Ah, the Reader’s Digest.  My aunt and Uncle have given us a subscription as a Christmas gift for years now.  I appreciate the gesture, and sometimes there are a lot of funny things in the humor sections.

     But The Reader’s Digest has always bothered me a little, because it has made it’s name making complicated things simple.   I remember reading the Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics as a child.  They took great and complicated works of art and made them simple and easy to read.  I read them, but found that many times there was something missing that I didn’t notice until I read the “whole” story.  Suddenly, there was a depth and vibrancy to them that had been missed.

     To be certain, Melville and Dickens sometimes benefited from the knife, but I found that as a general rule, most classics were the worse for being condensed.

     In my opinion, it is the same with social issues.  This month, the November 2004 issue’s regular column “That’s Outrageous!” features columnist Michael Crowley’s assertion that academic woes in America are the result of misguided efforts to save our children’s “self-esteem”.

     He touts such trends as not publishing honor rolls, or having multiple valedictorians or the elimination of “tracking” as being the direct and sole result of wimpy, touchy-feely liberalism and an aversion to competitiveness.

     It couldn’t be that parents who didn’t want their children’s names published in the paper under the Honor Roll could just not want the names of their minor children brought to the attention of creepy weirdoes.  No, it has to be because namby-pamby liberals are soft on the self-esteem of dummies.

     It’s not possible that larger class sizes (our high school has graduating classes of around 700 students) are responsible for multiple Valedictorians.,, or that an upsurge in the popularity of academics has caused more kids to work harder (unlike when I was a kid, you can now letter in Academics.  What a difference that has made, putting the badge of coolness on good grades.), and increases the sheer number of kids with perfect academic records, and exemplary extra-curricular and volunteer records, and that it’s nearly impossible to distinguish between them all and find one that stands out as superior?”

     School systems might not have done away with the practice of “tracking” students because it is a flawed and untenable educational practice and can trap high-quality students in years of underachievement…it has to be that liberal whiners don’t like to label people.

     His assumption seems to be that the cream will rise to the top, and should be rewarded for their effort and achievement, and the dreck can suck on it.

     But how do you pick just one Valedictorian out of 700 when there are at least 25 students with a 4.0 average?

     Mr. Crowley sneers, “In the real world, results matter –whether you’re a house painter or an accountant.”

     Well, if our school district were to limit our valedictorian role to one single student, results would matter less than they do now.  Equally talented students would be denied the honor of Valedictorian in order that a more “meaningful” honor could be bestowed upon a single student that is not appreciably superior in any way to the others.  How do we decide among twenty four 4.0 student, all in several extra curricular activities, all with notable achievements and multitudes of volunteer hours to their credit?  I would urge Mr. Crowley to come up with a criteria that would adequately distinguish one student above the rest.  If possible, I’d like to see him present it without sarcasm and pedantic rhetoric.

     Part of the reason why competition is becoming a dirty word in academics is because competition has become so fierce.  The volume of work required has increased dramatically (I took home no homework in grade school, and learned a mere ten spelling words, while both of my children do an hour to two hours of homework per night, and learn fifteen and twenty words per week).

     I think it’s appropriate to honor the top students, but also to step back and say, “these are the cream of the cream…we’ve got a district full of hard-working achievers”.  I think this not because I think that we should pander to the self-esteem of a bunch of losers, but because I think it is true that there are more kids out there with talent, drive, and a winning spirit than can be accounted for even in a field of 24 valedictorians.

     My youngest child has been placed in an intensive intervention reading program, despite the fact that he reads at a level much superior to where I was when I was his age.

     Half of the kids in his kindergarten class entered kindergarten reading at a first grade level.

     Most of the kids in my kindergarten class had learned their ABC’s by the END of kindergarten, and were “reading ready”...but not reading...upon beginning first grade.  That was the goal.

     Now, the story might be different in other school districts, but here where I live, there is very little chance that a talented, hard working student will stand out at all.

     I think that the de-emphasis of these honors, and the trend toward honoring larger groups of students are responses to the realities of the larger world.

     We have larger classes, larger schools, larger school districts than we used to.  We have more areas where students can excel…more subjects to be studied, and more options where students can find their area of expertise…where they shine.

     Magnet schools and charter schools allow students who are inclined toward the arts or technology or math and science to leave the general population and pursue their area of excellence, and that means achievement levels that are less diverse than they used to be…but no less excellent for all that.

     Short-term, intensive intervention programs in grade schools have made it possible for students that used to lag behind to overcome holes in their skills that would have landed them in a lower level group, and gone unaddressed, causing them to stagnate in a lower “track” through high school.

     Tracking has not been eliminated because of liberal whining.  It has been replaced by a superior product that works better and makes the academic horse race MORE competitive...by not giving up on and pigeonholing otherwise talented students.

     A small anecdote here.  I spend about forty-five minutes last Friday correcting spelling tests for my 11-year-olds classroom.  Most of them got perfect scores.  Maybe Mr. Crowley would like to make a snarky comment about how we should just pick one kid to give a 20 to, so that it would mean more.

     Mr. Crowley’s catchy tag-line “A is for Average.  Not achievement or accomplishment or All-American.  Not anymore.”  Misses the point.  At least in our school district, the middle is rising.  Achievement and Accomplishment are becoming Average…not the other way around.

     And lest the credit fall at the feet of No Child Left behind, this is part of a trend reaching back before the current administration and their under-funded mandates to the schools.

     This is the effect of a populace who are highly competitive, highly driven and motivated to have their children distinguish themselves in ever increasing levels of excellence.  This is the result of enormous pressure from teachers, peers, and parents to succeed and stand out in a field of achievers.

     This is about getting good grades being “cool”, and about being able to wear an “academics” letter on your jacket, and being able to be a valedictorian if you meet the very high requirements needed to win the honor.

     Sure, it’s a double edged sword.  The pressure is incredible, as are the achievements of these young people.  I do think it’s superior to when I was a kid, and the one reigning Valedictorian was referred to as “the crown dork”, and when the idea of an academic letter was treated as a joke, and athletes were heard to scoff that if a nerd could get a letter jacket, they would stop wearing theirs.

     It’s better than when I was a kid and was “tracked” into the very lowest groups where I stayed through high school, becoming increasingly bored, frustrated, and eventually completely shutting off and “doing my time” until I could go off to college and be a dean’s list student.

     It is better to have a wide range of areas for kids to find the area where they excel, and celebrating excellence wherever we find it, rather than just arbitrarily limiting recognition of excellence to the one supreme apple polisher, the football team quarterback, and the prettiest girl.