To be clear, this wasn’t one of those panicky, irrational emails that academic advisers receive at least a dozen times a year. This parent is sane, reasonable, and well-informed. She knows her kid. Her observations were measured and appropriate. There are, indeed, some academic skills that are challenging for this student. That said, nothing about her screams tutoring, educational therapy, IEP, or 504. Her skills are good, her grades are great, and her effort is exceptional. So why was her mother concerned? How had she come to believe her happy, high-achieving child was falling behind?
I began to wonder if the culture of private education had altered the way this student's parents saw their child. To be clear, as independent schools go, our parent body is pretty down-to-earth. But some things are inevitable. After all, people paying a lot of money for something they can get for free tend to expect the exceptional. But this wasn’t about whether our school was good enough. It was about whether the kid was good enough. I can’t say for sure, but I’m reasonably certain that this question wouldn’t have crossed these parents’ minds if they hadn’t entered the rarified world of independent education. I believe that something about the independent school ethos led the parents to look for deficiencies in their child. Typical academic challenges began to look like deficits. They perceived the natural unpredictability of developmental milestones as a form of academic peril. And I don’t think it's their fault.
An Academic Leg Up
Several years ago, we had an interim head of school who was in the unusual position to speak bluntly about our school’s needs and challenges. She was a well-respected veteran who knew our market intimately. She quickly surmised that our messaging needed to change. The images on our website and in our viewbook, she said, looked more like an excellent summer camp than an academically rigorous school. We were showing our students having fun. She wanted us to show them learning.While many of us bristled at the critique, especially coming from someone who wasn’t going to be around for more than a year, others had to admit she wasn’t wrong. It was her belief that, at least in our market, parents need to be convinced that their kids are going to be academically advantaged by attending independent school. Outdoor education, theater arts, sports programs—these were all desirable extras. But in our affluent marketplace, these were also all things that kids were getting already. We needed a change.
In a community where privilege was pedestrian, the one thing parents couldn’t guarantee their children was an academic leg up. They needed a school for that. And with excellent public options in our area, parents had to be absolutely convinced that our school offered something that neither they nor the public school could. A chance to get even further ahead.
But ahead of whom? Ahead in what? And for what purpose?
There are certainly plenty of parents who are apt to blame a school when their child’s tests scores don’t fall in the top stanine. After all, parents in our market who choose K–12 independent schools are making an investment of roughly half a million dollars in their child’s education before college. Most people who work in independent schools are used to answering questions about the value proposition of what we offer. Yet, in thinking about the parents of my student, I realized that those weren’t the questions they were asking. They weren’t questioning us. They were questioning her.
I began to feel that we’d done them a disservice. And by “we,” I don’t mean our school in particular. And by “disservice,” I don’t mean that independent school wasn’t worth their tuition dollars. Rather, I believe that the world of independent school affected these parents in ways they didn’t realize. The inherently competitive nature of our schools, the academic acceleration we depict in our marketing materials, the outcome-based assessment of our programs, all cause parents to view their children through a more critical lens. Over time, the conversation shifts from “Look at all the things my kid is good at” to “What are the ways in which my kid needs to be better?” Parents often don’t see it or feel it as it’s happening.
A Culture of Celebration
I find that I’m becoming more protective of my students these days. The pressure they experience before high school is enormous. But more than pressure, they experience the ineffable weight of their parents’ concerns. And the parents themselves bear a similar burden. In talking with parents, I find myself leaning on Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences more than ever. A student who isn’t a gifted reader may be a budding athlete. A student whose number sense is lacking may have the interpersonal skills of a future psychologist. A student whose working memory is iffy may have the spatial intelligence to be a world-class graphic artist. But by the time I talk with parents, they all too often brush off my appreciation for their child’s strengths as platitudes meant to divert attention from their deficiencies.To be clear, I’m not suggesting that schools gloss over a student’s areas of need. I’m suggesting something much more subversive and radical. We need to shift the entire conversation. We need to replace a culture of concern with a culture of celebration. This isn’t a pitch for participation trophies; this is about acknowledging the difference between intelligence and skill, and helping our families understand that a skill deficit is not an intelligence deficit. We need to offer diverse modalities to measure students’ intelligence and understanding, and we need to stop suggesting that successful outcomes (and successful lives) are attached only to a certain narrow set of skills. We need to re-educate our concerned parents.
If there is a universal truth in education, it is that students achieve more when they feel good about themselves. As educators, we must equip our families with the skills, language, and knowledge to partner with us in that effort. When parents elect to spend a small fortune on education, we should be teaching them, too. If they truly want their children to get ahead, we need to change the way we (and, in turn, they) talk about what that means.
It starts with creating schools that celebrate multiple expressions of intelligence and multiple performances of understanding. And, crucially, all of these should be given equal weight. The student who struggles mightily to write an essay on the Middle Ages might easily rearrange the entire classroom according to the feudal hierarchy of a medieval manor. Students who show advanced ability to resolve conflicts have a skill at least as valuable as students who can memorize the periodic table. An eighth grader who can run a six-minute mile possesses a talent at least as impressive as the one who will test out of algebra as a freshman. The sixth grader who grabs the lead in the middle school musical ought to be celebrated on par with the winner of the school spelling bee.
It won’t be easy. It requires a restructuring of just about everything: updated and flexible assessment tools, an emphasis on processes over outcomes, robust parent education programs, and, yes, an update of our marketing materials.
Considering my evolving opinions on what independent schools can and should be, I keep reflecting on the critique from our former interim head of school. At the time, I agreed with her. As a pragmatist, she knew that we needed to compete for enrollment in a challenging marketplace. The way to do that was to convince parents that our academic programs would put their children on some kind of fast track. In hindsight, it’s hard to say she was wrong. Changing our marketing materials took a fair bit of work, but enrollment increased. Changing the entire ethos of independent education will be harder. But it will be worth it. And I’m almost sure that our former head would agree with me. After all, before she became a head of school, she was an art teacher.