What Place Does Fairness Have in Schools?
Over at Blogcritics, where I sometimes cross-post my blog entries, Diana Hartman has written an article about fairness and what it does and doesn’t mean. Or maybe it’s about what it should and shouldn’t mean.
Hartman rails against scholastic relay races that either let all the kids compete regardless of skill level or that don’t have winners and losers, against the way school awards are given out to students, and against making tests easier in response to complaints that the tests aren’t fair.
She makes a good point with her last example, one from “real life”: the driving test U.S. military and their dependents have to pass in order to obtain a driver’s license when they’re stationed in Germany. Upwards of 45% have been failing the test — leaving military family cars in the holding lot for months at a time — so the military has decided to make the test easier. (Or at least that’s how Hartman sees it. I don’t know anything about the test.)
The problem — and I agree with Hartman on this — is one of safety. If she’s right and the test is being made easier, we now will have a bunch of U.S. drivers over there who don’t have as much knowledge and skill as the German citizenry. How dangerous will those drivers be on the German roads? How smart was it to make the test easier as a matter of convenience for U.S. military families new to Germany? Time will tell.
Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to lower standards on tests that measure a minimum competency in a skill or a field that impacts someone’s safety or health. I wouldn’t be happy if the state medical board exams suddenly got easier just so more medical school graduates could become licensed doctors, for example. Making tests like these easier does not necessarily make them any more fair, anyway.
The rest of Hartman’s examples come from her family’s K-12 school experiences. She’s apparently drawing a connection between lowered standards in American schools with the lowered driving test standard. “Why should we expect the adult graduates of American schools to work hard to pass a driver’s test when their school experience taught them that everyone should pass life’s tests?” she seems to be asking.
Unfortunately, these school stories don’t help her argument. First, K-12 schools are not “real” life and shouldn’t operate as if they were. And second, the specific anecdotes Hartman relates are cautionary tales about creating competition between students more than they are about lowered standards.
Teamwork Redefined
The first story, in particular, really has nothing to do with lowered standards being equated with fairness. It has everything to do with Hartman’s childhood desire to be recognized for her math skills. Fairness in this case means excluding others so one person can shine.
The story goes like this. The teacher, a nun, decided to run a math relay race. She split the class into two teams, boys vs. girls. Hartman was feeling confident because this teacher had helped her understand multiplying and dividing fractions for the first time. Hartman knew the other girls on the team were “indifferent” to math and possibly to winning the relay race. The boys were “loud” and apparently competitive.
So Hartman wanted to be the only one on her team to play in the relay race. Why? Because she was the best at solving the problems AND because she wanted to upstage the boys team and have something to hold over them.
What a lovely educational moment that nun created, huh?
In a twist of logic, Hartman accuses the other girls, who successfully lobbied for an opportunity to participate, of seeing teamwork and camaraderie as liabilities, not assets. These girls had been taught “fairness and sensitivity to a fault,” Hartman says.
I don’t understand Hartman’s definitions of fairness, camaraderie, and teamwork. To her, fairness — giving all the girls a chance to participate in their own schooling — is a bad thing. Camaraderie and teamwork equate to letting one person, Hartman, be the mathematical ball hog. If the other girls really understood teamwork and camaraderie, according to Hartman, they’d have limited their own participation to cheering for her.
Hartman feels she was cheated in the name of that dastardly fairness. The other girls should have been willing to let Hartman play alone so she could win a relay race. I’ve never heard of a one-person relay team, have you?
The Blowback of Competition in Schools
To be fair, Hartman was just reacting to the classroom environment her teacher created. The relay race story illustrates just how poisonous direct competition between children in schools really is. Even as an adult with children of her own, Hartman still remembers this relay race and the emotion of feeling cheated out of a chance to be singled out as a winner.
Hartman’s response was perfectly understandable. Should we expect anything less when a teacher pits students against each other so that individual strengths and weaknesses are amplified and put on display? Or when classroom activities focus on winners and losers and not on making sure everyone is engaged and learning? What educational value does a mathematical relay race have? In what other context are people forced to publicly show how quickly they can (or can’t) solve math problems? Why would children’s learning be reduced to battle-of-the-sexes bragging rights? And why would anyone expect anything good to come out of it?
All children have a right to learn at their own pace and to know their value as a human being has nothing to do with how quickly they can multiply two fractions or how many A’s and B’s they get on their report cards. They have a right to equal opportunities in the classroom even if they don’t excel in academics. Schools should be teaching that knowledge and skills are not things children should hoard or hide when other children are around. When it comes to school and learning, real fairness — allowing all children to develop and learn in a cooperative, collaborative, non-competitive environment (teamwork and camaraderie!) — is a much better value to teach children than winning at all costs.
Unfortunately, I doubt Hartman would agree. On her personal blog, she adds a comment to the start of her article: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t should not expect the rest of us to consider them equals.”
So much for camaraderie and teamwork, I guess.
