting. There is a bit of ritualistic puffery in the ” why-this-study-is-unique-and-path-clearing” genre (probably a recapitulation of the original grant proposal), but on the whole Beyond the Classrom is a blessedly cant-free and at times even wise book.
Steinberg contends that school reform has failed and that what is needed now is student reform. Indeed, he thinks institutional reforms over the past decade and a half may have produced scant results precisely because the students are so obtuse (“disengaged” is his term). He is not making a Pollyannaish argument that the schools are just fine; rather, he argues that the life of students outside the classroom is the telling factor in academic success or failure. Unless students are serious about the business of learning, other reforms are doomed to disappoint: “Most discussions of contemporary education overemphasize the responsibility of school to be engaging and ignore the obligation of the student to be ‘engageable.'”
Steinberg is admirably unwilling to let the kids off the hook just because their schools may be less than ideal, or even plain awful. Teenage students are not at the mercy of their environment; indeed, along with their parents and teachers, principals and school boards, they create that environment. Some kids, as he points out, excel even in the worst schools, and more could do so if they made the effort. Why so few exert themselves is what he and his colleagues set out to find.
The answer: “Students believe, with some accuracy, that there are no real consequences of doing poorly in school, as long as their performance is not poor enough to threaten graduation.” The effect is to turn students into slackers — which is magnified by a fact that will come as no surprise to anyone alert to human nature: “It appears that students are motivated much more to avoid the negative consequences of failure than to reap the positive rewards of success.”
How to change this calculus? Steinberg sketches three possible approaches. The first remedy is the well-known favorite of reformers: higher academic standards set by schools. The potential obstacle here is so great Steinberg resorts to euphemism: “If we go the route of raising minimum standards . . . we must be prepared to respond to students who do not meet the standards.” Translation: The standards will have no effect unless schools can summon the will to flunk those who don’t meet them. Then the schools must be prepared to withstand gale-force protests when it turns out, as it almost inevitably will at first, that minority students are overrepresented among those who flunk.
A second aud related approach would be to tighten university admission standards — this would expand the incentive for high achievement that now exists only for the tiny percentage who hope to attend a handful of highly selective universities. Do the obstacles here even need to be spelled out? Here is a partial list of the constituencies that would mount the barricades: every institution of higher learning and its political allies; every highschool student who hopes to attend college and his parents; every legislator who hopes to live out this three score and ten.
The third approach is to redefine the problem. Some students are motivated to succeed, not just to skirt failure. What makes them tick? Why do they care to get A’s, and not merely to graduate? What can we do to produce more strivers?
Hard-working students tend to share certain traits. They have what Steinberg calls a “healthy attributional style” — they attribute their triumphs to effort and, just as important, blame themselves for their failures. These same students also tend to have “authoritative” parents, firm but not overbearing, who are involved in their schools. Parental interest translates into greater effort by children, though how parents involve themselves makes most of the difference. Monitoring homework and cracking the whip don’t matter much. But showing up at school matters a great deal. Hard- working, ambitious students also hang out with their own kind: I’eers are influential, for good as well as ill. To the extent parents can steer their kids toward group of diligent students, “peer pressure” will turn out to be a wonderful thing.
Finally, successful students treat school as a full-time occupation. Working part-time jobs is a recipc for doing badly in school. The key is how illuCh time is spent on thc job. More than 20 hours a week will almost certainly take a toll on grades and interest — a threshold surpassed by half of all working seniors. (The same is true of over-indulgence in sports and extracurricular activities.) Those who think steady employment in high school builds character and teaches diligence will want to ponder this bit of news: ” Our longitudinal studies show that working long hours leads to increased alcohol and marijuana use. Teenagers with between $ 400 and $ 300 of discretionary income per month have a lot more money to spend on drugs and alcohol than their peers, and this is one of the things they spend their earnings on.”
Intriguingly, Steinberg and company found that the ethnic academic pecking order in America — from Asian to white to Latino and black — can be explained by these factors without recourse to the bedeviling bell-curve debate. Asian students seem to hold themselves entirely accountable for success or failure, have a heightened fear of failure, and associate with peers in the same boat. (They might like to hang with the slackers, but the slackers don’t necessarily welcome them.) Indeed, their peers are influential enough to compensate for ineffective parents. These qualities tend to fade as Asians acculturate to the American way: “Our findings, as well as those from several other studies, suggest that becoming Americanized is detrimental to youngsters” achievement, and terrible for their overall mental health.” At the other end, black and Latino students are more likely to believe that innate ability and luck explain success and failure, are more likely to feel that getting B’s and C’s is sufficient, are more likely to have friends who subvert parental authority, and, most consequential of all, “don’t really believe that doing poorly in school will hurt their chances for future success.”
The good news, then, is that parents who bestir themselves can push their children in the right direction. However mortifying it will be to their teenaged brood, parents who march into the principal’s offce early and often, consult with teachers, and generally make their presence felt at school will probably raise the grades of their offspring. Similarly, close supervision of the social life of teenagers by their parents would seem to be in order — an effort school-choice programs would assist by allowing canny parents to engage in the wholesale rejection of peer groups they disapprove of.
The bad news is that the oak grows right where the acorn falls. For just as too many students today can’t be bothered to pay attention to their studies, an alarmingly high number of parents can’t be bothered to pay attention to their teenagers. Steinberg calls these the “disengaged parents” and puts their number at 25 percent. What he reports is dispiriting: “We found that about one-fourth of students are allowed to decide what classes to take in school without discussing the decision with their parents, that about 30 percent of parents did not know how their child spends his or her spare time. And parental disengagement is not just limited to their youngsters’ school lives: one-fourth of the students we surveyed said their family ‘never’ did anything together for fun, and only 30 percent said their parents spend some time talking with them each day.”
Steinberg’s analysis in Beyond the Classroom is altogether believable. Its essential htmesty can be discerned in the fact that his prescriptions- greater effort by students, increased oversight from parents, an upward redefinition of expectations from “getting by” to excellence, curtailment of after-school jobs — will be resisted. That education might require drudgery, might ineluctably involve repetition, suffering, and sweating, is too seldom acknowledged (though we don’t flinch from this truth when it comes to excellence in, say, athletics or the arts).
Too often, ideas for school reform are the pedagogical equivalent of “lose- weight-by-eating-more-fat” diets. Consider such hardy perennials as smaller class sizes, computers on every desk, and higher pay for teachers. Is it not suspicious that these are all exceedingly pleasant remedies?
Beyond Steinberg’s prescriptions lies a larger question about public education his book only hints at. It is a commonplace in analyses of public enterprises with disappointing results to blame the “unintended consequences” of past reforms. This turn of phrase suggests there may be a way out, since no one wants the results we see. But what do we do when the consequences we dislike were intended?
Many people will say that it is a good and humane thing that children are no longer humiliated in school when they don’t perform up to par, that the social costs of failing kids are not worth the academic gains that would result if more kids had to fear flunking out.
Every roadside carnival worth its saltwater taffy has an attraction called the moonwalk that looks like a grounded hot-air balloon with a giant air- mattress inside. Kids take off their shoes and bounce around inside. The cushiony surface is a great equalizer. The klutziest can bounce around next to the most athletic. True, the inflated surface is too soft for handsprings or backflips. It turns every kid into a klutz. But unlike a trampoline, no one gets hurt. Everyone falls down and bounces right back up. No consequences. No tears. Just like the schools.
After the moonwalk, will we be able to stand gravity again?
By Richard Starr
