My best successes came on the heels of failures (Barbara Corcoran)

Photo by Alex Zamora on Unsplash

A recent report in Morning Brew indicated that reading and maths scores among high school students in the U.S. have dropped to their lowest levels in 20 years, per new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The downwards trend was evident before covid-19 happened, but it's continued apace since then.

The following are some excerpts from the news article discussing this situation:

“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows,” said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. “These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted and focused action to accelerate student learning.”

“The news is not good,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees the assessment. “We are not seeing the progress we need to regain the ground our students lost during the pandemic.”

While the pandemic had an outsize impact on student achievement, experts said falling scores are part of a longer arc in education that cannot be attributed solely to COVID-19, school closures and related issues such as heightened absenteeism. Educators said potential underlying factors include children’s increased screen time, shortened attention spans and a decline in reading longer-form writing both in and out of school.

This rings true for New Zealand as well. Anecdotally, this trend has been apparent to me and my English department colleagues for a while. Interesting that it is now backed up by research.

As I've written about recently, I've noticed, for the first time, students flat giving up. Because the task seems impossible, they don't believe in themselves. Their absence rate is also a real factor. 

This is a real worry, and I think school leaders need to be proactive now to consider courses wherein students can gain some confidence via success.

To paraphrase Soldner from above: we need to act now in a concerted and focused way to arrest this decline. 

Or else... 

When you see the shadows falling, when you hear that cold wind calling - hold on tight to your dream (ELO)

Photo by John T on Unsplash

Within striving for a quality education system, there's a battle between learning/growing as a person and assessment ratings; it is clearly an ongoing struggle within the English system that involves GCSE and A Levels.

It's deeply entrenched and made tougher to approach with its concentration on examinations at the end of each year.

Among other things, politicians love to measure and quantify things.

Final exams make the failure so much bigger. Incremental failures along the way with internal assessments are valuable. They allow the failures (and successes) to accrue more organically.

My students have recently received their results. I implored them to remember the feeling they had when they got them, whether it was elation at one end of the continuum, or profound disappointment at the other.

Let that feeling drive you.

And above all else - hold on tight to your dreams.

Everyone in the world has to strive to improve if they want to be outstanding (Hsing Yun)

Photo by Drew Graham on Unsplash

It's the start of a new academic year. True fact: my students will come into school next week and some of them will not succeed this year. Because they won't strive to be the best they can be, to be outstanding.

Some will - strike 'some', a lot will strive for success and be pushy and not settle for second best, and that's as it should be.

But I know going in that a continuum will again exist between those students and the ones that try to coast and under-perform, and the ones that give up because it's too hard.

That's the tragedy of school. All are capable but personality will enter the equation and the obstacles that test them will find them wanting.

For me/us the questions remain: how do I/we instill in them the spirit to strive for the best, the desire to produce outstanding achievements in any task?

Isn't that what we are all about?