Roy F. McCampbell's Blog

For several weeks, an eighth-grade boy outside of Kansas City has been expressing his individuality by carrying a floral-print Vera Bradley purse. But yesterday, his assistant principal demanded he remove it. The boy refused, and he was immediately suspended from school.

This raises a question: Why is it a problem for a boy to carry a purse instead of a backpack if he wants to? By breaking gender stereotypes, he’s not hurting anyone. Instead, he’s showing the world that he has good self-esteem and self-confidence—that he is secure his identity.

Unfortunately, his school administrators’ actions show that they want to force a 13-year-old kid into stereotypical masculinity. Apparently, they value gender conformity over creativity and individuality.

Mercedes Schneider has identified 17 states where protests against Common Core standards are heating up, in some cases leading to a slowdown or cancellation of implementation.

She writes:

“Over one-third of the states whose governors and state superintendents signed the CCSS Memorandum of Understanding as part of US Department of Education Race to the Top (RTTT) funding are now percolating with CCSS misgivings.

“That is what happens with top-down reform. The “bottom”– those directly affected by the “top’s” decisions– eventually seethe.”

She provides a description of each state where CCSS is in trouble.

I have been wondering lately why we are so obsessed with giving every student, every teacher, and every school a ranking, rating, and/or grade.

It seems to me that we are thinking about children, teachers, and schools the same way we think about sports teams. In every league, there are winners and losers.

But if we think about education as a culture that is very different from that of a competitive sports league, then the picture and the questions change.

What if we thought of schools as if they were akin to families?

Then we would work to develop school cultures that are collaborative and supportive. We would make sure that those with the greatest needs got the resources they need. We would stop thinking of winners and losers (and “racing to the top”) and think instead about the full development of each human’s potential.

It is a paradigm shift…

When I visited Finland, which is widely recognized as one of the top performing nations in the world, every educator spoke of their goals. They want their students to be happy, healthy, and enthusiastic learners. They did not care about test scores. The years from the beginning of school (at age 7) to high school graduation are considered a “standardized-testing-free zone,” as Pasi Sahlberg put it in his book “Finnish Lessons.”

In the U.S., our leaders want to turn schools into pressure cookers. They want to keep the students and teachers in a constant state of stress. Students worry if they will pass or fail. They worry if their performance on the test might cause their teacher to lose his or her job. Teachers worry that their students’ scores might ruin their chance of staying employed. They worry about keeping their job. They worry that their test-based evaluation might put…