Every once in a while, when they were younger, one of my three children would say they didn’t feel well and shouldn’t have to go to school. Or they were too tired to play in the recreation league soccer game. Or they would only take out one third of the garbage and recycling on Tuesday night, as the task was evenly divided between the three of them. Invariably, during any of these occurrences, I would give them my best “serious Dad” look as I made my disappointment clear. I expected a high standard, and feeble excuses meant to get them out of a responsibility wasn’t going to cut it in my house.
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Part of me wanted to let them stay home from school or skip the game. And taking out the garbage wasn’t such a big deal for me to do (I often had to re-sort the recycling anyway). I sometimes find myself torn between being the tough dad with high standards for my kids and being a compassionate parent who allows them to just chill. I suspect many parents balance on this tightrope.
These days, with mental health awareness ascendant in schools and society in general, it’s not just parents deciding if they’re going to force their kid to stick it out or relent and allow them to skip it this time. Employers are being asked to be more sensitive to their workers’ mental health, and educators must be on the lookout for students who are particularly fragile on any given day. Many of us, it seems, are the fulcrum on the seesaw of expectations versus exceptions.
The difficult balance
When I was recently visiting Warren County, Kentucky, schools, Monica Heavrin, the director of special education, described the difficulty of trying to find the balance between expectations and exceptions. It struck me as an incredibly apt description of the current state of public education. Coming out of the pandemic, schools are being asked to quickly spend tons of federal and state dollars to catch students up. Too many children lost academic ground while schools wrestled with decisions about keeping buildings open or delivering virtual instruction. Too many children were traumatized as parents and family members got sick and died, lost employment, or had to move. And now, there’s an urgency to get back to normal, whatever that was, which means a relentless drive toward getting kids back on track to college- and career-readiness.
Yet, we’re more aware than ever that academics aren’t the only purpose of school. The social-emotional learning movement has been growing for years, and it’s now seen as an essential part of schooling, not just a nice thing to do. Districts are investing in mental health services and wellness teams to help kids cope. School and system leaders are encouraged to be attuned to self-care opportunities for staff. So, on one hand, educators are trying to push as hard as they can to help as many students as possible achieve an academic standard with less time than they had before. On the other hand, we can’t push kids or adults past the breaking point. Expectations must be met. But exceptions must be allowed.
The greatest challenge, of course, to striking the right balance between expectations and exceptions is the equity imperative. The “soft bigotry of low expectations” is real in American public schools. For too long, too many educators have made exceptions for students who are low-income, Black, Latinx, or English learners or who have special needs. Those exceptions are frequently based on perceived abilities. And such perceptions are wrapped up in centuries of oppression. Thus, the history of exception-making in schools runs parallel to our collective failure to serve all our students. What, then, should a system leader do as our current reality confronts our shameful history and still abundant present?
Knowing students
My good friend Susan Enfield, currently the superintendent of the Washoe County School District in Nevada, coined the phrase that students must be known by “name, strength, and need.” I’ve heard Deputy U.S. Education Secretary Cindy Marten repeat this phrase, and I’ve known other great leaders to modify it to their context. The phrase pushes educators to focus on individual students.
Young people want to meet adults’ expectations. And sometimes making an exception can be a powerful act of love.
For too long, schools have been consumed with standardized test scores as the be-all and end-all purpose of public education. Data teams focus on assessment results and organize interventions to address students’ deficits. We’ve become very good at describing what educators and students don’t do well. I’m no Pollyanna who believes that all schools are great and we just need to let educators alone to do their thing. Such magical thinking hasn’t gotten us very far. Yet, to activate student learning, you need to have emotional connections with students and engage them in relevant learning. Susan’s mantra elegantly encapsulates a strategy for leaders to consider as they find the balance between addressing the need to improve achievement and responding to individual students’ needs.
When I was working on my dissertation back in the late 1990s, I came across an idea that stuck with me (although I can’t recall the specific source): Students who have a positive interaction with one adult for 20 minutes a week are more resilient. Think about that. A coach, a mentor, a paraprofessional, counselor, teacher, or administrator can positively impact a child’s life by spending 20 minutes per week with them. As I became a system leader and student surveys began to be used more often to understand student perceptions, I grew enamored with the question of whether students — especially at the high school level — felt that one adult in the building knew them well. Too often, results on this metric were dismally low. At the same time, Gallup was showing how student engagement decreases with age.
To my mind, there was a direct correlation between these two ideas. Students tend to be less engaged in learning when they don’t feel connected to others within the school. So having a relationship with students isn’t an add-on or a “nice to have.” It’s an essential part of being an educator, especially when working with vulnerable students. Knowing kids’ names (and pronouncing them properly) and being aware of their stories will enable an educator to understand when a student can be pushed a little further to achieve a little more or when to pull back because they’re near their breaking point.
Part of the challenge in getting to know students at the secondary level is that they switch classes every day and teachers must keep track of a lot more students. It’s easy to assume that unless a student presents serious signs of distress — very poor grades, excessive absences, egregiously bad behavior — they’re probably doing OK. And for many that could be true. But lots of students may do well enough to fly below the radar yet are in danger of falling behind if not given support.
Responding to the real needs
When I was superintendent in Montgomery County, Maryland, we created an early warning indicator system to identify students who weren’t on track to graduate on time. Our findings echoed those in the work of Robert Balfanz and the UChicago Consortium on School Research. A combination of factors that may not be readily apparent to everyone predicted the risk of a student not graduating on time. When school teams use data to get to know students, they can help get to the root cause of the problem a child may be having.
It’s tempting to just give students who are falling behind a double period of math or English, send them to tutoring sessions, or maybe switch their schedule around. But those interventions may not be based on a true understanding of the child’s story. Perhaps there’s something happening at home or a medical or personal issue that’s compromising their ability to succeed in school. Maybe they need some extra support in a subject area. Or perhaps they need glasses. Whatever the case may be, the key leadership move is to use multiple sources of data to determine which kids may be at risk — before the situation gets worse — and then organize a system of supports to understand the child’s story. Then, when an exception has to be made, it’s done so with full knowledge of what’s best for the student.
System leaders today are in a bind when it comes to striking the balance between expectations and exceptions. Standards aren’t likely to go away soon. Students have to pass standardized tests for schools to be deemed successful. Competitive colleges still require strong academic schedules, good scores on Advanced Placement exams, and an array of extracurricular activities. Parents and the public are demanding that students’ mental health needs are met and that we consider the whole child. The need to be culturally responsive when working with young people is acute. And yet personnel, mental health, and other resources are being stretched to the limits. Moreover, the recent influx of federal funds will dry up soon, even though the needs of young people will still be there.
This is a complex situation, but our students may provide the path to an answer. To my mind, if every student’s story is known, and the people closest to them are trusted to use their judgment, then just maybe a balance can be found. Young people want to meet adults’ expectations. And sometimes making an exception can be a powerful act of love. But the latter has to be done in service of the former. Organizing systems so that every child is known by name, strength, and need is a place to start.
This article appears in the December 2022/January 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 4, pp. 60-61.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joshua P. Starr
Joshua P. Starr is the managing partner at the International Center for Leadership in Education, a division of HMH, based in Boston, MA. He is the author of Equity-based Leadership: Leveraging Complexity to Transform School Systems.
