If you've worked in or around the field of education anytime in the last decade, odds are you've seen or heard this mantra somewhere:
Originally born out of the high-achieving charter school movement, this mantra has quickly spread throughout the education world into traditional public schools and even private schools. On its face, it seems like a wonderful mantra for educators to follow. After all, every child should have a chance to live a successful life. We should message to students that they can overcome any obstacle if they work hard enough, and we as educators should work to overcome every obstacle in our students’ way.
The problem with the NO EXCUSES philosophy of education, however, is the same problem that has plagued the No Child Left Behind law, which recently celebrated its tenth birthday: sometimes "excuses" are actually the reasons students aren’t succeeding...and ignoring those reasons gets us nowhere.
For those of you who’ve already forgotten about NCLB, it included the following goals: all children would be proficient in reading and writing and graduate from high school by the 2013-2014 school year. Spoiler alert! That school year is long done and closed, and we weren’t even close.
So why weren’t we close to meeting the lofty goals of NCLB? Did we make too many excuses for ourselves and our students? Or is it just that there are many solid reasons for why 100% of students are not proficient on state standardized tests and graduating high school?
Here are a few possible reasons worth mentioning.
-The 30 million word gap. This is, essentially, the research study suggesting that children born into low-income households have heard 30 million fewer words than children born into middle and upper-class homes…by the age of 3. As you can likely imagine, this gap has a long-term impact on all aspects of a student’s literacy instruction.
-The so-called “third-grade slump.” This is the research that suggests a student who is not reading on grade level by third grade is unlikely to ever read with full proficiency.
-English Language Learners whose schools lack the programming needed for them to successfully receive instruction
-Students with learning disabilities which prevent them from meeting full proficiency on standardized state tests
This is where the NO EXCUSES policy in education gets dangerous. Like NCLB, it names a goal of surpassing obstacles rather than seeking out the reason those obstacles are being created—and fixing them. NCLB set out insurmountable and pragmatically impossible goals for elementary, middle, and high schools, but it never tackled some of the biggest root causes of the obstacles those schools are up against. What if the more of the time and energy that went into chastising schools under NCLB had gone into making early childhood education programs accessible to all children in this country? What kind of educational landscape would we now, ten years later, be looking at? Would the 30 million word gap no longer exist?
I’m not advocating that we rid schools of the “No Excuses” concept entirely. The fact is that millions of students who sit in front of us need a high-quality education now, regardless of anything else. What I am advocating for is something more akin to what my co-worker sometimes calls the “Some Excuses” policy. I myself like to call it “No Excuses. Just Some Reasons.”
Under this new policy, schools in America would be held to high expectations for student success--and at the same time we could finally have a dialogue about what creates those obstacles. Rather than being told that discussing these obstacles is making excuses for our students, we could find logical and meaningful ways to eradicate these obstacles wherever and whenever possible.
At the end of the day, telling our students we don’t care about the reasons they are failing is a misguided approach to education. Those reasons do matter, and we’ll only continue to do a disservice to students in the American education system if we don’t work to acknowledge them.
No excuses. Just some reasons.
Let’s clear up one thing first: I am the ultimate law-abider. You know, the kid who never used the markers if the teacher said not to even though her seatmate totally did use the markers and get away with it. The teenager who never smoked or shoplifted. I am a rule-follower. Mostly because I believe in rules that are logical and clearly there for the protection of society…and partly because it seems to be in my nature, which contains a heavy dose of Fear of Confrontation.
But every now and then, even I, the ultimately compliant citizen, will bend the rules just slightly. In the past this has generally meant drinking when I wasn’t quite 21 yet (hey, I grew up on the Canadian border, where 18 worked just fine, thank you), and the occasional speeding ticket. But lately I’ve taken to a new method of civil disobedience.
I’ve been riding on the Light Rail at the discount fare. Yeah. For real.
The Light Rail is the commuter train in the Denver area. I don’t live in Denver, and I try to take the Light Rail into the city whenever I can. You know—save the environment. Not to mention the avoidance of parking fees and difficulties. But here’s the thing about the Light Rail. It’s four dollars a ride. ONE WAY. As in almost twice the price of the subway in New York City.
Listen, I’m not made of money here. And I really do try to support public transportation whenever possible, but FOUR DOLLARS A RIDE? It’s highway robbery.
Plus, I still have my student ID from grad school, which I’ll occasionally use to grab cheaper movie tickets or clothing discounts. So, I figured, why not do the same with the Light Rail?
Since it opened almost a year ago, I’ve been unapologetically buying the discount ticket to ride the Light Rail. And until Friday, the dudes who check the tickets really didn’t seem to care. One guy, ONCE, mentioned that I should start buying the full-fare ticket, because my age actually made me inelilibigle for the discount. Other than that? No one cared. I had a ticket, I wasn’t freeloading, and I’m quiet on a train. Everyone’s happy, you know?
So. There I am, listening to Pandora, minding my business on the way to a Very Important Meeting of some kind. Fare Checking Dude stops by, and I’m all yup, got my ticket right here, guy.
Only he gives me the stink eye and asks me for my discount ID.
Which is so no big deal, because I carry my exhausted (and expired) grad school ID with me at all times. So I flash that at him.
And he starts lecturing me.
I figure he’ll check the ID, confirm that I am the person on the grad school ID, ask me to get off the train at the next stop and buy the correct fare, and then go about his business. Only NO. He takes my poor ID away and moves down the crowded train car.
At which point I start to realize I am actually in Some Kind of Trouble here.
“Um,” I call out, “I have the extra two bucks. Sorry I bought the wrong ticket. I can just, you know, give you the two bucks.”
The train stops, people get off, and he comes back over. “Don’t do this again, ma’am. Next time it will be a fine of $106.” And then he holds up the little electronic thing he carries around and it FLASHES A SMALL LIGHT IN MY FACE.
“Um, excuse me. Did you just take my picture? Did you just take my picture?” Never mind that I’m having a pretty solid hair day, here—when did this become legal? When did it become legal—never mind polite—to give the mainly-law-abiding citizen no notice whatsoever before you basically subject her to a mugshot?
“I did. Here’s you’re warning. Remember to buy the correct fare from now on.” He hands me a ticket and hops off the train. Probably avoiding the scene that I was definitely about to start, if I could manage to quiet my Inner Person Who Hates Confrontation long enough to do so.
And there I was: me and my headphones, along with a ticket that said NO PROOF OF FARE.
Okay, so several things are bothering me about this encounter. One, the general lack of compassion and fairness of this guy. He could have let me hop off the train and buy a new ticket. He could have warned me that he was about to take my photo and explained why. (Which I still do not know, by the way.) Instead, he was a general a-hole about the whole thing. And I get that Light Rail Cop is probably not the most enjoyable job on planet Earth. But really? Is this how we’re encouraging people in Denver to use public transit these days? Please excuse me while I buy another vehicle.
Then there’s the fact that my ticket says NO PROOF OF FARE. For some bizarre reason, this is greatly bothering the Law Abider within me. Dude, I totally had a fare. It was the wrong fare—but it was a fare.
But what is possibly bothering me most of all is that I seriously don’t know that I can continue to ride the Light Rail after this encounter. Not just because this officer was a total dick, but also because $8 a ride is a lot. And CO isn’t great on public transit, so financially I have to support ownership of a car every month. I believe the world and our environment need more public transit, and I want to use public transit whenever it’s truly viable for me to do so—but $8 a ride on top of covering my car repairs and insurance ain’t all that viable. I mean, parking in Denver is less than $8 a day.
The lesson here, kids, is simple: if you’re going to buy the discount fare when you ride the Denver Light Rail, be prepared to possibly have your picture taken with neither your permission nor a smiling face. And if you’d rather not be subjected to a surprise mug shot, plan to spend $8 to go a grand total of nine miles.
Denver, your reputation for being environmentally-friendly? Way to stick a giant hole it in.